FogBugz World Tour Dublin Ireland

I've just been to Joel Spolsky's "FogBugz World Tour" in Dublin, Ireland.

I'm a pretty big fan of Joel's blog, his products and mostly his management style and as for the world tour this morning and his Demo of the FogBugz software... Impressive stuff.

With some complementary tea and coffee to warm\wake my self up before heading into the demo (a nicely sized room packed with a combination of smartly dressed business men to obvious developers) the setting was relaxed and not as formal as it very easily could have turned out to be.

The demo of FogBugz 6.0 jumped straight into the product, no slides and no obvious script with more of a structured walk through of the product being the mode of presentation. As he launched up FogBugz and started hitting off some of the new and existing features, some of which Joel himself is understandably proud to parade around it was obvious there were going to be two main features that were going to take the spot light for me.

The first of which being their WYSIWYG enabled wiki editor. This for all intent and purpose is a web based text editor capable of rivaling the basic features of MS Word. With rich formatting features such as table editing, a built in spell checker and user customizable style sheets, this is one wiki which doesn’t require you to learn any new mark-up or syntax language to be able to get full use out of it. The first thing that occurred to me with this feature was "What a nice way to keep all our A&D docs", this was further strengthened with the built in version control allowing you to see all the changes made to date and whom and why the were made.

The second Feature and the piece de la resistance of the product is the "Evidence-Based Scheduling" feature. A fully automated feature which can give a probability curve of ship dates taking into account your teams ability at giving realistic estimates for work based on the previous history of estimate times based against actual times and also taking into account holidays/weekends and buffer times. From this curve you can tweak the overall project to see where needs to be cut and sliced in order to make a desired ship date. This feature is pure quality, and with out a doubt would make a excellent addition to a development team.

I must admit, while I'm only highlighting two main features, these are my two personal favorites. The product it's self is awash with useful, necessary functionality which cover the a full development life cycle plus some little bits and bob's which when you hear about them you think "Awh how handy is that". This and the fact that one of my pet hates is having twenty different tools to do twenty related jobs, this system is a one stop shop covering A&D, Development, Testing and support in a manner which doesn’t leave the product feeling crammed and cluttered but still feeling like it's a small piece of software.

If you can, try make a trip to one of these demo's if for no other reason than to get another perspective on how very common jobs can be done differently