case-mgmt Questions - FogBugz Knowledge Exchange

Outlining Projects

2010-09-03T20:02:07Z

Let's say I'm starting a new project -- like, say, I'm contracted to make a custom website for a client -- what's a quick way to outline this work in FogBugz?

Feature Request: Merge emails into other cases to handle scattered email threads.

2009-09-10T15:35:52Z

We often get duplicative cases entries and we'd like to be able to combine them.

Case FC2026205

Currently Working On by User

2009-10-28T17:04:14Z

Is it possible for me to see what other developers are working on at this moment? I am the administrator of the account and there are several other developers. I still have to ask the other developers which case they are currently working on.

BugzScout to Capture Errors

2009-10-15T06:23:37Z

How can I use FogBugz to automatically capture error messages from my software?

Priority vs. Severity

2009-10-15T20:48:27Z

FogBugz uses a "Priority" system but other issue trackers often opt for "Severity," or even a hybrid of both. What's the difference between "Priority" and "Severity?"

Option for closing all active cases as Won't Fix/Implement/Complete/Respond on project deletion

2011-04-22T23:28:22Z

As a Site Admin, when deleting a project, I'd like to have the option to resolve and close all active cases as Won't Fix/Implement/Complete/Respond on a project, and without sending notifications. This is extremely useful for canceled projects.

The process for doing this manually requires a visit to each case category separately and several stages of bulk edits, and is quite involved. Not something a human should have to do.

Part of the reason for requesting an option for suppressing email notification (other than a desire not to spam people) is that undeliverable-mail responses from the mail server, for email addresses that are no longer valid, cause the cases to be reactivated -- leading to a paradoxical loop -- which has resulted in a lot of frustration for our users.

Thank you!

Edit a closed case

2009-11-09T21:51:58Z

Often a case in FogBugz is closed, but needs to be re-categorized under the appropriate project, area, or parent case. The person who closes the case may not care about the category as much as a project manager or administrator who wants to see the cases organized a certain way. Re-opening a closed case just to correct data like this throws off any value that the Resolved Date or Closed Date fields might have had regarding the actual resolution of the issue.

Is there a way to get FogBugz to allow milestones, projects, areas, and parent cases to be edited after a case is closed? Perhaps a plugin could be used for this purpose?

Case FC1778074

Importing your cases from another tool

2009-10-15T22:32:54Z

How can you import all of your cases from another issue/bug tracker?

Customizable filter for incoming email to tell FogBugz to skip processing

2011-05-10T19:53:29Z

As a site admin, it'd be useful to be able to set up a regular expression to be run against all incoming email and process common fields (From, To, CC, Subject, Body) prior to any other processing by the FogBugz server. On a successful match, further processing of the email would be abandoned.

Two main reasons:

New cases being created, e.g., when an Escalation Report bounces off someone who has an automated out-of-office reply turned on.
Cases being reactivated by the mail server's undeliverable mail response when they're resolved or closed when, e.g., a contractor is no longer in the system. This one results in a potentially endless resolve-reactivate cycle that can frustrate users who don't understand what's happening.

Is it possible to parse incoming email to setup case fields?

2009-11-04T21:46:36Z

We have an external ticketing system that is closed (meaning we can't push tickets to it). When a ticket is made in this other system it auto sends a response back via email with all the details of the ticket to confirm it was received.

I would like to be able to parse the email and push the data into FogBugz with the parsed details to the correct Project and Area. Is there any way to leverage the incoming email handlers in FogBugz to do this? I can code up anything needed if there is a way to do this with the API. I am trying to get around doing all the email handling (receiving, deleting, etc) and then using the API to just make the case.

Any suggestions on how I should go about this other than rolling my own custom app that just writes to FogBugz?

Edit: Is there a way I could hook into the email handler of FogBugz?

Example incoming email:

Issue: SCA #6465522 (Oct 30, 2009)
Status: Open
Priority: Routine
Facility: Some Facility Name
Description: Some Process Is Broken
Request Type: Bug
System Affected: Live
Customer Contact: Doe,John (888-555-1234)
Issue Notify: john.doe@someaddress.com (App Name Edits)
Details: Details of the bug would be here.

Edit by Fog Creek:

See this feature request that might cover the need here.

Can I have non-numeric or custom case numbers?

2011-10-10T22:22:32Z

My understanding is case numbers just keep incrementing across my entire account. (e.g. Case 1 was the default case in the inbox, 2,3,4 were cases in my first project)

Is it possible to customize the case numbers on a per project basis.

I'd like (especially if I have multiple customers logging cases on multiple projects) to have each project have it's own case counter and be prefixed by some identifying code. (similar to how JIRA works).

e.g.

Project: FooApp

Foo-1
Foo-2
Foo-3

Project: BarApp

Bar-1
Bar-2
Bar-3

Add Spell Check to FogBugz

2009-10-15T21:04:09Z

How can I add spellcheck to FogBugz fields?

How do I unlike/unassociate cases?

2011-09-13T16:58:24Z

Possible Duplicate:
Feature Request: Remove relations (links) between cases

So I learned that writing "case XXX" in a case causes them to be linked via "See also". However, I can't figure out how to unlink them. I've edited the original text and deleted the reference to the case, but in "see also" it is still linked :(.

Thanks, Vitaly

Feature request: auto-away message or some kind of redirrect

2011-08-01T03:24:35Z

It would be very convenient to enable auto-reply or auto-reassign of cases assigned to person who is on the vacation. Of course the person should enable case redirection in his options.

Feature Request: Site Admin option to adjust maximum cases per page in list view

2011-07-11T21:28:13Z

I'm ok with the 200-case-per-page default, but if users wish to bump it up, we'd like to support up to, say, 1000 cases (which brings me to another point -- there's no good feedback for users who attempt to make it higher; it just won't take beyond 200).

I understand that this can be accomplished by hacking the Wasabi code and rebuilding, but we will modify the source only as a last resort (not to mention that source modification done properly requires an update in several different places for this particular hack -- I've tested this).

Case FC2094366

Using Fogbugz for customer support

2010-06-02T11:48:09Z

We're currently using Fogbugz for project management and bug tracking and a separate system for customer support. We would like to get rid of the other system and use Fogbugz also for customer support, however there are a few things that our current support system provides which don't seem to be available in Fogbugz.

Mainly these two:

1. Ability for users from the same company to see cases submitted by other users of the company

This question was already asked here: http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/1503/how-can-i-give-each-user-at-a-customer-site-visibility-to-all-cases-for-their-com

and the community case plugin was suggested as an option.

However I'm afraid that using the community case plugin for this purpose would be a lot of work, since it would require creating a group for each company and manually adding each user to a group. I'd much rather see this type of functionality more closely integrated with Fogbugz so that for example all correspondents from the same domain would be able to access cases submitted by other users in their domain (Configurable of course).

2. Limited case management

Being able to login and see a list of your open/closed support cases, priority and status of them.

Are any of these improvements that are planned for Fogbugz in the future? Are there any workarounds or customization that would enable this functionality?

I'd love to hear how other Fogbugz users with similar needs are handling these.

Case FC1952617

Make Case Editor a modal popup dialogue box

2011-06-07T23:13:22Z

Going back and forth from the list to the case editor is lots of extra work. If the case editor was a modal popup dialogue box, closing it would refresh the list without my having to do that, thus saving one step for every edit I undertake and making the process considerably faster.

How to log a case and assign it to multiple projects

2010-08-06T00:00:11Z

My company work on multiple projects and very often the bugs we found in one Project A also happen in Project B and C.

How can I log a case and assign it to projects A, B and C?

Thanks.

Feature Request: Import in bulk via copy/paste

2009-10-27T14:39:30Z

In reference to this question: I have a few hundred tasks to import, but the XML API is overkill for a one-off thing - it would still be faster to pay someone to copy and paste the tasks for me.

It would be really nice if you allowed me to copy and paste a long list of tasks (one per line with no metadata) into a textarea. I'm sure you have a lot of potential customers who are coming from ad-hoc trackers (Notepad, Excel) or very simple task managers like Google Tasks or Basecamp.

Case FC2052495

Add estimates to new cases more easily

2010-10-21T08:59:32Z

When adding cases, it would be great to be able to enter an estimate directly, rather than having to go back & edit the case.

And/or, add the estimates directly from the grid - http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/1739/quickly-estimate-cases-from-the-grid-view-without-editing-each-case

Failing that, when editing the case, it would be good to see the title of the parent, to enable us to better remember what the case is about.

(I would have voted or commented on that question, but I don't have enough points yet, also I read somewhere to tag feature requests)

Open a new case and Resolve and Close in one operation?

2011-03-02T09:43:15Z

I would like to be able to open a new case and then resolve and close it immediately afterwards.

This would be useful for logging answers given by phone - so others may find them later.

I can probably achieve this with a keyboard macro sequence, but I would like a button doing this.

"OK" "Cancel" "OK + Resolve + Close"

Best way to keep track cases assigned to someone?

2011-02-17T02:54:58Z

Hi! Our team is trying to keep track every case assigned to us until it gets resolved.

But once we assigned it someone else, we lost track of them with the "assigned to" filter.

Is there any better way to do it?

Thanks.

How can I make bookmarklets to create various types of new cases in FogBugz?

2010-03-17T17:57:25Z

I often create new cases based on another case. Examples:

create a bug in my project from a customer's report, keeping the tech support communication separate from the bug in development
create a clone of a case
create a subcase with some fields matching
create a "Fix It Twice" case for an issue that needs a deeper solution

Creating bookmarklets individually is tedious. Don't you have some sort of neato script?

Case FC1860803

Developer Estimates history Rpt

2010-07-19T16:32:01Z

What is the best way to print a list for each developer showing their last say 20 cases with their estmates. so they learn and see % of they are on or off etc. Is it through the filters? or one of the Time Report Plugins? Also is the 'Elapsed Time' mean the 'Actual Time' they have put against a case?

What's the best way to handle small, quick, multi-step chained workflows involving multiple people?

2010-12-03T15:11:32Z

We do primarily web development, but have very segregated roles within our group, so to make even a fairly small graphical change to a page at least 3 different people all have to do some portion of the work, and what they do is strictly dependent on the person before them in the "chain".

In the past (and sometimes still) people talk about this process in terms of "passing" things from one person to the next, sort of like an assembly line.

A typical (as in, daily) conversation about what is going to happen with a small project goes something like this: Person X will design the screen, and then pass the design to person Y to lay the design out as a web page and chop up the images as needed, and then pass that layout to person Z to program the page up and deploy it.

Graphic designer creates a "screenshot" of what it will look like
Layout monkey takes the screenshot and turns it into a static web page
Programmer takes the static page and puts it into the site, attaching any code for content generation and functionality that might be needed, as well as adding the images and changing the HTML of the existing page if needed
Same programmer deals with deploying the changes up the server chain from their Sandbox -> Dev -> Demo -> Production.

Thus far, we have been having a lot of trouble mapping this sort of a workflow into FogBugz. We have tried to use a series of sub-cases to lay this out, but the backwards nature of putting the sub-cases together seems to just cause more confusion.

Implement layout for feature A
1. Layout design for feature A
  1. Design screen for feature A

One of the things that often trips us up, even when we do manage to get the tasks laid out properly, is that there is no way for the Layout case to know when the Design case has been completed other than for the person closing the Design case to leave a comment or change the status (from a custom status of Awaiting Dependencies to Active).

We've also considered using milestones, but that seems to be an even worse fit because there are a large number of small "chains" that happen all the time, and about the only way to do it that we can see would be to have a Graphics, Layout, and Programming milestone.

So, what do you, the FogBugz community, think is the best way to handle a chain-style workflow?

How to delete attachment(s) in a single case, or in a selected group of cases?

2011-01-12T15:41:44Z

Possible Duplicate:
How do I delete cases?

We are on FogBugz Version 8.2.25H (DB 771, Build 2)

Customers attach their data at our request but ask if we can delete their attachment when we are done with it.

What steps can we take to comply? On an individual case, or on a group of related cases - not necessarily determined by age of case nor of open/closed status.

How to filter to find cases not yet touched?

2010-11-20T16:31:44Z

I am trying to figure out how to create a filter that will have the following result:

We have cases coming in by customers who send an email that goes to a virtual user. There is one customer service rep who grabs cases from the virtual user and assigns them to himself to work on.

When he is busy, the rest of us would like to each pick up untouched cases in the virtual user to take them off his hands. How do we identify those virtual user cases that have not so far ever been looked at? Which search axes will accomplish this? (I can't seem to do an Openedby:none or a reverse Openedby) I will take any construct that will achieve the result!

What's the best way to split a case into two (or more)?

2010-12-02T19:10:09Z

We use FogBugz to handle support requests that come in via e-mail. If a user replies to an e-mail in a case, e-mails automatically get tacked on to the same case, and the case is re-opened and assigned to our tech support queue.

This is great behavior... when our customers stay on topic. But it seems that often, our customers make new support requests by fishing out an old support e-mail from their inbox and replying to it. Or, in the middle of a conversation about one issue, they'll mention another completely unrelated issue.

Right now, we handle this by: 1. Creating a new case in a new window. 2. Copying over relevant bits of the e-mail message from the customer. 3. Making sure to mention the original Case # in a comment so that the cases get associated. 4. Manually sending a message to the customer that the issue has been moved to a new case number.

And when we investigate the new case and are ready to respond, we have to manually enter (well, copy and paste) the e-mail address of the customer for the first e-mail, because while the e-mail exists in the case description, it's not in an e-mail message, so we can't click a "Reply" button.

Is there an easier way to do this?

Case Hierarchy: Parent cases and subcases

2010-09-03T21:44:57Z

How can I use subcases to break down tasks?

New to FB need to use for Project Mgt Reports

2010-07-19T16:07:15Z

we have a small team of dev working on web maintenance cases. They come in via email as bugs, features, inquiries. Most are very small jobs maybe changing a report or adding information to a report or feature on the portal.

There could be 2-6 ongoing yearly programs under each client running concurrently. There are no milestones the cases/programs dont' roll-up to each other. So since they are not using milestones i can't utilze any of the reporting functions or ebs.

I need to be able to come up with some prioritiaztion method. (right now everything is the SAME)
I need to generate some meaningingful reports.

Users are finally adding due dates to the cases and entering estimates.

I am new FB and am not sure how to manage this.

Also, is there a way to unselect certain groups from showing up in the Time Report plug-in rpts? they have one group dedicated to General Dev - and it screws up the estimates.