Planning and reporting for a small group?

Question

coworking

There is a small group of developers (up to 5 people), in which there is a need for the introduction of planning and reporting to analyze the effectiveness and improve it. There is absolutely no experience.
I wonder if there is some software that allows you to spend as little time on this as possible and at the same time extract knowledge about how the group works?
You can web services and desktop. You can pay, but free, of course, would have pleased more.

Answer 1

What specific reporting should be recorded?

Answer 2

Any software is automation. Before automation, you need to work manually, especially in your case:
you still do not know where problems and losses appear, respectively, what and how to change and measure.
Try to start monitoring activities and analyzing problems manually first - then you will see in which direction you need to dig, and you will understand the software requirements.
You can start retrospectively - try to understand why such results of the work already done, highlight what you lack for understanding. Then you can track the factors already found - manually, not on all tasks.
At the beginning of the journey, it is enough to understand the main problems “on the fingers” and start correcting them right there, tracking the same “on the fingers”.

Answer 3

My vision of the process is to break everything into small tasks, one task - one person, tasks in the form of a tree structure.
For each task, the one who solves it makes an estimate of the time for implementation.
Then, at the end of each day, each developer enters how much time was spent on which task. If necessary, changes the time remaining until the end of the task (if not changed, it will decrease by itself as the developer adds the time spent on this task).
As a result, you can see progress on tasks and the project as a whole at any time.
Soft - most interesting, recently raised the topic here. On a small project, it’s realistic to do everything on an Excel sheet, but automation can greatly simplify everything ...