The Time Has Come to Push the Button

Using the new ‘start work’ button for better time tracking in Manuscript

Gareth Wilson
Feb 21, 2018 · 2 min read

Agile Resource Planning

Time Tracking is an essential part of Agile software development. To make resource planning effective, you need to track the time you spend on tasks so that developers, technical management and product managers gain insight into project progress and how much work remains outstanding.

Time tracking is built right into Manuscript, and enables you to not only record time spent on each case, but from that logged time you can keep timesheets useful for keeping clients and customers informed, as well as generate reports and visualizations that show how individuals and teams spend their time. Like ‘Hours spent per person, per project’, or burndown charts, showing hours remaining to complete a project displayed over time.

It also provides the raw data, along with estimates, that powers our unique Smart Scheduling feature, which uses AI to calculate ship date probabilities and predict software schedules.

Tracking Time

We provide the facility to log time automatically. To make it easy to track your time, Manuscript uses your working schedule (which can be set at Time Tracking > My Working Schedule) to stop the clock automatically whenever you go home and start it again automatically when you come back in the morning. It also stops the clock during lunch breaks and when you’re on vacation, etc. That way you only need to change the “working on” case when you switch from one case to another. You can specify a site-wide working schedule, along with individual team members’ working schedules when they differ.

And now any case that has an estimate will show a start/stop work button directly in the case itself. This makes it even easier to record what it is that you’re working on, and provide accurate time information. This benefits everything you use time tracking for, from better probabilities of project completion, to more accurate reports that keep management informed and eases project planning.

Learn more about managing projects with Manuscript.

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