FogBugz is now part of the IgniteTech family
ignitetech.com
ignitetech.com
FogBugz was acquired in 2018 by DevFactory, a different ESW-funded company.[0]
The new owners promised that FogBugz would be rewritten in under 5000 lines of code.[1] (For comparison, the Flash ActionScript code for the “evidence-based scheduling” feature’s UI alone was over 5000 LOC.)
Nathan Vardi, then at Forbes, called ESW a “global software sweat shop”. Not really relevant to FogBugz, but maybe it explains some of what’s behind this IP transfer [2]
DevFactory announced the alpha of Cloud Native FogBugz in 2021 [3]
Now, in this article, IgniteTech is promising:
> 1) to save and stabilize the software and business[… and] 2) to continuously innovate and transition products to the AWS cloud
implying, to me, that the DevFactory “cloud native” version was a total failure, and that the old creaky legacy .NET version they acquired is too expensive for DevFactory to be able to run, and also somehow not yet fully transitioned to AWS?! (I had heard that they decommissioned the physical colo datacenter by 2019, so I’m not sure where FogBugz is actually running now.)
[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/devfactory-acquires...
[1] https://twitter.com/FogBugzTeam/status/1098287969700433920
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2018/11/19/how-a-my...
The product sucks, I've been using it for about ~18 months and it's been stale and close to abandoneware for longer than that.
For me it's too little too late, we're moving else where.
18 months is about half as long as it has been owned by private equity, and unfortunately the product was being under-invested in when I was last working on it 3 years ago.
It’s sad to see it languish, since I and many of my friends spent so long working on it.
The approach sounds lovely on paper, in practice most software development environments range from absolutely terrible to terrible - that level of organisation isn't something I can see more teams doing even if the tool does help.
What I learned is that people pad and fudge numbers to make the burndown chart nice, which might be what Spolsky's employees did in the end to please his try to make an estimation tool.
Also, breaking down task in my experience counterintuitively makes them harder to estimate. I.e. summing many small estimates over doing one big for the set of subtasks.
This technique is also how Evidence-Based Scheduling works.
Joel Spolsky hasn’t been involved in FogBugz at all since 2018, when it was acquired by DevFactory. Forbes calls their parent company a “software sweatshop.” None of the engineers at Fog Creek even bothered to interview to stay on after the knowledge transfer, if that gives you an idea of the corporate culture difference.
Before the acquisition, Joel gave Anil Dash the CEO role in 2016. Jordan Harris (COO) and Rich Armstrong (GM) led FogBugz/Kiln operations before then.
And even before that, it was fairly clear (at least to us employees) that Joel was more focused on his other companies: Stack Overflow, Trello, Glitch.
Trello spinning off into its own company in 2014 was a huge relief for Creekers, because we felt like we could finally focus on our own company again.
We were operating with a small, self-funded, crew, which made it very hard to compete with Jira and GitHub. With hindsight, I can say we bit off 1000% of what we could chew. Kiln was a maintenance nightmare, yet didn’t provide a quarter of the revenue FogBugz alone did. The FogBugz Plug-in API was a plain mistake (Second System Syndrome plus running user code in-app?!?). FogBugz’ database tenancy model was always a pain. ElasticSearch was fantastic for speed, but maintainability wasn’t great. We had a real bad case of The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern. Oh, and we were about infinity years late to the cloud: on my very last day, we were still on seven racks of hardware in a DC in the most expensive real estate in the country.
I would say the last “Joel” version of FogBugz was 7.0, announced July 20, 2009. Lots of customer excitement with that release.
Kind of like the Apache project.