Coming Soon - Early 2023

Jira

Track time spent by teams on issue resolution and product management.

Time Tracking for JIRA

Software development teams and IT contractors need time-tracking tools to measure engineering velocity and to accurately bill development work. In some cases, the account managers also need engineering timesheets for real-time progress updates for their clients. For both cases, we’ve built a time-tracking integration for JIRA. It captures the time spent on engineering and collaborative work across projects and JIRA tickets and can only be set up by admins.

We’ll go over the activities tracked in JIRA and the business benefits of understanding how engineering teams make use of their time.

Can JIRA track time?

No. Not on its own.

JIRA is a powerful tool when it comes to collaborating effectively across teams but when it comes to tracking time, it is somewhat lacking. Being able to accurate track where teams and individuals spend their time is vital to the success of projects.

Timely’s JIRA integration takes the guesswork out of tracking time and empowers individuals, as well as managers to get the most out of their work day.

How can you track engineering time in JIRA?

JIRA can only be set up by account admins for entire tech teams. Time spent in JIRA will appear on your personal and private Memory timeline inside Timely throughout the day. Each JIRA activity — or “memory” — will detail the projects and issues you worked on, including what you updated, created, and deleted.

What are the benefits of tracking time in JIRA?

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 tickets you work on throughout the day.

There's a more agile metric describing how long it takes to complete work - 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 JIRA, 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 ticket resolution delays – be it bad code, long approval and Q&A processes, or gatekeepers.

Improve DevOps metrics

Combined with Github, this JIRA 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 JIRA 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 JIRA ticket, 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.