Time Cockpit Blog

It is a well-known fact that constant interruptions can have quite negative consequences on your productivity. Instead of being able to concentrate on the important tasks you planned for a certain day, you are kept busy by phone calls, ad-hoc meetings, incoming emails, social media notifications, etc. As a knowledge worker, I struggle with this problem, too. As an entrepreneur building a project time tracking software, I am constantly looking for ways to cope with it. In this blog article I want to share some of my current thoughts on the topic of productivity and interruptions.  Read more ...

In the current version of time cockpit, there is a bug in the excel exporter when using conditional formatting in an excel template file. Precisely, when using a conditional format that spans a full row or column instead of a sub-region of a worksheet. The root cause of this is in the way that the [usually more than awesome] ClosedXML (http://closedxml.codeplex.com/) library handles ranges with covering all rows or all columns. In some of those cases, ClosedXML tries to apply something to every cell in that (semi-infinite) range.  Read more ...

Last week I travelled to Wuppertal to participate in the community conference NRWConf 2013. With time cockpit we have been sponsors and speakers for this event for years. In this blog article I publish some photos from NRWConf as well as the slide deck for my talk about effort estimation in agile projects.  Read more ...

What time tracking-related KPIs can tell you about your business’ healthy - Many companies use KPIs to manage their performance. The first part was an introduction into KPIs including tips and trick about successful performance management projects. In this second part we will show examples of KPIs related to time tracking.  Read more ...

What time tracking-related KPIs can tell you about your business’ healthy - Many companies use KPIs to manage their performance. This first article introduces KPIs. It points out our top 10 tips about how to successfully build a KPI system in your company. In the second part we will show examples of KPIs related to time tracking.  Read more ...

At time cockpit we are in close contact with our customers and we value their feedback. In one of our meetings with customers, we identified potential for performance improvements when it comes to drop-down lists (combo boxes). So we concentrated on optimizing the combo box experience in time cockpit. This is the first step to a more feature-rich combo box. There is more to come.  Read more ...

You may have recognized that the performance of the time cockpit online client is very bad today. Every database request takes multiple seconds, because the cached time cockpit DataContext, that is used to connect to the database, is rebuilt each time instead or reusing the cached version.  Read more ...

Last month we published a quiz in which you can demonstrate your estimation skills. Our article proposed that most of us typically overestimate our knowledge. A lot of people took the test. Do you want to know the results? Here they are.  Read more ...

At software architects we live and breathe agile development. Agile principles have been our constant companion for many years now. Over the years we have developed a solid practice for reporting in agile projects.   Read more ...

This month we continue the spate of performance and productivity improvements for time cockpit. We have focused on lists and the customization module. Time cockpit now provides shortcuts for opening forms not only as dialogs but also as tabs. This makes it much easier to deal with large forms as they can use nearly the entire screen. Additionally you can open a list and a form side by side so you still see the overview in the list while editing a data row. Such scenarios are very helpful especially for typical back office work like preparing timesheet data for invoicing, effort analysis in project management, etc.  Read more ...