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Category: Productivity (154 posts) Page 11 of 16

Ryan Jones
Productivity

Principles of Effective Story Writing: The Pivotal Labs Way

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Different teams across projects and companies have different styles of story writing. Ultimately, it is up to you and the team to figure out what is most effective given the goals and context of the project. However, the core principles that guide our story writing here at Pivotal Labs can be used regardless of style or variation in either process or syntax. While the differing views on the “best way” to write stories can make it difficult to determine the most effective approach, there are a few core principles that guide our story writing. In this post, we’ll explore the three most common types of stories that you can create in Pivotal Tracker and the core principles that inform how we write stories. Read more...

Lisa Crispin
Productivity

A Day in the Life: Testing on the Tracker Team

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The Tracker team as a whole takes responsibility for building in quality and making sure that necessary testing activities are done along with other development tasks. But we testers bring our own special value to the party, and we’re seeking another great tester to help us as we work to deliver the best possible product to our customers. Let’s walk you through a typical day of testing on the Tracker team. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein
Productivity

Guidelines for Agile Development Using Tracker

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When you’re bogged down working on your day-to-day chores and features, it can be tough to stay focused on the broader goal of smooth agile development. And while we don’t pretend that we have all the solutions, Tracker is, after all, designed to facilitate precisely that goal. Luckily, the time we’ve spent getting deep down and dirty with Tracker has allowed us to suss out the better agile practices from the. . .less better ones. Read more...

Matt Conger-Eldeen
Productivity

One Weird Trick to Switch from Polling to Push—with Zero Downtime!

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Pivotal Tracker is an always-up-to-date tool that you leave open all day. When Tracker was young, the only way to accomplish that was some variation of HTTP polling. But the web has evolved since then, and so have the protocols. Websockets are supported by every major browser, and server-sent events are supported by most (with hacks for ones that don’t). Push technologies are a viable option for change propagation. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein
Productivity

How to Use Zapier to Integrate Pivotal Tracker with GitHub, Trello, Harvest, and More

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On its own, Pivotal Tracker is a robust tool for collaboration and planning. When it has the opportunity to play well with other apps, however, it can really shine. Our friends at Zapier have made that linking process easy by putting together the definitive guide for integrating Pivotal Tracker with a variety of useful apps to create an even more powerful ecosystem. Read more...

Nathan Swain
Productivity

Migrating to Pivotal Tracker from a Third-Party Tool

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Welcome to everyone who recently started using Tracker! If you were using a different project management tool previously, you probably have tickets or stories you’d like to get into your Tracker projects. One convenient way to migrate them over to Tracker is to place them in a CSV file that’s compatible with Tracker’s import tool. Below, we’ve outlined five easy steps to accomplish that. Read more...

Emanuel Petre
Productivity

A Commitment is Not a Guarantee

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If your team uses Scrum as a development process, the team decides which of the next most important items it can complete by the end of the iteration. However, this “commitment” is often used to hold the team accountable for the amount of work that will be shipped by the end of the sprint. Holding your team accountable for failing to deliver on their engagements is counterproductive and will act as a regime of terror. This is no small issue, and Scrum now suggests using the word forecast instead of commitment. Read more...

Lisa Crispin
Productivity

Tracking Multiple, Related Projects

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Pivotal Tracker was originally created in the days when agile teams and their products tended to be small. All these years later, those teams have grown, and larger companies have adopted agile values, principles, and practices. Managing multiple projects, often among multiple teams, brings a new set of challenges. Read more...