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...

Steve Lichtenstein • Tuesday, August 25, 2015 • Updates

Android Version 0.8—Now with More Stories!

Back in July, on these very Interweb pages, we discussed the release of the Tracker Android Alpha. We explained our reasoning for putting out a less-than-fully-featured app, as well as—framed by a certain Talking Heads song reference—what the road map looked like for subsequent versions. At this point, get your camera and passport ready, because we’re ready to make the next stop on our journey: version 0.8 of the Android Alpha. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Friday, August 21, 2015 • BuildTV

The Art vs. Science of User Experience Design

In the new episode of FemgineerTV, we’re going to talk about the balance of science and art that goes into amazing design and discuss the building process behind products that delight users every single time. To help us out, I’ve invited Pauly Ting, a user experience designer who has helped brands like Bloomingdale’s, Lexus, and American Express to reveal their purpose, express their personality, and deliver a complete and authentic user experience. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Thursday, July 23, 2015 • FemgineerTV

How to Find Your Other Half: Secrets for a Good Co-Founder Partnership

In today’s episode of FemgineerTV, we’re going to talk about how to pick partners, assemble a founding team to get your idea off the ground, and reveal the key ingredient to a lasting partnership. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein • Wednesday, July 22, 2015 • Updates

We’re on a Road to Somewhere—An Android App!

There are all sorts of universal truisms in life: the lure of the cold side of the pillow, the joy of an empty airplane row, the need to release your product’s app on both the iOS and Android platforms. On this last point, Tracker has succeeded at the iOS half of the equation, but lagged behind on the Android front. No longer! We’ve heard (and sympathized with) you, Android users, and we’re pleased to finally release our Android Alpha into the Google Play wild. 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...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Wednesday, June 24, 2015 • BuildTV

How to Identify Efforts that Make a Big Impact When Building Software Products

In today’s episode of FemgineerTV, we’re going to tackle your to-do list. We’ll talk about how you can identify activities that will make a big impact for your organization, your team, and yourself, and how to feel good about deprioritizing those that don’t! 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...

Steve Lichtenstein • Thursday, June 4, 2015 • Updates

New Feature: Preventing Accidental Story Deletions

Throughout the course of history, humanity has learned to develop new and improved ways to correct or mitigate its mistakes. In 1770, the first widely available rubber eraser replaced the use of crustless bread to get rid of errant marks. In 1942, an Iowan farmer became the first person to exclaim “Argh! Do-over!” after mistakenly plowing over his recently planted crops [citation needed]. And now, continuing in that great tradition, Pivotal Tracker is introducing a new feature intended to prevent accidental multiple story deletion. Read more...

Joanne Webb • Monday, June 1, 2015 • News

Your Feedback and a Change to How We Support You

You may have noticed a Provide Feedback link in the Help & Updates menu, when you’re in a Tracker Project or workspace. We have big plans for that little widget. Though it’s currently intended only for feature requests and comments you don’t necessarily need an answer to, we’ll be improving it so you can find it anywhere, and use it for any reason you want to talk to us. Read more...

Matthew Gist • Tuesday, May 26, 2015 • Updates

Introducing: Pivotal Tracker for iOS v3.0! (Part 2)

No doubt you’ve read Part 1, installed the app, and you now know where everything is located in the new app—generally speaking—so let’s touch on a few of the finer details of this update. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Wednesday, May 20, 2015 • BuildTV

How to Use Empathy to Build Software Products

There’s one skill that every wildly successful product manager, UX designer, businessperson, and leader has in common. It helps them unite teams and ship products that customers love time and time again. What could possibly unite all these technologists? It’s conscious and deliberate empathy. Read more...

Matthew Gist • Thursday, May 14, 2015 • Updates

Introducing: Pivotal Tracker for iOS 3.0! (Part 1)

We hope you’re sitting down, because this one’s a doozy of an update. In this post, we’ll take the wide-angle view of what you can expect in the iOS 3.0 update. In Part 2, we’ll zoom in to the finer points of the new features. Read more...

Lisa Crispin • Monday, April 27, 2015 • Productivity

Cycle Time Report—An Example Script Using Trackers API

Tracker’s API can provide information that’s not currently available through the Tracker web application. Read on to learn how to use the API to compute cycle time. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Wednesday, April 22, 2015 • BuildTV

How to Build a Community of Evangelists for Your Software Product

Product Hunt did a phenomenal job building up a following. The founder, Ryan Hoover, started with a simple email list that grew into a strong community of evangelists eager to use the product every day. In today’s episode of FemgineerTV, we’ll cover how he did it. Any new startup—even if it’s not social or community based—can use these strategies to drive word-of-mouth recommendations for their product. Read more...

Nathan Swain • Monday, April 13, 2015 • Productivity

Getting the Most Out of Tracker with Team Strength and Velocity Override

Being that we’re all human, sometimes things happen that might disrupt a project’s “normal” flow: we get sick, we take a vacation, we put in extra hours to make a deadline, etc. When life happens, it’s good to reflect that in Tracker so we can depict the most accurate Velocity, and thus plan our iterations using the most true-to-life data possible. In Tracker, we do this by using a fun little feature called Team Strength (TS). Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Friday, April 10, 2015 • BuildTV

Stuck Making a Tough Decision? Here’s How Three Readers Decided and Delighted Their Customers

Some choices in life are easy. Coffee or tea? Tea, please. But the choices you face as a software developer are a little harder. Jocelyn Goldfein, former Director of Engineering at Facebook, joined us on the second episode of FemgineerTV to talk about how to make smart tradeoffs in the name of happier customers and smoother product development. Read more...

JoEllen Carter • Monday, April 6, 2015 • Updates

Introducing the Tracker API Postman Collection

Postman is a rest API helper app that is available as a Chrome extension or as a packaged app. Postman lets you build HTTP requests piece by piece, and is particularly interesting to our testing team because it allows you to switch context quickly through the use of “environments.” Postman also has some upgrades that can turn a simple API query into a powerful test that can run in several environments. Read more...