We have been bussy! 🙂
It turns out that montly timesheets are NOT the best way to handle Jira worklogs!
Initially we thought that developers would make a Jira worklog in a daily basis. But allthough I can mandate that as a manager, there people in the rest of the world who might do this differently and just enter a worklog of say, 80 hours. So storing that in a LibrePlan monthly timesheet wouldn’t make any sense.
We could store the worklog in a standard LibrePlan timesheet but that way we would not be able to use any additional comments that the developer would have written in the worklog. So we decided to store worklogs in a new LibrePlan timesheet, based on the default timesheet but with an additional summary or comment field. This can easily been done by making a new timesheet template and adding an extra field.
The other thing is, and now it becomes fancy (!), we can calculate the progress of the task since we also get the estimated time from Jira. So if we divide the sum of all worklogs by the estimated time, we get a progress estimation! So we also store that as a progress report on the date the sync is done.
But now it becomes tricky. Suppose someone changes the estimation. Let’s say he doubles it. That means that the progess estimation drops to halve of what is was. This is currently not possible to do manually in LibrePlan, but we are going ahead and doing it anyway in our code. This way, the progress shown in the task is accurate, still the new estimated duration of the task is not. However, the amount of worklogs can be shown in a bar above the task so when that one exceed the length of the task it is a clear signal to a projectmanager to look into that and, if needed, change the amount of time the task needs.
All this new stuff looks pretty fancy and I can’t wait to show a screenshot of it. We are still building so you just have to wait a bit. I will post an update as soon as possible.
In the mean time, I have started to write the book “LibrePlan, the missing manual”. It currently contains 30 pages of newbie course material and I want to write a lot more. I will publish it on my own Lulu.com page when it is done. I am using Asciidoc so I intend to keep the  book as up to date as possible in the future.