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FogBugz World Tour in Toronto
Friday, 21 September 2007

Posted by austin in: Technology, Toronto, trackback

So, Joel Spolsky has been making his world tour demonstrating the latest version of FogBugz (6.0), and I was able to attend last night’s demonstration. It was a small pleasure to be able to meet someone whose blog I’ve been reading for several years.

Joel doesn’t present FogBugz as a bug tracking tool, but as a communications tool. FogBugz is definitely an example of opinionated software, and works better when you adapt your work practices to it rather than trying to make it adapt to your work practices. After the demo, I asked Joel how he felt FogBugz and Basecamp work together or differ. His response suggests that there’s some similarities in how the two tools work, although he sees limitations in how Basecamp handles tasks and schedule changes. (Disclaimer: I have not used either FogBugz or Basecamp at this point.)

The software development lifecycle as presented by FogBugz is presented in its five major modules:

Of all of the features that I saw, the wiki seemed the least useful, although the WYSIWYG editor for it was pretty impressive. The value in the wiki is not the editing space that it provides, but that it provides it in the same place as you track your implementation, releases, QA, and support.

The other three pieces are all based around case management. A case in FogBugz can be a feature, a bug, or even a development task. Cases have time estimates and work times that are used in calculating estimated ship dates. FogBugz uses R-squared analysis of a developer’s estimates and actual work time to determine their reliability of estimates, and then runs Monte Carlo simulations to determine when the last feature or bug required to be fixed will likely be completed based on current task assignment, giving an estimated ship date. It’s all very impressive. (Estimates and work times aren’t immune to gaming, but that’s more of a social problem than a technological problem.)

Case entry and management is insanely simple. There are no required fields (which will, of course, bother some people), but it makes adding cases (which are tasks, bugs, and even support requests) dead simple. There’s no implicit dependency tracking, but you can easily link two cases together simply by adding a note (e.g., “waiting for case 72″) and FogBugz automatically provides a link between them. One clones bugs the same way. There’s good SCM integration into FogBugz (including for Perforce), and there’s even a VisualStudio plug-in for task/case management.

The demo was useful to see, but the hard part will be in seeing exactly how it would integrate into work’s development cycle. It’s not that expensive, so it may be worth getting a few licenses (or trying a few months of the hosted version) so that we can see whether it would work for us.

Comments»

1. Eric from Fog Creek – Monday, 24 September 2007

If you’re interested in trying out FogBugz, you can do a 45 day hosted trial for free at http://try.fogbugz.com. That should give you a chance to experiment with the features and see if FogBugz will integrate with your work processes.

Also, the hosted version of FogBugz is available in a “Student and Startup Edition”, where it’s free indefinitely if you have only one or two users. Just switch over to it in the Your Account area of your trial.


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