Yesterday I got the word on Fog Creek’s new FogBugz 6.0 from the man himself, Joel Spolsky, from a microISV point of view.
I wanted to see for myself whether the new 6.0 had gained anything that would make it easier to use as my one person tech support app; what I got was a hell of a surprise.
The surprise is something Joel and Co. call evidence-based scheduling (ESB). I think this one exclusive feature is going to rock the development world and be a real boon for microISVs. Here’s why: estimating development tasks has been broken in our industry since day one and Fog Creek’s evidence-based scheduling is the first painless tool I’ve seen in 25 years that actually fixes this problem.
No more guesstimates. No more complicated Excel spreadsheets trying to divine whether the app will be done by the target date. No more endless deathmarches to nowhere. No more faith-based developing.
I’m not going to go into how EBS works here – Joel does a far better job here than I can do. I don’t care how it stops the bleeding, only that it does.
Here’s what an IT shop gets: with almost no overhead, a IT manager can see in one second flat which of their programmers needs the most “management” applied to them to improve their productivity and stop screwing up the ship date. They don’t have to rely on hope and prayer that their developers are estimating accurately – EBS factors that in.
They can see – really honestly see – just when a project or a major version is going to be done, regardless of whatever development methodology or lack thereof they are using, whether they’re developing an app for desktops or the web, regardless of programming language.
For a microISV with one or a few developers, EBS means you can play what-if with your feature set to win: Just move a slider up and down your priority hierarchy, and you can see what it does to your ship date.
I’ve been a using FogBugz since 4.0 for my own commercial product, but the fit always left something to be desired – too many features that didn’t make sense for a microISV with one programmer. Now, all those annoyances have been scrubbed out with Ajax, and I can fit FB to my workflow so that things like estimating features and tracking time spent on those features is nearly transparent.
This is just awesome. While there are some other really great help desk apps out there, notably Userscape’s HelpSpot, FogBugz 6 is just what I’m going to need to develop Project X (my Next Big Thing) and then support it with the minimum of effort.
If Joel’s World Tour is coming to a city near you by all means check it out – the 60 or so developers who shared a hotel conference room with me yesterday got more than their time was worth. Or you could check out this movie. And if you’re not in a position to run your FogBugz on your own server, FogBugz On Demand is a very good deal.
(Disclaimer: I’m the co-moderator of Joel’s Business of Software forum.)
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