> For us the lifecycle of an issue is: analyzing (and communication with
> our customer-groups), programming, testing, documenting (online-help,
> courses ...), distributing ... So it would be nice if we could register
> the time we were working on the different activities we're doing. It
> are also different persons who do some of the tasks. So selecting the
> component "documentation" is not a good idea because an issue is rarely
> only about documenting.

[Jeff Turner]
I see. JIRA does have a 'work log' for each issue, which records the
user and a description of the work done. Would this be sufficient?

[KR]
We'd like to divide all the work that we do into the processes of our issue-lifecycle. The purpose is that we can track how much we time we are documenting, testing,... Now you can describe your work but there are no categories to extract data from.
With our manner over work every "status-change" is accomplished with a piece of work. So it would be nice if changing the status (with your workflow-engine) would give us the opportunity to select the category of work, the time spent and the new time-estimation (like you can do now with your-work-registration).