[rt-users] RT Reports - Time Worked?

[Drew Mooney]

Harald Wagener  wrote:

> changing the 'time worked' field is a transaction being tracked in the
> history by user. But it is not easy to use in the matter You want,
> because 'time worked' is absolute. If You worked on it for 30 minutes,
> and I for twenty five, I would have to change it to 55 to reflect the
> time worked correctly, and some script would have to sort things out on
> a per user basis.

Bradley Kuhn added:

We had actually been looking at making extensive use of the "Time Worked"
field as well.  We did encounter this very problem.

One thought I had was that the interface could be changed to make updating
a bit easier.  The user who wanted to increase the time worked by N could
type in "+ N" or "Add N".  Seems like a bit of a hack but might be useful.

Would this seem useful to others?  Would it be worth doing a patch for it,
or would it work better as a custom site modification?

   -- bkuhn

Then Drew Mooney mused as follows:

We're still mulling over this one. I'm curious about the built-in ticket
linking / dependencies / merging features of RT as a solution to this. I
haven't tried it yet, but is RT out-of-the-box-smart-enough to add up the time
worked fields of two merged tickets?

If so [or if this wouldn't be terribly difficult to hack in] then I'm thinking
it might be best to create linked tickets either dependent on or dependents of
the master ticket [need to give the logic of this some thought] for every user
assigned to a particular task.

Each user then tracks his own time against a particular task; and can submit
individual 'time-worked' reports each week, and/or when the master ticket is
resolved or closed for any other reason.

At this time we would merge all of the linked sub-tickets into the master, and
[hopefully] end up with a compreshensive history of both activity and
time-worked pegs.

Thoughts?

Drew M. Mooney
Motorola Professional Services