Overview

You have a few third-party contractors that use their own issue tracking system.

You would like to use FogBugz to capture what they are doing and their projected timelines to enhance your schedule completion projections. However, they will never directly interact with FogBugz and you would prefer not to add normal user accounts for this purpose.

Solution

You can track the contractor's time by:

• setting up virtual users, one for each individual contractor
• create and assign them tasks (cases) to mimic the tasks in their own issue tracker,
• estimate the completion times (add estimates), and
• manually add hours on a weekly basis based upon the hours they bill you.

This way you can use the time tracking and EBS algorithm to improve your projections of when the contractor will complete their tasks.

You can execute all steps from the FogBugz UI, except the last one: adding hours for your virtual users, because the FogBugz UI by default adds the time intervals for the currently logged in user, but virtual users can not log in.

This last step can be executed only by using the FogBugz Time Tracking API.

Adding Time Intervals for Virtual Users using FogBugz API

1. Create an API token that you will use to authenticate your API request.The person creating the token should have FogBugz Administrator role.

    

2. List your Virtual Users using the API to get their FogBugz user IDs. For eg. by using a similar command:

   https://yourfogbugz.fogbugz.com/api.asp?cmd=listPeople&fIncludeVirtual=1&token=secrettoken

   where:
   • cmd - is the API command for listing FogBugz users
   • fIncludeVirtual - use this parameter to filter your results to show only the virtual users
   • token - the token you created at step 1.

    

3. Add the time tracking data for each virtual user using the time tracking API endpoint. For eg. by using a similar command:

   https://yourfogbugz.fogbugz.com/api.asp?cmd=newInterval&ixPerson=9&ixBug=18&dtStart=2021-02-01T09:00:00Z&dtEnd=2021-02-01T10:00:00Z&token=secrettoken

   where:
   • cmd - is the API command for adding a new interval
   • ixPerson - is the FogBugz user ID of the virtual user you want to add time for.

     Important: If you miss adding the ixPerson parameter, the time will be added for the user whose token is used for executing the API command.

   • ixBug - is the case ID of the case (the mimicked task) you want to add the time to
   • dtStart - the start of the time interval in UTC.
   • dtEnd - the end of the time interval in UTC.
   • token - the token you created at step 1.

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Testing

Verify on FogBugz UI that the time intervals for your virtual users have been added.

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