Estimates

To help make estimates of when the project will be complete, FogBugz lets you enter an estimate for any case. An estimate is given in days and/or hours. You type it in using the form 1d4h, for example, which means 1 day 4 hours. You don't have to include both parts: 8h is considered equivalent to 1d; 12h is the same as 1.5d or 1d4h.

Note: if your days are not usually 8 hours long, an Administrator can change the length of the day. Click Site and then click on the link to configure the working schedule. For example, if your company is particularly bureaucratic and programmers spend half of their time in meetings, you can configure FogBugz to use 4 hour days, so a "3 day feature" is the same as a "12 hour feature".

You can use 0.25h for a quick, fifteen minute case. The only thing you can't enter is 0, because that is indistinguishible from "no estimate at all."

Using filters, it is easy to search for all the bugs without estimates so you can add estimates.

If you ever change an estimate, the original estimate is remembered next to the current estimate. That is useful if you want to go back to your old bugs and see how good a job you've done estimating in the past, so you can learn to estimate better in the future.

Once you enter a non-zero estimate, you can enter the elapsed time, and FogBugz will automatically calculate the remaining time. For long features which take several days, at the end of every day's work, you can re-enter your current best-guess estimate and the amount of time spent so far.

For an interesting article about successful software schedules, read Painless Software Schedules by FogBugz designer Joel Spolsky.

At the bottom of any list of bugs, FogBugz will always calculate a summary of the estimated time for all bugs shown in that particular list. If you are careful to maintain estimates and elapsed time as you go along, you can use these summaries to get a good approximation of how much work is left in a release.

Buy FogBugz Now

Email Us