Question

Is anyone using FogBugz for development and Zendesk for customer support? What workflow do you use for getting the two products to work together.

Zendesk has a plugin to sync it's content with Jira, but even if they had that for FogBugz we don't want all cases sync'd, just those that get escalated from support to development.

Answer 1

Hey, I just set a poor-man's integration between FogBugz and Zendesk that only requires one manual interaction. Here's how to do it:

First of all it's important to note the workflow at my company. One person in CS filters all tickets that are to be escalated, they then assign the ZD ticekts to me, the IT/dev manager, and I then delegate the tickets as FB cases.

1. in ZenDesk change your profile's email to cases@mycompany.fogbugz.com
2. Add a custom ticket field in ZD for a FogBugz case id
3. Setup two Triggers in ZD, one called "Export ticket to FogBugz" and the other "Export ticket reply to FogBugz" as so:
   • for "Export ticket to FogBugz" have it match:
     1. all tickets assigned to (you)
     2. NOT containing a tag of "fogbugz"
   • then have it perform the actions:
     • Email user (you) with the subject "{{ticket.title}}" and the body "{{ticket.latest_comment_formatted}}", I also put "{{ticket.url}}" in the email body, you'll see why later.
     • Assign to the dedicated CS ticket manager (you could also do assignee here, but see my workflow above)
     • Add tag: fogbugz
   • for "Export ticket reply to FogBugz" have it match:
     • all tickets assigned to (you)
     • CONTAINING a tag of "fogbugz"
   • then have it perform the actions:
     • Email user (you) with the subject "Re: (Case {{ticket.ticket_field_113027}}) {{ticket.title}}", where "113027" is the fogbugz id custom ticket field id, and the body "{{ticket.latest_comment_formatted}}".
     • Assign to the dedicated CS ticket manager (you could also do assignee here, but see my workflow above)
4. in FogBugz turn off "Reply automatically" on your cases@ mail account (if you already use this and need the automatic reply, you may have to setup a new mail box because this will cause issues with ZenDesk automation on the flip side).
5. Set the cases created from cases@ in FB to auto-assign to you.
6. When a case gets created you'll get an email, you then need to then jump to the ZD ticket (if you added the URL in the automation above this should be in te FB case) and save the case id into the ZD custom field you created before.

That's it.

Issues:

• Step 6 is annoying, but less annoying than copy/pasting a bunch of fields.
• I haven't tested to see what happens if the subjects of the ZD of FB cases change.
• If someone assigns the ZD ticket to you before you fill the FogBugz id in on the ticket, it'll create a new ticket in FB instead of attaching to the original one.

Future:

I don't think it would be too hard to develop an application to do this exact workflow, eliminating Step 6, like Rob Sobers suggests. But this took 15 minutes to setup. Vs writing, deploying, and maintaining an application would take a few hours (at least).

Answer 2

FogBugz works great for both technical support and development. I've found that it really helps to be able to have your customer submitted inquiries and bugs all in the same place so you can cross-reference them.

That said, you should be able to, at the very least, loosely integrate Zendesk if they provide some sort of hook that allows you to submit a web request to the FogBugz API to create a developer case whenever there's an escalation in Zendesk.