Having a central place for all of your bugs is going to help you make much better software. That central place could be a whiteboard or a bunch of post-it notes, but how do you know who is working on what? What if you’re not in the office? How can anyone know what’s going on? Anything other than a centralized bug tracking system is keeping you from doing your best work.

If you don’t have a bug tracker, you need to get one—it is literally the simplest thing you can do to make your whole software team more productive and your software better.

A lot of people try to do this on the super-cheap. They use Excel, or post-it notes, or their noggin, but we’ve never run across a shop that could do this effectively for long. It’s better to fix this right. Such an important link in your development chain deserves a tool that works for you.

You find a bug on your website or in your software; what should you do? Capture it! Get it in a system you can trust. Right now! This lets you keep concentrating on the important task you’re working on. If you try to keep this thing in your head you’re either going to forget it (until your customer suffers from it), or it’s going to gnaw at you and slowly erode your productivity. A good easy-to-use bug tracker minimizes the context switches that destroy your flow.

We put a lot of thought into getting FogBugz out of your way so you can get on with your day. These design touches are found all over the place so that you can enter bugs, defects, issues, or cases with no fuss. It doesn’t matter what you call them, as long as you’re not calling your bug tracker vile names. Entering a bug in FogBugz is as easy as typing in notepad.

Typing up cases in the web-based bug tracking system is just one way to use FogBugz. Users can also create cases via email or use the FogBugz screenshot tool (available for Windows and Macintosh), which captures bugs on the screen and submits them to FogBugz with just three clicks of the mouse.

Cases can also be created programmatically using a BugzScout HTTP post, a FogBugz XML API command, or a few lines of code contained in a FogBugz Plugin.

• Your bug tracker shall not complicate your life.
• Your bug tracker shall not waste your time.
• Your bug tracker shall not keep secrets from you.
• Your bug tracker shall help you make better software.

If your bug tracker fails on any of these points, it’s time to make a switch. Remember that not all bug trackers are created equal. Ease of use is a feature that directly effects how much your issue tracker improves your work.

See The Basics of Bug Tracking for a complete example of how FogBugz can make your development better, and check out our Workflow Plugin to see how you can tweak this system to fit your needs.

FogBugz comes with its own powerful search engine. You can search the complete contents of cases, wiki articles, and customer emails instantly. You can also specify fields to search, such as “openedby:me opened:yesterday."

You can also add a FogBugz search box to your browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer 7+) to find cases quickly even if you were busy checking out pictures of elephant seals on the internet.

Even though FogBugz is easy to use, it can also handle complex needs. We’ve just gotten the advanced features out of your way until you need them. FogBugz comes with an expansive and powerful set of tools to make all of your day-to-day tasks as painless as possible.

• Seamless email handling
• HTML email
• Bulk-email capabilities (for handling a large number of identical problems, like an outage)
• Public case submissions via web form or email
• Customizable workflows
• Customizable case-types
• Customizable statuses
• Enterprise-ready permissions system
• LDAP integration
• Fast bulk-editing (for handling large volumes)
• Case editing with full audit log
• Tag system
• Integration with the built-in wiki
• Full support for source control check-ins
• Case subscription
• Quick-add case entry
• Bugzscout case creation (for automatically capturing crashes and exceptions)
• Due dates
• Drag-and-drop attachments
• Good notification system
• Text box search ahead (for systems with many users)
• Saved filters
• Shared filters
• Virtual users
• Export to Excel
• Keyboard Shortcuts