Anyone soloing using fogbugz? [closed]

Question

Is there anyone working solo and using fogbugz out there? I'm interested in personal experience/overhead versus paper.

I am involved in several projects and get pretty hammered with lots of details to keep track of... Any experience welcome.

(Yes I know Mr. Joel is on the stackoverflow team... I still want good answers :)

Individualize

Answer 1

I use it, especially since the hosted Version of FugBugz is free for up to 2 people. I found it a lot nicer than paper as I'm working on multiple projects, and my paper tends to get rather messy once you start making annotations or if you want to re-organize and shuffle tasks around, mark them as complete only to see that they are not complete after all...

Plus, the Visual Studio integration is really neat, something paper just cannot compete with. Also, if you lay the project to rest for 6 months and come back, all your tasks and notes are still there, whereas with paper you may need to search all the old documents and notes again, if you did not discard it.

But that is just the point of view from someone who is not really good at staying organized :-) If you are a really tidy and organized person, paper may work better for you than it does for me.

Bonus suggestion: Run Fogbugz on a second PC (or a small Laptop like the eeePC) so that you always have it at your fingertips. The main problem with Task tracking programs - be it FogBugz, Outlook, Excel or just notepad - is that they take up screen space, and my two monitors are usually full with Visual Studio, e-Mail, Web Browsers, some Notepads etc.

Kenwrick

Answer 2

Go to http://www.fogbugz.com/ then at the bottom under "Try It", sign up.

under Settings => Your FogBugz Hosted Account, it should either already say "Payment Information: Using Student and Startup Edition." or there should be some option/link to turn on the Student and Startup Edition.

And yes, it's not only for Students and Startups, I asked their support :-)

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with FogCreek and Joel did not just deposit money in my account.

Kenwrick

The tip about the "Startup Edition" was very helpful! – Spinescent

Does this work for the self hosted version or the on demand version only? – Burge

Answer 3

When I was working for myself doing my consulting business I signed up for a hosted account and honestly I couldn't have done without it.

What I liked most about it was it took 30 seconds to sign up for an account and I was then able to integrate source control using sourcegear vault (which is an excellent source control product and free for single developers) set up projects, clients, releases and versions and monitor my progress constantly.

One thing that totally blew me away was that I ended up completely abandoning outlook for all work related correspondence. I could manage all my client interactions from within fogbugz and it all just worked amazingly well.

In terms of overhead, one of the nice things you could do was turn anything into a case. Anything that came up in your mind while you were coding, you simply created a new email, sent it to fogbugz and it was instantly added as an item for review later.

I would strongly recommend you get yourself one of the hosted accounts and give it a whirl

Myxomycete

Answer 4

In addition to the benefits already mentioned, another nice feature of using FogBugz is BugzScout, which you can use to report errors from your app and log them into FogBugz automatically. If you're a one person team, chances are there are some bugs in your code you've never seen during your own testing, so it's nice to have those bugs found "in the wild" automatically reported and logged for you.

Subphylum

+1 for making me aware of the BugzScout facility. Great stuff. – Heterograft

Answer 5

I use it as well and quite frankly wouldn't want to work without it.

I've always had some kind of issue tracker available for the projects I work on and thus am quite used to updating it. With FB6 the process is now even better.

Since FB also integrates with Subversion, the source control tool I use for my projects, the process is really good and I have two-way links between the two systems now. I can click on a case number in the Subversion logs and go to the case in FB, or see the revisions bound to a case inside FB.

Atchison

Answer 6

I think it's great that Joel et al. let people use FogBugs hosted for free on their own. It's a great business strategy, because the users become fans (it is great software after all), and then they recommend it to their businesses or customers.

Malan

Answer 7

Yea FogBugz is great for process-light, quick and easy task management. It seems especially well suited for soloing, where you don't need or want a lot of complexity in that area.

By the way, if you want to keep track of what you're doing at the computer all day, check out TimeSprite, which integrates with FogBugz. It's a Windows app that logs your active window and then categorizes your activity based on the window title / activity type mappings you define as you go. (You can also just tell it what you're working on.) And if you're a FogBugz user, you can associate your work with a FogBugz case, and it will upload your time intervals for that case. This makes accurate recording of elapsed time pretty painless and about as accurate as you can get, which in turn improves FogBugz predictive powers in its evidence-based scheduling. Also, when soloing, I find that such specific logging of my time keeps me on task, in the way a meandering manager otherwise might. (I'm not affiliated with TimeSprite in any way.)

Range