History

Development of the Clock App

The idea for Clock originated around 2014 at Zentrum Naturwissenschaften. Back then, obligatory Time Sheets were introduced on a monthly basis, and that proved to be quite a stressful and uncomfortable affair, because the forms had to be completed manually.

Beginnings

A student assistant (and his boss) had the idea to build a web application to facilitate the job: an app to track your working time like an actual time clock. Of course, some research was done in advance, to find out whether there was an existing software solution up to the job. However, existing solutions turned out to be either very expensive or too complex for simple time reports.

So the decision was made to just build it. Moreover, this was a thrilling project to learn how to design and program such an application (the very same student now works at Apple, it proved to be a good investment for him...).

Clock 0.1

The very first version of Clock looked quite promising, although it had a few bugs that kept it in a nearly publishable (but unfinished) state for a long time.

When finally the Working Time Account according to German Minimum Wage Law (Mindestlohngesetz, MiLoG) was officially introduced, it became apparent that an adaptation of the existing code would be more complicated than recreating the application from scratch.

Furthermore, programming skills as a whole had evolved, and new technologies had come into existence that made the job easier.

But above all, there was a Human Resources Department with a great interest in providing an attractive alternatice to the old Excel sheet – and would be ready to support the development financially.

On our way to Clock 1.0

Since it is always a good idea to learn from past mistakes, the new project was planned much more carefully, and thoroughly re-conceptualised, following agile project guidelines.

As a first step – which took quite a number of e-mails and meetings to complete – User Stories were written, to specify precisely what the application had to be able to do from a user's perspective.

The extrinsic requirements for the app – concerning e.g. the regulations on the Working Time Account and mandatory pauses etc. – were formulated as Business Rules.

This process resulted quite specific, clear-cut requirements for the application and the data models to be used.

Test... Test...

A new product needs to be tested, as well: whether it does what it is supposed to do, if it does produce errors and whether it is usable at all. So before the app was officially released , we tested it carefully. At least we tried to – it proved to be quite a challenge to recruit enough student assistance willing to actually use a half-finished project.

It's alive!

Finally, in autumn 2020, we decided to make Clock available to all, and simply put up a link next to the established forms provided for student or graduate research assistants. Ever since, we've seen a robust increase in the numbers of users and plan to advertise the product even more in the near future.

Still, some details will always have to be revised from time to time, and additional features will be implemented. It's part of the process that some things do not work perfectly well.

You can also participate in improving by sending us your feedback!

How to contribute

If you know something about the technology of frontend or backend development and are interested in participating, drop us a note: [e-mail], or via Rocket.Chat. You are also welcome if you feel you can contribute something else to the project (e.g. a translation into yet another language).