Add timer counter while ticket is "open"

[melinate]

This may be two requests, but here it goes... I saw a feature of ATTACC Help Desk that kept track of the amount of time that a ticket is left open. The idea is you leave the ticket open while you are working on it and close it when you are done. Then you don't have to manually keep track of hours/minutes/seconds.

Of course the field would need to be editable as well, but to have the advantage of a built in timer is a greater degree of accuracy in the amount of time spent on the ticket. The second request this necessitates is a more accurate field(s) to keep track of at least hours and minutes if not seconds. Perhaps just seconds then it can be displayed in a number of formats (hours, hours and minutes, days & hours, etc.)--based on the requirements of the project.

[Russ Tyndall]

The way we currently use trac would not really facilitate the timing based on ticket open time. We currently leave tickets open much longer than than the amount of time we work on them. For example, when we begin a project we often spec out many tickets in advance then spend weeks (months) filling in the implementation. Because we are trying to bill out of this system, we need to record the actual time spent working on it rather than the amount of time open.

That being said, the ticket open time is available and could be added to any of the reports or to a new aging report fairly trivially (its just the seconds form the last 'open' ticket change to the first).

As far as more accurate time fields, all times are being stored as a decimal. Our company policy is to bill to the nearest quarter hour so just an hours field works fine for us. Even if you were billing to the nearest 7.5 minutes this would still work. However, it might be worth while to add a mode for precision time keeping. The real issue with this as I see it, is that it requires three fields in the ticket properties rather than one. As this area is alread a bit bloaty I was trying to avoid adding more boxes.

What do you think? Would there be a tangible advantage to more accurate time keeping that would outweigh the clutter of extra boxes?

Thanks for the comments,
Russ

[bmf1972@…]

"The way we currently use trac would not really facilitate the timing based on ticket open time. We currently leave tickets open much longer than than the amount of time we work on them."

Why not counting time automatically since "accept" till "resolve"? Then the ticket could remain "new" any time needed.

[Russ Tyndall]

If you want to provide a patch I would be happy to incorporate it. There are plenty of solutions for keeping accurate time that allow you to stop and start counting. Currently I tend to just make a comment "start" when I start working. then I have a record of when I worked on it in the ticket change log. Not particularly elegant, but solves the problem for me.

Your idea of using assigned time is fine and would work, but I cannot do this right now. My company will not allow me to work on things that we will not use without being paid for them.

Patches welcome :)

[anonymous]

Have a look at the TimingAndEstimationPlugin. It adds fields for hours spent on a given ticket. I am thinking of also writing a desktop application in Python that will use the RPC interface in Trac to allow you to time yourself neatly and submit the recorded time to the ticket. That way you can get a popup every 10 mins or so to keep you focused (and so you don't forget and let the timer run away with itself). That aside, I think this plugin will more or less do what you want tho'.

[Russ Tyndall]

see #1667 for someone actually trying to fix this (as per the previous comment)