Automatically tracking development time [closed]

Answer 1

If you use source control you can use svn (or any other) hooks on commit and checkout that log timestamps to a db, etc when you check your project out and when you check it back in.

The trick to making this work - and it is easiest on single developer projects - is to MAKE SURE you check your work in when you are done working for a period of time, and that you check it out immediately prior to doing actual work.

This might not be feasible for your project. Build process checking etc suffers from the same issues - namely that you might work for 3 hours and then build 8 hours after that.

Answer 2

We wrote a plug-in for our IDE (IntelliJ in our case) that keeps track of time spent per project automatically. The IDE's API lets you list for events like edits, changing windows, etc., so we log a record every time something like that happens. The reporting module looks at this raw data and determines the total time spent per project by comparing timestamps between records. If the difference is greater than 5 minutes, it assumes no work was done during this time.

It's not perfect and it's not 100% accurate but you do eliminate all the overheard of manually tracking this stuff yourself through some external tool.

Answer 3

My opinion is that you would greatly benefit yourself in keeping a light-weight development journal. Notes, sketches, times, dates, etc, designs. It's not an answer to your question, but it is a discipline that few developers have and one that they desperately need.

Life is busy and people must learn to track / budget their time and discipline themselves to take on good behaviors and habits.

I encourage you to fight and win this battle. Don't compromise something so easy to automation when there are greater gains if you improve your skills. You might also want to check out LifeHacker for some ideas.

A bit of a non-answer, but I hope you find it helpful.