Agile Time Tracking Practices: Tips for Adaptive Projects

If you want to pick a fight with a software developer, try bringing up Agile time tracking.

There will be denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, in some cases, acceptance. In others, you’ll never hear from them again.

The gist of the argument is this: while there’s no doubt that tracking time has many benefits for a Scrum team, the cons outweigh the pros. But then again, if we take a closer look at the cons in question, it boils down to resentment from the team. And no wonder, seeing how developers, like many professionals in other fields, hate micromanagement and wasteful, manual work.

In this blog post, we’ll consider Agile time tracking without BS like micromanagement and manual timers. There’s a way for remote teams to get all the benefits of Agile time tracking without growing resentful of the process.

If you’re a Product Owner trying to get a better hold of Sprint progress, this is a must-read for you.

Let’s get to it.

Should Agile teams track time?

When it comes to deciding whether Agile teams should track time, we can’t help but go back to the conversation about the pros and cons of it. Let’s review the pros first.

Pros: Better project management

Agile project time tracking provides better insight into Sprints. Seeing how both Scrum and Kanban were developed with speed and efficiency as the guiding principles, it’s essential that roadblocks are resolved on time and value gets delivered to customers as promised.

Product Owners can’t do their job well if they don’t have real-time insight into project progress. It’s not about hitting a billable utilization or some other target – it’s about knowing how busy the team is and adjusting resources accordingly.

Pros: Better SP estimates

Story Points (SPs) are merely assumptions and the ratio of Story Point to hour can be very far from 1:1. In fact, there’s no conversion rate that can be applied to all Agile teams and project scenarios. Which makes time tracking such a useful tool for Product Owners.

Knowing exactly how long an SP takes helps Product Owners establish a project-based threshold – whether it’s an hour or a range of 10-20 hours. Again, it’s not about replacing SPs with time estimates; it’s about having a project-based understanding of how Story Points translate into real-world value for customers that’s measured in products delivered on time.

Pros: Better profitability management

Ultimately, the job of a Product Owner is to keep projects profitable and stakeholders happy. To do this, they need to make sure projects don’t exceed the allotted time and budget because both result in scope creep and overservicing clients.

Time tracking data on past projects is the best benchmark for profitability forecasting. Whether it’s during Iteration Planning, Sprint Backlog, or Retrospective, having historical time data at your fingertips helps Product Owners make better decisions and keep Agile teams profitable.

Let’s now review the cons of Agile time tracking.

Cons: Manual work

Nobody likes unrewarding, unpaid, distracting tasks such as time tracking. Software developers suffer a lot from distractions like running timers, especially when in the flow state. Not only does it interrupt focus, but also breeds the anxiety that stalls the creative process of coding.

When it comes to Agile software development, manual time tracking is worse than no time tracking at all. At least with no time tracking you don’t lose the time it takes to start and stop the timer and then regain focus after the interruption.

Cons: Micromanagement concerns

Micromanagement goes against the principles of Agile, and developers are rightfully opposed to intrusive and unethical employee monitoring techniques.

When asked to track time on Story Points, agile teams will often complain about micromanagement because they feel a lack of trust. This results in BS data in timesheets, which leads to wrong utilization insights and ultimately hurts Agile projects.

How to track time the Agile way?

The fundamental challenge of software development is that there are no two scenarios that are exactly the same. Even with two very similar projects, there are always variations that may impact the complexity and make estimations impossible.

And yet it is the Product Owner’s job to respond to the management and report to stakeholders. When projects inevitably exceed scope, it’s not enough to shrug and say that Agile software development is just “too complex and unpredictable”. Having reliable timesheets with accurate data on where developers’ time went is a much better justification of any delays.

Now that we’ve established the pros and cons of Agile time tracking, we can figure out a way to balance out and minimize the cons while keeping all the pros.

We know that 1) manual time tracking is not an option, and 2) micromanagement will harm projects more than it could ever help. With these two assumptions in mind, we can establish the principles of time tracking the Agile way.

1. Fully automated process

For Agile time tracking to make sense, it needs to be seamless. Better yet, completely silent, i.e., automated. No timers, no minding open apps, no clocking in and out. An example of an Agile time tracker that satisfied all these requirements is Memtime.

Memtime is an app for Windows, macOS, and Linux that works in the background and quietly records all computer activity, including all time in developer tools. You don’t need to keep the app open or even be logged into your account. As long as Memtime is installed on your machine, activity recording will happen automatically 24/7.

2. Uncompromised privacy

The beauty of a desktop time tracker app is that user activity data never leaves the device. Developers understand that and appreciate the privacy they get with automatic activity recording.

It’s your job as a Product Owner to explain to your team why you need to track time and how it serves Agile projects. And then give your team the tools to track time safely and on their own terms.

For example, with an Agile time tracker like Memtime it doesn’t matter how much time passed since you worked on a Story Point. Memtime stores all of your historical activity data on your device, so you can go back and complete timesheets days or weeks later, with unprecedented precision.

Implementing Agile time tracking

Now that we’ve established the fundamentals of Agile time tracking and looked at an example of a time tracker that fits the requirements, we need to understand how to fit it into the Agile process and tools you’re already using.

An automatic activity tracker is wonderful but it’s not enough to support Agile software development on its own. Luckily, you can use automatic time tracking as an extension of your project management tool, e.g. Jira or Azure DevOps. Let’s review the process of implementing Agile time tracking for a team using Jira for project management.

Add Memtime to Jira

Whatever Agile methodology you use, be that Scrum, Kanban, or some other custom solution, Jira offers tools for efficient project management, including timesheets powered by Tempo. If you’ve ever used Tempo Timesheets, you know that it requires a fair share of manual work of starting and stopping timers.

The good news is that you can easily integrate Memtime with Jira by simply authenticating your Jira Cloud, Jira Server, or Tempo account in Memtime. These integrations are available out of the box, meaning you can set up automatic time tracking as an extension of your current tech stack.

The way the integration works is that it pulls data from Jira into Memtime (and back) so you can:

Automate timesheets

As you log hours on Jira issues based on activities recorded automatically by Memtime, your timesheets are automatically populated with project hours. For software developers, this means no more dreading Fridays when timesheets are to be submitted, or struggling to come up with what to put in comments and descriptions.

Which brings us to the final point.

Get your team on board

Ultimately, your Agile time tracking process is only as good as your team’s compliance with it. Even with the best tools available, if you fail to communicate the importance of time tracking to software developers, they’ll never do it the way you need them to.

Starting the conversation about Agile time tracking is not easy so open with your two strongest points:

1. It takes zero effort from the team.
2. It’s completely private and safe.

And then follow up with why you do it in the first place:

1. Plan Sprints better.
2. Deliver on time.
3. Grow profitability.

Final thoughts

Even though the topic of time tracking in Agile development is controversial, there’s no doubt it can be highly beneficial when done right. As long as the software development process involves stakeholders other than developers, the question of real-world quantifiables will inevitably arise and it’s Product Owners’ responsibility to resolve it in the best way possible.

Agile time tracking is not only possible, it’s essential if we take a closer look at the pros vs cons and realize that the cons can be overcome with very little effort. Agile time trackers like Memtime are there to help Product Owners get the full benefits of project time tracking with none of the consequences of a bad timekeeping process.

We hope this guide inspires you to take a fresh look at Agile time tracking through the lens of automated and safe tools. If you’re ready to make the most of your Sprints with smarter time and productivity management, create an account with Memtime right now, no risks involved. And see the difference it can make to your project progress management, planning, and profitability.