Has anyone tried to 'cost' their project development?

[togFox]

For science, I'm thinking of tracking my development time in my next project just to see how many hours I spend. Just curious. I might also track all the free images and sound files I use and see at the end how much that would cost if they weren't free. Might make an interesting blog article.

Has anyone tried to do this? I'm thinking of writing a simple LOVE program that prompts me to log activities every 30 minutes so I get some low cost discipline. It might have a single button that says 'I'm still coding!' And writes to a text file. IDK.

How world you track your time in a semi-reliable way if you wanted to?

[EngineerSmith]

I personally keep a log in a notebook of when I start and when I end. I lay it out in a simple bar graph that is aesthetically pleasing. I mostly do it to track the time working since I'm self employed

[togFox]

I spent a few hours yesterday writing my own app in LOVE2d (of course):



It will run on my second monitor and beep every 20 minutes. I could be working collaboratively so I have a text box for name, whatever the activity is (I'll be using github issue numbers) and the source folder.

The source folder is where the csv file is saved to. It's probably badly named. It saves a csv to the nominated love2d source folder. This enables it to be uploaded to github during a routine pull request. This means teams working collaboratively can see each others time logs stored right in github. For science.

The productivity (badly formatted) lets me say "I worked on issue #9932 and I was 25% productive" because I spent most of that time making a coffee in the kitchen. The app will then log only 25% of the time to the csv.

I will tweak and improve as I go.

[KayleMaster]

I used to track my time in Gitlab, where my repository lives. I stopped because I didn't really care, but you could get a nice breakdown to see which features were the most "expensive", how long they took you on average, etc.

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[gcmartijn]

At work we use everhour.com + asana.com, in asana you create the tasks and you can start a timer for each task.
Then you know how many hours it cost. There is also a browser plugin (everhour) to time the Asana tasks.

With asana you can create graphs if you want, with completed tasks, and see totals.
Then you only need to define how much dollar is 1 hour.

[Ross]

I have a physical timer that lives on my desk that I use to track my hours each day. I like having it separate from my computer. It's simple, it works. I'm fairly strict about only counting real work time. Basically, if I get up from my chair, I turn the timer off. If someone starts talking to me, I turn it off (sometimes the audible beep makes them keep it short, which is a bonus). If I notice that I've just been staring at the wall for 15 minutes with the timer going, I make a note to subtract 15 minutes. It keeps things real. Sometimes I may feel like I worked all day, but I only actually got 4 hours on the timer... :'(

Then to log it: If it's personal work, I write it on a physical calendar at the end of the day with the name of the project and maybe a short note about what I did. I'm not too concerned about graphing it or task-specific times, so that works for me. For some freelance game programming work I did, the company used Favro, which was...fine. The boss wanted stats, so I roughly divided each work day's hours into different tasks.

I always use git, even if it's only local/offline, so I always have a log of what I worked on.

[kbmonkey]

Good question togFox. I used to time my hobby projects with the taskcoach.org app. It includes time budgeting and effort tracking, revenue costing, prompts you when idle, and a bunch of other useful features.

[knorke]

togFox:
Did you keep logging? I thought I saw something on your blog but now I can not find it anymore.

I tried logging my computer-time or other activities several times because I like useless statistics.
However, I am too forgetful and lazy so it never lasted more than a few days.
So I had an idea:

Code: Select all

function love.load ()
	logRun("physics debug")
....
end
function logRun (s)
	if s then s=";"..s else s="" end
	success, errormsg = love.filesystem.append( "runlog.txt", os.date("%d.%m.%y;%X;%A")..s.."\n")
end

This function logs time & date of each start into a file "runlog.txt" that looks like:

24.12.22;18:10:49;physics debug

On each run a new line is appended.
In the parameter of function logRun(s) one can type a note about the current task. Of course it does not log when the game fails to load or when reading documentation etc. Despite that it should be possible to roughly tell how much time was spent per day.
Might be interesting to make some graphs after a few months.

[togFox]

My solution runs as an exe and 'dings' a really annoying alarm every 20 minutes. You type in what activity you are doing and then that gets written to a file.

It was an interesting experiment. This will mean little to you - and me! - but here is my raw data presented as a pivot table. The numbers are 'seconds'. Sorry about the formatting.

Code: Select all

Added custom font and display in game	1203
Added GameLoop screen	484
Added zoom/panning	350
Adding an undo function	534
Adding CREDITS menu	780
Adding keypress QoL	1117
Adding LoS functionality to TARGET mode	3227
Adding new markers	2119
Adjusting camera focus	4004
Animations	559
Can change game modes	129
Combat resolution	49969
Creating assets	3765
Creating main menu	3292
Creating wiki and github workflow	1099
Debugging	7751
Detecting end game	8201
Determining guns downrange	3620
Displaying nation flags	1530
Drawing markers	5772
GUI/HUD improvements	903
Initialising flotilla's	9834
Move formation	4966
Move markers during move phase	12777
Processing mouse clicks	2407
Refactoring	6225
Released v0.01	25
Select targets during targeting mode	4373
Sourcing assets	2188

My source is here: https://github.com/togfoxy/TimeLog-Source