Question

I used to be a team lead that used FogBugz to manage our project, using FogBugz 6 and 7. It was really useful to have the Evidence Based Scheduling show us our burndown and predictions.

I'm now at a different company, and have converted them to FogBugz, and we're on version 8. We have a three week release schedule, and all our projects adhere to them.

We are using Global milestones. When I goto the schedules menu and select a project, I get no scheduling information. The project's own milestones are on the list to report on, but none of the global milestones. Since we don't use individual project milestones, this makes the project reports useless. We don't get any data.

I can see overall reporting using Schedules -> Global Milestones, but i can't break it down by project.

EBS is really useful, and our company is getting ready to make more use of it. Global milestones seem to take this feature mostly away from us. Why can't I get reporting in a project on a global milestone? This is seriously frustrating, as I know how useful EBS is.

Answer 1

For anyone else interested, this is what I sent to Tyson:

Global Milestones are meant to be used for cases that cross project boundaries. All the cases in a global milestone, no matter what project they are a part of are set to be released simultaneously at that milestone's date. With this meaning / these assumptions, cases for one project within a larger global milestone don't have their own release date because they are merely part of a release, not an actual (sub)release.

I think a setup which will work for you would be to use project milestones for each project's component of a global release. You can then setup a global milestone which is dependent on each of the project milestones for the projects involved. This lets you view the global report or the project report.

More on how the global reports work:

The global report should work essentially the same as a project report. It will show you the ship date estimate, burndown, etc for all cases with work remaining which are set to the milestone(s) being viewed, plus any cases in milestones which the current one(s) depend on.

For example: If you have cases in a Project-level milestone "Widget 1.0" and cases in another Project-level one "Software 1.0" and you have a global milestone "Product 1.0" which is dependent on Widget and Software, if you view the report for Product 1.0, you should see the ship date for all the cases. If you don't have the dependency, however, you will see nothing, since you have no cases set to the "Product 1.0" milestone.

Keep in mind that FogBugz uses the nominal dates you set on milestones to determine their order, and milestones in different projects don't influence another project's EBS graphs unless there is a dependency set. For the purposes of all this, consider "Global" to be a special project of its own.