Pivotal Tracker Help

New Release: Jun 4, 2010

OAuth For Twitter Notifications

Starting Jun 30, the Twitter API will no longer allow 3rd party applications (such as Tracker) to connect using your Twitter username and password. Instead, applications will be required to use OAuth, an authentication protocol that allows users to approve a 3rd party application to act on their behalf without sharing their username/password.

Tracker now uses OAuth for project Twitter notifications. When you enable this feature for your project (see the integrations help page for more on that), you'll be asked to sign in to Twitter (on the Twitter site), and give the Pivotal Tracker application permission to access your Twitter account.

If you have enabled Twitter notifications for your project(s) prior to this release, the stored credentials are in the username/password format. You'll need to remove these old credentials, by clicking the 'Remove Twitter Credentials' button. After you've done that, click the 'Sign In With Twitter' button to re-enable the Twitter notifications using the new, more secure OAuth way.

More information on Twitter and OAuth can be found here.

Move Stories to Project

We've added the ability to move stories from one project to another. To move a story, or a group of stories, select them first, using the checkboxes to the right of story titles:

Then, select the 'Move to Project...' option in the Actions drop-down, and choose the project you'd like the story or stories moved to:

You should see a message that the stories were moved, and there should a history entry for the move as well, both in the source and destination project. Moved stories retain comments, tasks, attachments, as well as their own history of actions.

It's also now possible to move stories to a project via the API. Simply do a story update, with the target project's ID in the story's <project_id> element. More on that on the API help page.

Release: Apr 9, 2010

Multiple Integrations

You can now have multiple integrations of the same type for a project. This allows you to see and import Satisfaction topics from different products, for example, or use multiple Zendesk views for different types of support tickets.

Configurable Updates

Each integration now lets you choose which updates Tracker should send to the external tool, for example story state changes or new comments. For the Campfire integration, you can select whether your chat room receives updates for new comments, state changes, or new stories.

Issues/Tickets No Longer Filtered

For Zendesk, JIRA, and Lighthouse integrations, the list of issues/tickets in the import panel should now match what you see in the corresponding Zendesk view, Lighthouse bin, or JIRA filter. Previously, we only showed new tickets/issues. The only ones that don't appear are tickets/issues that have already been imported into your Tracker project.

Satisfaction Questions

The Satisfaction integration now includes Questions, in addition to Ideas and Problems. We use the integration ourselves, and find that many people use questions for feature suggestions on Satisfaction.

Release: Mar 8, 2010

Zendesk Integration

We've added Zendesk to the list of applications that Tracker integrates with. Zendesk is on demand customer support help desk system, and this integration allows your development team to prioritize and collaborate around Zendesk tickets as linked Tracker stories.

To learn how to set up Zendesk integration for your project, visit the integrations help page. Once enabled, you'll see a new panel in your project, allowing you to see and drag/drop Zendek tickets into the backlog or icebox. Story comments and state changes will appear in the corresponding Zendesk ticket as comments.

Note: At the moment, the Pivotal Tracker target in Zendesk does not create linked stories in Tracker. We're working with Zendesk to enable that, and make the two integrations seamless.

Release: Jan 23, 2010

API V3

This is a new version of the API. As part of this release, the first version of the API (V1) has been removed. You may continue to use V2, but that version will is deprecated and will be removed at some point in the future.

API V3 adds the following:

• more complete and detailed activity resources
• support for adding file attachments to stories
• ability to move (re-prioritize) stories
• GitHub post-commit support, as well as a generic post-commit hook, that will allow you to associate source commits with stories
• more information in the project resource, including labels

Complete documentation is on the API Help Page. For more details about what's new or changed, see this blog post.

Activity Web Hook

You can now have Tracker post notifications to a URL you specify as story activity happens in your project. The POST body of these requests will contain XML describing the activity, as well as the affected story, in the exact same format as the API activity response.

One way to use the web hooks is for integration, to keep stories synchronized with resources in other systems. We're hoping you'll find other interesting ways to use them - let us know what you build!

Enable an activity web hooks can be enabled on your project's Integrations page. To get there, go to your project settings, and click on the Integrations tab at the top right. More information on activity web hooks, as well as other types integration are available on the Integrations help page.

Bug / Issue Tracking Tool Integration

In this release, we're introducing the first of many external integrations, starting with support for JIRA, Lighthouse, and Satisfaction.

The idea with these integrations is to allow your team to prioritize, and collaborate around stories that are tied to tickets/issues in other systems, increasing overall visibility without having to do manual double entry. For the JIRA and Lighthouse integrations, changes to story states, and new comments will be reflected in the linked ticket/issue.

In the first release of integrations, story - ticket synchronization is 1 way only (Tracker -> JIRA/Lighthouse), but it's possible to make that 2 way by using the Tracker API, and Lighthouse webhooks or a JIRA plugin. We hope to add 2 way synchronization to the integrations in the future.

See the Integrations help page for more on integrations, and how to set them up for your project.

Campfire Notification

You can now see activity from your Tracker project in your Campfire chat room.

Read more about the Campfire integration on the on the Integrations help page

Release: Nov 28, 2009

New story search criteria

We've added the ability to search for stories based on created or last modified date, as well as for stories that have attachments. Examples:

created_since:11/16/2009
modified_since:11/16/2009
has_attachment:

This works both in the user interface, as well as the API.

For more information on search criteria, see the FAQ entry on searching.

Release: Oct 27, 2009

Create Projects and Manage Members via API

It is now possible to create projects, as well as add/remove members to/from projects using the API. The project XML also now includes member information, as well as all of the fields that you see on the project settings page.

For more information, see the API Help Page.

Release: Sep 9, 2009

Ability to Override Length of an Iteration

Teams that use longer iterations occasionally run into situations where a particular iteration needs to be of a different length than the rest. One example is a Scrum team, running 3 weeks sprints, that decides to cancel a sprint in the second week. To keep Tracker iterations aligned with real-world cycles/springs, it's now possible to override how long a particular iteration is or will be, in # of weeks.

Click on the iteration start date to override it's length, or revert an override. An iteration's date range will appear in yellow if it's been overridden. Also, Tracker will automatically adjust how many points worth of stories fit into a longer (or shorter) iteration.

Explicit Project Start Date

Normally, the first iteration of a project begins the week of the date of the first accepted story. For multi-week iterations, it's sometimes desirable to specify exactly when the project started. You can now do this, using the Start Date field in your project settings.

If a start date is specified, your project will start on that day, or the date of the first accepted story, whichever is earlier.

Preview Balloon for Story Descriptions

Based on popular demand, the preview balloon is back for stories that have a description (but no comments). Note - you can see a preview for all stories by hovering over the story type and estimate icons.

Story Labels on the Left

We've moved the story labels back to the left of story titles. The motivation for moving the labels to the right (in the previous release) was to align story titles vertically, for easier visual scanning. However, we received a lot of feedback that this made it harder to see groups of related stories, for which labels are commonly used for.

We may introduce a way to either hide labels, or configure where they appear, but for the time being, we've moved them back where they used to be.

Enhanced Project Export

It's now possible to export a subset of the stories in your project, by choosing whether to include done stories, stories in current/backlog, or the icebox.

Current Day in Points Breakdown Chart

The points breakdown chart now includes data for the current day. Previous day counts are all based on a nightly snapshot, but the current day counts reflect the current state of the project.

Release: Aug 23, 2009

There's a new report feature available, to help you analyze how smoothly your project is progressing.

These Point Breakdown charts help you visualize the progress of your project as stories move through different stages of completion. Stories start out as "Unstarted", then move on to "Started", "Finished", "Delivered", and then "Accepted" (unless they get rejected). The different colored bars show the point totals of the stories that are in each state at the end of each day. As days pass, you would expect the number of unstarted to go down, and the number of accepted to go up. If any of the other groups are especially big, the chart may help you identify bottlenecks in your workflow.

This breakdown is available for both the current iteration and the previous one. You can also use it to visualize the development of your entire project for the last 15, 30, or 60 days. Stories in the icebox, and stories that were already done at the beginning of the period, are excluded from the totals.

Access the Points Breakdown charts here, click the Reports link on top of the page, or navigate from your project via the Reports option in the View menu.

Release: Aug 5, 2009

Story Tasks

You can now keep a list of tasks for each story. Ideally, the stories in your projects should be small as possible, so that each story describes a single, concrete feature that delivers incremental value to your project's customer. With small stories, there is rarely a need to break things down further, but sometimes it's really useful to keep a to-do list while working on a story.

To enable story tasks, go to your project settings, and check the 'enable tasks' option under Experimental. You should then be able to add tasks to stories, under the description field. Hover over a task to edit it, delete it, or move it up and down. You can also check off a task when it's complete, but task status does not affect overall story status.

Story tasks can be viewed and updated via the API.

API Improvements

The API help page has been reorganized for easier readability. It's also now possible to get stories based on a list of filter values, for example multiple IDs.

Project Hints

New users will see hints, when getting started with a new project. If you're an existing user, and would like to see these, go to My Profile, check the Show Hints checkbox, and create a new project.

Release: Jun 16, 2009

Activity Feed

We've made some changes to the dashboard and introduced an activity feed. The activity feed lets you quickly view recent events that have occurred in all your projects including new stories, comments and stories that have been accepted and rejected. You can subscribe to this activity feed using any blog reader that supports Atom. Click the Subscribe link above the feed or the feed icon in the browser address bar and your browser should handle the rest. Recent activity data is also available via the API.

Improved Project History

The project history panel should now be more readable. Event timestamps are relative now (for example, "2 hours ago"), and updates to the same story within a short period of time together are bundled together. For example, if you add a new story, and immediately move it to the backlog, this will appear as one entry in the project history. You can also subscribe to a project's history feed by clicking on the feed icon in the browser's address bar.

Follow your project on Twitter

To give even more visibility to the activity on your project, Tracker can now tweet project updates. Create a Twitter account for your project (or choose an existing Twitter account), and configure your Tracker project's Twitter account settings on the Project Settings page. Remember - by default, Twitter accounts and tweets are public and searchable, so if you want to keep your project information private, make sure you enable the "protect my updates" option in your Twitter account settings.

Project Velocity on Dashboard

Another new feature on the dashboard is a small graph that shows the number of points accepted per iteration. Th current velocity for each project is also displayed. If you hover over a project, you'll see links to some of the more commonly used project pages, including members and settings.

Remember Me

If you select the "remember me" checkbox on the sign-in page, Tracker will do just that and you won't need to sign in again after re-opening your browser. To clear this "remembered" state, log out or clear your browser cookies. Resetting your password will reset "remember me" on all computers where you may have previously signed in from.

Time Zones

Tracker now supports time zones, allowing you to see all dates in your local time zone, and giving all project members a consistent view of iteration boundaries. Every user has a default time zone (based on what your browser tells us), but it can be overriden on the My Profile page. Projects have time zones as well - this defaults to the time zone of the user who created it, but can be changed as well, in project settings. The project's time zone controls when iteration boundaries occur. If a project's iterations start on Mondays, and it's time zone is PST, that means new iterations will start Mondays at midnight PST, and everyone in the world, will see the new iteration at that same time, even though they may be in different time zones. Someone in New York, for example, won't see a new iteration until 3am their time.

Release: Apr 22, 2009

Labels Enhancements & Saved Searches

We've added a new panel on the project page that will help you organize and keep track of related stories in your project - Labels and Searches. Open it using the View menu, or with Shift-L. On this panel, you'll see all labels in your project, as links, with numbers indicating the number of stories that have yet to be accepted. Click on a label to see stories with that label.

You can now save any search, by clicking on the disk icon at the top of search results. Saved searches appear below labels, on the Labels and Searches panel.

The new panel also allows you rename or delete labels, and delete saved searches. Hover over a label or saved search, and you should see rename and/or delete buttons.

Ability to apply and remove labels to selected stories

It's now possible to apply labels to multiple stories, using the Actions menu at the top of the project page. Select stories using the small checkboxes to the right of story titles. The same action also allows you to remove labels.

Ability to export selected stories to CSV

You can export selected stories in the project, also by using the Actions menu. One possible use of this feature is to move or copy stories from one project to another. Select some stories, export them to CSV, and import that file into another project.

API: Get stories by iteration or iteration group

We've made it easier to retrieve stories by iteration through the API. You can get stories based on an arbitrary iteration range, done iterations, the current iteration, or iterations in the backlog. See the API Help page for more details and examples.

Release: Mar 31, 2009

Cloning of panels

Click on the new clone button () at the top of a panel, and Tracker will open a copy of that panel, scrolled to the same position as the original. This is especially useful for organizing a large icebox or backlog, for example, it lets you move stories from the top to the bottom of the same panel quickly, without having to scroll. You can also use it to see two charts at the same time. For browser performance reasons, there is a limit of one clone per panel type.

Pinned search results

It's also now possible to see multiple search results at the same time. Click on the pin icon at the top of the search results panel and that panel will remain open until you close it. A new search panel will be opened the next time you search.

Saved panel layout

There's a new 'Autosave Layout' option in the View menu. When selected, Tracker will automatically save which panels you have open, and re-open them when you return to Tracker or switch from one project to another.

Keyboard shortcuts

We've added keyboard shortcuts for the following actions: adding stories, searching, and the toggling of panels. Type ? on the project page to see what the shortcuts are. We'll be adding more shortcuts in the future.

Current iteration in the backlog

For users that prefer to think of the current iteration as just the first part of continuous backlog of stories, we've added an option (in the View menu) to include the current iteration in the backlog.

Commit mode for current iteration

This is an experimental new feature, and allows you to manually plan the current iteration, overriding Tracker's estimate about which stories (from the backlog) the team might complete.

In general, we believe that it's more efficient to allow Tracker to plan things automatically, based on historical velocity. Explicit commit mode is based on requests from our users in the Scrum community, and we can certainly understand the value of explicit, collective team commitment at the beginning of a sprint or iteration.

To plan the current iteration manually (and override automatic velocity-based planning), start by enabling Commit Mode on the project settings page. You will then see a diamond ring icon () at the top of the current iteration. If you click that, and turn Commit Mode on, you'll be able to drag as many stories into (or out of) the iteration as you'd like. This is only possible for the current iteration - the rest of the iterations in the backlog will still be planned automatically, based on velocity.

Release: Mar 3, 2009

Public projects

It's now possible to make your projects publicly visible. As a project owner, you can enable public access on the Project Settings page. Anyone you give the project URL to will be able view stories in your project, without having to sign in to Tracker. They'll also be able request project membership by clicking the "Join This Project" button, on the project page.

Moving release markers within current iteration

You can now move release markers to, and within started stories in the current iteration. Previously, release markers would get "stuck" at the bottom of started stories.

Links to stories in same project

If you click on a story link (in the description or comment of a story in the same project), Tracker will now instantly reveal that story, instead of opening a new browser tab or window and loading the entire project again.

Release: Jan 28, 2009

New API Version

There is a new API version (v2), with the following: support for ActiveResource, the ability to list projects, story paging, as well username/password authentication (for interactive clients). See the API Help page for details.

Ability to change point scale

It's possible to change a project's point scale. Existing story estimates are adjusted automatically.

Story comment notifications

All project members can now receive story comment email notifications. Previously, only the story owner, requester, and people who previously posted comments to a story received notifications.

Demo projects

There's now a link on the dashboard for new users to create a demo project with example stories. If you already have projects, it's possible to create a demo project on My Projects page.

Release: Nov 25, 2008

It's now possible to add comments to stories via the API. Also, there should be fewer conflicts when multiple people update a story concurrently.

Release: Oct 30, 2008

REST API

This release introduces the Tracker API. This HTTP XML API can be used to access project and story information, as well as to create, update, and delete stories. For more information, see the API Help page.

Release: Oct 1, 2008

EngineYard Hosting

Tracker is now running on EngineYard.

Updated Look & Navigation

You may have noticed Tracker looks a little different these days. We've updated the overall look and feel, improved the Dashboard as well as overall navigation. Reports, time, and admin tools are now accessible on any page, using the top right navigation links. The Dashboard now shows a summary of the current iteration for your most recently used projects.

New Project Details

There's a new Project Details page, with easy access to all project-specific functionality, including members, reports, settings, import/export, etc. You can also maintain a brief project profile, which can be used to share an introductory paragraph for new project members, and for external links, for example to the project demo or staging environment.

Faster Page Loads

We've improved page load times, especially in the various dashboard & admin pages.

Panel Auto Scrolling

Panels now scroll up/down automatically when dragging stories around. This means you can now move a story from the bottom of a long backlog all the way to the top, with one action.

Multi-story Actions

You can now perform some common actions on multilpe stories with one step. Select stories by clicking on the small square box to the right of story name, and use the Action dropdown at the top of the project page to delete the selected stories, or ove them to the icebox or backlog. We'll be adding more actions soon, including the ability to apply labels.

Ability to Hide Project Tabs

The project tabs can now be hidden. Click the 'x' on the right of the black project tabs bar to hide it, and use the View menu to show it again.