Question

I work irregular hours (40 hours per week, but not your normal 9-5 schedule) and I'm trying to figure out how to track my time so that I can get reasonable results from EBS. Based on the following quote from this article:

Another way to account for it is that he leaves the clock running even when he's not working on features at all

I have the impression that I can just tell FogBugz that I work 9-5, 40-hour weeks, tell it to not clock me out automatically, and let it know every time I start working on a new case. I understand that my velocities will always be low (around .33 if I estimate well), but that's OK as long as it's consistent.

The point I don't understand is - when creating my schedule and trying to decide when I will finish my work, is FogBugz able to deduce that in my estimates, 1 day is 8 hours, but in my elapsed time, 1 day is 24 hours?

Since I always take 24 hours to finish 8 hours of work, I wouldn't want the schedule to say - this guy always takes 3 times longer than he estimates, so each 8 hours of estimated work will take 3 calendar days to finish because he needs 24 hours and works 9-5.

So my questions are:

• Is it safe to track my elapsed time by never clocking out and only telling FogBugz when I start working on a new case?
• If so, am I correct in setting my work hours as 9-5 M-F, or should it be 00:00-23:59 Sun-Sat?
• If not, how should I track my time, knowing that I work irregular hours and want to spend as little time and effort tracking my time as possible?
• How will any of this affect cases that are initially estimated by someone else and later assigned to me, or vice versa?

Answer 1

That does seem like it would cause problems, but you could try it, switching your working schedule to a 24/7 working schedule. You would have to re-estimate every case assigned to you to make yourself the estimator of record.

I don't know how much of this sounds like less of a pain that setting your Working On correctly. I guess it's a matter of personal preference.