The Top 3 Time Tracking Software for Developers

The question of how to measure software developer's productivity is impossible to solve without developer time tracking.

If we examine it in detail, we can see that it plays a pivotal role by offering multiple benefits and enhancing personal efficiency and project management.

Here are the key reasons why developer time tracking is essential.

• It aids in managing time more effectively, allowing developers to allocate their hours more strategically across various tasks.
• It assists in improving productivity by identifying areas where time can be saved or reallocated to more critical activities.
• For those working on freelance or client-based projects, it ensures accurate billing and provides transparency and trust in professional relationships.
• It allows developers to gain insights into how much time different tasks take, facilitating better planning and estimation for future projects.

Below are the top three time tracking software for software developers.

TMetric

Code Smarter, Not Harder: Elevate Developer Productivity

TMetric is a comprehensive tool for developer time tracking. By boosting productivity, streamlining project management, and facilitating accurate billing, TMetric's features empower businesses.

Importantly, understanding the sensitive nature of automatic tracking, TMetric prioritizes user privacy. Developers can choose what information to share, ensuring their data remains confidential while benefiting from the convenience of automatic time tracking.

Let's look at how TMetric stands out as a tool for developers and what practices are worth knowing.

TMetric Functionality for Developers

Automatic Time Tracking

TMetric provides an easy-to-use interface for tracking tasks and project time. Developers can start and stop timers as they work or manually enter time, making it flexible to various workflows, whether coding, debugging, or attending meetings.

Project Management and Budgeting

It allows developers to create projects, set budgets, and track progress against time estimates. It helps manage project timelines, ensure projects stay within budget, and allocate time across tasks precisely.

Detailed Reports

TMetric generates detailed reports offering insights into time spent on activities, productivity levels, and project costs. These reports can be customized and filtered to provide the data needed, aiding in analysis and future project planning.

Team Collaboration

For development teams, TMetric facilitates collaboration by allowing team leaders to track project progress, monitor team members' time, and distribute workloads evenly.

Integration with Tools

TMetric integrates seamlessly with a wide range of development tools and project management applications, such as JIRA, GitHub, and Trello. It enables developers to track time directly from any development environment and eliminates context switching.

Billing and Invoicing

TMetric offers a simplified billing process for freelance developers and client-based projects: it accurately tracks billable hours and generates invoices directly from the time tracking data.

Best Practices for Developers Using TMetric

Integrate with Your Development Environment

Leverage TMetric integrations to minimize disruptions in your workflow. Tracking time directly from your IDE or project management tool saves time and ensures accuracy.

Set Up Projects and Tasks

Set up projects and tasks within TMetric to organize your work. This organization helps you understand how much time individual features or bugs consume, aiding in better estimates for future projects.

Utilize Tags for Detailed Analysis

Use tags to categorize your time entries (e.g., coding, testing, collaborating). This helps developers gain insightful trends and analyze time allocation.

Regularly Review Reports

Make it a habit to check TMetric detailed reports. Aside from revealing productivity patterns, it can assist in habit-building and optimizing work.

Leverage Budgeting Features for Projects

Use the budgeting features to track projects and monitor their financial health by preventing project overruns and ensuring profitability.

Simplify Payroll

Set up projects and tasks within TMetric to organize your work. This organization helps you Track developers' hours and integrate them with cost rates for easy calculation.

Maintain Transparency with Clients

For client projects, share time reports to maintain transparency about time spent. This practice can strengthen client relationships and facilitate smoother project reviews and billing.

🪙 TMetric offers a free plan with time tracking for up to 5 team members and paid plans starting at $5 per user per month with extended functionality.

Timely

Track, Analyze, Excel: Unleashing Developer Potential with Precision

Timely takes a different approach by automating time tracking using AI. It captures the time you spend on different tasks and suggests entries, reducing the manual effort required.

This feature is particularly useful for developers who dislike the disruption of starting and stopping a timer.

Timely Functionality for Developers

Time Tracking

At the heart of Timely offering is its AI-powered automatic time tracking. Unlike traditional time trackers, Timely nets everything you work on in real time and suggests entries based on your activity. This means developers don't have to start and stop timers or manually log hours spent on coding, reviewing code, or attending meetings.

Memory Tracker

Timely Memory Tracker automatically records the apps, documents, and websites you use for work, providing a detailed day's timeline. For developers, this means having a comprehensive record of time spent in different development environments without any manual input.

Project Management and Insights

Timely allows developers to organize their work by projects, set budgets, track progress, and monitor time spent against estimates.

Team Coordination

For teams, Timely offers visibility into each member's work, facilitating better workload distribution and ensuring team members are not overburdened.

Integration Capabilities

Timely integrations streamline workflow by connecting with ABasecamp, ClickUp, Gmail, etc.

Best Practices for Developers Using Timely

Utilize Projects and Tags

Use tags and projects to categorize your time entries. This helps you analyze time spent on different types of work (e.g., frontend, backend, testing) or specific projects.

Timely allows custom tags to be created and assigned to entries.
Utilize project dashboards to quickly visualize time spent on different aspects of a project.

Gain Insights for Increased Productivity

Make it a habit to review your time entries regularly, ideally daily or weekly, to ensure accuracy and understanding of individual productivity patterns. Adjust misclassified entries and fill in any gaps. This habit ensures that your time data remains reliable for reporting and invoicing.

Optimize Performance

Adopt real-time dashboards and live reporting to monitor project metrics closely. Utilize strategic planning tools to control capacity, deadlines, and financials efficiently.

🪙On Starter Plan, the service is $9 per month per user.

WakaTime

Code with Insight: Boost Your Development Workflow

WakaTime is tailored specifically for developers, integrating directly into coding editors and IDEs to track time spent coding automatically.

It provides detailed metrics on coding activity, helping developers analyze their productivity and considerably improve their time estimates.

WakaTime Functionality for Developers

Automatic Coding Time Tracking

WakaTime integrates seamlessly with a wide range of IDEs, tracking how much time developers spend coding without requiring manual input.

Detailed Insights and Dashboards

WakaTime offers programmers a deep dive into their coding habits through detailed analytics on languages, projects, and branches. By analyzing this data, developers can optimize their work schedules, identify peak focus periods, and unlock their coding potential.

Real-time Coding Activity Feed

It offers a real-time activity feed that shows coding activity as it happens to get instant feedback on software developers' work habits.

Goal Setting and Tracking

Developers can set daily or weekly coding goals in WakaTime to stay motivated and monitor their progress. This feature is particularly useful for ramping up productivity for upcoming deadlines.

Project Time Tracking

Beyond individual productivity, WakaTime enables project-level time tracking. Developers can see how much time is spent on specific projects or tasks, making project timeline estimation easier and ensuring balanced work distribution among team members.

Plugins

WakaTime empowers developers with productivity insights through seamless integration with popular editors like Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, and Atom. These open-source plugins track time spent across languages, projects, and branches, offering valuable data for optimizing your coding workflow and identifying areas for improvement.

Best Practices for Developers Using WakaTime

Integrate WakaTime with Your IDE

To fully leverage WakaTime capabilities, integrate it with your primary IDE. This integration ensures that all your coding activity is automatically tracked, giving you a comprehensive view of your productivity.

Set and Monitor Goals

Use WakaTime to establish daily or weekly coding goals. Monitoring these goals can keep you motivated and focused, especially during longer projects or learning new programming languages.

Benefit from Integrations

By signing up for the paid plans, software developers can get full advantage of GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Office365, and Slack integrations

Leverage Project Tracking

For those working in teams or managing multiple projects, utilize WakaTime project tracking features to allocate your time effectively across tasks.

It offers a free plan with 2 weeks of dashboard history and daily email reports. The Premium Plan starts at $8.25 per month.

Concluding Thought

Developers often juggle multiple projects, tasks, and sometimes even roles.

Time tracking tools help manage these complexities and provide data to improve future estimates and project planning.

Uncover hidden insights into your workday with TMetric tracking functionality and gain complete control over your time.