FogBUGZ 3.0 is now shipping! This is a really huge upgrade; FogBUGZ moves up from being a simple bug tracking package to a rather robust management system that handles the entire development process.
One big theme of FogBUGZ 3.0 was “listen to your customers.” If you use FogBUGZ you can get feedback from your customers via email or the web. You can even add a menu item to send feedback in your application, or catch crashes from the field and submit them directly into FogBUGZ like we do with CityDesk. Customer suggestions can become feature items, prioritized and tracked alongside other development tasks.
Here at Fog Creek we started using the email integration component to handle all customer service email that comes into the company. Instead of using a lame single-user email client like Outlook, we now have a web interface that shows everybody messages as they come in, which anyone can assign, track, and prioritize just like bugs. And a complete record of every customer email interaction is kept in FogBUGZ for all to see, so anybody in the company can pick up the thread of a conversation with a customer. If your company-wide email aliases (“info@little-hope-inn.com”) are causing problems, you should look at FogBUGZ, even if you don't use it for bug tracking at all.
Inspired by the Extreme Programming idea of prioritized user stories, FogBUGZ lets you maintain lists of features, ideas, bugs, keep them prioritized at all times, and always work off the top of your list. If 3×5 cards or big whiteboards don't cut it for you, FogBUGZ is a great way to do Extreme Programming. (Read about how the Six Degrees team did it.) [Joel on Software]