Drew McKinney • Friday, September 9, 2016 • Productivity

Velocity is a Measure of Pace, Not Productivity

When we first introduced Pivotal Tracker Analytics, we put a big Send us Feedback! button at the top of the screen. And to our delight, it worked! We received lots of feedback from customers all over the world. The requests were extremely varied, but one request we heard frequently stood out amongst all the others. With 22% of all customer requests, reporting on points completed (or velocity) per individual developer was by far the most requested feature. Read more...

Lisa Crispin • Tuesday, July 5, 2016 • Productivity

Tracker and Cross-Functional Teams: Where Do You Fit In?

It takes a village to deliver a great software project. Tracker’s workflow accommodates a developer’s perspective well, but there can be many actors involved in delivering a feature. You’ll use Tracker differently and get different benefits depending on your role and competencies. Read more...

Ryan Jones • Monday, March 28, 2016 • Productivity

Principles of Effective Story Writing: The Pivotal Labs Way

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...

Jeff Schomay • Monday, February 29, 2016 • Productivity

Spring Cleaning: Finding Dead Code with istanbul.js

Many cultures have the ritual of spring cleaning, a deep clean to get areas that aren’t normally covered—scouring the oven, dusting the blinds, and getting rid of your old junk. At Pivotal Tracker, we decided to do a little spring cleaning in our code base to kick off 2016. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein • Wednesday, November 11, 2015 • Productivity

Guidelines for Agile Development Using Tracker

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...

Steve Lichtenstein • Thursday, September 17, 2015 • Integrations

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

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 • Friday, July 17, 2015 • Productivity

Migrating to Pivotal Tracker from a Third-Party Tool

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 • Wednesday, July 8, 2015 • Productivity

A Commitment is Not a Guarantee

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 • Tuesday, June 30, 2015 • Productivity

Tracking Multiple, Related Projects

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...

Nathan Swain • Wednesday, June 10, 2015 • Productivity

Customer Support—The Tracker Team’s Approach

Next to improving and maintaining an awesome application, supporting the people who use it is key to success. We’d like to share how we ensure our customers are cared for on the Tracker team. Read more...