Overall Goal:

• Increase efficiency and accuracy for users to track their time against a specific issues or projects. 
• Increase time tracking usability when users are actively working on multiple issues or projects

Background:

• Time tracking has always been a challenge for users and organizations to track how much effort was actually put into a specific project or issue. In my experience, anytime a users is logging time against an issue in Jira, it is always a rough subjective estimate of how long the user was working on the issue.
• The reality of the situation is users aren't keeping a notepad or excel sheet on how long they are working on a current issue, especially if users are switching between multiple issues to complete a certain tasks. Time tracking can get quite fuzzy when trying to accurately log time between multiple issues. 
• For the organizations using the time tracking feature, it can be very difficult to do the following points with the current time tracking in jira v.s. a semi-automatic time tracking feature:
  • Resource allocation and capacity planning within agile or other methodologies 
  • Accurate time tracking against specific issue types
  • Accurate reporting on where teams are spending a majority of their time based on the issue or task.
  • Accurate time tracking for billable hours.
  • Time and budget planning for current and future projects.

Current Challenges:

• Users not accurately tracking time against issues.
• Logging time after the issue has been completed.
• Unable to track or monitor what the user actually did against an issue when tracking time.
• Users sometimes forget to track time on issues (Training problem, but it can be improved with a better user experience).
• **Users don't like to waste time manually logging time on an issues, especially when users are juggling multiple issues 

Suggestion User Stories:

• As a Developer switching between multiple Jira issues, I would like to be able to start. pause, and end a timer that tracks my time against an issue, so I do not have to manually track my time each time I am switching between issues.
• As a Project Manager, I would like to have more accurate time tracking for project issues, so I can more accurately plan and estimate the duration of a future projects with similar tasks. 
• As a Team Manager, I would like to more accurate time tracking for my team, so I can accurately measure where my team is spending their time.
• As a Billing Manager, I would like to have more precise time tracking feature, so I can accurately bill our customers for the work our teams have completed.

Suggested Functionality:

• Ability for users to start a timer on an issue.
• Ability for users to pause a timer on an issue.
• Ability for users to end a timer and log time against an issue.
  • Ability for users to edit the timer duration before logging time against an issue.
• Ability for users to cancel or reset a timer.
• Ability for users to log internal notes or a summary of what was completed during the duration of the logged time.
• Ability for users to configure the feature's fields based on specific user groups or issue types.
• Ability for users to turn the feature on or off based on their preference for project, tasks, etc. 
• Ability for users to leave the page, return to the page, and still see the unlogged paused time on the issue that still needs submitted.
   

Other Notes:

• I've seen other requests like this suggestion in the JRASERVER , but I was unable to find anything that fulfills this need for team-managed (formerly next-gen) besides manual time entry.
  • JRASERVER-1946
  • JRASERVER-14907
• I've seen 3rd party tools that organizations can purchase and utilize in the marketplace, but they either require a purchase or it takes some manually configure the tool to work seamlessly into your reporting.
• Time tracking has the potential to be a powerful and insightful tool if implemented correctly. I believe the community wants to have better tools to manage projects and their teams inside jira. I believe this suggestion can be very beneficial for a wide variety of users utilizing Jira as the main project management platform and for that reason, I believe this suggestion should be apart of Jira's core product.