Question

So Im the only lonely dev working on a simple project in Fogbuz on demand.

Im not all that clear on how the whole time tracking thing works.

Do I have to come around and say what case Im working on every time I start working on a case? Then what does the Work Schedule option do?

Also, I work from home and usually don't have a fixed time, so I can end up programming at generally odd hours.

When I resolved a case late at night, it said you doing something out of your schedule, so this doesn't get tracked something?

Could someone maybe post an overview of how time tracking works? I couldn't find any docs or posts on this (Or maybe if didn't search well enough, point me in the right direction?)

Answer 1

Initially, we also struggled with the same sort of confusion regarding the whole Time Tracking thing. Here's how it all works in a nutshell:

1. For each case, enter an Estimate to tell FogBugz how much time you think you need to spend working on the case in order to resolve (complete) the case
2. As you work through your case list, you track the time you spend on it. If you track this yourself (outside of FogBugz), you can enter the time spent in the Elapsed field of the edit window. If you don't want to deal with the hassle of tracking the time you spent on your own, FogBugz can track the time you spend for you and automatically apply it to the correct case. To do this, you indicate what case you are working on through the Working On menu in the top-right of every page.
3. As you work through your list of cases in this manner, FogBugz builds up an Estimation History for you which allows it to predict how you will work through cases in the future. It uses this information in it's Evidence Based Scheduling (EBS) mechanism to predict when milestones will be met and when projects are likely to be completed.
4. The 3rd and final piece of the puzzle (estimation and time tracking are the first two parts) is the Working Schedule. FogBugz uses users' working schedules in a couple of different ways. As you've seen, it tries to help out with the time tracking, mainly by keeping the clock from running forever on a case if you forget to turn it off. The main purpose of the working schedule, however, is that it tells EBS how much time you spend working on FogBugz projects each day. Using the time you say you have available, as well as your estimation history and estimates to predict how long things will take, EBS calculates the schedule I mentioned above.

The working schedule is just a guideline for FogBugz to get an idea of how much time it has to work with when it tries to figure out estimated completion dates. The actual start and stop times in the working schedule don't matter as much as the length of time. So, if you work 4 hours a day on FogBugz cases, as long as the time in your working schedule is 4 hours, FogBugz doesn't really care when that time starts and stops.

Lastly, don't worry about the Off Schedule message. That is just FogBugz trying to be helpful and warning you that it won't automatically "stop the clock" for you if you leave for the day and leave a case timer running. The time spent (and any other actions taken) are still recorded and still matter.

Answer 2

Fact is that working schedules, EBS, and time tracking yield the most value to larger teams. If you're less than four devs, you're probably not paying the fixed-cost of communication that larger teams are paying to keep up with each others' work, and so can afford to leave EBS aside and just trust your gut.