Item: FogBugz
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with FogBugz

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FogBugz is used primarily by our Software Development Team for Issue Tracking, Source Control, and Wiki. Our Support Team will create Cases for Dev to look into, as they need more feature rich services for Customer Support. The entire company will reference the Wiki for internal documentation. We also have a public Wiki which serves as a place for us to post information/steps to our customers.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Evidence Based Estimates for scheduling (This alleviates issues that arise due to people who estimate time poorly)
Made from the developer perspective, versus others that are by C-Suite who are so far removed from the actual development process they just contribute to the disconnect or inaccuracy of the system
Direction/Ambition/Transparency of DevFactory after their purchase of FogBugz/Kiln is refreshing

Cons

Workflow capability is very limited to the original implementation, could use a refresh and extension of the capabilities
UI/UX needs improvement. This was in the works prior to purchase by DevFactory, and has taken a back seat to backend improvements that rightfully needed to be fixed first.
Pricing model doesn't fit our usage very well, so we're paying for full-featured users for everyone even though the majority of Users only need to submit Cases and modify the Wikis, and our small percentage of Users are in Dev and need all features.

Return on Investment

Saves time by quickly allowing Developers to make the necessary notes without getting bogged down in bloated UIs
Has allowed us to look back easily and see the exact code changes made for the exact Case to aid in decisions for current changes, increasing the certainty of the decided path, without regression

Alternatives Considered

JIRA Software

FogBugz is made for the Developers who actually use it every day, while JIRA is made for the C-Suite who oversees them but has little idea of the finer points of daily dev tasks. In reality, most don't fit into the mold of JIRA tickets, and the summarized information that C-Suite is reviewing is incomplete or skewed.

There is also an outstanding issue since 2004 that JIRA refuses to implement despite wide user support, the merging of tickets. You can see the open ticket with the JIRA team here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-3592

Likelihood to Recommend

FogBugz has been a very useful tool to our organization, and much preferred over other options we reviewed, mainly JIRA. There are still some improvements needed, but with the fairly recent acquisition by DevFactory, we have a great deal of hope for what is in store given DevFactory's focus and transparency. It seems like both DevFactory and FogBugz customers are eager for substantial improvements on the front-end, but there is/was a great deal of backend housecleaning that definitely needed to take place first.

Comments

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A great fit for software development teams