Pivotal Tracker Blog

How GOV.UK keeps calm and carries on with Tracker

Ronan Dunlop — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:50:00 -0700

The courageous folk working on the GOV.UK website (an experimental ‘beta’ replacement for Directgov and the first step towards a single government website) have regularly written about their experience and their blog is a worthwhile read.

Their most recent article Delivering Inside Government, posted by Peter Herlihy, offers great insights and advice for agile teams.

Below is an outline of their article with point six detailing their use of Tracker and how making their stories public while scary at first proved to be a good move.

If it's hard to write a story, it's probably not as important as you think
If it's important you will remember it
Investing time preparing stories before sprint planning paid big dividends
Avoid the temptation to make the newest story the most important
Make sure you can tell when your objectives are met
Running our project in the open wasn't a scary thing.
Read the full blog post here

Tracker Meetups in Denver, NYC and SF - Join us!

Ronan Dunlop — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:53:00 -0700

Save the date.

If you live in or plan to be near any of these locations on those dates we'd love to hang out at the watering hole and talk Tracker with you.

We look forward to meeting you - the Tracker team!

Using Epics for Your Project

Joanne Webb — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:28:00 -0700

We recently launched epics, to make it easier to plan and track progress of large features at a high level. Whether you are in the early stages of defining your product or have a Pivotal Tracker project you are working in already, epics can help you manage your work more effectively. In this article, we’ll show how to create epics, for a hypothetical shopping site project.

Roles and activities

The web site allows people to do all the typical things you would expect while shopping online. Customers can browse for products, search for specific items, put them in a cart, sign up for an account to track their orders and make future shopping more convenient, check out, etc.

To help us design the site, we want to identify all of the key “activities” for all user roles. To start with we can think about admins who will stock and manage the site, and shoppers who actually use it. Each has a specific set of wants and needs that we might consider as stories that will be entered in Tracker. As well as feature stories, there are activities to do with setting up hardware and infrastructure for the site which can be added as chores.

As we think about these activities, they fall into natural areas of functionality such as ‘deployment’, ‘admin’, ‘shopping’, ‘’search’, shopper accounts’, ‘checkout’, ‘orders’, etc.

At least some of these will have enough stories associated with them, that to get a higher level view of each and more easily manage their priority, you can create an epic.

Creating epics

You can either click EPICS toward the left of the Tracker project page to open the Epics panel, then click the plus icon at the top, or type ‘e’ (when the cursor is not in an editable field).

Alternatively, if you have already entered and labeled stories in Tracker, you can convert a label to an epic. The label will remain, but change color from green to purple to identify it as an epic linked label.

Describe and discuss large features

In your epic, you can describe the high level goals of the feature and attach mockups that demonstrate desired designs. Comments can be used to have a conversation with the team about the feature and record overall decisions.

Planning your stories

The feature or activity described in the epic can then be broken down into small, concrete, actionable stories. For example, with the Shopping epic in mind, you might have a story called “Shopper should see list of products, with primary photo as thumbnail”. After entering your stories, you can drag and drop them onto a collapsed epic, so that they get the epic’s linked label and become part of it. Click the arrow icon to the right of the collapsed epic to see all the stories in the epic or simply type shift+e. You can also drop stories into the epic stories panel and start ordering them by priority, the most important being at the top.

Then you’ll want to determine the level of effort for each story, and can go through and estimate them.

Representing milestones

Having broken down each epic into stories, it helps to put a release marker into the backlog to represent the “minimum viable product” milestone (or “first demo to investors”).

Then drag all the stories for that milestone into the backlog, above the release marker. Release markers should always go at the end of the set of stories that the milestone or release will include, not the beginning, then they follow those stories through the workflow.

Keeping track of progress

As you start working on stories, their state is represented in the epic’s progress bar. It gives an immediate overview of how far along the epic is. The colors in the bar match the color of stories, and it’s width represents the size of the epic, relative to other epics. As your stories are completed and accepted, the bars update to reflect what’s happening.

Mousing over a progress bar reveals a more detailed breakdown of progress, including an estimated completion date. This date is the last day of the iteration that the epic's last prioritized story appears in, in the backlog.

Re-prioritizing stories

Priorities always shift during a project and you can reprioritize stories directly in the backlog, or in the epic story panel. The changes you make are always also made throughout the project and reflected in the different views of it.

Stories moved in the epic story panel are reprioritized relative to other stories there. The following show a selected story before and after it is moved:

Completing epics

As you complete your stories, epics are considered done (and appear in green) when all prioritized stories in them are accepted. Stories in the icebox are not considered to be "in play" - they're on ice, and in most cases epics will have stories in the icebox indefinitely. It’s often the case that everything you wanted doesn’t actually get done, yet the feature is perfectly usable. However, as soon as you drag a completed epic's story from the icebox to the backlog, it will stop being green.

Done epics remain in the Epics panel until the iteration in which stories in them were accepted is over. Then you'll see “Show x Done Epics” at the top of the epics panel instead.

More information and feedback

We hope this helps you get the most out of epics for your project. For additional information, please see the FAQ, and watch this brief overview video. As always, we value feedback, so we’d love to hear from you in the comments here or on Facebook, Twitter, or by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.

Introducing Epics: They’re like stories, but bigger

Ronan Dunlop — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:43:00 -0700

We’re proud to introduce a brand new feature to Pivotal Tracker: EPICS.

Epics are a powerful management tool providing teams with big picture detail. It sounds like an oxymoron, but that’s what Epics offer, the ability to zoom out and zoom in at the same time.

Now you can group dozens of stories into a bucket that represents a significant feature. Epics can hold digital assets, such as requirement docs and mockups as well as high-level discussions. You can also prioritize Epics and at a glance know the status of the stories within each Epic.

We’ve been in beta for a few months now and we’d like to thank everyone who volunteered to test drive this feature while it was being built. Here are some of the things these courageous people have shared with us:

"It’s now much easier to coordinate people working on multiple goals at the same time." Tikitu at Buzzcapture.

"We love the ability to radiate progress information and the ability to maintain a focused conversation on it." Diogo at Sport Science School of Rio Maior, Portugal.

“...it is quite helpful in making it easier to see what's being worked on" Frank at Disney

We hope you enjoy Epics. You can find more detailed information on our FAQ, getting started document or our short screencast.

We look forward to hearing from you on Facebook, Twitter or tracker@pivotallabs.com.

Warm regards,

The Tracker Team

P.s. The new shortcut key for Epics is 'SHIFT' + 'e' (you can find all the short cut keys at 'SHIFT' + '?').

P.p.s. Please download our Epic Map below.

Setting up & Troubleshooting Bugzilla with Tracker

Joanne Webb — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:35:00 -0700

Bugzilla is a popular Tracker integration and fairly straightforward to set up. In general all you need is here: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/integrations?version=v3#bugzilla

But if you do receive an error message instead of bugs loading in your Bugzilla integration panel, here are some tips to get past them. The following also applies to other error messages, but these are the most common:

"Unable to load bugs - Please check your URL and remember to include http:// and exclude the xmlrpc.cgi."
or
"Unable to load bugs - There was a problem processing your request."

You can take the first error literally, but there are also some other causes for it which aren't obvious.

We only support versions 3.4.x and above. That said, at the time of writing, we're looking into an issue with the the 4.2.0 release and possibly some preceding minor versions and release candidates.
If you haven't changed the integration's "Bug 'Status' values to exclude" (currently RESOLVED, VERIFIED, CLOSED), these defaults could be trying to pull in too much data and hence failing. To check, log in to your Bugzilla instance and use the advanced search options to find a small number of bugs, to help you change the default values to exclude all but those, and see if they'll be pulled in.
You may need to install one or more optional Perl modules, i.e. SOAP-Lite and possibly Test-Taint. To determine if you have them installed (or to get the commands necessary to install them), go to the directory where you installed Bugzilla on your server and run the checksetup.pl script. It will tell you what modules are installed, and what optional modules can be installed (and what they will enable). Check to see if these modules are there and if not, install them.

Once that's done, you can test it using the following. To run this you'll need access to a machine that has the CURL command. Create a file called version.xml with the following text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>Bugzilla.version</methodName>
<params>
</params>
</methodCall>

Then run this curl command:

curl -X POST -H"Content-Type: text/xml" -d @version.xml <url of Bugzilla server your>/xmlrpc.cgi </url>

To see a successful version request, run the command against the Bugzilla "Landfill" test server. For example:

curl -X POST -H"Content-Type: text/xml" -d @version.xml https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.0-branch/xmlrpc.cgi

If all is well, the response should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><methodresponse><params><param /><value><struct><member><name>version</name><value><string>4.0.2</string></value></member></struct></value></param></params></methodresponse>

If the response printed by the curl command accessing your Bugzilla server is like this, then the Tracker integration should be able to access your Bugzilla server. If this is not the kind of response you get, then your server is still not setup correctly. In general the response's content should help you troubleshoot. For example, if contains, "The XML-RPC Interface feature is not available in this Bugzilla." it means you need to enable the XMLRPC interface on your Bugzilla server.

However, if you are using version 4.0.5, a bad response (such as "Application failed during request deserialization: 32612: When using XML-RPC, you cannot send data as text/xml; charset=utf-8. Only text/xml and application/xml are allowed.") could be the result of the following Bugzilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=731219 It's been fixed in the patch referenced in the bug, but by the time you read this, there may be more recent updates.
Another problem can be with the data that is being transferred to Tracker, if there are one or more bugs which contain multibyte characters in the description or comments. This is usually a result of pasting text into a bug from rich text email or office documents. These characters cause the length of the data stream that the web server sends to us to be incorrect, and we are unable to parse the XML on our side. In that case, determining if your bugs have any multi-byte characters and removing them, should resolve the problem. We can provide steps to help you with this if you need them.

The above should cover the most common problems. Hope it helps.

Finally, we get asked if you can integrate Tracker with Bugzilla if it's behind your firewall. Yes, we have 2 API servers that you can allow through your firewalls for Pivotal Tracker integration with your Bugzilla server, "api.pivotaltracker.com" and "api2.pivotaltracker.com". Please refer to our Integrations help page for more information: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/integrations

If you have any questions, or there's something this doesn't cover, please send email to: tracker@pivotallabs.com

Pivotal Tracker maintenance this Saturday, Mar. 31 at 9am PDT

Dan Podsedly — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:37:00 -0700

We're moving Pivotal Tracker to a new, faster database server with solid state drives tomorrow, and performing some other maintenance that requires downtime. To minimize disruption during work hours in as many parts of the world as possible, we're planning this maintenance for tomorrow, Saturday, March 31, at 9am Pacific, and we anticipate it to take approximately one hour.

To get the latest updates, and real time status of this maintenance, please follow @pivotaltracker on Twitter.

Pivotal Tracker has a new home within EMC

Dan Podsedly — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:12:00 -0700

It’s official - Pivotal Labs, the company that made and owns Pivotal Tracker, has been acquired by EMC, and we are thrilled! You can read all about it at Pivotallabs.com/emc.

What does this mean for Tracker, and more importantly, all of our great customers around the globe? In the near term, it’s business as usual.

Tracker has grown in popularity beyond our wildest expectations these last six years, and we owe that to our extremely loyal and passionate user community. Up until about a year ago, our work on Tracker was focused on our own needs at Pivotal Labs, to allow us to work more efficiently with our clients, and to promote our brand of software development. In other words, we’d been more Pivotal-focused than customer-focused.

That said, we’ve been changing that for a while now. We want to build more of the features you are requesting, we want Tracker to be in more languages than just English, we want to offer more integrations... and the list goes on. Of course, all that takes resources.

Now, we have EMC in our corner. A company with a great reputation, and plenty of resources. They know they’ve acquired a great product as part of the deal, and they are eager to see Pivotal Tracker grow to be the best Agile project management tool in the market.

To all of our customers - thank you! This is a new beginning, and we look forward to serving you better.

Tracker Ecosystem News: PiRo = Chrome goodness from Railsware

Ronan Dunlop — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:53:00 -0700

The good folks at Railsware do it again. A little while back they released a Mac OSX client called PivotalBooster and just today - they released a very slick Pivotal Tracker Chrome extension called PiRo.

It's a multi-login/multi-story/multi-project gem (I mean that in the sparkly sense) that lets you do all these things from within the same window. In other words a multipass for Tracker (You know - Milla/the Fifth Element "Leeloo Dallas mul-ti-pass"...).

It also looks great. Give it a shot and if you like it - be a good Tracker citizen and vote up our friends with your stars!

Tracker Ecosystem: Meta collaboration tools

Ronan Dunlop — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:37:00 -0800

Is it a sign of the times that the cloud-based tools that allow us to work together better now need a tool of their own to work together better? A meta betta togetha tool in other words.

Sounds ironic, but it’s a fact that we struggle to manage the multiple communication streams we’re connected to - we’re running out of sandbags to contain the overflow.

For those of you that have Pivotal Tracker as one of your streams, we have many friends in the community that are seeking to help folks stay on top of and act upon all that valuable info in these multiple streams. One pond that all your streams feed into if you will. Not wishing to play favorites, here are some of our more recent partners in alphabetical order.

Try them out and please tell us what you think.

300 Miligrams all your business information from various cloud services together in one place.

BusyFlow A workspace that makes your web-based productivity and collaboration apps work together.

Clutch All your project updates in one beautiful feed, and works with many popular project management systems.

Flowdock is a collaboration web app for technical teams.

Hojoki lets all your cloud apps work as one.

Teambox Joining social collaboration tools with online project management.

Traction Stream Listen to your applications and streams – curate and share what matters.

Updates to the Pivotal Tracker story redesign

Dan Podsedly — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:36:00 -0800

Last week, we launched a complete redesign of stories, as part of our ongoing effort to make Tracker easier and more enjoyable to use. We've received a great amount of feedback about what's working well in the new design, as well as what could be improved. As a product team, we're extremely lucky to have users who time and again have shown such passion - thank you, we really couldn't do this without you!

The redesign was a big change and involved some significant behind-the-scenes investments for big upcoming features. There were a few bumps after the release, and we've rolled out a number of fixes over the last week as well as some design tweaks based on your feedback. See below for the complete list.

Here's what's new since last week.

You can now navigate through all of the drop-downs and select values with the keyboard.
When adding a new story, in addition to being able to move through the story types and point estimates with your left/right cursor, you can also choose values with a single key. Use F/B/C/R for Feature/Bug/Chore/Release, and the number keys to pick an estimate.
CTRL + S (or CMD + S on a Mac) now save stories.
Enter and escape work everywhere again, to save changes or cancel.
The overall visual design has been adjusted to improve contrast and scannability, especially in the top section.
There's now a save button at the top of new stories, for more consistency between creating and editing.
We've adjusted the gray background to a warmer color.
Clicking on a file attachment thumbnail or file name should open the file inline in the browser, at least for most file types. To download a file, use the cogwheel menu next to file attachments.
The 'view all images' page now shows upload date/times.
The Flash-based 'click-to-copy' feature for story ID and URL can ow be explicitly disabled on the Profile page, for those having trouble with Flash. When disabled, your stories will show a text field for both story ID and URL, which should auto-select when clicked into for easy copy and paste.
Story tasks can once again be disabled in project settings, if you're not using them.

We're by no means done, and the design will continue to evolve, and we're working to improve story manipulation and drag/drop performance, especially on larger projects.

Thanks again for all the feedback!