JIRA - ictime plugin worklog

JIRA is my preference in issue trackers, it’s well designed, flexible, well priced and integrates nicely into my other Atlassian products such as Confluence and Stash and also 3rd party products, for example Jenkins Continuous Integration server.

Another bonus is the external plugins that can be installed either for free or for a varying sum normally dependent on number of users. One of the plugins I had been using was ictime as it enabled me to see a bigger picture of what hours I’d spent working on a project.

Another tool that I use coupled to JIRA is Almworks‘ JIRA Client. Not only is this a decent Windows GUI to managing many issues and many projects all within a single view, it also has a work timer, so I can click start and then stop. I can then submit this as a worklog making time tracking nice and simple.

I’d pretty much left the config for ictime as it came “out of the box” but went back into the admin and noticed that you can hide JIRA’s default worklog menu item (although I found it only did this in the admin area unless I’m missing the point somewhere).

I start working on another project tonight and load JIRA Client again and all of a sudden, the start work button removes itself from the toolbar. After a short while of thinking, I thought that perhaps something had changed in JIRA‘s REST API as I’d just upgraded to 6.3.15 earlier today too. After some more head banging and looking in the release notes I found nothing. I ultimately installed another plugin to do the simple task of start and stop, but alas, this wasn’t working either. I was still able to submit a worklog though, although this doesn’t have the benefit of simple time tracking.

After some more thinking and head banging, it dawned on me! I went back into ictime‘s admin panel and re-enable JIRA‘s built in worklog menu. Voila!! All of a sudden, I have the time tracking feature available again.

It isn’t clear what the 2 buttons in ictime‘s admin panel actually do, so hopefully this finding becomes useful to others potentially too.