Timesheets with TFS

If you haven't taken look at http://tfstimesheet.codeplex.com/ already, please take a look at it. It’s a pretty interesting plugin developed and quite useful. If you are an organization who is worried about daily utilization and derive billing out of it, its pretty handy and solves many of the problems.

If you are thinking why do I need this, when I can update the task directly – here is the answer

• People are lazy – its not possible to expect everyone to update all the tasks they worked on, on a daily basis. If they miss one day; its not present in the TFS Cube daily snapshot.
• If you are working on say 5 generic tasks(say daily standup, code reviews, helping QA etc) on regular basis; its pretty hard to open all talks and update the numbers.
• No approvals – If the time logged is important for your business, like billing; you definitely want to have an step to review and approve the time logged.

All these problems can be addressed by a simple table view of the tasks and days, something like this.

Now its easy, you can enter effort for any day for the week, multiple tasks in one go, one single view.

All right, that answers all the problems we talked about.

But, but, this plugin

• Doesn’t work with TFS 2010 server
• Doesn’t support working with multiple projects and collections
• Doesn’t support approvals by projects(i.e. having one PM for each project)
• Doesn’t come with reports

So how do you solve? Read on…