Jira Time Tracking Integration

Sprint estimates we can trust

We always logged time in Jira, but the worklog numbers were whatever people remembered to type in, so our estimates never got better. With WebWork tracking on the same work items, the hours come from the work itself, and within two sprints we could see we were under-estimating backend Stories by about a third. What I didn't expect was the effect on retros — nobody argues about whose memory is right when the hours are sitting there per work item. We hit our sprint commitments a lot more often now, because we plan from hours we measured, not hours we guessed.

Every invoice line traces back to a ticket

We bill clients by the ticket, so for years our invoices ran on whatever hours the developers jotted into Jira. Now WebWork tracks the time on each work item as it's worked, and every invoice line maps back to a Story or Bug the client can look up themselves. What caught me off guard was how much we'd been under-billing — small fixes nobody logged were adding up to whole days each month. Recovering those hours has paid for the tool several times over, and the disputes we used to get over invoices have basically stopped.