TracHours Plugin User Manual

Track hours spent on tickets

Description

This plugin helps to keep track of hours worked on tickets. This is an alternative to TimingAndEstimationPlugin, but with a different approach:

• Instead of adding hours only via ticket fields, there is a separate view for managing ticket hours. /hours/<ticket number> displays the accrued hours for a particular ticket with a timeline-like view, but should also allow adding of new hours (by default, on "today", but this should be changeable via dropdown menus for day, month, year, etc), editing previously entered hours (amount, date, description) and deleting previously allotted hours if you have the appropriate permissions (TICKET_ADD_HOURS for your own hours, TRAC_ADMIN for the hours of others).
• A management and query view is at /hours. This view displays the hours for all tickets for a given time period (last week, by default) in a way that combines the query interface for querying tickets and the timeline display for hours on the tickets in the time period. Query filters are available to find hours for people, hours for tickets of a certain component, etc.
• Hours are uniquely assigned to tickets and people.
• Hours may have a description, which should be displayed in the applicable views; if a description is provided, the hours and description are logged to ticket comments.
• Tickets have links to /hours/<ticket number> as the total hours field so that a user can add and view hours for the ticket.

Hour tracking and estimation is most useful for the following types of questions:

• How much time has been spent on a project?
• How much time remains in a budget (estimate for a project)?
• How much time have we committed to for the next time period?
• How much time is a developer committed to over the next time period?

If we put hour estimates on tickets, assign tickets to people, associate tickets with milestones, and give milestones due dates, TracHours can generate reports to answer those questions.

For other Trac time-tracking solutions, see t:TimeTracking.

Components

TracHours consists of a number of components that work together to help track time:

TracHoursPlugin

TracHoursPlugin is the core component of TracHours.

• API function.
• Navigation bar provider.
• Query view for /hours.
• Ticket hours view for /hours/<ticket number>
• Stream filter for checking and rendering of estimated hours and total hours fields for tickets
• RSS feeds at /hours?format=rss and /hours/<ticket number>?format=rss

This component must be enabled to use the TracHoursPlugin functionality.

SetupTracHours

SetupTracHours sets up the database and custom fields for the TracHoursPlugin. You must enable this component for anything to work, including the TracHoursPlugin component.

TracHoursRoadmapFilter

TracHoursRoadmapFilter adds hours information for milestones at /roadmap and /milestone/<milestone name>

TracHoursSidebarProvider

The TracHoursSidebarProvider component uses the TicketSidebarProviderPlugin (if enabled) to add a form to each ticket for direct addition of hours to the ticket. Hours will be logged as the authenticated user and comments will not be made.

TracHoursByComment

The TracHoursByComment component enables adding hours by ticket comments. Comments containing snippets like 5 hours, 1 hour, 3.7 hours, or 0:30 hours will be added to the total hours for the ticket, provided the commenter has the TICKET_ADD_HOURS permission.

MultiprojectHours

The TracHoursPlugin exports RSS from the /hours handler. This has been utilized to provide hours reports across projects sharing the same parent directory. If trachours.multiproject is enabled, then /hours/multiproject will become a handler front-ending hours reports throughout the project and a link to this will appear on the /hours page to /hours/multiproject.

The multiproject report breaks down hours by project and worker giving row and column totals. If there are no hours for a project, then that project will not be shown.