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Does anybody know of developer activity tracker software used to increase productivity of development?

I need to find out developer's time distribution. How much time do they spend on browsing, coding, and offline time. I need it to be free software.

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What are you trying to accomplish exactly? Software development isn't exactly a manufacturing process, and if you try to run it like one your team might fall flat on its face. ;) – jmort253 Dec 8 '12 at 6:25
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I can use it other way round means if someone have overload of work then I can try to use this fact in better way. – Abhijit Shelar Dec 8 '12 at 6:30
Oh interesting! On Project Management Stack Exchange, whenever we get questions like this, it's usually people trying to avoid actually doing project management and hoping to mindlessly run their team, so I just assumed you were doing the same. :) – jmort253 Dec 8 '12 at 6:32
I'm not sure this shouldn't be closed as effectively a product recommendation question. In saying that, Arun's answer does seem useful. – Rory Alsop♦ Dec 8 '12 at 11:03
That's the thing, @RoryAlsop, is a product recommendation question can sometimes be made to work with a great answer and then moderating the rest to keep out the spam and one-liners. ;) If any further posts get added to this that aren't as thorough as Arun's, I'd be tempted to flag those for removal instead of the question. :) – jmort253 Dec 10 '12 at 3:22

2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Software which best and most nearest to Sapience is

  1. Rescue time - The free version does everything you need. It's intended use case is to see how productive you are being, and with pro to remind you to stay on task, as opposed to monitoring as you require, so it probably won't be ideal. [Edit: I personally use it to see how productive I'm being, and like it, haven't heard of any of these other apps though.]
  2. Manic Time - It has free/trial version it has appealing UI
  3. There is another s/w which captures and takes video of the screens, I am not able to recollect the name, only thing is you need to have a good storage space for everyday's video to be stored, though it do have delete videos after X days option.
  4. Time snapper classic, timesnapper(dot)com - is free and takes screen grab as photos after every few seconds, better then storing videos it also shows photos as slideshow.
  5. ProcrastiTracker, procrastitracker(dot)com - My favorite and best recommended, simple without bells and whistles and it doesn't take much memory.

Advice

  1. Do not enforce these softwares on your team, Use it as a self Quantification tool for yourself and measure your own productivity. Once you are able to see that you are being productive, share your Experience with your team (lead by example) only if the team sees that there could be Some value or benefit for them they would like to opt for Themselves. Do not monitor their time slots let them manage, measure and improvise their own productivity.
  2. If you enforce it on your team without their approval, trust and confidence by monitoring their activity you will lose your respect in their eyes, instead of becoming leader you will become tyrant and your initiative of improvement will back fire on you.
  3. I have been developer, team lead as well as project manager one hard lesson that I learnt in my career is that

You can't control people, you can only influence them.

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up vote 2 down vote

Another tool that can help you track how developers spend their time is Time Doctor. This tool tracks effectively all your activities in Real Time and gives you analytics of your workday, which allows you improve productivity and eliminate less productive activities. It is applicable for teams or individuals that want to increase productivity. This gives you a reading on exactly where time is spent, and how much of that time was productive or unproductive. It includes tracking websites and applications that are actively being used. It is also a good alternative to Rescuetime and this is what I use personally. Check out this article regarding the comparative reports of Rescue Time and Time Doctor.

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