Our experience with FogBugz

We are implementing FogBugz (from FogCreek / Joel on Software) at Dimagi and our team will be blogging about our experiences with it and the customizations we are adding.  We’ve spent a lot of time and effort over the past many months attempting to use a variety of products, including Basecamp, ActivCollab, DotProject, MS Project, and Excel/Google spreadsheet (which was actually working the best).  All of these didn’t do something quite right, which made us keep searching for a better solution.  Hopefully FogBugz is our answer.  At least we have complete access to the database so we can get out any types of reports we need.

We may not fit the ideal profile of a FogBugz company (or a profitable company, for that matter) in that we have many clients, many projects, many collaborators, and many collaboration tools that we use.

Currently:

SmartCare in Zambia is running on MS Team Foundation Server, we are collaborating with developers in Zambia as well as MS Trainers in Dubai and the States using the system.

JavaRosa is a collaboration with groups in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Bangaldesh and more and we are using Trac as the collaboration suite for that.

ASHand is a completely internal product and we will be using FogBugz only for its project management.

Part of the reason it has been so hard for us to find a working project management tool is the wide variety of projects we work on and the different tools all of them use.  Also, we have many other collaborators.  We may run into some hurdles trying to use FogBugz in the way that we want, and we’ll look to share that information.

Some current tools we are thinking about building for FogBugz:

1.  A web based timesheet editor that provides a week long view and entry system.

2.  A script to import from TFS work items and Trac tickets.

3.  Custom reports that we can use for billing purposes and planning purposes.