What do you think about TFS as time tracking tool? Are there built-in functionalities that can efficiently track time that is spent at some work items, sprints, projects,... Also, it would be useful to explain how to do it.
I found at MSDN forum some suggestions that it is better to use some other tool. What is your opinion about this?
I edited this post, because I wanted to add one more topic - Bug tracking. During internet search I found many articles that agree that TFS is good Bug tracking tool, so I wanted to ask for your experiences and for suggestion for good How-to articles or books. Usually people suggest book Application Lifecycle Management with Vs2010 so I take a look and found interesting chapters, but in this moment I need book or tutorial that covers Bug tracking in details (in this book it is not covered in that way). Also, book is very useful and I recommend it.
We used a different tool before we found TFS. In that tool we tried to track time on a per bug/feature basis. In short it failed miserably. Unless you are a consultant, developers just don't think of tracking time on that level. (If you are able to track it on that level then just add some time fields to your task work items and use something like TFS Aggregator to roll those totals up to the parent work items.)
We have found that tracking time in a more general way works for us. We made an admin project and created a "Timecard" work item. All developers create these work items as they do work. (Daily or Weekly)
On our timecard we enter:
Project: We have a list of projects (in a global list, because our TFS project list does not match up to our actual list of projects exactly).
Day the work was done: This is the end of the week it was done if entering weekly.
Work Categories: We have about 8 or so categories that time can go into. We enter the hours worked into one of those categories.
One thing I think we will end up doing with TFS 2010 is adding the release version to the time card. (This allows tracking time on both the project and the release. As our release system is fairly specific to us I will not go into it. If you want details on how we do it leave a comment.)
There's a project on codeplex called: http://tfstimesheet.codeplex.com/ but it appears to not be updated for TFS2010
Personally, it sounds like a good idea, but it really needs to be executed correctly.
As a side note there appears to be a number of them at: http://www.codeplex.com/site/search?query=tfs%20time&ac=8
We're actually in the process of doing this right now. Unfortunately, we've got TFS 2008 currently, so we lack the ability to have hierarchical work items, but we're making do with it by managing our links internally. We need the hierarchy for Project->Phase->Task in our environment.
Our implementation actually makes heavy use of a SQL server back-end, with linkages to the tasks in TFS. SQL is the repository for most of the actual time reporting, with actuals and ETCs being synced back with the appropriate work items in TFS. There will be a scheduled (probably nightly) synchronization and roll-up that will be responsible for bringing the TFS fields for Actuals and ETCs up to date, and then rolling them up from task to phase and project.
We are using a custom-developed front-end that theoretically can be integrated within Visual Studio.
We looked at some of the offerings on codeplex, and I think there's one commercial offering. Unfortunately, none of them met our specific needs, and there was a strong desire for the ability to customize our system in the future.
If you are searching for an extension that adds full time tracking capabilities to Team Foundation Server, maybe you like to take a look at http://www.tfs-timetracker.com. We developed this tool to be fully integrated into TFS, so you have an additional menu in TFS web access, and it allows to track your times directly against work items. In addition, there is a client running on your desktop for tracking the time you spend on TFS' workitems.
I'm currently using this tool: http://tfstracker.codeplex.com/ It uses a couple of custom fields from TFS Server but even with this, the tool is 100% functional.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5487254/tfs-time-tracking-and-bug-tracking