The Second Way To Skin A Cat

You know the season of a t.v. show when you realize that they’ve run out of plots? One of the most common signs is when the characters start reversing roles. Suddenly Sylar is a good guy, or Dharma stops being a hippie and Greg stops being a Republican. You know the gig is up when that happens.

This week I’m left wondering if a software company is “done” when it starts releasing products that compete with itself. Google has had me a bit confused with Chrome OS and Android for a while. But this week things hit closer to home for me when the makers of FogBugz, a project management tool, released Trello, a project “organization” tool.

Project Management Pegs

I’m a big FogBugz fan. Heck, I even wrote a blog about it for a while. I’ve promoted FogBugz at work for years and I’ve used it for personal projects many times. I’m in the software dev world, so a tool like FogBugz is essential for almost every project. However, I’ll be the first to admit that FogBugz is not for everybody or every situation.

I’ve tried lots of other project management tools. I’ve used some “agile” tools like Pivotal Tracker and Rally. Recently, I’ve pushed BaseCamp strongly for lots of teams at work that needed something different from FogBugz. And I’ve tried various kanban tools like KanbanPad.

So, when I load up Trello for the first time I’m not trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole, but I also recognize a square peg when I see it. Trello is clearly a project management tool in the spirit of kanban (kanbanpad, leanitkanban).

Why Trello?

Okay, I’m cool with that. Maybe they’ve made an electronic kanban system that works. But wait, why is Fog Creek producing two apps in the same market? Why is one of them free and the other one is charging $25 a user a month (for the hosted version)? And why isn’t FogBugz getting some of these features?

So, I go back to the source to see what Joel Spolsky has to say about the release of KanBugz, err, I mean Trello.

“After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction was “why the hell are you working on THAT?” So one of the teams started working on finding better ways to keep track of who was working on what. It had to be super simple and friction-free so that everyone would use it, but it had to be powerful, too.”
Joel – JoelOnSoftware – emphasis mine.

So, Trello (man, I like KanBugz, do you mind if I call it that?) lets you see “who was working on what.” Really? I think like most project management software, what it really lets you see is who is SUPPOSED to be working on what. What feature shows you what folks are really working on at the moment?

Okay, it actually does have that feature! It’s the “Activity” feed, or board, or panel, or window, or thingy on the side of the screen. Whatever they call it. And that feature seems to work okay, based upon my initial experiences. The allocated area is a bit narrow, but it works.

But all the other stuff, the cards flipping and dragging, the lists, the boards, etc., all of that stuff doesn’t tell you what anybody is actually doing.

And I have to wonder, doesn’t the FogCreek team live in FogBugz already? What are they using internally now? Trello or FogBugz? Because FogBugz already has the features that you need to run a project and to know what everybody is working on.

Working On

The “Working On” feature in FogBugz literally let’s one identify exactly what they are working on at that moment. If that’s not enough, Working On provides time tracking and provides the raw data that powers Evidence Based Scheduling.

"Working On" Feature in FogBugz

There is a drop-down labeled “working on” in FogBugz that lets the user, very easily, identify what they are currently working on and how long they think it will take.  This feature is very smart.  It adjusts for your lunch schedule and your normal beginning and ending of the day.  So you don’t have to micromanage the app to accurately record the key activities of the day.

FNN – FogBugz News Network

So, maybe your users refuse to enter estimates or indicate what they are working on during the day.  That’s okay, if they are doing anything with the project management software, like opening, re-assigning, or resolving cases, then everything gets recorded and can be reported.

FNN is a nifty little FogBugz plugin that, wait for it, tells you what people have been doing. Here is a quick screenshot of the plugin in action:

FogBugz News Network

Kanban Plugin

And just to be clear, you can kanban in FogBugz. (say that 3 times fast). There is a plugin for that too!  Kanban boards are useful in software projects and they are available for FogBugz.  The Kanban plugin provides a nice little board for your card sorting pleasure.

Kanban Plugin for FogBugz

So, About This Trello

I’ll be the first to admit that FogBugz is not perfect. But Joel’s claim that he didn’t know what his employees were working on doesn’t pass the smell test. He already has one of the best project management tools on the market and it includes specific features for the problems that Trello claims to address.

So, what is good about Trello?

It’s a huge step forward in interface design for Fog Creek. The initial interface of a “board” is simple and well implemented. Drag-n-drop features work well, and like most kanban boards, it provides an understandable high-level view of a project.

Fog Creek doesn’t have the best reputation for building fancy user interfaces.  FogBugz is powerful, flexible, and full featured, but it is not pretty.  Trello shows that they can embrace design at Fog Creek.

And I’ll admit, we are giving Trello a shot at our office.  The R&D team is using Trello to describe high-level projects and tasks.  Essentially, we are using it for release planning.  But we are still managing all of the details and sprints within FogBugz.

Why?  The problem I’ve always had with Kanban boards, both physical and electronic, is that when they get too big they start to lose their effectiveness.  When everything fits on one screen, or one whiteboard, and when each card can hold all of the relevant information at that level of the project, then they can convey a lot of information very quickly.  But when the card gets too full and the board starts overflowing, then the metaphor starts getting in the way of actual project management.

Take a look at the Trello Development Board for example. It’s an impressive example of eating your own dog food.  But at the moment, there is something like 36 cards in the ideas column and I can only see about 5 cards at a time on my laptop screen.

Trello Development Board

And then you flip a card over and things really get messy.  For example, this is part of the back of a card about sorting cards:

Back of a Trello Card

Buried somewhere in that list of over 100 votes that scrolls forever, you will find almost a dozen comments.   And that’s on a card that can be described in 6 words.  I don’t have many cases in FogBugz that are only 6 words long.

And if you were actually a member of a board, you would see that the right hand side of the card has all kinds of other doohickeys that I haven’t taken the time to figure out.  Let’s just say that the first time I turned a card over it reminded me of the story cards from Rally and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Project Management for Real People

The frustrating thing about Trello is that I sort of get why they created it.  Back in 2009 I said this about FogBugz:

Perhaps the greatest flaw in FogBugz is built right into the product’s name.  Bug.  FogBugz was born as a software defect tracking application.  It is hard to escape one’s heritage and yet there is a much larger market available that has thus far been out of reach.

http://fogfanz.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/7-and-beyond-glass-half-empty/

Trello seems to be Fog Creek admitting that FogBugz will never be adapted to appeal to a larger market.  And that makes me a little bit sad.

Of all of the project management tools I’ve used, to manage software projects, house projects, blogs, customer support, clients, and co-workers, none of them have made me as happy as FogBugz over the years.  And yet, I know not to use it for certain projects because I know my client or co-worker will be overwhelmed by the density of information.  What works great for programmers doesn’t work great for everybody else.

Clearly, since our own R&D team is trying to use Trello to manage releases at a high-level, even while they live and breathe FogBugz daily, there is a need for this type of view for software teams.

Yet I shudder to think of managing a large-scale software product via Trello.  One look at the Development Board for Trello convinced me that is not how I want to work when we get down to the details of a large project.

Conclusion

I’d rather see some of Trello’s approach integrated into FogBugz than to see more of FogBugz’s features integrated into Trello. And I’d like to hear Joel and company speak the truth about the purpose of Trello and where it fits within their product lineup.  I just don’t buy the “what is everybody working on” story and I’m not sure I like what it says about their long-term belief in FogBugz.