OK, so in FogBugz, there’s this fancy pants “Add case” link at the bottom of the list where you can enter one-liners and quickly enter cases into the system, and it’ll even assign them to the project that the list is reporting on.
Visually speaking, clicking on this:
Gets you this:
Then you can type away, hit enter, add another case, hit enter, etc. It’s a really painless way to add items to the system, and painless means there’s a better chance you’ll actually do it.
It’s very cool, and possibly the best thing in the latest release (we don’t schedule releases in a way that makes the otherwise very cool evidence-based scheduling feature handy for us – yet.) There’s just one thing…
I was having this problem where all of the new cases were all being added as bugs, which meant that features and inquiries required that extra step of selecting the new items and doing a batch edit to change the category. More work means less chance of it getting done, which leads to a less accurate task tracking system, which leads to anarchy and cheese flavoured ice cream and whatnot.
Here’s the way around that:
If you sort the items by category, it’ll group the lists by bug, feature, etc. Each list has an “Add Case” link at the bottom, and if you add under the appropriate one, it’ll be entered in the right category, no second edit required.
But wait! You can’t click on the category to sort it like you can the other columns! Turns out you need to customize the filter through the Filter->Customize menu. Scroll down to the “Sort by:” section and make the first item “Category” (I’m using Status and Priority for the other two at the moment, but that might change). Save that filter (I’m making one per project, but you can also do it for all the cases assigned to you, for example) and you’ve got something that you’ll be more likely to update.
Plus, the cheese flavoured ice cream forces of darkness will be forced back to their caves for another day.
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