Missing Features

Your correspondent logged into FogBugz On Demand this morning to continue an evaluation of moving the server install of version 5 (a painful upgrade to version 6) used by Urban Insight to an on demand account.

Immediately, something didn’t look right in the header:

Then it was clear. The FogBugz logo — complete with that little odd bird — had changed to a happy sleeping bird with a pillow.

Why? Because your correspondent was logged in at 5 AM.

There are a lot of stunning improvements in the new FogBugz 6 (cases actually load quick; a new resolve & close button) for which the team should be proud . But such subtle attention to minor detail is the show stopper for this correspondent.

Sure, this was easy to implement and only took a few lines of code (well, maybe). But someone took the time to think of doing this and then actually implemented it.

This isn’t surprising. FogBugz is littered with other little features that bring the whole experience to a new level. Take the SuperDate function where you can type in a valid date or a phrase like “next Friday” — and it converts the latter to a valid date without complaint.

Since great software is the result of constant daily tinkering over weeks, months and years it really helps if your programmers are never satisfied with doing the minimum work possible but are quietly obsessed with getting every last thing just right.

Will you ever get to every last fix, adjustment and feature? Nope. But if you don’t try, you won’t ever get to more than half of what really needs to get done to make great software.

Joel Spolsky has a popular post where he explains the two most important traits in programmers at successful companies are:

1. Smart; and,
2. Gets things done.

He is only two-thirds right.

He’s missing the all-important number 3: high attention to detail. If you’re a smart, productive and sloppy programmer then you aren’t a good programmer and you won’t make great software.

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