A few days ago, I received a free copy of the new book by Mike Gunderloy called “Painless Project Management with FogBugz”. This is for FogBugz 4.0 and for those of you who don’t know what this is, it is a bug tracking system done by Joel Spolsky’s company Fog Creek. As I enjoy reading both of these two authors and the fact that I have done some research into bug tracking systems for work recently, it was nice to have a go at this book. Also, I should mention I knew a little about FogBugz and had tried it out a few months back.

Generally speaking, I guess before going for such a system you have to define your strategy as to how it fits into the big picture. By this I mean as your organization is trying to climb up the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) ladder you will need processes and tools for request analysis, requirement gathering, design and development work, testing, and maintenance and for this purpose you will need to define how you want to approach this. There are a few ways to approach it but by now I am starting realize more and more that the best strategy is to be able trace things between different phases For example if you find a bug you should potentially be able to trace it from bug to test case, design and all the way up to a request. I don’t want to go into too much details about this as it is a separate discussion but my point is to think about your strategy and don’t evaluate products for source control, project management or bug tracking by themselves but rather how they fit into your overall picture.

In any case, after that little intro, here is what I thought of the book. I will avoid talking too much about the product itself as I have not played around with this version, but rather what I thought of the book and how it’s written.

Mike starts with a top down approach by giving us a an overview, thoughts and philosophy of FogBugz and does this by giving you a feel for what it was created for with a few scenarios. Drilling down, you will then read about how a case is managed, what the pieces are, how you create them, filter, attach files etc to a case. This is then followed by a whole chapter for the administrator of FogBugz and another one for the software manager on how to deal with deadlines, estimation of time and so on which I found interesting and useful. FogBugz also handles communication with customers through discussion boards and email and he dedicates a whole chapter to this which I just skimmed through to see what features it offered.

After that, he tells us how FogBugz integrates into your source control product. This one was important as bug tracking and source control are in my opinion step 1 if you find yourself to be 0 on the CMM and want to do something about it. And finally he shows us how FogBugz is installed.

While the book is well written and easy to get through, even though this is a product reviewing book, I would have found it more useful if Mike had given us a little more about his views on strategies regarding project management, bug tracking and source control a bit like I mentioned above and how FogBugz relates to it, its limitations and advantages. This is because, if you haven’t done your home work on the big picture and are not sure how a bug tracking system fits into it, you will find it more difficult to see the drawbacks and advantages that FogBugz will bring to the table.

And finally, “A Guide To Evaluating a Bug Tracking System”