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Review: FogBugz 7.0

While ignoring completely that I was promised access to the FogBugz OnDeman 7.0 Beta program and just forgotten somehow, I'm going to come say that one day with the official release and I'm more excited than ever to be a FogCreek customer. Yes, I am still a card carrying free software nut-bag. I'm absolutely sure certain individuals will get grated at me, again, for not using Trac like a good geek.

Call me a fanboy, but boy-oh-boy is this a sweet release. It is a shining example of knocking a release out of the park and impressing everyone (who could be impressed at all, and thus disregarding those who will never be impressed by a commercial, for-profit bug tracker, ever, no matter what, not in a million years).

The experience is absolutely slick. Faster, brighter, shinier. Packing new features, improved features, and bug fixing in a new package is a great way to make the functional improvements stand out. Even if we have a good design, any product should take a note from this book and spruce up the design just to highlight that change is in the air.

I'm actually struggling to think of something that has been added that I didn't want or that I wanted which was not added. I'm sure there are people on both sides, but I'm still thrilled to apparently be an exact match for their target unsatisfied customer to satisfy. Even though I have really liked FogBugz for some time, I have also struggled with it to represent my work flow. I've worked out different sets of behaviors with different clients.

I keep a milestone that never gets a due date and only exists to hold cases that are approved to be done "some time" and we get to a few of them between each actual milestone. Today, I can drop that and prioritize cases in the backlog directly. I also added custom case statuses to "propose" and "reject", so I can track what I think we should do and what has been approved.

Was it a bug or a feature when I needed to clean up the content form? Next time something like that comes along, I'll enter the case as an "Improvement", the new category I added for such in-betweens. I'll probably tag it for organization, too. Maybe, I'll add a custom tag to track the branch I'm working in. I'm really looking forward to getting more and more mileage out of this release. I really have to commend everyone that worked so hard to bring this iteration to the public. Thank you, so much!
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