News

Case study: DORIS (NSE's development tracker)

March 01, 2011

As we've grown in size we felt that we needed to be able to more accurately track developers time and make billing clients a more automated process.

We were already using Team Foundation Server (commonly abbreviated to TFS) to track versioning of the source files for our software (source control.) TFS is a Microsoft product offering source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking, and is intended for collaborative software development projects. It is available either as stand-alone software, or as the server side back-end platform for Visual Studio Team System.

We realised that we could write a piece of software to talk directly to TFS to track our developers' time and enable automated billing and performance monitoring. DORIS was born.

DORIS is a realtime development tracking tool. We use it to track all our projects. Clients can log in and look at exactly what's happening on their project to the minute.

As a developer starts work on a project, they log into DORIS and start the clock on that project and the specific task - when they're finished, they stops the clock and this time is added to the clients accounting. This feature enables to accurately track by the minute exactly how long the developer is spending on the client's project.

[screenshot of client view]

Our clients are able to log in and look at every aspect of their project - current development work streams, bugs, changes to spec and any other issues that may arise. This allows them to see exactly what's happening before calling the project lead at NSE. The system will automatically email with any updates.

[screenshot of developer view]

Our developers can instantly see the current position of their projects, outstanding issues and any new items. They are able to log in, click go, and start work a new chunk of development. The clock starts and as soon as they have finished they stop the clock and the client's account is updated.