John Luif

I have chosen to use Axosoft's OnTime software to help manage projects. This is a very powerful and adaptable piece of project management software with many strong features. My biggest reason for choosing OnTime over FogBugz was the user interface was more intuitive to the business user. I like to get the business involved as much as possible on projects and if they can not figure out how to use the software then it is the wrong tool for the job. Personally I think FogBugz does some things very well and in a lot of ways allows a knowledagble user to be very efficient using it but the fact remains that the learning curve is too steep for business users to use it, they just do not have time to sit down and learn it.

Honestly there is almost to much out of the box with OnTime so I simplified it. Out of the box it comes with separate areas for features, defect, tasks, incidents and a wiki. I chose to turn off the defects and tasks and rename features to backlog items. I also added a custom field for backlog item type which can be scenario, feature, defect, or task. The reason I did this is I like working from one prioritized list and it just simplifies the whole process. I have also modified the workflow process each backlog item goes through (another great feature of OnTime).

There are many more customization that I may do in the future but this is my first pass through OnTime and it is working pretty good so far. There is also developer sdk which I'm actually using on one project to call the OnTIime web service to submit incidents from a web site. Incident is something else I preferred to change and call them tickets instead.

While I am happy with OnTime there is a downside, it is slow. Not slow enough that I will not use it but noticeably slower than FogBugz.