Documentation > Case Studies > Software Developer

Software Developer

As a software developer you can track time on the software projects you are working on. In this example we will show you how you can track time on Visual studio.net but you can track time on any software development tool as long as the title of the window changes:

Case study:

Joe is a  software developer works with visual studio .net and has 2 major projects he works on and multiple small projects. The mayor Projects he works on are simply called “Software Project 1″ and “Software Project 2″. And he use word to write down the documentation of the software. He wants to track time on these items but all he sees now is when he open the “Remind Me” window is just the screenshots :

remind Me Window not configured

Not a easy way to track time since you don’t see in a structured way how and when you work on the different projects. But this can be changed in the following text it will be explained how to setup Premember so you can easy fill in your tasks.

Overview

The ability to make it easy to look back in time is all based on the window title. With the window title “screen shot filters” can be set. These make it possible to see at a certain time in a certain color what you did. So before we start setting this up there is some extra information needed to see if here is a pattern in the window titles that we can use. Below we will look at the two programs we use to see if there is a pattern in the title of the programs.

Visual Studio

The program we use for Programming is Visual Studio  so we will look if there is a pattern in the window title. When you start “visual studio.net” the window of the title of the window is always in the format “name” followed by “- Microsoft Visual Studio”. the Start page title for example look likes this : When you now for example open a project called “Software Project 1″ the window title changes to “Software Project 1 - Microsoft Visual Studio”. The conclusion  is that there is a pattern in the Visual Studio window title and we will use this to setup the filters.

Word

The program we use for writing is Word so we will look if there is a pattern in the window title. When you start “Word” the window of the title of the window is always in the format “name” followed by “- Microsoft Word”. When you open a new document the  window title look likes this : When you now for example start a new document called “Software Project 1 documentation” the window title will show “Software Project 1 documentation - Microsoft Word”. The conclusion  is that there is a pattern in the word window title and we will use this to setup the filters.

Configuration

Now that we have the information needed to setup Premember we will first configure the projects. After this we will setup the filters with the window title pattern we just found.

Projects :

Since Premember works on a project base we have to create projects based on the information Joe gave we create the following 3 Project and task categories : Projects :

1. Software Project 1
2. Software Project 2
3. other

And under each of these projects we create the following 2 task categories :

1. Programming
2. Documentation

Screen shot Filters

With the information Joe gave us and the conclusion we found by looking at the programs Joe uses we setup four filters. Of this four, three are used for tracking when he programs and one is used for writing documentation. Below is the table of each of the filters we setup, the (*) is a wildcard and is used to mark that the text can be anything at the place of the (*).

Filter name	Filter window title	Color
Software Develop Environment	* - Microsoft Visual Studio	Red
Software Project 1	Software Project 1 - Microsoft Visual Studio	blue
Software Project 2	Software Project 2 - Microsoft Visual Studio	purple
Word	* - Microsoft Word	green

End result :

Now that this is all configured  you can easily see when and how long you worked on the different software projects in different colors. A typical day would now look something like this :

Remind Me window With Remind Me Screenshot Filters Configured

And Based on the colors you can easy fill in your tasks, and when you have filled in your tasks it will look something like this :

Remind window with tasks added