User>Driven

I attended the Boston installment of the FogBugz World Tour this morning held by Joel Spolsky, the author of Joel on Software and cofounder of Fog Creek Software.

The software includes bug and enhancement tracking features like those in Bugzilla with a wiki for managing requirements, discussion boards for you and your customer, and project management software that uses your developers estimates and (critically) your developers historical accuracy at estimating. It wraps these features together in one of the smoothest, lowest-effort Ajax UIs I've seen to produce a suite of tools for managing the software development process.

Joel himself was the first person I met at the seminar and I got the chance to shake his hand and ask him a few questions one on one. He is low-key, articulate and funny, just like his blog. Some of his memorable lines at the seminar included:

We're on roughly a 1-year release cycle. If you are on a more like a 6-year release cycle, you're probably on the Vista team at Microsoft.

FogBugz handles email because, as we all know, all applications eventually become email clients.

We don't have an offline mode because it turns out it's easier to get internet access on planes than it is to get offline synchronization to work right. 

We use FogBugz internally to manage our projects. We don't use Microsoft Project because the software development team for Microsoft Project doesn't use Microsoft Project.

That last quote brings me to why I think Fog Creek has been able to produce a product in FogBugz that is so neatly tailored to the needs of software developers and development organizations. Joel and his crew are so very user-driven in my estimation because they themselves are the users.

The company's motto is "Building the company where the best software developers in the world want to work." They are famous for providing privacy and large monitors for all of their developers, for eschewing VC capital, and for doing very little marketing outside of Joel's blog. Joel says the most reliable way to grow revenue that he's found is to simply release a new version of the product. This all contributes to their focus on developers and since they are developing tools for developers, there arises a virtuous cycle.

Let me give you an example of how this works. In an interview with Robert Scoble, Joel described why there aren't a lot of reports on developer productivity in FogBugz. He says it's because lazy managers use these kinds of reports against developers and that creates a disincentive for using the bug tracking software, which in turn actually makes it harder to manage the development process. Joel's intimate familiarity with the reality of software development processes makes it possible to look at a feature request from what he calls an "anthropological point of view," rather than simply a prioritization or implementation point of view. What he's really saying is that Fog Creek is user-driven rather than feature-driven.

I don't know if Joel and crew would be as good at putting themselves in someone else's shoes. In fact, I'll bet the relative lack of success of another of their products, City Desk, is related to the fact that it's not really a product for developers. Or rather it is, but it shouldn't be. I've tried the software and it's really attempting to solve the problems of web content producers in small organizations. Unfortunately, I think it takes a developer-oriented approach to that set of problems, limiting its appeal to those developers who sometimes have to act as content producers.