FogBugz has a ton of sophisticated features to keep your projects on track. It uses a statistical algorithm called Evidence-Based Scheduling to produce realistic schedules based on all available evidence (including how good your estimators are!)
For each project, you can create releases. These are milestones during development. For example, a typical software project might have milestones of Alpha, Beta 1, Beta 2, Release Candidate, Gold, Service Pack 1, etc.
Every case in the system is given a priority from 1 to 7, where 1 is the highest priority. You can change priorities whenever you want. FogBugz assumes that you plan to do the highest priority cases first.
Team members can enter estimates for how long each feature will take to implement.
Developers fill out timesheets indicating how much time they've spent working on each feature. FogBugz can automatically fill those out for you, if you tell it whenever you stop working on one feature and start working on another using the "Working On" menu.
If you use timesheets, FogBugz can show you how good you are at estimating and help you improve your estimating skills:
FogBugz uses an algorithm called Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS) to produce a chart that shows the probability that you will be finished with all the features for a given release by any given date.
EBS uses a statistical process called bootstrapping. It takes into account all the estimates you've provided, how much work is already done, the historical accuracy of each member of your team at providing accurate estimates, and which priority feature you're planning to do to come up with a single dynamic chart so that you can see what the probability of shipping is by any given date.
Most importantly, EBS recognizes that when a feature takes longer than expected, it tends to eat up more time than you can make up by another feature coming in early. It's far more common for an 8 hour feature to take 32 hours than for it to take "negative 24 hours" which is, actually, impossible. That means that when you have a bunch of features to do, the ones that come in early cannot completely make up for all the ones that come in late.
The EBS algorithm provides radically better schedules than any other method. It gives you excellent results when you provide estimates and track time for all your features, and it degrades gracefully in the face of bad estimators... the worse your estimators are, the wider your probability distribution will be; when you have very good estimators, the probability distribution becomes steep and tight.
FogBugz helps you stay on track by showing you how the ship date has changed over time.
This chart has three lines showing the 5% (optimistic) date, the 50% date, and the 95% (pessimistic) date. If you see those lines converging, it's a sign that the estimate of the ship date is becoming more and more reliable.
FogBugz helps you find bottlenecks by seeing when each team member will finish the tasks assigned to them.
Developers with wider bars are historically poorer estimators, so there is more uncertainty in their ship date.
FogBugz lets you set up company-wide working schedules and lists of holidays which are used to set ship dates accurately. Each developer can also provide their own schedule and list of vacation dates. FogBugz can account for team members who do not spend their entire day working on FogBugz tasks.
Separately, FogBugz allows you to set due dates for particular features. This can be done automatically with incoming email to set a deadline for replying to customers.
