Tracker Blog

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Ryan Jones
Productivity

Principles of Effective Story Writing: The Pivotal Labs Way

Principles of Effective Story Writing: The Pivotal Labs Way blog post featured image

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...

Lisa Crispin
Productivity

A Day in the Life: Testing on the Tracker Team

A Day in the Life: Testing on the Tracker Team blog post featured image

The Tracker team as a whole takes responsibility for building in quality and making sure that necessary testing activities are done along with other development tasks. But we testers bring our own special value to the party, and we’re seeking another great tester to help us as we work to deliver the best possible product to our customers. Let’s walk you through a typical day of testing on the Tracker team. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker
BuildTV

The Challenges Immigrant Tech Entrepreneurs Face

Welcome to a brand-new season of FemgineerTV! We’ve got some great guests lined up for you this season, and we’ll be tackling some tough topics related to startups, design, engineering, product development, and leadership. To kick the season off, we’re going to be tackling one of the toughest topics that not a lot of people talk about: The Challenges Immigrant Tech Entrepreneurs Face. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein
Community

Case Study: Humana

Case Study: Humana blog post featured image

Humana knows a thing or two about transformation. From its inception in 1961 as a nursing home company, through its period owning and running hospitals in the seventies and early eighties, the company founded by David Jones and Wendell Cherry has made a habit of reinventing itself. Now they are in the midst of yet another reinvention—as a healthcare provider with a laser focus on their customers’ well-being. Read more...

Dan Podsedly
Updates

Tracker Analytics—Now in Public Beta!

Tracker Analytics—Now in Public Beta! blog post featured image

Tracker has always focused on facilitating collaboration and transparency at the story level, but it hasn’t always been easy to see the big picture or interesting/worrying trends in your projects. In other words, there are plentiful trees, but no forest. With our new Analytics beta, we’re ready to introduce the forest to the trees. This effort has largely been driven by your feedback, and our continuous desire to improve the Tracker experience for our customers, and it’s now ready for a test drive. Read more...

Dan Podsedly
Updates

Performance Improvements, New Features, and a Peek at the Road Ahead

Performance Improvements, New Features, and a Peek at the Road Ahead blog post featured image

If you’re among the folks who have been wondering whether we’ve been trapped under a rock or lost the source code to Tracker, fear not! We are alive and well, and our coding fingers are in fine shape. Many of our efforts over the last few months have been focused on making Tracker rock-solid stable and secure, as well as iterating on brand-new features to improve the overall experience. But it’s one thing for us to say “We’ve been busy!” and hope you take our word for it; we thought it would be more useful to outline what we’ve been working on. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein
Productivity

Guidelines for Agile Development Using Tracker

Guidelines for Agile Development Using Tracker blog post featured image

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...

Poornima Vijayashanker
BuildTV

How Investors Add Value Beyond the Check

If you’ve been following along with the show, you’ll have learned what the investor-founder dynamic is like from the viewpoint of an entrepreneur. In the last episode, I sat down with the CEO & Co-Founder of StyleSeat, Melody McCloskey, to understand what it takes to raise capital at the various stages of a startup, from Seed to Series A and beyond. In today’s episode, we’re going to get the opposite perspective by diving into an investor’s mindset. We’ll try to understand what compels them to write a check and, more importantly, how they add value beyond a check. Read more...

Matt Conger-Eldeen
Productivity

One Weird Trick to Switch from Polling to Push—with Zero Downtime!

One Weird Trick to Switch from Polling to Push—with Zero Downtime! blog post featured image

Pivotal Tracker is an always-up-to-date tool that you leave open all day. When Tracker was young, the only way to accomplish that was some variation of HTTP polling. But the web has evolved since then, and so have the protocols. Websockets are supported by every major browser, and server-sent events are supported by most (with hacks for ones that don’t). Push technologies are a viable option for change propagation. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker
FemgineerTV

What It Takes to Raise Capital for Your Startup

You’ve probably noticed the ongoing debate about whether or not we’re in a tech bubble. Headlines are always gushing about the latest companies with billion-dollar valuations. There’s a lot of investment capital out there right now, and if you’re a startup founder who hopes to raise money, you might be wondering what it takes to attract some of that capital to you. Read more...