User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 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.
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.
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