Joel on Software

Half a million bugs!

Last night, at some point, we passed case number 500,000 in the Fog Creek in-house FogBugz database.

Yikes. OK, it's nowhere near a half million bugs. All our faxes go in there, all our customer email goes in there, developers use it for to-do lists, job applications, phone messages, sysadmin notifications, automatic crash reports, etc. More significantly, incoming spam gets assigned a case number, even though it usually lands in a spam folder and gets deleted after seven days, so most of those cases are spam. We actually have 66,443 real cases and 489,022 historical events. We have replied to 33,692 customer emails using FogBugz, fixed 7,303 bugs, and implemented 909 features.

815 bugs could not be reproduced.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make Trello, insanely simple project management, FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracker designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Kiln, which simplifies source control. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.