Dataset: Issues & Pull Requests
Entity: Pull Requests, Issues
Field ID: time_spent
Type: Integer
Description: The time spent (in seconds) on the issue or pull request, as entered in the source application.
Source: App
Transformation logic: N/A
From: |
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Github (PRs, Issues) | N/A |
Gitlab (PRs, Issues) |
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Bitbucket (PRs) | N/A |
Azure DevOps (PRs, Issues) | N/A |
JIRA (Issues) |
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ClickUp (Issues) |
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Trello (Issues) | N/A |
Reporting Use Cases
The Time Spent field is the counterpart to time_estimate, providing a record of the actual effort expended on a work item. It is a critical metric for conducting sprint retrospectives, improving future estimations, and understanding where your team's time is truly going.
Filtering for Process Compliance and Auditing: You can create reports to ensure that time is being logged consistently and to identify outliers.
Find Items Without Logged Time: To ensure your team is tracking their work, you can create a report of all completed items where
Time Spent = 0.Identify High-Effort Items: You can analyze which tasks consumed the most effort by creating a report and sorting by the time_spent value, or by filtering for items that took longer than a certain threshold, like
Time Spent > 40 * HOUR().
Measuring and Analyzing Effort: You can aggregate this field to understand the total work delivered by your team.
Total Effort per Sprint: A KPI with the custom formula
SUM(time_spent) / HOUR()will show the total number of hours your team logged in a given sprint or time period.Effort per Work Type: By creating a bar chart with a dimension like
Sub-Typeand a metric ofSUM(time_spent), you can see a breakdown of how many hours are being dedicated to "Bugs" versus "Stories."
Improving Estimation Accuracy: The most powerful use of this field is to compare it against the original estimate to improve your team's forecasting ability.
Estimate vs. Actual Ratio: You can calculate your team's overall estimation accuracy with a formula like
SUM(time_spent) / SUM(IF_ZERO(time_estimate, 1)). A value greater than 1 indicates a tendency to underestimate, while a value less than 1 suggests overestimation.Deviation per Item: In a list report, you can add a custom dimension to see the variance for each individual item with the formula
(time_spent - time_estimate) / HOUR(), helping your team identify which types of tasks were the most mis-estimated during retrospectives.