Fogbugz is simple, flexible and easy to maintain. Great for SMB's, not great for large organizations.
February 17, 2015
Fogbugz is simple, flexible and easy to maintain. Great for SMB's, not great for large organizations.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Version 8.8.39.0
Modules Used
- Autosubscribe
- Bugmonkey
Overall Satisfaction with FogBugz
We are currently using Fogbugz for our internal Production, Development, and Project Management teams. It is serves as a light weight task management system to move/track jobs between departments. it is effectively a virtual job jacket for our creative agency. We introduced the tool to support our teams with tracking fast moving jobs and keeping individuals accountable for responsibilities for a given job. It also helps team member transitions and coverage by showing a quick summary of the job history.
We selected the tool for it's simplicity, flexibility and ease of management because it would be used company wide accommodating varying experience levels of task management literacy.
We selected the tool for it's simplicity, flexibility and ease of management because it would be used company wide accommodating varying experience levels of task management literacy.
- Simplicity: Compared to other tools like Jira and even Bugzilla, Fogbugz minimizes the number of fields. The general workflow and status' of a given task works well for us. (Assigned, Resolved, and Closed).
- Flexibility: The list views are highly customizable. This allows for many ways to display information and create custom lists for teams and departments. It has prebuilt queries, and basic boolean syntax that you can stitch together to build a list.
- Easy to maintain: There are just two types of access rights. Regular and Admin. With some training, administration of the tool is done by project managers and a general user admin. We have a self hosted version, so there is an IT component in our maintenance, but it does not requires much attention.
- The simplicity of a single admin type user is not great because anyone who can create a job or client in the system, can also add and delete users. Content and User administrative rights should be separated.
- There are ways to change the terminology/lexicon within the tool, but we are not able to get it to work even after reaching out to tech support. So we are forced to use the system terminology that doesn't match up to our company making training a bit difficult.
- There is a subscribe function that you can opt into, there should be a way to add subscribers as you create a new task.
- Less downtime of jobs. It is each person's responsibility to check their list to see if they have any pending work.
- When people are out sick or busy, a supervisor can easily shift work from one person to another who many have time to cover work.
- Management has a quick view into seeing what is happening with a job and can use it as a tool to request addiional resources as needed.
- Bugzilla,Workfront,jira
Bugzilla is probably the closest to Fogbugz and is a bit more refined. Bugzilla however is very much geared towards programmers where FogBugz has a broader audience. Jira is much more invovled and also geared towards programmers. Workfront is a heavy system if you are looking for task management tools.