Question

What's the best route to follow when determining milestones ? We often work with fixed price projects budgetted at a certain ammount of hours with developers working on multiple projects a the same time.

How can we thus most reliably tell our customers when we'll start and when we'll be able to finish? taking into account who'll be working on the project and what they're workload is like.

We dont want to look at each "Per User timelines" report for each milestone for each project we need a wider view. Is it possible to get such a workload report from FogBugz? Making it easy to get a grip on how busy someone is say next week/month and how big the chance is that they might be available for more work (any project) at a given date ?

Say a developer A has 2 task each taking 4 weeks (bad numbers i know bare with me) this basically means this developer is out of the running for ~8 weeks (depending on his ECB score). Developer B has 200 tasks totaling 2 weeks of work, assigning a task to developer B is therefor more preferable.

Side Note: Come to think about this the above information could render an availablity percentage which could prove really useful when assigning task:

Assigned To:
Developer A (80% workload)
Developed B (20% workload)

Answer 1

When EBS in FogBugz 7 calculates completion / ship dates, it uses each developer's per-project percent times set in their working schedule. So when you look at one project's developer ship date report, that date is assuming that the developer is spending X% of his time on that project over the whole time period, as set in the working schedule. Other project's reports will use the % set for them, or the "all other fogbugz tasks" setting if there isn't one for the project.

If you make sure all your developers have good % times set for each project, then you can simply look at the developer ship date chart to see who is done the soonest when there is more work to be done for that project.

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it might work. EBS is assuming that everyone is multitasking when it gives you each project's graphs. You should be able to shuffle cases amongst developers for one project to get the load balanced there, then do the same for the next project and the next.

This question seems related to yours as well.