Joel Spolsky in Philadelphia

Stephen Tolton — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:51:20 +0000

Last night I attended the FogBugz World Tour event in Philadelphia. Joel gave a great demo on the new FogBugz 6.0 features. It was a lot of fun. Meeting Joel, as my co-worker put it, is like meeting a programming rock star. Does that make me a groupie?

As for the content of the presentation, the really interesting new feature is the Evidence Based Scheduling, or “EBS”. By recording programmer estimates of time to complete individual FogBugz issues, their actual time spent on on these issues, and then running a Monte Carlo simulation on possible future scheduling outcomes, the new FogBugz can output a nifty graph that visually shows the shipping dates of your product to within different percentages of accuracy. For instance, if you are starting a project today, you might get a graph that says that you have a 2% chance of shipping at the end of the week, but a 90% chance of shipping by January 1. This graph is dynamic and will change over time as estimates and real time spent on bugs is taken into account.

Of course, my description is not doing it justice. You should really check out the tour and sign-up for the free trial.

Other great stuff in there included a Wiki that seems to actually work. Joel told me that they spent a lot of time creating a very fast AJAX interface and rich text editor widget, optimized for speed. For instance, their WYSIWYG editor’s button bar is really just a single image map, so it only requires a single HTTP call to the server to render versus the more common approach of having each button be a separate image and therefore requiring multiple server trips to render the bar.

I generally prefer to use Open Source and Free Software applications as much as possible, but I have to hand it to Joel and his team. This product is by far the best bug tracking software I’ve ever seen. It actually does a lot more than simple bug tracking. I am going to give it a try myself. Apparently, there is a free two-user student/start-up hosted version available. It’s fully functional, so I’ll report my experiences after I get it setup.

It is well worth the few hours of time required to check out the FogBugz 6.0 demo. Not only is the spread good (Philly had free candy!), but the software rocks, and of course, listening to Joel give a presentation is always fun, even if it is a transparent sales pitch. But, I don’t mind when the product is as good as FogBugz 6.0 seems to be.

Check if your city is on the list and sign-up. You won’t be disappointed.

Ramble » Philadelphia

Joel Spolsky in Philadelphia