Track Commits. Not Time ...?

[nelsonic]

https://medium.com/@ericclemmons/track-commits-not-time-5d9e1d61d34f#.ys3j58gs2 ??

[ghost]

Interesting

[nelsonic]

@markwilliamfirth hence wanting to build a "workflow" around GitHub.
Tudo and Time are "synergistic"... 😉

[Cleop]

Arguments against time tracking:
For prioritisation:

time tracking...erroneously tracks the results rather than the initial direction
For trust:
Perhaps this affects contractors more than salaried employees, but the problem exists nonetheless.
Without trust, anything else, such as time tracking, is trivial until this core tenant of the employee/employer relationship is resolved.

Alternative for companies trying to work out project costs:
If you use semantic branches and commit messages...

(Commits per Project) / (Total Commits) = % Time on Project

Own thoughts:

I think that using commits instead of time to manage a project could be useful in the context the author gave of trying to fill in time sheets etc. if your project consists of big features and developers are working on one project on a daily basis. However, I'm not sure that this technique would be so beneficial for personal productivity time tracking. Sometimes commits for me can vary in size/ amount of time spent considerably and so I'm not sure how accurate this would be for me to understand how long I've spent on a task.

That's not to say that there's not another useful way in which commits could be used in a time tracking application.

[nelsonic]

I have been tracking my commits for the last few years: nelsonic/nelsonic.github.io#346
Even though it has helped me "pace myself" on personal level I don't think it's a "good" measure at all.
It's Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Commits can easily be "gamed" by creating many small commits e.g: adding one line/file per commit.
This is both undesirable from a version control perspective and totally useless for tracking effort.

What we need is a universally objective measure that cannot be "fudged": Time.
We need people to get into the habit of estimating how long a task will take.
So that the product owner can budget for time on the project and calculate "resource" requirements. Additionally, by tracking actual time against original estimates people get better at not under/over estimating the effort (measured in "focus hours") a given task will take.

Closing as not relevant.
(Thanks for reminding us to close it.) ✨