Introducing FogBugz 6.0

At some point, while I was running around the country giving demos of FogBugz 6.0, the development team officially got it out the door, and I don't think I ever officially announced, "FogBugz 6.0 is now shipping," so, here it is:

FogBugz 6.0 is now shipping!

It has a ton of major new features: an integrated Wiki, an API, a completely overhauled search engine, and lots of Ajax to make things really snappy.

Probably the most interesting part of 6.0 is Evidence-Based Scheduling, which uses a statistical technique called bootstrapping (a variation on Monte Carlo) to determine the probability that you'll ship on any given date. EBS is interesting enough that I'll devote a whole article to explaining it as soon as I get a minute of free time. Briefly, with EBS, you estimate features as usual. But then, instead of adding up everyone's estimates—instead of taking them on faith—FogBugz does a Monte Carlo simulation looking at what speeds developers worked at in the past, vis-à-vis their estimates. You use that same distribution of probabilities that you had in the past and run a simulation of 60 futures each of which will occur with equal probability. What you get, instead of a date, is a probability distribution curve that shows the probability that the product will ship on such-and-such a date:

The introductory price is a terrific deal, and it's only good until November 1st. For example, a ten-pack is only $999 instead of $1899. If you sign up for the On Demand version, you can lock in a rate of $21/user/month instead of $25. Go make yourself a free online trial, what are you waiting for?

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About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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