FogBugz 7 will be coming out in a few months and one of its coolest features is support for deeply integrated plugins.I have been participating in the FogBugz 7 Plugin Alpha, and It has turned out to be a lot of fun. I am working on my second plugin already. It is basically a built-in Kanban board for FogBugz. We’ve been using a Kanban board at ICHC for a few months now and it really helps to get a project organized. The main problem is that there isn’t really an online Kanban board that is as easy to use as post-it notes. My Kanban plugin is working now, but still lacks some features. Here are some screenshots. The cool draggy effects that you would expect all work. I just need to improve some other parts of the UI a bit.

You can search and sort the Kanban board information.

You can view and edit the board as well.

Kanban information can be edited in the normal Case editing page, which adds a pretty cool way of moving stuff around or changing colors.

Over the weekend, the latest version of my Kanban Board plugin for FogBugz became available for use in FogBugz OnDemand. The new version has a lot of bug fixes and cool new stuff. Over the last month, I’ve got a lot of positive feedback. From the feedback and feature requests, I’ve been able to get a better idea of how people are using my plugin. As a result, the new version should fit a lot more peoples needs an make working with cases that much easier.

New Cases

There is now a option to create a new case in the column dropdown menu. It pops up a New Case dialog. Setting the properties will seem very familiar if you have used FogBugz search axes. In the above example I typed: title:”Rocks!” project:”Kanban” assignedto:”Stefan”. This will create a case in the Kanban project that is assigned to me and has the title “Rocks!”.

Filter Options

By far, I’ve had the most requests for either personal kanbans or single project kanbans. This was kind of tricky given that I wanted to keep the UI simple and understandable. I feel like the new solution to this problem will make a lot of users happy. If you click the Filter Options button the above dialog will show up.

As you use FogBugz, you end up with more and more closed cases. This is generally a very good thing, but most of the time you don’t want to see them in your kanban. In the past you could only remove them from the kanban, but this isn’t always desireable. Now you can click the “Hide Closed Cases” box and they disappear without loosing any data.

If you have multiple projects, then your kanban can start to feel cluttered with cases from other projects. You can now select a specific project and see only the cases in that project.

You can also filter by who the cases are assigned to. This is a handy way to see what cases you are working on.

The dialog is draggable so you move it out of the way of the kanban view and change the options and see the results instantly. Your options are saved so the board will look the same when you return.

Give it a try!

You can find the plugin at http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/Plugins/plugin.aspx?ixPlugin=15. you can install it on your own FogBugz install or you can install it into your FogBugz OnDemand account. There is a handy feedback link inside the app, so you can complain to me about stuff or even tell me how useful you find it. Either way, I will be glad to hear from you!

This weekend the latest version of the Kanban plugin for FogBugz went live. This is the first time I've blogged about the plugin for a few months. The current version has a lot of bug fixes, but it also has some cool new features. Some of these new features were inspired by my talks with people at the Open Agile Northwest Conference in February.

Multiple Simultaneous Editors

Originally, I only invisioned having one person edit the board at a time, but almost immediately after we started using it at icanhascheezburger.com, it became clear that my assumption was bad, and people would commonly accidentally squash one another's changes. The latest version allows multiple people to edit the board at the same time, and will automatically sort out conflicts. Additionally, it will automatically reload the board if someone edits the board, so you don't need to worry about seeing a stale version.

Custom Colors

Often, when a physical Kanban board is used, people will use certain colors of post-it notes to mean specific things. One of the really powerful aspects of Kanban is that people decide what the colors mean for the way they are using the Kanban. To better support this, you can now easily add your own colors, and name them something meaningful for your Kanban.

Kanban Metrics

Kanban, like all agile development methodologies, has at its core the ability (no, requirement) to evolve over time to improve your development process. (If you aren't constantly tweaking your process, then you aren't being agile.) In order to understand what is happening on your board (and hence your process), it is important to understand how items are flowing across your board. The latest version of the plugin tracks items as they move across the board and provides some statistics on what has happened, making it easier to see where your bottlenecks are and to understand your flow. These reports will almost certainly evolve over time, but they should be pretty useful in their current state.

I am really excited to see 2.0.3.7 on FogBugz OnDemand, and I look forward to getting feedback on what is working and what can be improved. The plugin is a free download.