Painless Project Management with FogBugz

by Michael Gunderloy

Project management is the bane of the team approach to programming. Many programs out there purport to help a development team manage a projectthe only trouble is most of them aren’t very good. World-renowned software guru Joel Spolsky’s company, Fog Creek Software, has created a tool called FogBugz that incorporates all of Joel’s insight into what works and what doesn’t work in project management. FogBugz is based on a keeping track of a database of cases. At any given time, every case is assigned to one person who must resolve it or forward it to someone else. Cases can be prioritized, documented, sorted, discussed, edited, assigned, estimated, searched, and tracked. Because FogBugz is web-based, everyone on the team always sees the whole picture. Everything from customer feature requests to high-level design discussions to tiny bug fix details is instantly searchable and trackable.

Painless Project Management with FogBugz, Second Edition, written with the guidance of the whole FogBugz team, completely describes the ins and outs of the latest version of FogBugz, version 6 of which is scheduled for release simultaneously with this book.

What you’ll learn

If you are looking for a quick read on how to do software development project management (with or without FogBugz) that can get you started right away, this is the book. The tips and techniques and information about configuration and implementation are key benefits. For the developer wanting to be able to get started with the basics and not have to worry about various methodologies, theory, and discussions of various styles, this is probably the best book on software project management.

Who this book is for

This book is for users of FogBugz, potential users of FogBugz, project managers using FogBugz, and project managers who might use FogBugz

253 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[John Harper]

Good overview of what you can do in FogBugz, but short on workflow examples. Would like to have seen more in best-practices.