Painless Project Management With Fogbugz

Painless Project Management With Fogbugz

I am a huge Mike Gunderloy fan and so I pretty much buy every one of his books and read his Daily Grind blog posts religiously.

I just recently got my copy of Painless Project Management With Fogbugz and I really didn’t know much about FogBugz prior to reading this book.  Once I started reading I was immediately intrigued by the way that FogBugz ties right into your mail server and treats each incoming email as a case within the system.  You simply point it to any POP3 mailbox and when an email comes into that account it goes right into the system and you can assign a due date.  You can reply directly to the message within the system and FogBugz keeps track of the entire thing.  If the user that sent the message replies back, then that message is tracked in the original case as a threaded discussion.  Amazing!   If a user happens to submit a bug that you want to track, you can just edit the case and assign it to the correct project, mark it as a bug and that’s it.  As I kept reading, I quickly realized that FogBugz could single-handedly manage my support requests, sales requests, bug tracking and project management for CodeSmith.  I bought my copy about a week ago and I could not be more happy with my purchase!  FogBugz 4.0 is truly an amazing product.

6 Comments

  • Fogbugz is not the first product to have this feature. I have personally administered 2 open source trouble ticketing packages, viz. RT [www.bestpractical.com/rt/], and Bugzilla, and both of them had this feature.



    Probably Fogbugz is easier to setup & use..

  • It is cool, but this is stuff people were doing with Lotus Notes 3+ years ago.

  • First I read through it in Barnes & Noble for an hour. Then I put it back on the shelf. Then I saw it again at Borders and picked it up and started reading it a second time. I decided what the heck I was already spending over $400 that day on research books so what was another $34.99 gonna hurt. I took it to work today and read from the front page to Page 16. I was stunned from the wealth of new visions that filled my head during lunch. I opened my laptop and went straight to Google and entered FogBugz software --> That took me to the Fog Creek site and JoelonSoftware, another book that I bought last week.As a matter of fact, I think people around me thought I was completely insane, since every time I opened it to a new page, within seconds I was laughing quite loudly -- in a bookstore? So, I bought both books. Anyway, back to today -- So there I am reading "Painless Project Management with FogBugz" and all of a sudden it hit me...I can use that for an open source project that I am working on codename "Millenium". Anyway, after hightlighting more sections and making squiggles in the margins, I went straight to the online store and bought a copy of FpgBugz 4.0. It took me until page 16 to realize I had discovered a secreat weapon that was the answer to my greatest question...How was I going to keep everything going when my entire team of co-conspirators -- I mean collaborators would be literally spread across the globe? The answer was obviously I had to have a Web-based project management, issue tracking, feature collecting, defect assigning tool --> FogBugz 4.0 was exactly what I have been searching for -- now we can start working on the project and all it will take is for everyone to have their own copy of FogBugz 4.0? Definitely --> for $100 each we can all get going on a truly amazing product. Thanks for writing the book and for the first 16 pages that gave me the key to what we needed to start to bring the realization of our vision that much closer. Your other books rock too! My advice to everyone reading this: Buy them all and use them everyday!!!

  • I would like to get into project management. Would this book help me on that? I am currently a systems admin and want to do more.



  • Mailbox integration is indeed a very nice feature and we are going to integrate it later in our software as well as I personally use that a lot.

    We think the important thing is to materialize whatever was discussed into tasks and keep the development in sync between discussions, tasks and milestones. That's what's really needed.

    Anyway, I'm biased obviously, just my 2 cents.

  • It would be an interesting product to try out with my estore www.GrindWheat.com

    Many Thanks!

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