Surely an easy way to add this feature is as an optional setting for the project which if set checks that the estimated remaining time is 0 when an issue is closed. We already force people to estimate how long work should take by making estimated time a mandatory field when creating an issue, so this would have the effect of forcing work to be logged before an issue could be closed.

All you would have to is include a new custom field in the resolve screen and then create a post-condition plugin to get this value and modify the work feild through the jira API.

So, even though we wont be implementing it for 3.2, it will be possible to do with a little work.

Cheers,
Nick

a) Stop progress for an issue
b) Edit issue (as separate tab )
c) to create a link in the Issue navigator (similar for the IssueNavigator Workflow actions plug-in)
d) to make it available for non-JIRA standard workflows and related screens.

We use a lot of custom workflows and we need this feature almost in any of those.

Cheers,
Natasa

Nick, if it's that easy, why hasn't anybody done it yet?

This issue (and similar issues) have been around for several years without a resolution. What's holding them up? To me, it just makes sense to allow somebody to log work done on an issue in the same screen as resolving an issue.

I notice this issue hasn't been solved for 5 years !
I'm using version 3.10, and I also need the Time spent field to be logged on resolved screen, but also on other workflow transition screens.
In Administration panel, I can add fields on different screens, but the only Time related field is Estimated time left.

Could we add Time spent field on any screen we want ?

Thanks.

Seems that Atlassian is no longer interested in developing user requested features - they are more interested in testing new technologies (like AJAX).

As the person who is advocating internally for more ajax and 'cool, funky features' in JIRA, I take a little offence at that comment. Mainly because the reason we don't have more ajax and whiz-bang features is that we do spend a large amount of time on user features.

In JIRA 3.10, we did editable worklogs, and having work-logs have dates. In JIRA 3.9, we had convert issue to sub-task. In JIRA 3.8, we had editable comments. We are doing the top issues that people ask for.

I also did some statistics on old issues. Of the 905 issues that were opened in 2002, 597 were also closed in 2002 (65%), 194 in 2003 (Total of 86%). Today, there are only 44 issues left from 2002 that have not been resolved (< 5%).

Now, of those 44, we could drop everything and start working on them. But we don't operate a FIFO queue. We look at all issues that are open.

I really wish we could fix this issue. It's one of my pet peeves also. But unfortunately our resources don't allow us to do everything simultaneously. We have had to make choices and trade-offs.

The reason we make our issue tracker public is so that we can get feedback from you, our customers. So that you can share work-arounds with each other. So that we can harness your collective talents to help us make the best product possible. I couldn't imagine it any other way.

There are down-sides however. One is that our competitors use this information against us. Another is that we have to devote a large amount of time writing and composing these responses. I know of very few other companies that open their issue tracker for a commercial product.

Please - help us make a great product by telling us where we can improve. Spend your energies explaining why a feature is important. Help us feel the pain that you go through. Suggest possible work-arounds, say why this feature is more important than every other feature. That is what is going to help us make the best product out there.

Apologies for the rant. Happy to chat on the phone / email / IM / IRC with anyone who wants to chat about this in real time.

note that this is not a one year old bug. This bug was created FIVE years ago. If you aren't going to do it, close it with a decent explanation

We always look to close bugs asap. But feature requests may or may not ever get done. This depends on our what priority our customers place on features over time, and the way the product evolves.

We could close every 'year old' issue as won't fix. But then how to you get to vote on them? Increase their importance?

Perhaps I'm missing something regarding the age of an issue. How does 'how long an issue has been open' have any impact on it's priority? What about a one year old feature request? We currently have 2575 feature requests open. We obviously aren't going to do them in FIFO order. I guess that is the bit that perplexes me.

http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&&pid=10240&resolution=-1&sorter/field=priority&sorter/order=DESC&sorter/field=issuekey&sorter/order=ASC&sorter/field=votes&sorter/order=DESC (it's sorted by votes but you'll have to add the votes column to see the number of votes)

This one is in position 20, of all the unresolved issues in your database. You just said you'd like to get feedback from us, the customers. Well there it is! How many votes does something need to get implemented? Is there any point to voting? The top 3 by votes seem to have been open since 2003. I wouldn't say that Marc was that far off in his assessment. There are a lot of 2002s, 2003s, and 2004s on that page. How many bugs/features take several years to implement?

In my opinion the age of an issue SHOULD have some effect on an issue's priority. If ten customers have been asking for feature x for five years, but now fifteen customers are now asking for feature y, I would hope that feature x would still get implemented first.

A simpler way to see popular issues is this link:

http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:popularissues-panel

However, if you want to see what we have implemented, you can view this url here:

http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&&pid=10240&sorter/field=priority&sorter/order=DESC&sorter/field=issuekey&sorter/order=ASC&sorter/field=votes&sorter/order=DESC

In the last year we have 4th, 6th, 9th, 11th, 14th, 15th, 18th most popular issues. At the time they were fixed, they would have been higher. For the same reason, the top voted issues get more votes quicker than other issues. Many issues stay for 2-3 years with no votes, and then suddenly becomes popular.

You mentioned 'how many votes does something need' - we listen and pay close attention to the votes. And the comments. However, we can't do everything at once.

I appreciate your patience, and I hope that you have seen some value from the other top issues that we have implemented recently.

Do you have a phone number I can call you on?

Cheers,
Scott

• So looking at the top 100
• Only 2 Issues are less than 1.5 years old (all others are dated pre 2006)
• Only 24/100 have been closed

And you still insist that voting for an issue is the way to get it some attention?

Here is what we've found :

http://code.google.com/p/jira-suite-utilities/

It's a plugin that allows to add conditions for workflow transaction.
The Value Field condition can be used with the Time spent field so that this field is not NULL (string field) to allow users to make the transition : Resolve or Close issue for example.

A condition can be add only for inactive workflows.

This is quite a limited solution, because the Time spent field only have to be logged once (so all the users don't necessarly log their time spent), but it's a good and easy first step.

Regards,

Julien Proult.

I understand that there are many feature requests and bugs to be solved. And I really appreciate the public approach to software development. Jira is still a great bug tracking tool but it lacks some major features that we would need in order to upgrade.

time tracking

We need time tracking in order to do precise logging for our customers: by categories/cost centers we want to define, e.g. specification, development or for support/maintenance topics whether the service was performed during normal work hours or late or on weekends, etc. Times for subtasks need to be totalized in the parent task - and times should not be visible to everybody.
It should be possible to reduce the times.

We want time tracking related reports

• which features took long
• which topics are time consuming and why
• by cost center (and employee), by cost center (and project)
• export to excel

With JIRA I am only able to enter the estimated time and the total time spent. I can use different custom fields, but that is just an inconvenient workaround.
I need plugins like Kaamelot or the plugins developed by my former colleague Phil Herbst - but with integration and support from Atlassian.

billing

We want to do billing for JIRA issues. Time tracking is the first step towards billing. We want to decide which JIRA issue will be billed to the customer. We want to have different costs for different services performed. We want to know which feature was expensive to develop.

project planning

We want to enter availabilities or unavailabilities for our colleagues. We would like to generate reports that consider availabilities and estimated cost for the selected tickets. We want to know whether it is possible to have more tickets on the roadmap or if the team is already overburdened. That would require a personal calender for each team member in order to manage availability.

We don't need MS project, but we would like to export the (related) issues to MS Project or OpenProj (e.g. http://www.mondo.com.br/jiraintegration/).

support for test specification

see JRA-7688 and JRA-11059

Eclipse plugin for JIRA and Crowd administration

Managing many projects with permissions and users is arduous using the web interface - even Crowd should have that. Eclipse is our development environment. The Mylyn project is already integrating JIRA - but it does not aim towards JIRA administration.

More convenient distribution and installation

I spent many, many hours integrating and setting up the latest test versions of JIRA, Confluence and Crowd and migrating existing JIRA user data to Crowd. I gave up and wait till it is more convenient. A big problem is that we use (external) plugins that need to be upgraded as well.

I introduced JIRA and Confluence in our company and I'm a big fan of your products and many people in our company and many customers use these tools.
But up to now I cannot find any arguments why to upgrade - and with the missing features I don't want to upgrade. Even if there is the money - it is just too much work to upgrade Atlassian products.

p.s. I hope that my German English is good enough to transport my thoughts I just wanted to tell you that I have the feeling that there could be more drive on the subject.

Time tracking (and the analysis of the data afterwards) is an exceptionally powerful tool. What better method for scheduling and planning projects do you have than by using actual data from previous projects? My department works internally within our corporation, but we still have a budget and have to report time and expenses. It is through the time tracking mechanism that we would have this data. Let's make it as easy as possible to get this data logged.

The thing is... almost nobody fills the work log when resolves an issue.
Then one day (normally in the end of the month) each team recieves an email from their project manager saying...
hey you didn't fill your times.
They go there, fill there times and we have a lot of workers that don't work for a hole month and then on day 30 of every month work hundreds of hours...
I know this feature does not resolve this issue completly but (specially in help desk) it would help a lot.

Carlos

As for this issue, I agree that convenience is quite important, especially when it comes to gathering data. However, this issue is just a nuisance, it is not much of an excuse for not entering time! I do hope this will be fixed in 2008 though.

In the meantime, I suggest requiring employees to enter time on a daily basis, and have project managers verify this is done weekly. Employees who fail to do so should be chastised.

I would like to subsribe to other people's opinions regarding this problem.
I am a Planning Assistant in my company and every day I am exposed to the same problem: My colleagues - developers always forgot to fill Time Spend when they close theirs issues. Without Work Logs my work became non efficient: How can I schedule future tasks, assess and control risk, acquire human and material resources and analyze the results? Without data it is impossible!

According to developers Work Log option is highly unintuitive. You have 2 operations to complete
• First: open Work Log and fill Time Spend
• Second: to resolve one issue open Resolve Issue screen and fill it

Sometimes those two actions take more time than issue resolution.

It could be so easy for everyone to integrate Time Spend in resolve or close screen and even have a possibility of marking it as mandatory field.

I hope that in this year 2008 you found a bit of time to resolve this issue, may be for you it is small thing buy for many people is a fundamental thing.

We are paying for Two Licenses of Jira Enterprsie it will be nice to take more seriously voices of paying customers.

Desperate Planning Assistant

Iwona

If this is a going to be a major effort, you really should look at being able to track time spent by category. I know I want to be able to track time by:

• Pre programming (Design)
• Programming
• Post Programming (Test)

Others may need to categorize time spent for billing reasons, specifically rates. In addition to whether to bill at all. The original estimate should be maintained separately with a history modifications. Original should be tagged once the first "time spent" is posted to the work log. You want to track how you are doing on your estimates. Be able to estimate by category would be the next step.

I like several of the new features you are working on for 4.0. Both of those features are sorely needed, but they effect only the administrator. Here that is me. This feature would effect the 35 other people using the product in a huge way. Others have already commented about how having worklog capability at all is worthless without having this feature as no one puts in there hours or if they do, they are at the end of the month, and the time is a wild guess. I know this suggestion is for the resolve screen, but we need it on most of our transition screens. We have some workflows with 20 + statuses.

By the way, would you please update this to at least critical do to the number of people it effects (not customers, but the people at a company which would be everyone that process a workflow). Personally, I think this is a blocker!!!

I had however a similar case, where all I wanted is for JIRA to tell me who resolved the issue so I can get a chart telling me who closed how many issues last week, not only in general how many the team did. Again I was told I can write some code myself, and a lot of energy was given why this is not going to be supported anytime soon. I actually bought that, thinking it must be very hard and there is just no way it will get done.

And then, some angle comes and writes this http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JIRA+Enhancer+Plugin .

Don't ge me wrong, the plugin system in JRIA is great, and probably what keeps me from going to other vendors. But it makes me sad to see that:

• Trivial things, that should be IN the product are left to the good of the community
• After using Confluence, I understand why JIRA suck so much in few aspects: because they don't want to put the investment in "us". I guess JIRA is just not a money maker like other strategies. How can it be that I need to work so hard to install a plugin in JIRA, when in Confluence (same company) it is as easy as a click on a link?
• How can it be that to upgrade from a version to the next, I need to read 3 pages of step by step instruction?

Anyway, guys, don't get angry, it is just that as a company the priority in terms of resources that we are getting are small. If you look at the fixes they have done, many are also only relevant to the Enterprise level JIRA, if you (like me) are using the Standard, then you get even less reasons to keep paying for maintenance.

I understand why Atlassian needs to prioritize, but what I don't understand is why minor bugfixes/feature requests with lots of votes don't get done sooner. I bet with just a day or two of development time they could resolve 10 of the 100 most voted issues, subsequently creating a bunch of goodwill towards hundreds of their customers with very little effort, and making themselves feel better in the process too.

Why is this not being looked at or commented on by Atlassian??? We have a renewal coming up in a couple of months and I will likely suggest we don't renew until some of these obvious easy things are handled. As someone else mentioned in the thread, you have 5 to 10 issues in the top 25 on your list and it wouldn't take no more then one programmer a couple of days on each. They have been on the list for years!!!!!!

This issue and several other time tracking issues are being moved to our short term roadmap.