Overview
You would like to understand what is the use of the Project field on a case: is it to categorize functional areas of your system or to categorize time-bounded efforts (eg: Release 1, Release 2, Demo, or other delivery milestones).
Solution
Project
A Project is a higher level of categorization object, usually used for categorizing your work by functional areas or by modules of your product.
On typical software teams, you might set up a project for every individual product that you develop. But if you have only one product, then a Project can be used to track the development of your modules (eg: Landing Pages, Sign Up, Payments, Billing, Property Management, Lead Management).
New FogBugz accounts have a project already set up called “Inbox” which is intended to be used for cases dedicated to customer correspondence, which is an example of a type of work that is never complete and therefore gets its own project.
Each FogBugz can be used to keep track of multiple projects.
If you need an additional layer of grouping on top of Projects, you can Organize Your Projects with Project Groups
Area
Within each project, you can divide cases into areas that are aspects of the larger project but still largely separate from each other.
For example, a software project might have separate areas for front-end code, back-end code, and documentation.
Alternatively, the Inbox project might have separate areas called “Sales” and “Support”. Each area is a part of the larger project but is more or less separate from the other areas in the project.
Read our Tips on Creating Good Areas.
Think of Project and Area as two levels of (parent-child) categorization of cases.
In Agile Development terms they could be also used to categorize Epics (Projects) and Features (Areas)
Milestone
Milestone is the time-bound aspect of tracking work on Projects and Areas.
They are markers for big, specific, achievable goals.
In software development terms you can use them to track milestones of your project, like Release 1, Release 2, Demo A, Demo B, etc.
In Agile Development terms you can use Milestones to track the Sprints, eg: Spring 1, Sprint 2, etc.
Read our tips on Using Milestones Effectively.
Setting Up Projects, Areas, and Milestone
Projects, Areas, and Milestone can be set up and configured under Avatar > Projects by an Administrator. Administrators can also determine which users can view, create and edit cases within a project using Project Permissions.
Each project has a primary contact. The primary contact is the default person whom you’ve designated to look at cases in this project and take the appropriate action (e.g. set their priority, assign them to the correct developer to fix, or send back to the opener requesting more information). When someone enters a new case, they usually leave it assigned to the primary contact.
In FogBugz, every case is always assigned to one person, which helps cases from falling through the cracks!
If desired, you can also set up different primary contacts for each area. By default, areas will inherit their primary contact from the project they are in.
If you are working on a large project team, you may want to have several people who help sort through new cases. To do this, we suggest that you set up a virtual user account called “Up For Grabs” and make that the primary contact of the project. You can use as many email addresses as you want for the Up For Grabs user, separated by commas so that a group of people receives an email notification whenever there’s a new case in a particular project. Anyone who wants to help sort through new bugs can create a saved filter on “all cases assigned to Up For Grabs” which they check occasionally, or you can create this filter as a shared filter so that all users can see it.