I feel like this space is underexploited- and I can't figure out if it's because every company's requirements are so different, that it become hard to create a good product, or if there's really no target market segment for this.
any thoughts?
If you ask people to enter their time, they will lie. Sometimes not on purpose, but they will lie nonetheless. And, they'll eat up 10-30 minutes trying to remember what they did and enter it in in a human-readable way. And they'll piss away some time/focus shifting from productive stuff to time-entry stuff and back throughout the day.
Of course, for time/materials folks-- lying is GOOD. It almost always means that you bill for more hours than you spend on behalf of the client. If you bill for an hour of time, you almost certainly aren't subtracting the 7 minutes you spend emailing your girlfriend and the three minutes you spent twittering about the bowl of oatmeal you had.
But I truly think that one of the most important things a person or business can do is understand how people spend time (and how that changes over time).
(note: I run RescueTime, which passively records how people spend time/attention. I also ran a time/materials consulting biz for 8ish years and constantly was nagging geeks to enter their billable time. Yuck!)
1) Review a random sample of their unit tests
2) Count the number of passing unit tests that they write
3) Count the number of story points they complete
(Then I got a salaried job ;) Though keeping track of the time you spend on things is important for another reason: those "I'll be done in a few days!" declarations are either backed up by fact, or provably wrong.)
I agree, it's funny, but see you later!
Yes, I'll do them, probably this week when I have a spare hour, but how accurate do you think they will be?
I have no idea whether they're good or not, but they're profitable and he's a nice guy. Worth a try!