Announcing FogBugz 7.0
July 19th, 2009 by Dan Wilson
(Click here to skip straight to the “What’s New” page.)
FogBugz 7.0 has launched, and the Fog Creek office is buzzing with
activity. We’re answering customers’ questions, helping them through the
upgrade process, and making sure that nothing falls through the cracks (by using FogBugz, of course).
Focused Flexibility
We’re
proud to have created a new version of
FogBugz that adds an
enormous amount of flexibility, but stays true to our core design
philosophy. You can now add structure to your task list with subcases,
and use tags to create your own taxonomy. You can use Burn Down Charts
to track your agile development sprint, or use new EBS 2.0 features to track a
longer-term effort involving dependencies and part-time participants.
But
the ease and simplicity of the FogBugz case workflow hasn’t changed.
Resolved cases are still automatically assigned back to case opener for
verification.* The number of case fields is kept at a bare minimum,*
and of course the number of required fields is still zero.
*FogBugz Plugins
Sorry
for all the asterisks, but I’ve left out a major part of the FogBugz 7
story. We’ve adhered to our design philosophy in core FogBugz, but that
doesn’t mean you can’t bend the rules by installing a Plugin or two.
You can use the Custom Workflow Plugin to tweak the rules for case
assignment (as well as create custom categories and statuses), or install
the Custom Fields Plugin to add those extra few case fields your
organization can’t live without. These are just two of the many Plugins
available at launch in the FogBugz Plugin Gallery.
We’ve also
opened up the FogBugz Plugin Platform, allowing any developer to create Plugins that
can deeply integrate with nearly every piece of FogBugz functionality.
We’re launching with a first batch of plugins created by the FogBugz
development community including Balsamiq Mockups for FogBugz, Kanban
Board, FB_Scratchout, and ClarkKent. We look forward to seeing many
more, and will follow up with blog posts about our favorites.
An Emphasis on Usability
FogBugz
7.0 isn’t just about big new features and the introduction of Plugins. It’s also about the dozens of usability tweaks that will make
life easier for our users. Case number fields are now aided by
auto-complete, so forget about having to remember or copy six-digit numbers.
A new context menu control in the case list allows you to perform
actions on cases more directly. An “Add Fields” control in
the case view clears unused fields out of your way. These enhancements are really just the tip of the iceberg; if you’re evaluating FogBugz 7.0 we recommend a nice, long test drive.
The Passion of the Kiwi
A lot of hard work
went into fulfilling the team’s product vision and making sure FogBugz 7.0 meets a wide range of customer needs.
For example, the Plugin architecture was born out of months of hard
work by the FogBugz development team, who first ported our entire code
base to the .NET platform and then created a massive API that touched
nearly every part of the application.
The herculean task of
creating the Plugin architecture was nearly complete when I arrived at
Fog Creek last September. Right off the bat, I was tasked with writing feature specifications, which I spent
months churning out, each one a little bit less clueless than the last.
It’s been quite an experience to work with the FogBugz team, to see
(the good parts of) my mockups turn into living, breathing features
that exceeded my expectations.
The FogBugz Developer Series
Stay
tuned for a series of blog posts from the developers who crafted
FogBugz 7.0. You’ll first hear from Brett Kiefer, designer and
developer of Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS) v2.0.
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