Question

Is FogBugz intended to track your entire work-day, or only that part of your work-day that is spent on cases in FogBugz?

I wear two hats: About half my day I am a programmer. The other half of the day, I am off to another office entirely.

So, on my Working Schedule page, I can tell FogBugz that I am spending half my day working on a project called "Dashboard:"

But then it forces me to commit the other half of my day to " All Other FogBugz Tasks." But again, I'm in an entirely differing office that doesn't use FogBugz at all.

I can't set my working schedule for a half-day, say, 9-1, because my real schedule is not fixed - I never know in advance when I have to switch hats.

I guess another way of looking at it, is that, in that screenshot, if, where it says, "Total % time spent on FogBugz Tasks: 100%," it were re-worded to say "Total % time spent working: 100%," and I was allowed to associate only 50% of my day with a specific project, it'd all make sense. But instead I am forced to add up to 100%.

Or yet another angle is, why am I allowed to have "nothing" gaps in my timesheet, if FogBugz assumes I spend 100% of my day working cases?

Confused,

Michelle

p.s. I actually raise this question on http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/2507/how-to-get-a-reluctant-team-to-use-fogbugz , but figured I'd just start a new thread to allow me to post it more specifically.

Answer 1

Let me try, if I may, to expand a bit on Rob's answer and address some of the comments left there.

FogBugz doesn't really care if you don't tell it about what you are doing at each moment in the day. All it really cares about is that the time you estimate a case will take, and the time you indicate the case actually took, are measured consistently.

So, this means that if you give estimates with the idea that it will be X hours of dedicated time working on only that case, the time you spend should be that type of dedicated time. Conversely, if you estimate the time with the idea that there will be small breaks and interruptions, you likewise record time working on that case in the same fashion. (ie. the "working on" time includes those other small things)

(of course, consistency is the only true thing that matters to the EBS algorithm, so as long as you always estimate the same way, and work the same way, you'll be fine)

The "working hours" and the percentage you work on projects comes into play really only when FogBugz uses it's scheduling mojo to try and estimate how things are likely to progress in the future.

From what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong), EBS uses the % time for a project as a multiplier for how much time you will actually need in order to get your cases resolved. So, if, for example, EBS calculates that a case will take you 10 hours to complete (based on your estimation history), but you only work 50% on that project, the 10 hours it calculated is multiplied by that 1/50%, meaning that on the schedule it will actually take 20 hours for you to complete, because you can only put 1/2 of those 20 hours into the project.

What Rob is suggesting is to basically trick FogBugz into thinking that you always have some other project that 50% of your time is allocated to, even if there are no actual cases to work on. This makes EBS think that you only have the remaining 50% of your time to work on the rest of the cases it knows about, so it will stretch out your cases in the schedule to compensate for this.

So, since FogBugz doesn't care about when it doesn't know things (eg. It doesn't care if you are working on something outside of FogBugz), you don't need to "fill in" any time you were not working on FogBugz cases. Simply leave "working on" set to "nothing" when you are working on other things.

In other words, what FogBugz doesn't know won't hurt it!

Answer 2

FogBugz assumes that your entire day is spent working on stuff in FogBugz. I suppose what you could do is create a project called "Not In FogBugz" and split your time 50/50 between that and "All Other FogBugz Tasks." As a result, whenever you work on a FogBugz task, it will compute your completion dates with the knowledge that you're only working on FogBugz stuff for half of your 8 hour days.

It looks like I was wrong. FogBugz doesn't actually expect that you're always working on FogBugz stuff. You can allocate a percentage between specific projects and "All Other FogBugz Tasks" and it doesn't have to add up to 100%.