RFE: dedicated "stopwatch" page

[Sam Halliday]

First of all, I have to congratulate you on this plugin - it does a lot more than I thought it would and I am very happy.

Until now I have been using a free service, slimtimer.com, to manage time sheets and run reports. It is a very good service - mostly AJAX - but it can never be as good as a TRAC plugin in terms of integration with projects.

There are, however, a few things SlimTimer.com does exceptionally well, and it would be good if TimingAndEstimation were to duplicate the same functionality. Most notably, slimtimer's dedicated stopwatch (which can be viewed as a popup window, or even fits nicely in an iPhone screen) lists all the currently active Tasks, so that the user can clock time against them.

Please support a similar dedicated stopwatch screen, making recording time very easy.

[Sam Halliday]

I have since discovered the WorkLogPlugin which, I suppose, aims to implement this kind of functionality.

I now see TimingAndEstimation as the function at the top which produces reports of time spent on issues. It doesn't have the ability to print out reports for non-Owners of an issue and doesn't provide a way to record time sheets.

However, I'm not convinced about WorkLogPlugin. It still insists that there is only one person at a time who can log time against an issue, and it is not very easy to use.

For me to be able to use a time tracking system inside TRAC it would absolutely have to meet these criteria:

• allow any registered user to clock time against an issue (not just the owner)
• have a dedicated stopwatch page/popup that has a similar UI to slimtimer (actually toggl.com is much better, but is expensive)
• produce timesheet reports, with similar options as slimtimer.
• record the date and value for estimates, given by individual users.

I think, ultimately, any tool that does this would have to update the data stored in TimingAndEstimation so that plugins which use the estimate/hours columns would have access to these fields. So perhaps what I am wanting is new plugin, that I might have to write myself.

Basically, I would like to have all the recording/reporting of slimtimer right in TRAC :-) (The slimtimer plugin doesn't work for 0.11+ and only synchronises with slimtimer anyway)

If you don't want to work on this, please feel free to CLOSE. But I'd appreciate as much advice as you can to help me out, should I decide to write a plugin.

[Russ Tyndall]

Currently T&E does allow any registered user to clock time against an issue (not just the owner). So one point is out of the way. Not sure what a timesheet report is, but it sounds like the "Developer Work Summary" report to me. T&E also keeps track of who set an estimate at what time (in the ticket_change table), I'm guessing this is insufficient, but I am not sure in what way (only thing I can really think of is wanting multiple estimates per ticket or something).

So it seems like most of what you want is already in T&E, but perhaps with a few modifications.

A stopwatch page would probably not be terribly difficult and could fairly easily be written as a plugin that relies on T&E. You can also provide T&E reports from a plugin so that should mostly cover everything you need. If you need specific advice for integrating with T&E I would be happy provide some.

My company, Acceleration.net, would also be willing to develop this plugin for you. I assume you would not mind it being open source, so it would qualify for a lesser hourly work rate than we usually charge. If you are interested, we could communicate over email to work up a spec-document / proposal.

Cheers, please let me know if you have any specific questions

[Sam Halliday]

Thanks for the response Bobby, I really appreciate your comments. I will likely call upon you for advice as I intend to take this challenge up over the coming 6 months – my estimation, tracking and reporting requirements are quite specific. I don't have budget but will keep it in mind if I am in a situation where I really need this outsourced and budget is available.

When I say "timesheet" I mean the individual atoms of time (start/end/paused/user), with reports available to collate that information. I think slimtimer does this perfectly, but it lacks trac integration and the plugin doesn't necessarily provide that (even for versions of trac which it supports). We'd have to take the conversation offline if you want examples. I think a DB schema to support timesheets and multiple user estimates is *essential* and therefore T&E probably isn't the right base for me to extend. That said, whatever I do I'll try to make it as compatible as possible with T&E (e.g. use different field names etc).