Working hours report template

Here is an example for recording your time spent on the project. We all need to keep track of the time we work on the project, to report it to the project supervisors.

Each group member logs the hours spent on the project into their own text file. These files should be uploaded to the CVS. Make sure that the file extension is .txt, and that you upload it to the correct common directory.

The format of the file needs to be the following: The first line of the file contains the name of the person who's hours the file contains. The rest of the lines contain work hour information. Any lines beginning with the number sign (#) signify a comment line, which the script will not process. Empty lines are allowed, and are also not processed.

Each line processed as a log entry is divided into four parts, which are separated by a tab or a whitespace character. The parts are as follows:

Date

The date is expressed in the format dd.mm.yyyy. The program makes a check that the day [dd] is between 1 and 31, the month [mm] is between 1 and 12, and the year is greater than 1900.

Project phase

The project group will agree upon a phase division and the proper coding of each phase into a 2-character representation to be used in the logs. For example PP could signify the work of writing the project plan, RA for requirememts analysis and so forth.

These are some temporary abbreviations that can be used (Vesa's proposal):

 ME - Meeting (basically for full group, official, minutes taken, local or global)
 GC - Global communication, other than meeting
 LC - Local communication, other than meeting
 PP - Project Planning, writing plans
 DE - Designing, writing design documents
 DO - Documenting the code or writing user documentation
 CO - Coding, including debugging
 TE - Testing (separate unit testing, functional testing, final testing)
 AD - Administration duties (eg. transcribing the minutes...)
 TM - Technical maintenance (Web sites, CVS, other software...)
 RE - Requirement Engineering

Hours

The actual hours should be written down as full hours, as an integer [hh].

Work description

The last section of the line is a short description of how the time was spent.

An example of a file

 Jonathan Brown
 #DATE      CLASS   HOURS   TASK
 04.09.2000   PP   2   first meeting with the project, management stuff mainly
 06.09.2000   PP   1   reading the SQL manual
 07.09.2000   PP   3   prepared a presentation about CVS
 08.09.2000   PP   2   group meeting. Client visited us and explained project. I gave my CVS presentation.
 08.09.2000   PP   2   read the document given by the client
 08.09.2000   PP   1   e-mails and thinking about the problem
 10.09.2000   PP   1   working with LaTeX files
 10.09.2000   PP   4   thinking about the requirements; prepared questions and ideas for the client.