Time tracking using Discourse?

[downey (Michael Downey)]

Hi folks. I’ve poked around as this topic has come up now and then over the years, but has anyone successfully found a way to use Discourse to log time/effort/money spent by people working on a project.

We have the assign plugin that is great to show who’s doing what, but I don’t see any clear standard for keeping track of how much effort was spent on the various things that were assigned.

An alternative is something like GitLab which allows you to run an issue tracker and log time against it with comments (which get added to cumlative totals and then you can run reports on it). But in some cases, folks would rather keep everything in Discourse rather than running two separate systems.

This may not be an actual Discourse feature, but rather may be more of a hack that folks have come up with. Anyone have any experience or ideas?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Interesting. We don’t tend to track time this way, but there have been notable recent improvements to the assign plugin:

• you will be reminded by PM every month (by default, can be set daily / weekly / etc) of any pending assignments

• there is a centralized page for managing all your assignments which cuts across public topic and PM assignments as well.

Anything else I missed here @Roman_Rizzi?

[Roman_Rizzi]

That’s pretty much everything. Reminders are disabled by default and the weekly option will be available soon.

There are some upcoming features too:

• Users will be able to override the frequency of the reminders (Hopefully, this feature will be available tomorrow)
• Allowed groups will be able to assign topics instead of just admins and moderators (I’m currently working on it).

Assign topics to non-staff users

Is it possible to add the possibility of assigning topics to users of other groups than staff? I would be very much interested in this as well. In a recent Discourse blog post, there is an allusion to such functionality We use a category on our internal instance of Discourse to manage tasks. New tasks are written up in the todo category. In some cases they are immediately assigned and in others, we tag a group to give visibility of the task so that a team member can claim it using Discours…

[tobiaseigen]

Interesting… I think time tracking may be overkill for discourse and it’s not something we use either. There are other tools that are better at it and more flexible, and provide related functionality like invoicing etc. However, I could imagine something could be done with a plugin that lets you record time in a post in a certain syntax, which then displays it in some useful way in the topic title and in the post.

@codinghorror

there have been notable recent improvements to the assign plugin:

Whoa, that’s cool! I just updated and am happy to see this nifty new feature. It will help so much with followup.

[Campano]

@tobiaseigen

I think time tracking may be overkill for discourse and it’s not something we use either. There are other tools that are better at it and more flexible, and provide related functionality like invoicing etc.

My team spends a lot of time answering client requests on our forum and I really wish they could:

• associate the topic to a client (maybe I could use private tags or categories for that)
• declare the time spent on an answer (summed up on the topic)
• so I could have a report of time spent by client / topic / member / etc

The invoicing and other functions can be perfectly handled by other systems through APIs, but tracking time outside of discourse for time spent on discourse is a real pain.

[hellekin]

The leantime software seems to have a number of complimentary functionality that seems useful for project management. Are there people here using leantime who could make a feature comparison with project management in Discourse?

Here is a short overview of leantime features, from the above link:

Leantime	Discourse	Notes
Todos	Kanban Board, Discourse Assign
Milestones	?
Ideas	Topics?
Docs	Discourse Docs (Documentation Management)
Blueprints	?	(maybe Discourse Templates would be useful here?)
Reports	?	(this is the @Campano’s interest)
Timesheets	?	(ditto)
Retrospectives	Topics?

I think it would be interesting to see how much time was spent on a topic, especially in the context of a task. Although ‘reading time’ is an indicative figure, it lacks context. Since there is an estimation of reading time in a topic, there could be a way to estimate time spent responding to a topic – or at least some measurement that would send an alert to the user telling whether they’re spending too much time on this topic. But as I write this I also consider the implementation nightmare of such time estimation, especially as writing is a different thing than researching what to write or spending time resolving an issue, so it’s mostly abstract and detached from any single real situation. That said, a burndown chart (“Reports”) for tasks (using the Kanban board) would be useful, as well as milestone management (grouping tasks together to understand scope and follow progress).

[Campano]

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about any time that discourse should track, but rather a declarative field. As stated by OP, that field could also be effort, money, etc.