Best Jira Time Tracking Application

If you spend as much time as I do in Atlassian Jira working on tickets and tracking work, you will be aware that the built-in time tracking is lacking.  Basically when you transition a ticket between workflow items it just asks you how many hours (or partial hours) you worked on a ticket.  You can also add work manually to a ticket as you work on it.

This is OK if your team is good with you dropping in estimates (you might have worked 47 minutes on something and you round up and submit 1 hour.)

If you want to keep exact time, this is where a time tracking tool comes in.  There a few time tracking tools that work with Jira (paid and free) and a bunch more that don’t integrate.

I have found that the JIRA StopWatch tool works well.  It will track hours/minutes and attach it to a ticket/issue/story that is assigned to you.

Once you type in the ticket number, it will pull the ticket title and allow you to hit the “play”button to start tracking time.

Here are a few things I like about it.

• It’s free, but not crappy
• Will automatically pause tracking if you lock your computer and start it back up when you unlock the computer (great for coffee breaks)
• You can edit any of the times manually.
• You don’t have to keep going back to Jira just to submit time as you work on something