Another piece of the puzzle

There comes a point in a young company's life where the white board is no longer the best place to store your bug reports. This is especially the case for the "wait, didn't we fix that last week?" variety of bugs.

I'm all about kicking things out the door quickly and getting user feedback but if the thing keeps breaking, people are going to quit using it. I've had limited success with bug tracking systems in the past as they can rapidly become very cumbersome and before you know it, nobody's using them.

Recently, we've starting using FogBugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz) and while I wasn't surprised to see how many defects we had, I was surprised at how everyone has responded to them. Suddenly, quality isn't just my concern. Everybody seems to have turned their attention to testing and fixing defects. Granted, there's been some overhead added to my day as I try to teach the team to write better bug reports (so that developers can actually reproduce them) but it's well worth the effort.

A big thank you to the folks at Fog Creek for making such an excellent product that everyone is happy to use.