Enhanced integrations and updates to promote efficient use of Tracker

Everyday, teams use Pivotal Tracker to smartly manage software projects. Your feedback showed you want more out of the current Tracker Slack and Tracker GitHub integrations. We’ve added new features to the Pivotal Tracker app for Slack to collaborate seamlessly and transfer important conversations your team has everyday through the communication tool you love to use! In addition to seeing, sharing, creating, and updating stories in Tracker directly from Slack, you can now estimate or clone a story via Slack, or add Slack comments to a Tracker story. Creating code reviews and syncing code review updates from GitHub to Tracker stories is now easier than before. You can now create and update code review status directly from GitHub to a Tracker story.

Let’s explore what we’ve built:

Estimate stories via Slack when you are using Slack for your remote planning meetings

The Projection visualization shows time on the X-axis and Estimated Point Scope on the Y-axis. It consists of the following curves/lines:

The new age of working has been both more collaborative and daunting as well when it comes to remote working environments. Now you and your teams can estimate stories from Slack during a remote estimation, meaning there will be one less application you will need to juggle. This will allow you to focus on your remote planning meeting by reducing the number of applications you are using.

Image: Use the Tracker Slack app for remote estimation cpabilities.

Clone a story from Slack

You can clone stories from your team’s Slack workspace by using /tracker clone_story [ID], so that you can quickly create new features, bugs, chores or releases without leaving the conversation.

You can also choose to retain / discard existing labels and tasks in the cloned story from the original story via the clone story dialog box.

Image: Cloning a story via the Tracker Slack app.

Add a Slack comment to a Tracker story via Slack

You can now post a Slack comment to a Tracker story directly without leaving an ongoing conversation in Slack.

Image: Adding Slack comments to a Tracker story via the Tracker Slack app.

GitHub Tracker Integration

Now you can create, update and submit code reviews automatically via GitHub into Tracker stories. All you need to do is follow the 3 simple steps below.

Prerequisites for users to automate the code review process via GitHub:

1. Raise user reviews via pull requests for the newly committed changes in the GitHub repository. → The appropriate Tracker user receives an email notification for the code review request from the GitHub user
2. While reviewing the pull request in the GitHub, select the appropriate review options and the saved comments as shown below
3. A code review is automatically created in Tracker story and an in-app notification will appear in Tracker.

Note: - @reviewer is a Tracker User who has appropriate access into the Tracker project to review a Tracker story.

Image: Automate code reviews in Tracker Stories via GitHub.

Other updates to the existing features

• Adding images to the story contents is a much smoother experience. Now you can more easily embed image attachments into story text including the title, description, tasks or comments by having the appropriate Markdown copied to the clipboard and ready to paste right where you want it. Inline images in your story text allows for animated GIFs, more specific placement in your story, and larger, more visible images compared to the attachment thumbnail.

• Tagging users is more intuitive as now the @username-auto-suggestions will appear in-line to your cursor position in the activity, blocker and tasks text fields.

What’s coming next…??

Stand-up ceremonies in a remote working environment can be long and overkill if your team is distributed across many locations / team members prefer to work in the remote settings. We are working on a Beta concept to automate your stand up experience so that you can focus on the most important things that matter to you and your teams. Feel free to reach out to us if you wish to subscribe to this beta program.

We hope these new updates and enhancements in the Tracker Slack and Tracker GitHub integration capabilities are valuable to you and your teams

As always, please don’t hesitate to share your feedback by emailing us at support@pivotaltracker.com or by selecting Provide Feedback under the HELP menu in Tracker. We love hearing from you!

–The Tracker Team–