Comments on: Joel Spolsky’s FogBugz world tour comes to Dublin

By: james whitehead

james whitehead — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:09:14 +0000

and I think that’s the thing with FogBugz - you have to respect it as a developers tool, not so much as a project management tool.

If FogBugz allowed its cases to be broken down into tasks it would be much more useful to all concerned. A project manager could track on business level progress while developers retained the freedom they need to describe and manage the tasks that drive the result - free of any bogus dependencies.

I’m caught between management and developers and for me it’s a problem of project scope, time, and a human limit to the amount of information that can be remembered and communicated for a variety of purposes.

In our small team most developers love or at least respect FogBugz and I think it’s a great tool for recording and communicating single task issues - but how many single tasks exist free of wider concerns? For the management crew, FogBugz filter results are way to obscure and turning these into useful projects reports means tons of labour in your favourite charting tool.

This might be an unreasonable request of the FogCreek people but … there’s a level of project/development communication that they could address by adding one more reportable layer - and I’m calling it the Bogfugz Layer.

where did all that come from? jumping off the hobby horse now - J

By: Des Traynor

Des Traynor — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:47:49 +0000

I also found the dependencies snippet interesting, it makes all those Gantt charts you see in software companies look incredibly pointless.
I guess the Gantt chart represents the order in which the final product can be put together, but not soo much the order in which the code can be written.

By: John

John — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:19:03 +0000

Hi Rob, Joel was responding to a question from the floor on how you might represent dependencies between tasks in FogBugz. His answer was that they didn’t have an explicit dependencies feature because he believes there are few real dependencies in the writing of software.

The example he gave was that you might be assigned to write some code that processes the output of some other guy’s code. People usually enter that in a gantt chart as a dependency, but it really isn’t. There’s nothing to prevent you writing a function to return some data, such as your code will expect, and then working away on your assignment.

So most of the dependencies in project plans for software development are bogus, assuming, of course, that you have a decent speciofication to work from.

By: Rob Brooks

Rob Brooks — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:06:01 +0000

Johm, any chance you could expand on “why there are few true dependencies in a software development project”? It’s an interesting snippet!

Personally, I’d love to see a project management tool that focused on the actions rather than the dates - but it seems to be a paradigm that’s never been explored in any project tool I’ve come across. I know that Z follows Y follows X, but I don’t know when I’m going to start on X so why do I have to pick an arbitrary date before I can explore the structure of the project?