The Tracker Team spent the last week working on individual projects to improve the product. This post is the first in a series about what we did, and how it went. Read more...
Email notifications allow you to stay connected with your project when away from Pivotal Tracker, and respond quickly when needed, for example to answer questions in story comments or accept delivered stories. Read more...
Most of us prefer to spend our time developing new features for our customers. But we usually have some overhead in the form of bugs and chores that takes some of our time. Since Tracker started out life on greenfield projects, it has a default setting that bugs and chores don’t get point estimates. The idea is that bugs and chores emerge over time, and while they do take time to address, they’re an ongoing and fairly consistent cost. Read more...
Tracker’s mission in life is to give teams an up-to-date snapshot of where they are and where they are headed. When we look at our project(s) in Tracker, we know for sure what we’ve done and what’s currently in progress. Tracker uses that information to help us visualize what we’re likely to be able to do for the next few weeks. Read more...
Most people who have worked remote will agree—nay—commiserate on how hard it is. I’ve done it before, and while it never really gets easier, you learn to get used to it. Read more...
The Obama 2012 campaign has been hailed as the most tech-savvy and data-driven to date, a sophisticated operation led by CTO Harper Reed. Reed had no problem finding developers eager to join the campaign—the challenge was finding people up for the formidable task before them. A Presidential campaign poses unique challenges: an environment where volatility is the only constant, developers must iterate often, yet there is little margin for error. To meet this challenge, Reed and his team placed an emphasis on people who could resolve problems and learn quickly, rather than focusing on a particular skill set. Read more...
As a feature story progresses through the Tracker workflow, a lot of testing activities are also underway. Team members are collaborating to turn examples of desired behaviors into business-facing tests that guide development. Testers are performing manual exploratory testing on stories as they are delivered. Performance or security testing may be underway at some point in the development process. Read more...
I asked this to my pair on my first day here at Pivotal. Read more...
Volatility is what Pivotal Tracker uses to measure the consistency of your team’s work output. You can use that number to help you estimate the first approximation to answer the eternal question, “Will I make the deadline?” Read more...
What’s a release? For us at Tracker it’s a marker in your backlog that represents the most important milestones. As you can see in the screencast, creating a release marker is just like making a story. Read more...
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