Why Time Tracking is Critical for Software Development

For most software development companies, understanding your project costs, optimizing your resource allocation and making sure your projects stay on time and on budget are the most critical factors that help drive the profitability and success of the organization.  However, the concept of tracking time to development efforts can be somewhat difficult for dev teams (some may argue that it simply doesn’t work). This is mainly because developers tend to have a certain “flow” and can jump from project to project within a set period of time. This can lead to ambiguities in how to bill time to different projects.

Most software development teams will also work with concepts such as sprints or points to measure their productivity; however, from a project management perspective, a key data element that helps project managers measure success is the amount of time their team spends achieving those goals.

Are you able to answer the following questions regarding your development projects?

• Are we going to complete our projects on time and on budget?
• What is our historical project estimate-to-actual variance? How can we better estimate future projects?
• How optimized are my resources? Do I have enough of the right people to complete my projects on time?
• Are my resources working on the right projects?   Are we keeping in line with the organization’s objectives?

With the right project time tracking solution in place, software development team managers will be able to answer these key questions. As a software organization, the Development team here at Journyx utilizes our own project time tracking solution to answer these questions.  Without the data collected through Journyx, they would not be able to understand their project costs, compare actual work to estimates, optimize their team’s resources or understand utilization metrics (as they compare to company objectives).