Question

Hi there,

I'm thinking of creating ReportingMate for FogBugz and I need your opinion before I spend any time and effort on it. I'm a FogBugz user for years and the only thing I miss is custom reports; the ability to pull useful information directly from the FogBugz database. FogBugz only offers basic reporting functionality and I like to enhance its reporting with my product ReportingMate.

So this is my plan:

Build a set of reports to cover every reporting need from developers, development managers, project/product managers and other executives. Basically, I would like to give the ability for everybody in a corporation to pull reports on development and project information.

Development managers can pull reports about current case assignments, who's working on what, how far from completion, how long it took, etc.

Project managers can monitor project progress and prepare for the next ones, executives can pull reports to measure productivity, accounting can pull usage reports to estimate cost of production etc.

The sky is the limit here; as long we have the data in the FogBugz database any report can be built.

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A little about ReportingMate:

ReportingMate is the only reporting software that doesn't use report designers and allows developers to provide live, interactive data to users which means, everyone in the corporation can have access to FogBugz data in a meaningful way for his position. On top of that they can manipulate the data in a familiar Excel-like grid, build their own reports and views of the data and save them as Report Snapshots for future use.

ReportingMate Is a windows forms application not a FogBugz plug-in. It has its own database and can be used to create reports pulling data from any SQL server database in the corporation. Allows developers to share live, read-only, interactive data with users and let them create their own reports without the use of report designers.

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I want to filter the idea through the FogBugz community and get some expert feedback.

You believe this is something that you'll use/need? If yes, what kind of reports you want to see?

Looking forward to your comments.

Thanks,
Stefanos Tses
www.reportingmate.com

Answer 1

Y-E-S this would be a godsend. i'm new FB and as a PM hate it!!

Answer 2

We would love to have that, but we wouldn't pay for it. Since we host our own instance of FB, we have full access to the DB and hence can write our own reports against it. So, if it was free, or very, very cheap, yes we would go for it, but if it cost us much, probably not.

Answer 3

At our company we also would like to get some more summarized type reports than FogBugz provides out of the box (or currently available plugins). Managers have a need for statistics without all the detail, so they can get an overview. Personally I don't believe strongly in that type of reports, but I think there is a need for something like that.

Currently we are looking for a way to measure how long it takes to handle a incoming customer support request.

Perhaps you should consider using the FogBugz webservice, otherwise ReportingMate for FogBugz wouldn't be an option for us using the hosted version of the product.