I work as a software developer, lately spending some time with React for the Frontend and .Net Core in the backend. In my company, we always have to book the time we spend on the task we are working on. The tasks usually have a limit of hours you can book to them and, if you reach the limit (something that's pretty common lately), you need to speak to the project manager and find a solution. The whole process makes me feel anxious, mainly when the budget is very limited, and I'm trying to find ways to improve it.
What are your thoughts on this? Is it the same for you?
Top comments (4)
Speaking from my experience, time spent tracking time is time wasted. There are two reasons time tracking happens that I know of.
1) The team is underperforming so there is a misguided attempt by the team to show management that you are fighting fires all day.
2) The team is underperforming and a manager decided to micromanage rather than fix the underlying issues. This sounds like your situation.
I have yet to see a positive outcome from spending more time in ticket trackers. It is much better to go out, buy some books on development practices, and get the team on board with those practices.
Time spent is used to guage two things: cost of the work (in time) and how close our estimate was. it should never be a blocker; though you should always tell your PM as soon as you see that you'll need to invest more time.
We generally put up the requirements and design documents of the project that we are responsible for developing. This helps for the better estimations of the timelines. Once timelines are decided by the team. We split the tasks among the team members and create a cards in trello boards and assign the tasks or cards amongst us based on the interest of the developers in the team. Then to track the state of the project we will have a daily stand up everyday where we discuss the accomplished things and road blockers to find out the best way of tackling the problems.
Seems like a problem with bad management. In my work, (typical big corporation) we track time spent on tasks but if we reach the limit it's not the dev problem but the project manager.