Dr Jan’s Tips From The Top

I attended the FogBugz 6.0 World Tour presentation this morning at the British Library in Euston Road, London. Joel Spolsky was the speaker and he made an excellent job of describing some of the funky new features in FogBugz 6.0.

The Evidence Based Scheduling (EBS) is sufficiently similar to witchcraft to warrant further investigation Joel has a good explanation here – it’s a long article but well worth reading.

I’ll attempt a summary here, in case you can’t follow the link above. EBS tracks developer estimates of time required to complete code and compares this to the actual time used. From this data it can work out how effective your estimating skills are. It doesn’t matter if your estimates are inaccurate, but if you are consistently inaccurate (say, you always underestimate by 100%) this can be taken in to account quite easily. A bigger problem is inconsistently poor estimates, where sometimes the estimate is 12 times too small, other times it’s twice as big as it needs to be.

FogBugz collects all this data and uses the information to produce a probability curve of your likelihood of shipping code on a particular date.

Check the link for more details with pretty graphs and everything

Crucial things to know are:

1. You can sign up for a free 45-day evaluation of FogBugz on the website.
2. There is a (not yet publicised) Student and Startups edition (for up to 2 users) which is free. Hurrah!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 @ 18:56 on the category software.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.