Time sheet - the use case
January 14, 2007
Somebody said "We, developers have a great privilege to be able to develop tools for ourselves".
At our company we have to print out our time sheet every month, let the customer sign it and transfer it to the accounting department. At the end of the month we also hand in the travel costs report, which (for every day of the month) contains the name of the customer, the address of the customer's site (for computing the kilometer allowance), the working time and the particular costs.
By the way, later the tax inspector does some sort of consistency check, so it appears logical to create both documents from the same source.
I was using excel sheets, I mean two separate sheets for time sheet and for travel costs. I mean the first one is on my desktop computer at customer's office (if the project takes longer) and the second one is at home (I do not always carry my notebook with me, it is not allowed to connect it to customer's network anyway). I tried to combat synchronization problems with google docs. You upload your excel sheet, edit docs online with some ajax magic and if you have luck, you can continue editing from any other place. The idea is great and I love all the google products anyway, but this one is a beta, you know. ;-)
I could continue with different scenarios involving a paper based note-book and cross media synchronization problems, but you already got the idea what a mess it is.
The idea to program some application, preferably a web application is obvious. I've heard, some of our guys even started to implement this but abandoned it later. I can imagine why...
A developer can make his own tool, but the time/energy saving must outweigh the development effort. Unfortunately, the case is not so often even for an experienced Java / EJB developer.
Lets have a look on how you can be much more successful with a better programming language and better platform, both feature clean and readable syntax, powerful language concepts, well-thought intuitive API and a light-weight easy-to-install runtime environment.
I am not talking about Ruby on Rails, although it is pretty close to that.
After I've promised so much, stay tuned for the practical solution.