If you are looking to understand the subject, this book is unfortunately rather painful to read. It gives just the briefest nod to the underlying software engineering technology. For understanding of why anything works, it merely refers readers to other books. However, the The book is useful for understanding how to use one bug-tracking package. As such, it reads like a user manual or marketing piece for the software.

On page 88, the author states, “The good news is that there are easy ways to improve your estimating ability.” But there is no mention of the use of function points, the constructive cost model, surface compositional linear internal matching, or any other accepted practices. The prescribed advice comes across as preaching. Furthermore, the notion of due dates is not explained, and the difference between mileposts and events is missing.

The book’s explanation of how to use the FogBugz software seems excellent. Since I did not actually run the software, I cannot vouch for its accuracy. The book does a fine job of explaining how to track bug reports, but does not delve into why they should be tracked.

This is a how-to book. It is long on the use of screens and short on why to use them. Page 147 gives a good list of source control systems that you can use with FogBugz. The recommendation of concurrent versions system (CVS), a powerful open source tool for source code maintenance, was very helpful. This gave me the idea of using the Web to find other bug-tracking tools. While I would neither demean nor advocate the FogBugz tool, it is worth noting that there are several other tools out there, including ExtraView (http://www.extraview.com), Rally (http://www.rallydev.com), Problem Tracker (http://www.problemtracker.com), Everest (http://www.lynksoftware.com), and Fast BugTrack (http://www.fastbugtrack.com).

In conclusion, I would recommend this book only to those who need help in using the FogBugz software. The laid-back style of the writing is refreshing; the book does a good job of explaining “how,” but is lacking in explanations of “why.”