Pivotal Tracker is an easy to use, agile project management tool that brings focused collaboration to software development teams. Built by Pivotal Labs, it embodies proven agile methods, based on experience from hundreds of successful large scale projects.
Pivotal Tracker is the agile project management tool of choice for over 510,000 users across thousands of companies, from large public companies to fast growing startups, and open source development teams.
From CEO to developer, everyone shares one view. Work at a fine-grained level, without losing sight of the bigger picture.Learn more.
See and react to everything that matters on your project, in real time. Bring your distributed team together.Learn more.
Effective agile software development, from the people that helped invent it. This is agile that really works.Learn more.
Easy to adopt, out of the box workflow that's surprisingly powerful. Transform your productivity.Learn more.
Focus on building great software, not keeping your project management tool in sync with reality. Learn more.
Tracker complements tools and services you already use at your company, and is easy to extend.Learn more.
“I've waited 15 years for a computer program that out-performs index cards. Pivotal Tracker's smooth interface and network-native architecture supports my team's collaborative/distributed planning without giving up the simplicity and physicality of cards. This product had to come from a team that understands how I work.”
-- Ward Cunningham, CTO, AboutUs.org
We've been doing agile software development since before terms like "Agile" and "XP" existed.
Over the years we've made numerous attempts to use the variety of software project management and agile development applications available, from Microsoft Project to the more current agile-specific products.
We kept returning to index cards, sometimes augmented with a patchwork of wikis and spreadsheets. We followed the agile planning tools out there, but each attempt to adopt one resulted in frustration.
Configuration and data entry were a constant expense. User interfaces were clunky and had too much back and forth navigation. The workflows were inefficient and the overhead was high. (We kept hearing circus music in our heads, with all the hoops we were jumping through.) The usage cost never seemed sustainable. It always felt like we were working for the product, instead of it working for us.
As our business grew, so did our frustration; index cards were far from ideal but the alternatives were worse. And at the same time, we were just starting to look at a promising new technology, Ruby on Rails. So we decided to build our own agile project management tool. We started working on Pivotal Tracker in late 2006. Its beginnings were very humble. All we needed was to have a backlog and be able to easily prioritize. We created simple story editing and built drag-and-drop prioritization and we were ready to start the switch from index cards. (These simple features gave us parity with index cards, with the bonus of having the backlog online.)
We started using Tracker on all of our client development projects. We continually improved and tweaked the application, integrating our experience and feedback, and we started to find that it really transformed both the transparency and the flow of development.
Tracker quickly developed a following among client developers who had used it when working with us, too. We would routinely receive requests for accounts: "I used Tracker at my last job. Can I have an account to use in my new one?"
We would always accommodate these word-of-mouth, friends and family type requests. Entire client organizations, beyond our projects, started using Tracker. The interest continued to grow and with much greater enthusiasm. We kept getting emails saying things like, "Please let me pay for Tracker; I can't live without it."
So we decided to make Tracker publicly available. We launched the public beta at RailsConf 2008 as a free agile project management tool. Over 10% of the attendees signed up that week.
We had three key insights at the outset that made Tracker work:
The first point is simply about good UI design, but it's amazing how many tools out there get this wrong.
The last point is more subtle. In agile processes, particularly Extreme Programming (XP), there is a concept called velocity. The basic idea is that you assign a point cost to stories and the sum of the point costs of completed stories in a given iteration is the velocity. You then use the velocity to project how much you will be able to get done in each future iteration.
As software development teams start to gel, they exhibit a strong central tendency to get a consistent amount done each week, and this velocity becomes extremely predictive and reliable. Traditionally in XP, after completing an iteration, you would re-plan each subsequent iteration, adjusting for the actual rate of progress. This can be organizationally onerous, but it's critical, as it allows you to project when each milestone will be reached. The feedback loop needs to be maintained to insure better-informed decisions.
The solution is the emergent iteration. Pivotal Tracker automatically (and in real-time) tracks story completions, iterations and velocity and will dynamically adjust iteration backlogs based on actual progress; Tracker does the grunt work and your project schedule is always up-to-date.
Tracker embraces simplicity. It should make managing projects easy, rather than make its users slaves to maintaining the plan. It should give every user of the system more information back than they put in. Tracker doesn't have a huge list of features, because it tries to stay true to its core purpose. (Remember, it exists partly because of our frustration with the bloated alternatives.) At times, Tracker appears opinionated as it can place strict limits on how you manage your project. But this is a consequence of its focus and the interdependence of features; the sum of Tracker is far greater than its parts. While we don't always get it right, we try to make sure each additional feature or product change adds a lot of value and makes users' work easier.
“Pivotal Tracker is a fantastic product. We've become a more efficient development team since we started using it. And even better, the management team gets on-demand visibility into my team's priorities and accomplishments.”
-- Jim Gochee, VP Engineering, New Relic
With Pivotal Tracker, everyone shares the same, up to the minute view of what's going on with the project, and what needs to be done next. It lets product owners know in intimate detail where things are, without having to ask, and lets developers spend time on work, rather than on reporting the work.
Imagine if everyone on the team knew what the highest priority thing to do was, what one thing they could do next that would move the company forward? Tracker facilitates that communication, by letting developers focus on what's next, without losing sight of the big picture.
Every story is within reach with Tracker's easy to use full text search, with support for more powerful structured queries when you need them.
Keep an eye on your project with Tracker's built-in charts, including release burn-down, iteration burn-up, story type breakdown, and historical velocity.
See everything that's recently happened in your software development project recently. or a particular user story. All with one click or keystroke.
Rearrange stories in your project to reflect new priorities with simple drag and drop, and see the impact on your release schedule immediately.
Your view of your project is always up to date, without ever refreshing the browser. Updates from others are seen instantly, and changes from multiple people are merged seamlessly, in real time.
Tracker drives conversation from it's workflow transparency to help your team work better and faster. Story comments allow each story to evolve based on feedback and discussion.
Whether your team is in the same room, across the hall or across the world, Tracker keeps everyone in sync with the latest changes. Not logged in? Tracker can keep you up to date through email, RSS, Twitter or Campfire, or use web callbacks to keep you up-to-date however you like.
Take the assets you've gathered for your project and attach them directly to stories, so your developers don't have to hunt for them when they're ready to turn those mockups into working software.
Tag your stories with labels to tie related stories together. Labels let you find stories quickly, and see progress at a higher level.
See updates from Tracker in your Campfire chatroom, allowing your entire team to stay abreast of the project development activity.
“Pivotal Tracker is as simple as a to-do list you might write on paper, but online, shared and collaborative (try the real-time collaboration and be amazed). Every bug or feature request we get ends up on our Pivotal list.”
-- Jim Gochee, VP Engineering, New Relic
“Mandatory for agile teams on the go. Keeping abreast away from a laptop or even mobile browser is fantastic!”
-- App Store Review
Plan your next iteration with your fingertips, effortlessly dragging stories into place with Pivotal Tracker for iOS's fully multi-touch interface. Scheduling a story is as simple as grabbing it from the icebox and dropping it at the top of your next iteration.
Whether you're in a meeting or in a foreign country, you'll be able to manage your stories and projects with ease. Record new stories while meeting with a customer, or plan your next iteration from 35,000 feet.
When inspiration or disaster strikes, add and prioritize important stories right at that moment.
If you're at home in the Pivotal Tracker website, you'll fit right in to Pivotal Tracker for iOS. Your backlog, icebox, and other panels are all exactly where you'd expect from using the Pivotal Tracker website.
Sometimes you just need to focus on a small part of your project. Search for stories by keyword, or filter them the same way the Tracker website does. Pivotal Tracker for iOS also supports a My Work panel that includes stories that need your attention.
When you don't have access to the internet, you'll still have read-only access to your projects. Pivotal Tracker for iOS keeps a full copy of your project for reading offline. This also makes using the app quick and painless at all times, without reloading from the server whenever switching panels or searching for a story.
The agile, iterative workflow and story management in Pivotal Tracker embodies years of experience by Pivotal Labs on real world client projects. This is agile project management that really works!
Tracker calculates future iterations automatically, based on historical performance. Focus on prioritizing and completing your stories; let Tracker take care of planning future iterations, based on actual progress.
Planning a release and focusing on milestones as real world changes occur is easy with Tracker. Completion dates are calculated automatically, based on velocity - your live measure of historical performance. See impact on scope as new stories are added immediately, and move stories around easily via drag and drop as priorities change.
Tracker is especially effective when used by self-organizing teams, who embrace collective code ownership. Since anyone can work on the next available story in the shared, highly visible backlog, you'll see fewer bottlenecks, and the team will move faster toward shared goals.
Jump right into your project with a simple workflow that emphasizes rapid delivery and lots of feedback. Simplify your process, rather than struggle trying to manage shifting complexity.
A Tracker story is only considered done when accepted by the project's customer. This creates a constant feedback loop, starting in the very first iteration, which shapes your product and eliminates costly surprises typically found only after software ships to production.
Long software development projects that don't ship are expensive and often lead to failure. Focus on delivering stories and shipping working software often are tightly woven into the fabric of Tracker.
“Pivotal Tracker is a great lightweight tool for running distributed Scrum.”
-- Jeff Sutherland, Chairman, Scrum Training Institute & CEO, Scrum, Inc.
Take your features from concept to reality. As a team.
Add features to your overarching roadmap and reprioritize them in Tracker as your priorities change. Tracker lets your product stay nimble, just like your users.
Epics provide a central place to see story-level mockups in their contextual whole. Need more context for a story’s mockups? Quickly and easily reference its epic and see how a story-level mockup fits into the broader view.
Give your team visibility to upcoming features and see the status of features currently being implemented. Your team can follow any epics they are interested in, and can receive notifications on any epic activity they’d like.
Project members can easily see how the story they are working on fits into the bigger picture. your team stay focused while they work. Work together on fine-grained details with transparency and a strong understanding of the big picture.
Collaborate with others to crystalize your big features. Work with your designers to develop mockups and flows to create a cohesive experience at a holistic level.
"We are using Pivotal Tracker to manage all of our new web apps under development. This thing rocks! It has a very nice workflow and has really helped us know what other team members are working on and to know what our velocity of development is."
-- Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Founder and Senior Fellow, Engine Yard
Start your project by breaking down user features into small concrete user stories. Each story is bite size, about what might fit on a small index card, and represents an increment of value for your product's customer. Deconstructing your project into concrete stories can be enlightening, and gets your entire team on the same page what's really important about your project.
Once you've broken down your project into concrete stories, huddle as a team, and estimate them in terms of complexity using 'points'. To get started, take a really small story, give it 1 point, and estimate the rest keeping relative complexity in mind. This helps Pivotal Tracker predict when you might be finished with a milestone or release, but more importantly, estimation drives important conversations and helps you flesh out hidden complexity early.
Tag your stories with labels to tie related stories together. Labels let you find stories quickly, and see progress at a higher level.
Take the assets you've gathered for your project and attach them directly to stories, so your developers don't have to hunt for them when they're ready to turn those mockups into working software.
Drag stories from the Icebox, where all new stories start out, and into the Backlog, in the order that reflects business priorities. As these change, reflect new priorities by dragging stories up or down in the backlog, and let Tracker adjust projected release dates automatically.
Development work begins when your team starts the first story in the Current panel, which shows this week's iteration from the Backlog. As coding for a given story is completed, the whole team will see that story change state and color in real time, giving everyone visibility where things stand with the project. Developers always know what they have to do next by grabbing the next available story from the backlog.
Stories are evolving conversations, it's easy for anyone to engage by posting comments on stories, and receiving instant notifications via email, Twitter, or RSS. Bring your distributed team into the same virtual room!
Your team delivers finished stories by deploying new features to a staging or QA site where the team's product manager or customer can verify them. A story is only considered done when it's accepted by the customer, and story rejection is an opportunity to incorporate feedback early!
Tracker takes the busy work out of agile project management by automatically updating your project's velocity, a measure of progress, at every iteration, based on the point estimates of accepted stories. Future iterations and release dates are projected seamlessly, allowing your team to focus on prioritization and delivering great working software.
It’s been said that Pivotal Tracker turns work into a game. Keep working to improve your velocity by honing your software development process, identifying problem areas through the transparency provided by Tracker. As your team takes stories through their life cycle, watch Tracker’s colors come to life as your vision for your product crystallizes.
Tracker lets you focus on what's next, without losing sight of the big picture, or getting in the way. Plus, scoring lots of points in the iteration can be rewarding!
It's easy to extend Tracker and build your own tools using the Tracker Developer API. There is a growing collection of useful third-party tools already available.
Tracker supports integration with your Source Control Management system. We support Subversion, GitHub, and Git, plus you can create your own hooks for other systems.
Open source teams can harness the collaborative power of Tracker and share progress with the community, with public projects. Check out some public projects now!
High-level release planning tool, based on Jeff Patton's story mapping techniques. From Carbon Five.
Free Pivotal Tracker app for Android, by Niels Linnemann.
Written by our friends at Hashrocket, Slurper is a ruby script that allows you to compose stories in a plain text file and then slurp them into Pivotal Tracker through the API.
Simple but useful Mac OS X Dashboard widget that lets you create Pivotal Tracker stories easily, by Thomas Vie.
Synchronize stories in Pivotal Tracker with Cucumber features. Cucumber is a test framework that can execute plain-text documents as automated functional tests.
A Ruby-based IRC bot that lets you interact with Pivotal Tracker projects, by Doug McBride.
Chrome extension that allows you to visualize your current Tracker iteration as a cardwall.
Analyze your agile development process with this full-blown business intelligence app for Pivotal Tracker, built on the GoodData cloud business intelligence platform.
Ruby wrapper for the Tracker API, Justin Smestad.
Prioritize and collaborate online around stories linked to tickets in your bug tracking tool or support site. Tracker integrates with JIRA, Lighthouse, Bugzilla, Satisfaction, Zendesk, and includes a flexible interface to support other tools. More integrations are on the way!
It's easy to import stories from other tools, or export them to a CSV file. You can even use a spreadsheet program - just export your project, move, update, or add stories with Excel, and import them back to Tracker.
See and import your Lighthouse tickets directly into Tracker with drag and drop, and keep them updated as you collaborate and complete related stories.
Turn your Zendesk support tickets that involve bug fixes into Tracker stories, and reflect status of these to your support team.
Report and manage your bugs in this popular defect tracking tool, and use Tracker in conjunction to prioritize them along with feature work and collaborate in real time.
Leverage the openness and flexibility of JIRA while keeping your team focused with Tracker. Import and link your issues via drag and drop, and share story progress and conversation with JIRA users.
Engage with your user community easily. View, import, and collaborate around ideas, questions, and problems posted for your product on your Get Satisfaction powered support site.
An open integration framework, a rich developer API, and activity webhooks allow you to connect Tracker with just about any software tool in your workflow.
Pivotal Labs is the recognized leader in agile software development. We have successfully delivered hundreds of client products, including Pivotal Tracker, our own agile project management software. Our disciplined agile techniques accelerate development, reduce risk, and increase responsiveness to market trends.