188575 - RFE: Add activity type on a per-comment basis to Bugzilla's time reporting

Status: NEW

Description

[Russell Odom]

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Where Bugzilla is used in a commercial environment, it would be good if it could
also capture information necessary to be able to bill clients/customers for the
work being carried out - i.e. in the same system as that work is being logged,
rather than a separate system.

In the company where I work, the information for this would be:
1. The time taken for the individual piece of work or part of a task (also see
bug 185774) - we have a dropdown for hours, and a drop-down for minutes (15-min
increments)
2. The type of work carried out (in our case, we bill some things at different
rates, and don't charge for things like our time spent on phone calls) - this
would be a drop-down list. As an example, a few from our internal time-tracking app:
Coding
Data entry
Documentation
E-mail/phone/fax/letter
Meeting
Quality Assurance
Testing

These two pieces of information would be collected each time some work is done
on a job (read: bug), so a single field for each per bug isn't sufficient.
Instead, it would be added in the same way as comments - several per bug. I
would envisage that these fields be added next to the 'Additional comments' box
on show_bug.cgi.

I would suggest that show_bug.cgi shows:
* Somewhere near the top: Total time spent on the bug so far
* Next to/interspersed with comments: Time and task type

I would not expect that the values would normally be editable once they've been
entered via show_bug.cgi, but there may well be need to go back and correct
mistakes somewhere. This functionality could optionally be restricted to certain
users, and optionally with the exception that users can modify their 'own'
values. These 'optionally' settings would be defined by the administrator.

Obviously, not all intallations would need this (b.m.o for a start!), so the
fields should be able to be disabled for a particular install.

Other admin settings I can envisage are:
* Administration of all possible task types - add to and (constraints
permitting) remove from the list.
* Checkbox: Require a time/task type to be added for each comment (i.e. no doing
work on a bug without logging the time you spent on it).
* Checkbox: Require a comment each time a time/task type is added (i.e. no
adding work without noting what you've done).

Reporting
---------
There's no need for complex reporting initially - just a simple search by
product/component/date/person with the ability to include and exclude certain
task types, and return all matching bugs/comments and the time for each. This
could be exported to an external spreadsheet package (perhaps a 'Save as CSV
option' should be included). Of course, it'd be nice to add all sorts of funky
graphs and pie charts at a later date!

Management love this kind of reporting - it'd make Bugzilla advocacy easy :-)
In general, adding this feature would probably make Bugzilla just the thing that
loads of companies have been looking for.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:




I realise this is a bit of a meta-bug; it's really here to get the idea out
there. I would imagine individual bugs would be spun off as required for the
actual implementation of front-end, administration and reporting parts.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave] ([e-mail])]

Narrowing scope because Bugzilla already has time reporting (see
http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/ and play around with it)

I'm not personally working on this at the moment...  I'd welcome anyone who
wants to play with it though, it would be useful.