January 24, 2014

Collaborating With Pivotal Tracker

A collaborative, lightweight, agile project management tool.

Pivotal Tracker is a great tool that allows our team to track development tasks for major roadmap milestones and internal and external requests for bugfixes, improvements and new features. The web app’s drag and drop interface makes it super easy to manage tasks in a given time period and the universal iOS app is just as easy to use while on the go. Also, if you use a Mac, be sure to checkout the free PivotalBooster toolbar plugin.

Stories

Stories make up the core of Pivotal Tracker. Every story has a title, description, type (Feature, Bug, Chore) and point value (0 - 8). Points provide a straightforward view into how long the story should take to complete. For example, at Tailwind, we use the following point breakdown:

  • 0 Points: 30 Minutes
  • 1 Point: 1-2 Hours
  • 2 Points: 1 Day
  • 4 Points: 2-3 Days
  • 8 Points: > 4 Days (exact time unknown)

Workflow

When we come up with a new idea, find a bug or receive feedback from our team or customers - we create a new story. We approach stories from the perspective of the end user - and our story titles and descriptions reflect this.

New stories are automatically added to the Icebox - a list of stories that have yet to be scheduled. From there, you can easily drag and drop a story into one of the weekly sprints within the Backlog. Each Backlog sprint contains a list of all of its stories and a total points estimate. Finally, the Current view contains stories being worked on for the current sprint. This view makes it easy to see which stories have yet to be started and those that are in progress, finished and accepted. Each Monday, our engineering team reviews the progress made during the previous week and adjusts the new Current list accordingly.

What Do You Think?

There are certainly a lot of task management apps to choose from. Yet, Tracker’s drag and drop UI and simple Current, Backlog and Icebox views has worked best for our team thus far.

Does your team use Pivotal Tracker? What other task management suites have you worked with? Let me know what has or hasn’t worked for you @smwrxforever.

I originally wrote this post for the Tailwind Engineering blog. I'm cross-posting it here.