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Joel Spolsky has just published another interesting blog entry called Evidence Based Scheduling. As so often in recent times the blog is about the latest release of FogBugz and some of its new features. It is hard to restrain the feeling that Joel is using his blog more and more as a marketing platform, but on the other hand that's probably what it is and who wouldn't knowing how many people one can reach.

Anyways, as the name suggest Evidence Based Scheduling it is about scheduling software and at its core it also deals with estimates of individuals. You probably think now:"Oh god, another one!". In fact the ideas behind Evidence Based Scheduling are not new. A little bit of SCRUM, a little bit of probability theory and voila you have Evidence Based Scheduling. What is new is that there is (supposedly) tooling around it. A lot of books tell you how to do it in theory, but none gives you the tools to do it. And with tools I mean an easy means to gather the required data to make the framework work - and in case you are wondering, excel spreadsheets are not cutting it!

To be honest i haven't tried FogBugz yet, but this new feature might get me to do it. Maybe it really solves one of the big problems of estimation frameworks - gather the relevant data! I would love to hear if someone has already some experience with FogBugz. Anyone? If not, make sure to drop by soon again. There will be more on this shortly.

--hardy