In my last essay, I compared FogBugz to a pitching machine, lobbing balls towards the sweet spot of software developers. However, an unattended pitching machine eventually runs out of balls, so somebody needs to collect balls and refill the machine regularly. 

Similarly, FogBugz needs a project manager who can keep feeding tasks to developers as fast as they can do them. The project manager needs to:

• Talk to customers, both internal or external, to figure out what tasks need to be done,
• Enter those tasks into FogBugz. 
• Decide when those tasks need to be done, assigning them to releases, and setting due dates and priorities.
• Assign those cases to the appropriate developers, balancing workload and expertise. 
• Keep track of the progress of the developers on those tasks.

Of course, a developer could do all of those things, but wouldn't you rather have your developers doing what they're best at? FogBugz lets the project manager take care of everything but the software itself, creating the development abstraction layer.

Imagine that you are managing a new release of your company's product. You talked to your customers, figured out what needs to go into this release, and opened dozens of different features as FogBugz cases. After creating each case with due dates and priorities, you assigned them to appropriate developers. Let's also say that your developers have gone through the features assigned to them and estimated the time necessary to accomplish those tasks.

Now you can get the status of your project by doing a filter of the open cases in the new release. At the bottom of the page, you'll see a summary that looks like:
Cases on this page
Total  30
Cases without estimate  1
Total estimated time remaining  9 days 2.94 hours
Total elapsed time  2 days 3.79 hours

You can sort the list of open cases by assignee so you can tell which developer has the highest workload, and assign some of their cases to somebody with fewer cases. If the estimated time remaining is going to make you miss your ship date, you can re-sort the features by priority and move the lowest priority cases to a future release until the estimated time remaining is consistent with your deadline. 

FogBugz makes it easy for a project manager to see and manage the current state of the project. By letting the project manager take care of refilling the task lists, FogBugz allows developers to stay in their zone, crunching through coding tasks and delivering quality software.

P.S. If you'd like to learn more about how to use FogBugz for project management, Mike Gunderloy has written the definitive guide to FogBugz: Painless Project Management with FogBugz. It covers FogBugz in depth and provides a lot of helpful tips for managing successful projects with FogBugz.

Tweet