Deploying Time Sheet Tracking to SCRUM Projects in Rational TeamConcert

 Rational Team Concert gets more and more traction in the industry.  It is a collaborative application lifecycle management product that allows a team of developers, project managers, designers, testers, analysts, executives, and stakeholders to work in unison. It works in harmony with other DevOps concepts such as:

• Continuous Release and Deployment
• Continuous Testing
• Application Monitoring and Optimization

It is geared towards agile development, and as such is itself an agile tool able to adapt to a constantly changing industry.

One feature that the RTC project team has recently baked into the project is the ability to track time (as in timesheets) on a project, and work item basis. Project managers need to track not just actual time, but often time that gets billed to a project to compare with vendor invoices.  This features is enabled on the "Formal Project Management" template, which is an RTC process template geared for large companies that are migrating away from waterfall processes, but not quite ready for full on agile. The SCRUM template however, does not have the feature out of the box, but it can be deployed by following these instructions.

Note, that you can do this on a project template, or if you are just getting started, you can create a project template once you make the following updates. You also need to have the Data Warehouse functions of RTC setup and installed to make this work properly.

This must be done for each project area that you wish to report time on. Within the project dashboard, go to Reports -> Report Resources

In the upper right hand corner, click on the icon to Deploy New Resources.

In the next screen select the following five (5) resources to deploy (hold your control key down to select multiple options):

Personal Timesheet

Personal Timesheet by Project Area

Personal Timesheet by Work Item

Team Timesheet

Work Item Timesheet Summary

Then click the Deploy button in the top right hand corner of the screen.

Here is a good video demonstration of these steps.

Next you will need to update the Process Configuration for your SCRUM project in the Eclipse client. Go to your Team Artifacts view. Make sure your project is listed. Then right click on the project and select Open from the context menu.

Click the Process Configuration tab, and click Project Configuration > Configuration Data > Planning > Time Tracking.

Select the Synchronize Time Spent with Time Tracking check box.

In the Time code box, click Add, and enter the name of the time code. You can add multiple time codes for different categories of work, such as Coding and Testing. Click Save.

To configure how progress on work items is tracked, click Project Configuration > Configuration Data > Planning > General, and make selections in the Estimates Attributes and Backlog Iteration sections.

Click the Process Configuration Source tab, search for a configuration data section with the ID com.ibm.team.workitem.editor.configuration.presentations, and add the following code as a child of that section:

<tab id="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.timesheet" layout="builtInOverviewLayout">
 <section sectionId="com.ibm.team.workitem.section.timesheet" slot="description" title="Time Tracking"/>
 <section sectionId="com.ibm.team.workitem.section.timesheetQuickInformation" slot="quickInfo" title="Timesheet Entries"/> 
</tab>
<section id="com.ibm.team.workitem.section.timesheet">
 <presentation kind="com.ibm.team.tpt.kind.internal.timeSheet"/>
</section>
<section id="com.ibm.team.workitem.section.timesheetQuickInformation">
 <presentation kind="com.ibm.team.tpt.kind.internal.timesheetEntries"/>
</section>

In the Process Configuration Source tab, search for an editor section with the ID com.ibm.team.workitem.editor.default. Within that section, after the line<tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.history" title="History"/>, add the line <tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.timesheet" title="TimeTracking"/>. For example, after you add the line, the editor section should look like this:

<editor id="com.ibm.team.workitem.editor.default">
 <tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.editor.default.internalHeader" title="none"/>
 <tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.overview" title="Overview"/>
 <tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.links" title="Links"/>
 <tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.approvals" title="Approvals"/>
 <tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.customAttributes" title="Custom">
  <property key="hideIfEmpty" value="true"/>
 </tab>
 <tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.history" title="History"/>
 <tab tabId="com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.timesheet" title="Time Tracking"/>
</editor>

It is recommended that you change the Time Spent attribute to read only. In the Process Configuration Source tab, search for an editor section with the IDcom.ibm.team.workitem.section.details, and change

<presentation attributeId="com.ibm.team.workitem.attribute.timespent" kind="com.ibm.team.apt.kind.internal.timespent"/>

to:

<presentation attributeId="com.ibm.team.workitem.attribute.timespent" kind="com.ibm.team.apt.kind.internal.timespent">
 <property key="readonly" value="true"/>
</presentation>

Important: For consistency, be sure to set the read-only property value to true in any presentation that you include it. For example, if you add it to the work item editor, you need to also add it to the plan preview. This ensures that the both the plan and the work items are not editable.

Process configuration instructions courtesy of the IBM Infocenter on Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management 4.0.3

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