GitHub

Time Tracking for Github 

Github is the go-to place for software development teams. It helps organize code for backend and frontend development within several areas of one cohesive platform or product. Whether it’s in-house engineering teams or external contractors using Github, the time spent creating next-gen tech tools matters. Companies want to minimize time-to-market, product managers want to improve deployment rate, and clients wish to have more features shipped faster.

Time tracking for Github helps in all of these cases, plus more. It captures the time spent in GitHub repositories on pull requests and commits with an unmatched level of precision.  

In this article, we’ll show you how time spent in Github is tracked with this integration and explore a few business and product management use cases that will help you make the most out of this integration.

Can Github track time? 

Not on its own.

As a place for dev teams to collaborate Github is a great resource for teams to work together, but it can also be the place where the most time gets lost. 

Minutes reviewing a project, can soon turn into hours and as such, having an accurate view on time spent here, is vital to building the most efficient development team available.

Once integrated with Timely, you’ll be able to see where yours and your team’s time is being spent in Github and how you can best optimize this to drive business results.

How can you track your time in Github?

A Github integration in Timely can be set up by anyone with a Github account and access to work repositories. All commits, pull requests, and time spent on them will show up on your personal and private Memory timeline inside Timely throughout the day. Each Github activity — or “memory” — will detail what you’ve worked on, and for how long, including comments, pull requests, and code branches you’ve created, deleted, or updated.

What are the benefits of tracking time in Github?

Measure engineering performance and velocity

Most engineering KPIs are measured in volume: how much code you write, how many commits you log, and how many branches and pull requests you work on in a day. If you’re charging based on your time, it’s hard to track how long you’ve spent writing code, then writing commit description, documentation, and merging it with the right branch. Commit count is and writing code is only one part of your work, the other part - happening mostly on Github, can only be accounted for with this Github integration. Start tracking the time spent on Github and get accurate, to-the-minute reports of how long it takes you to update repositories, review and test pull requests, and more.

in addition to lines of code written and commits logged, there's a more agile metric describing how long it takes to complete work - and that’s called engineering velocity. While there are ways to measure velocity over days and sprints, measuring engineering velocity on discrete work units is much more complicated. 

With the time tracking integration for Github, velocity measurement is ultra-precise. Every ticket, comment, or project is tracked and added to your timeline. Product managers can find tickets that cause most bottlenecks in a sprint and assign them to senior engineers. Or, engineering teams can create their own velocity benchmarks and discover what causes bottlenecks in code reviews, quality testing, or code commits.

Improve DevOps metrics

Combined with JIRA, this Github integration gives businesses precise estimates for the actual development time of products, features, or improvements. This can immediately improve your agility strategy, whether you’re a software business or an IT consultancy. Here’s how:

When you account for the time it takes to make code changes on every single Github pull request or ticket, you get more accurate inputs for your lead time to changes, a critical delivery metric your clients and stakeholders ask about non-stop. For example, you can track the time for all tickets related to programming a set of answers into your customer service chatbot. In the future, when your team is tasked with another update, you’ll be able to give your customer support and leadership teams an accurate completion date.

Improve project profitability in software and IT

When your engineering costs are lower than the revenue brought in by a software project, congratulations, you’re profitable! That’s not the end goal, though. Teams change, deliverables change, and IT budgets shrink as more players enter the market. 

Besides accurate project estimates, there are a few other levers you can lean on to improve profitability: internal costs, pricing, and margins. 

In Timely, you can set up cost and billable rates for every engineer. When they log time against any Github branch, pull request or commit, you can generate detailed profitability reports for the work they’ve been doing. If you find yourself in a position where your team includes only senior engineers, you’ll have to consistently charge a higher price for even the slightest code change. As a project and IT manager, you can suggest hiring a few junior engineers to take on this type of work. Subsequently, your pricing will improve, and you’ll be able to offer competitive services at a higher profit margin.

Who can make the most of the Github time tracking integration?

• Companies that bill by the hour

• IT agencies and consultancies, app and software development agencies

• On-demand engineering teams
• Software and IT consultants