13 ms·

Pivotal Tracker will shut down

311 points by sandinmyjoints 2y ago

neshaz 2y ago
We love PivotalTracker so much, that we want to build alternative that feels like home. We are looking for support to make this happen. Can you check out https://litetracker.app https://litetracker.app p.s. Yes, we tried all of the alternatives and none works for us.
Arubis 2y ago
Truly the end of an era.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
wrl 2y ago
Anybody know any other PM tools that do the auto sprint planning like Tracker does?
- jeffnappi 2y ago
  Linear
  - wrl 2y ago
    Looks like it, that's new! I tried Linear quite some time ago and it didn't "stick", I'll have to give it another shot. Thanks for the tip!
    - jeffnappi 2y ago
      Linear is the best project management for software I've ever used, highly recommend. They've added many many amazing features this year... Incredible team over there that are just a joy to work with.
      - jamil7 2y ago
        I really like it too but am worried it will go the way of other tools and need to start appealing to enterprise to expand.
      - t1mmen 2y ago
        +1. Linear is a great PM tool, maybe even the best. What makes it awesome is their support team. I’ve been in touch with them a handful of times over the past ~5 years, and each time, they’ve been excellent — fast response times, with genuine and tech savvy people on the other side.
        enra 2y ago
        I’m glad to hear! :)
      - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
        Linear is starting to hit against the boundary of enterprise requirements: tracking and compliance where as a product company needs to ship great products. The VC returns is in the former so it will be interesting to see which path they choose.
        enra 2y ago
        Linear founder here. We aim to build the product in a way that it works well for smaller/early stage teams as well as all the way to the enterprise. So I think lot of the “enterprise” stuff will be optional.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
raverbashing 2y ago
I remember their (pivotal) culture was very unique. Maybe the developers have tired out of mandatory pairing
- N_A_T_E 2y ago
  I recall the mandatory pairing as quite popular among some devs during that era. I wonder if anyone is actually still working in that manner.
  - numbsafari 2y ago
    Yeah. Now they are pairing with a chatbot.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    I do alot of my work after close of business, I don’t do well in companies that require collaboration to get tasks done I’ll pass all team player marks and metrics, but if there’s too much custom tooling, distributed knowledge and gatekeepers, my performance will suffer more than those that pair all day
  - Puntergone 2y ago
    Funny story, I work out of a small part of Accenture and was just today explaining to a client that this is how we work (pairing, TDD, etc.). Way back in 2018 or so we had a partnership with Pivotal and they taught us a bunch of their ways of working. It's been a challenge to maintain, especially through Covid, but a lot of the core ideas and practices are still alive. It doesn't work on every project, but man when it does it's a very nice way to do software.
    - _boffin_ 2y ago
      When the flow between the pair hits, it’s a beautiful thing.
  - SalientBlue 2y ago
    I work at what used to be Pivotal, now Broadcom via VMware, and do pair programming every day. It was a bit of an adjustment, and I do sometimes miss solo dev work, but pairing does have some real benefits. It is really nice to have another set of eyes to catch mistakes you miss, and it's fantastic for spreading knowledge and onboarding new developers.
ethbr1 2y ago
Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least. It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done. It limited customization down to a sane level. And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
- uzyn 2y ago
  I agree. I have been on Pivotal Tracker for over a decade. Still am. Tried Jira and a few others, usually feeling like they are too taxing on the management part. What are alternatives that are light on the customization and day-to-day management?
  - rboyd 2y ago
    end of an era linear.app seems ok
    - fowkswe 2y ago
      +1 for linear.app. It's somewhat similar in feel to PT. It's very responsive and has vim style key bindings. We switched a year ago and haven't looked back.
  - Goofy_Coyote 2y ago
    I’ve been using Github Projects. It’s not as advanced and complex as Jira though, but its simplicity and closeness to code and documentation is a blessing for my hyperactive geek brain
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
      The problem with Github projects is that they don't seem to have a super focused direction. They're trying things and then shutting them down after two years: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39106 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39106 I do like conceptually the idea of issue tracking living tightly coupled with the codebase, but unfortunately Github can't seem to get it quite right yet.
revskill 2y ago
[flagged]
willsmith72 2y ago
Noooo I use tracker for everything. There's no project management software like it in simplicity and function. You'll be missed
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  You should try out Taiga.io. Super simple (possibly TOO simple), light-weight, open-source and self-hostable.
- cknoxrun 2y ago
  I do like the approach Basecamp took to Kanban ("Card Table") - very very simple and clean (https://basecamp.com/features/card-table https://basecamp.com/features/card-table). We moved off of Basecamp but we found it super effective when we were a smaller team.
briandear 2y ago
No way!! The best tool ever. Jira and its ilk are designed around executives “product managers” who want to micromanage every damned thing.
stackskipton 2y ago
Only 7 months to get their data out and migrated to new provider, oof, thats rough.
briandear 2y ago
Can they open source it?
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  It should be a legal obligation that, passed a certain threshold of time and user base, you are required to do so.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    There should be a very high standard for "the government can force me to do [something]" and it shouldn't be thrown around as casually as, one of a thousand enterprise CRUD apps went away.
    - account42 2y ago
      Government doesn't need to force you, they can just not grant you copyright protection if you don't escrow your code for eventual release.
  - account42 2y ago
    It should be a requirement for receiving copyrigt protection in the first place. The whole point was that things end up in the commons.
  - mxuribe 2y ago
    Respectfully, i am not sure that i agree with that. I think if it were allowed to slip into, say, public domain, then, yes, i agree. HOWEVER, on a slight tanget from that point...If this company and its software have ever received any sort of taxpayer funds, then my opinion is that from the beginning, such software should have been open sourced. Publicly-paid software should be publicly available. Of course, said business has every right to earn profits from providing the service such as hosting said software for convenience for customers. But, every citizen who paid taxes has a right to see (and access!) all the code...well, that's my belief anyway. ;-)
- 2y ago
neilv 2y ago
They're not migrating users to another VMware company product? VMware can't sell Pivotal Tracker to some company that will keep it going longer (and perhaps try to migrate customers to their own product)?
- jitl 2y ago
  Since VMware sold to Broadcom in 2023, they've been cutting jobs and increasing prices to squeeze every bit of profitability possible out of their remaining customers. I'm actually kind of surprised they aren't offering support past April 30 2025 end-of-life date for 50x the current pricing.
  - sonofhans 2y ago
    Oh, not to worry, they will :)
    - benzible 2y ago
      Actually I think that was the original plan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607630 Apparently not enough interest to justify continuing.
  - neilv 2y ago
    Broadcom is in my bad-vendor list due to the handling of VMware. Most of my job as a developer now is wading through bureaucracy that other people created (e.g., figuring out a poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, and poorly-communicated third-party API that often would be easier to do myself from scratch). When I do hold my nose and wade through someone else's bureaucracy, and become dependent upon it, it had better not be pulled out from under me by some coked-up MBA who doesn't care what customers think of them.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    Can someone explain to me how Broadcom's plan is supposed to be profitable in the long term? I don't get it. You buy a company, then deliberately destroy it. How is that profitable? I get that there are tax benefits to being able to show massive losses, but certainly the net at the end is still a loss.
pwenzel 2y ago
We have to use Jira at my current workplace and it's so complicated. Pivotal Tracker, which I used at previous workplace, was so simple and focused. Sad to hear it's shutting down!
- mikehollinger 2y ago
  I am fascinated by how complex JIRA is. We evaluated it in 2008. It seemed fine enough. Looking at it 16 years later, and… what is this nonsense? It’s so customizable that it’s loaded with footguns.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    I had some thoughts on Jira: https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects. Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      > Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable. PM's gotta justify their jobs somehow.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        I love a good PM. Trust me, you don't want to be responsible for all the reporting and status updates and all that they have to deal with daily. It's just that I've never worked with someone I considered a good PM who loved Jira. The great ones wouldn't care if we did all the planning on papyrus because they were more concerned with getting things done than documenting them in excruciating detail.
    - carimura 2y ago
      it's the super customizable ones that end up adopted across large Enterprises. Flexible workflows I guess. eg Salesforce, Jira
frankjr 2y ago
[flagged]
- aleksiy123 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_(computing) Its pretty common. I think the difference is its a shutdown with a timeline.
- kawsper 2y ago
  dhh have a fun rant about using the word "sunsetting" in regards to products and services going away https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8f639H6dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8f639H6dQ
JasserInicide 2y ago
Pivotal is the company whose CEO went to Burning Man and wrote a 100% unironic blog post about how it changed his life right?
- hluska 2y ago
  How many companies have you sold?
- hu3 2y ago
  And who are we to judge what changes someone's life?
  - smegsicle 2y ago
    who are we to judge what someone finds funny?
- jordinl 2y ago
  Really? Do you have a link to the blog post?
cheschire 2y ago
This has been coming for a while. I feel bad for anyone still building on anything Tanzu these days. I expect we will see a similar announcement about some or all of those products in the coming years. It’s gotta feel stressful to those teams relying on these products.
jonheller 2y ago
That's too bad. At one of my companies they were using Trello for all engineering development which I found just too casual of an approach. Jira would have been overkill. Pivotal provided a nice middle ground and was so easy to use with just the right amount of customization and power user functionality. But I always felt like there was a small group of users and it just never got a foothold in companies.
- hammerbrostime 2y ago
  I find Shortcut to be a nice middle-ground between JIRA and Trello.
alexhutcheson 2y ago
Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project management tools that still have a committed team and forward momentum? I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot, but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step away. My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.
- nattaylor 2y ago
  https://we.phorge.it/ https://we.phorge.it/ is a community fork that appears pretty active. I was also very fond of Phabricator (all though my team preferred GitHub style pull requests) but I haven't had a need for it recently, so I haven't tried phorge myself.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- acaloiar 2y ago
  I've been using Plane (https://github.com/makeplane/plane https://github.com/makeplane/plane), also available as a hosted solution (https://plane.so https://plane.so).
- sofixa 2y ago
  > Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project management tools that still have a committed team and forward momentum? Taiga.io? > My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS. Especially with the presence of free SaaSes such as Trello, and integrated project management in self-hosted GitLab, yeah.
- Terretta 2y ago
  Phabricator? OK, how about… Redmine: - https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/repository/svn/show/trunk https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/repository/svn/show... - https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download RequestTracker: - https://github.com/bestpractical/rt https://github.com/bestpractical/rt - https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/releases https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/releases A bit like Phabricator, these are almost frameworks that can do a ticketing UI. // But really, probably something mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Taiga: - https://community.taiga.io/t/taiga-30min-setup/170 https://community.taiga.io/t/taiga-30min-setup/170
aantix 2y ago
The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was visibly obvious that there was only one queue. It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions. In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other. It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.
- aquilaFiera 2y ago
  +1. It's been 15 years since I used Tracker but I miss that aspect of it.
- jadbox 2y ago
  I LOVED Pivotal tracker for just this reason- it was way more focused. It was hands-down my favorite task tracker. Since most of my projects were code related, we eventually moved to Github Projects which is honestly very similar in being focused. The downside is that non-technical people may need to get a Github account, but it wasn't that much of an obstacle in practice.
- cpeterso 2y ago
  An alternative to one big queue is a separate queue for each client (external customers, internal teams, the dev team's own tech debt, etc) as described in "JIT selection from independent streams: An alternative to the “big backlog” of work": https://longform.asmartbear.com/jit-backlogs/ https://longform.asmartbear.com/jit-backlogs/ Each client manages their queue order, so the dev team just needs to focus on the head of each queue. (Of course, the dev team should also work with clients to clarify the requirements for the next few tasks in their queues so the head task will be shovel-ready). The dev team can then choose which queue heads to prioritize and maintain a balance, such as always have one tech debt task and X bug fix tasks in progress in addition to client work.
- teeray 2y ago
  I also loved that it was adamant about having specific, defined states with no customization. The issue is todo, in progress, done, delivered, accepted… that’s it. Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.
aantix 2y ago
What's the best, open source equivalent?
webdood90 2y ago
I briefly worked on the Tracker team until VMWare bought Pivotal. One of the best teams that I have ever worked on that truly cared about the product they were building. While pairing could be exhausting, it built a really incredible culture there that will be hard to recreate. RIP
semperos 2y ago
Shortcut (https://www.shortcut.com/ https://www.shortcut.com/) is a solid alternative to Pivotal Tracker. I work as an Engineering Manager there and helped build an importer for Pivotal Tracker data into Shortcut (https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivotal-import https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivota...). Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.
- aantix 2y ago
  Still feels like too many columns, too many states. Pivotal Tracker - ice box, backlog, or current iteration. I see companies in Trello Hell - well meaning, but often conflated, grey area states. There's like 10-15 columns on their boards. It's a hot mess.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I worked on a tool more crowded than this and of late I’m coming around to the idea that these tools are all built for management which is why they get deployed. These drag and drop views aren’t that helpful for engineers. And they just make it easy for someone else to accidentally fuck up the status on your tasks. The task list in Jira is good enough for finishing or marking one task as blocked and starting another. If anyone is using the interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, dragging things around at pace, it’s because people aren’t keeping their tasks updated and a tool can’t and probably shouldn’t try to fix that. You fix that by orienting the UI so devs benefit from using it, not by guilt tripping or lecturing.
  - DangitBobby 2y ago
    I agree. People who like Pivotal Tracker (like me) for its focus and simplicity would not enjoy Clubhouse.
- sergiotapia 2y ago
  Woah wasn't this called Clubhouse at one point? I'm getting blast from the past! We used Clubhouse at Papa long time ago.
kjksf 2y ago
Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team. People often ask: how do I find business ideas? Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away. This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this. All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care. You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product. It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone. Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow. Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company. This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.
- neshaz 2y ago
  Well, we took your approach and we'll see where it will take us. We are a company, so we made similar products before in our past, we should be good.
- anonymoushn 2y ago
  Given that it's impossible to sign up, it looks like most prospective cloners will have to learn all the features by watching videos and learn about the exported CSV format by asking former customers for their CSVs.
  - ericpauley 2y ago
    Most people probably have a PT account lying around or can find a friend with one. I just checked and my account from 6+ years ago is still active.
  - aantix 2y ago
hammerbrostime 2y ago
Pivotal Tracker was the first time I saw a digital kanban board where the workflow was represented as a series of columns you dragged items through. Since then, its become popular paradigm for pretty much every popular project management software UI around. I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.
- bityard 2y ago
  My first tech job was for a small IT consulting company that specialized in open source solutions in the early 2000's. The owner was basically the sales and overall strategy guy, I did consulting and implementations with clients, and most everyone else specialized in either their own low-level tech or business stuff. At our height, the owner started bringing in more projects than our current workflow could handle. Customers started getting angry because their projects would slip through the cracks and get delayed if they weren't calling us up weekly to nag us for status. I sort of became the project manager by default because I touched most of the projects in some way and I was the go-to guy when someone had a question about the status of a project. I wasn't really happy about this because I liked doing tech stuff more than I liked managing projects. In an attempt to preserve my sanity and get back to logging billable hours, I grabbed a deck of blank index cards and wrote down the company name, project name, status and for each project we had. (I didn't like spreadsheets at the time and this was faster than writing code.) That way, I didn't have to actively remember the status of every project. When needed or when asked, I could just grab the card and look. Once a week or so, I would update the status of each project on the card. Not long after, I got to noticing that there was really only four (or five, I don't recall) states that any project could be in and decided to stop writing them on the cards. Instead I placed the cards in dedicated piles that represented the project's status and moved them around as needed. That worked well. Eventually, I thought it would good if everyone on the team could see the projects and their status as well, so I grabbed an old whiteboard, hung it on the wall behind me, drew a column for each status, and taped all the cards into the column corresponding to their status. This was a BIG improvement. I stopped wasting an hour every morning just going over project status with the boss and other employees. Everyone could just walk over to the area near my desk and look at the wall behind me. (It was an open-plan office before those were "cool.") Others could move the cards between columns themselves. When a client called demanding an update, I could just glance behind me. A few jobs later, I took a compulsory three-day seminar on Agile and saw that they called this thing a Kanban board.
sandinmyjoints 2y ago
I will really miss Pivotal. Looks like my org will shift to Jira. People talk a lot about how Jira is so customizable to the point of it being problematic. But would it be possible to customize it to work somewhat like Pivotal, I wonder?
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Like others have mentioned, if you like Pivotal, check out Linear first. If you end up on Jira, once you get it configured, put the admin password in a bottle and throw it into the ocean. Do not let anyone say "you know, if we made this one little change to our workflow...", because once that dam breaks all hope is lost.
bschmidt1 2y ago
These guys were pioneers who set forth a lot of the patterns used in other PM software (Did they invent "Velocity"?). I hated Pivotal in the early days, but after a couple years on the job I learned to really love it especially as the newer flimsier sprint planning tools were popping up in the early web 2 days. Only Trello really "beat it" fairly - Jira was always top-down forced, and Asana only won with designers because it was pretty while Pivotal was more tactical (not to mention they clung to skeuomorphic UI a little too long). The rest is history. I guess we can say Pivotal was quite pivotal in the AGILE/sprint/PM software race. RIP
- skybrian 2y ago
  We were doing “velocity” at a startup using a rack of index cards. Software is not strictly necessary when everyone is in the same room.
  - latchkey 2y ago
    PT's concept of velocity isn't just tracking a number. It is tracking what work will get done within a period of time based on the average amount of work done previously. It allowed PM's to actually estimate when a feature would be completed and how adding or removing stories (or people!) would impact future feature deadlines. Initial velocity was meaningless and only developed over time as an average value of a team of people working together, taking into account things like vacations and sick days. None of this could be done realtime with a rack of index cards as it was something that happened over many weeks.
    - skybrian 2y ago
      Yes, that’s basically how we did it. Though not formally accounting for vacation days; there were four of us and we didn’t have people coming and going much. We only did it once a week during the retrospective. It’s not hard to add up story points for the week and remember what you did in previous weeks. You could enter it into a spreadsheet if you want to get fancy. The concept comes from Extreme Programming. Software implementations came later. I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you need a larger team for it to matter. Here are some photographs of the team room: https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/ https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/
latchkey 2y ago
RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I use these skills every single day. You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.
- makk 2y ago
  > How to polish a turd over time. You mean iterating and pivoting.
  - latchkey 2y ago
    No, I mean taking a turd, which was the Cloud Foundry codebase that Pivotal inherited (aka purchased), and polishing it to be something that actually worked. It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at least we tried our best.
- Dansvidania 2y ago
  I heard this from other people that worked on Pivotal. Must have been a cool eng team.
  - latchkey 2y ago
    Some of the best people I've ever worked with. Still friends with many of them to this day.
- rudnevr 2y ago
  Same. Out of 15 shops I worked for this was absolutely different (2017-2018) and the only place I've seen pair programming and TDD done right. Once we managed to deploy first version of a trading product with no bugs at all. When I tried to explain other people afterwards how to do this, they just shrugged, as if I told a fairy tale. I had a chance to demo it maybe a couple more times while migrating other systems, and very successfully (and with very low mental and emotional effort) - itemizing the tests cases first, building fakes, frequent commits, trunk-based development, small stories, incremental improvements. But it's never been perceived as a designed success, they are typically so prejudiced that they saw it as a fluctuation in the monkey circus of software development they got used to. Now I'm at the stage we need a support group for ex-alumnis.
larrywright 2y ago
This is sad to see. I haven't used PT in over a decade probably, but I used it heavily for 3-4 years before that. As a contrast to other "agile" tools, it was a breath of fresh air. So simple, everything was all on one screen, so easy to move things from state to state. My team loved it because they could just open it up in a window and leave it open all day, making changes as needed. I don't think I've ever seen anything since that came close to it. I just logged in for the first time in years and found that I still had two side projects in there. Time to download them I guess.
throwaway918299 2y ago
man, what would I give to have Atlassian shut down - so much frustration, anger, productivity lost and just absolute misery caused by that terrible company and their horrible products I actually liked using Tracker.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Atlassian's primary sin is listening to PMs for features. As a subset of users, they seem to want the flexibility of Excel, except it also has the specific workflow they want out of the box (which is different for every PM). Every product that's chased that rabbit down the hole has ended up with something customizable enough that (a) users need training to actually use it & (b) nobody is ever trained on it. I'm sure Jira is great... if I and everyone else at the company went to a two-week training course on configuring and using it. But none of those people, nor I, am ever going to do that. Tl;dr - project management/tracker tools should have a complexity feature cap, defined by what a reasonable person can intuit in the course of normal use over a month.
  - throwaway918299 2y ago
    I would rather just use an actual spreadsheet for issue tracking than Jira. We lost our CTO recently, and he was also the "jira admin" (ie. the only person who knows how the hell to do anything with jira) and it's just been a clusterf*ck ever since.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Excel-as-a-benchmark is a powerful thought argument. If something can't be significantly better than Excel, then product specs probably need refining. It's not that Excel is amazing or perfect in any one thing, but it is a pretty amazing blend of simplicity, flexibility, out of the box features, programmability, and presentation.
      - karmajunkie 2y ago
        this dovetails into my test for whether i’m looking at a good startup idea or not… if existing solutions are all complicated spreadsheets, there’s both a potential market of users, and the problem is complex enough to warrant some code to manage it. ETA: obviously not all good startup ideas fit into that thesis, just the ones i tend to enjoy working on.
schnable 2y ago
Their site still has a COVID-era banner about "unusual times." Talk about a neglected product.
- leptons 2y ago
  COVID is still a thing, and we are indeed in strange times.
  - justusthane 2y ago
    When does "strange" become "normal"?
    - leptons 2y ago
      Maybe after the upcoming election? But I'm sure the next election will also make things weird.
constantinum 2y ago
I signed up for Pivotal Tracker a month ago, after a ten-year gap. I loved the simplicity then, and I love it even more now. I'm saying this after using multiple different project management/Agile management apps. I still use all the terminologies I learnt from PT — Icebox, backlog, current — across other project management apps. Sad, and you will be missed.
sub7 2y ago
IMO all of these todo list apps are the same - no moat and not useful enough to be critical for anyone or anything. No idea how Asana is still valued at $3B it's literally just notepad with checkboxes.
geenat 2y ago
Surprised to see this. Still one of my favorite kanban implementations. Mostly just gets out of your way.
j45 2y ago
Ouch. VMware could at least open source it if it's no longer available.
aaronlsilber 2y ago
Wish 37Signals would clone something like this and sell it via https://once.com/ https://once.com/ (pay once, install and host yourself).
- nickisnoble 2y ago
  They won't because Basecamp has a board view.
dan1111 2y ago
Shortcut.com has it's an importer tool from Pivotal. Give it a go! https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Importing-data-from-Pivotal-Tracker-to-Shortcut https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...
dan1111 2y ago
Checkout Shortcut.com! They have an import tool from Pivotal Tracker. https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Importing-data-from-Pivotal-Tracker-to-Shortcut https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...
mixmastamyk 2y ago
"Yes, that Pivotal."
desireco42 2y ago
I always loved Tracker and it sucks it got sold and resold until they shut it down like this. I am using Linear but it doesn't have simplicity of Tracker tbh. Maybe Tracker belongs in different time that we will not go back to, who knows.
arepb 2y ago
Hate it when the VMware Tanzu division does that
bleonard 2y ago
Just came to say, I still think this is the best balance between the many factors of running a dev team. I keep trying to recreate it in every tool I use.
seattle_spring 2y ago
I could have called this years ago when I found out they exclusively use and enforce pair programming in-house https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to-pair https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to...
- quesera 2y ago
  > I could have called this years ago when I found out they exclusively use and enforce pair programming in-house No, you could not have. The environment that birthed Pivotal Tracker had the same culture, and the death of PT is a consequence of multiple profitable acquisitions, eventually into a multinational semiconductor corp that has no use for a small SaaS devtools product. You could probably have called it based on the acquisition chain though. Many of us have been hoping to be surprised. Our luck has run out.
grishka 2y ago
I remember using this around 10 years ago and liking it quite a lot, especially compared to Redmine we replaced it with.
edida 2y ago
Shortcut is a good alternative to Pivotal (https://www.shortcut.com/ https://www.shortcut.com/)
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
If it's really that valuable, someone will offer to buy it.
amai 2y ago
There are many alternatives: - https://www.easyredmine.com/ https://www.easyredmine.com/ - https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/ - https://taiga.io/ https://taiga.io/ - https://www.stackfield.com/ https://www.stackfield.com/ - https://zenkit.com/en/ https://zenkit.com/en/
hyggetrold 2y ago
Surprised nobody has dropped a monday.com advertisement into this thread yet ;)
m25n 2y ago
I was an engineer on Tracker from 2013 to 2020. I’m sad to see it go.
m3kw9 2y ago
Problem with these trackers is that they are by design super opinionated on how your work flow is gonna be once you get past simple reminders type tracking
briantakita 2y ago
I got to work on Pivotal Tracker in 2006 during it's first rewrite. Fun project.
negativeonehalf 2y ago
Pouring one out for Pivotal Tracker. This was an outstanding ticket tracking and project management system, way ahead of its time. Back when I did contract software engineering, Pivotal Tracker made managing client relationships a breeze by giving the client perfect visibility into the impact of feature requests, and allowing them to make the tradeoffs that made sense for their business. "Want to add this new feature, and do it right away? No problem, but as you can see, if I drag it into this week, as a 4-point task, it pushes everything else back by two days, which means we'll have to cut something else or change the launch date." Great UI, great vibes, and was just a delight to use. Even as PT dies, its legacy lives on. Thank you, PT team!
vic40 2y ago
The end of an era. Good Pivotal Labs, was nice working there.
furilo 2y ago
I'm opening my Pivotal Tracker project from 2011... and I'm surprised at how good the UX is/was!!! Visually it looks old, but the UX I think is great: Simplicity is reinforced with a great information density: lots, but not overwhelming. Current design trends make information density super low, forcing you to scroll a lot and spending much more energy/time just to be able to look at things. When you need to "open" an item, you remain in the same screen (no modal, no context change): metadata, description, conversation. Nothing more! In Linear I'm totally lost with projects, cycles, views, projects... I'm stuck with Github Issues/Projects, but I miss Pivotal simplicity!! I've just exported a 10MB Pivotal CSV...
DLRiker 2y ago
Devin from Shortcut here, happy to walk anyone through our API importer capabilities and provide a couple months of our Business plan for evaluation. Details on the importer capabilities: https://www.shortcut.com/blog/importing-from-pivotal-tracker-to-shortcut https://www.shortcut.com/blog/importing-from-pivotal-tracker...
patrickw 2y ago
http://www.centralcm42.com http://www.centralcm42.com https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central > An agile project planning tool and Pivotal Tracker drop-in replacement
gregsadetsky 2y ago
If anyone is still lurking in this thread - how realistic would it be to try to buy Pivotal Tracker back from Broadcom? Is the possible purchase cost below the minimum that Broadcom's legal department even accepts to look at? (i.e. they don't get involved with "small" sub-10M deals..?)
jFriedensreich 2y ago
Its really sad to see the best project management tool ever created fade away. Its not just the best and most intuitive way to do delivery predictions and team capacity planning but also somehow managed to reach peak interface. As development slowed down it felt more like a japanese tea cup that just reached perfection. (except for github integration) would love to make a clone.
enra 2y ago
Pouring one out. I remember using Pivotal Tracker back when working in a Ruby on Rails shop and enjoying directness and how optioned it was of it. Then several years later, after working in large Silicon Valley tech companies, and seeing how they run with Jira, I decided to start https://linear.app https://linear.app So much team's time and effort went in to configuring their tools instead of actually working on things. We do more than PT did, but aim to keep the experience straightforward and focused, regardless of the size of your team or company.

We love PivotalTracker so much, that we want to build alternative that feels like home. We are looking for support to make this happen. Can you check out https://litetracker.app https://litetracker.app p.s. Yes, we tried all of the alternatives and none works for us.

Arubis 2y ago

Truly the end of an era.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

wrl 2y ago

Anybody know any other PM tools that do the auto sprint planning like Tracker does?

jeffnappi 2y ago
Linear
- wrl 2y ago
  Looks like it, that's new! I tried Linear quite some time ago and it didn't "stick", I'll have to give it another shot. Thanks for the tip!
  - jeffnappi 2y ago
    Linear is the best project management for software I've ever used, highly recommend. They've added many many amazing features this year... Incredible team over there that are just a joy to work with.
    - jamil7 2y ago
      I really like it too but am worried it will go the way of other tools and need to start appealing to enterprise to expand.
    - t1mmen 2y ago
      +1. Linear is a great PM tool, maybe even the best. What makes it awesome is their support team. I’ve been in touch with them a handful of times over the past ~5 years, and each time, they’ve been excellent — fast response times, with genuine and tech savvy people on the other side.
      - enra 2y ago
        I’m glad to hear! :)
    - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      Linear is starting to hit against the boundary of enterprise requirements: tracking and compliance where as a product company needs to ship great products. The VC returns is in the former so it will be interesting to see which path they choose.
      - enra 2y ago
        Linear founder here. We aim to build the product in a way that it works well for smaller/early stage teams as well as all the way to the enterprise. So I think lot of the “enterprise” stuff will be optional.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

raverbashing 2y ago

I remember their (pivotal) culture was very unique. Maybe the developers have tired out of mandatory pairing

N_A_T_E 2y ago
I recall the mandatory pairing as quite popular among some devs during that era. I wonder if anyone is actually still working in that manner.
- numbsafari 2y ago
  Yeah. Now they are pairing with a chatbot.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  I do alot of my work after close of business, I don’t do well in companies that require collaboration to get tasks done I’ll pass all team player marks and metrics, but if there’s too much custom tooling, distributed knowledge and gatekeepers, my performance will suffer more than those that pair all day
- Puntergone 2y ago
  Funny story, I work out of a small part of Accenture and was just today explaining to a client that this is how we work (pairing, TDD, etc.). Way back in 2018 or so we had a partnership with Pivotal and they taught us a bunch of their ways of working. It's been a challenge to maintain, especially through Covid, but a lot of the core ideas and practices are still alive. It doesn't work on every project, but man when it does it's a very nice way to do software.
  - _boffin_ 2y ago
    When the flow between the pair hits, it’s a beautiful thing.
- SalientBlue 2y ago
  I work at what used to be Pivotal, now Broadcom via VMware, and do pair programming every day. It was a bit of an adjustment, and I do sometimes miss solo dev work, but pairing does have some real benefits. It is really nice to have another set of eyes to catch mistakes you miss, and it's fantastic for spreading knowledge and onboarding new developers.

ethbr1 2y ago

Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least. It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done. It limited customization down to a sane level. And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).

uzyn 2y ago
I agree. I have been on Pivotal Tracker for over a decade. Still am. Tried Jira and a few others, usually feeling like they are too taxing on the management part. What are alternatives that are light on the customization and day-to-day management?
- rboyd 2y ago
  end of an era linear.app seems ok
  - fowkswe 2y ago
    +1 for linear.app. It's somewhat similar in feel to PT. It's very responsive and has vim style key bindings. We switched a year ago and haven't looked back.
- Goofy_Coyote 2y ago
  I’ve been using Github Projects. It’s not as advanced and complex as Jira though, but its simplicity and closeness to code and documentation is a blessing for my hyperactive geek brain
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
    The problem with Github projects is that they don't seem to have a super focused direction. They're trying things and then shutting them down after two years: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39106 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39106 I do like conceptually the idea of issue tracking living tightly coupled with the codebase, but unfortunately Github can't seem to get it quite right yet.

revskill 2y ago

[flagged]

willsmith72 2y ago

Noooo I use tracker for everything. There's no project management software like it in simplicity and function. You'll be missed

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
You should try out Taiga.io. Super simple (possibly TOO simple), light-weight, open-source and self-hostable.
cknoxrun 2y ago
I do like the approach Basecamp took to Kanban ("Card Table") - very very simple and clean (https://basecamp.com/features/card-table https://basecamp.com/features/card-table). We moved off of Basecamp but we found it super effective when we were a smaller team.

briandear 2y ago

No way!! The best tool ever. Jira and its ilk are designed around executives “product managers” who want to micromanage every damned thing.

stackskipton 2y ago

Only 7 months to get their data out and migrated to new provider, oof, thats rough.

briandear 2y ago

Can they open source it?

BiteCode_dev 2y ago
It should be a legal obligation that, passed a certain threshold of time and user base, you are required to do so.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  There should be a very high standard for "the government can force me to do [something]" and it shouldn't be thrown around as casually as, one of a thousand enterprise CRUD apps went away.
  - account42 2y ago
    Government doesn't need to force you, they can just not grant you copyright protection if you don't escrow your code for eventual release.
- account42 2y ago
  It should be a requirement for receiving copyrigt protection in the first place. The whole point was that things end up in the commons.
- mxuribe 2y ago
  Respectfully, i am not sure that i agree with that. I think if it were allowed to slip into, say, public domain, then, yes, i agree. HOWEVER, on a slight tanget from that point...If this company and its software have ever received any sort of taxpayer funds, then my opinion is that from the beginning, such software should have been open sourced. Publicly-paid software should be publicly available. Of course, said business has every right to earn profits from providing the service such as hosting said software for convenience for customers. But, every citizen who paid taxes has a right to see (and access!) all the code...well, that's my belief anyway. ;-)
2y ago

neilv 2y ago

They're not migrating users to another VMware company product? VMware can't sell Pivotal Tracker to some company that will keep it going longer (and perhaps try to migrate customers to their own product)?

jitl 2y ago
Since VMware sold to Broadcom in 2023, they've been cutting jobs and increasing prices to squeeze every bit of profitability possible out of their remaining customers. I'm actually kind of surprised they aren't offering support past April 30 2025 end-of-life date for 50x the current pricing.
- sonofhans 2y ago
  Oh, not to worry, they will :)
  - benzible 2y ago
    Actually I think that was the original plan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607630 Apparently not enough interest to justify continuing.
- neilv 2y ago
  Broadcom is in my bad-vendor list due to the handling of VMware. Most of my job as a developer now is wading through bureaucracy that other people created (e.g., figuring out a poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, and poorly-communicated third-party API that often would be easier to do myself from scratch). When I do hold my nose and wade through someone else's bureaucracy, and become dependent upon it, it had better not be pulled out from under me by some coked-up MBA who doesn't care what customers think of them.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  Can someone explain to me how Broadcom's plan is supposed to be profitable in the long term? I don't get it. You buy a company, then deliberately destroy it. How is that profitable? I get that there are tax benefits to being able to show massive losses, but certainly the net at the end is still a loss.

pwenzel 2y ago

We have to use Jira at my current workplace and it's so complicated. Pivotal Tracker, which I used at previous workplace, was so simple and focused. Sad to hear it's shutting down!

mikehollinger 2y ago
I am fascinated by how complex JIRA is. We evaluated it in 2008. It seemed fine enough. Looking at it 16 years later, and… what is this nonsense? It’s so customizable that it’s loaded with footguns.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I had some thoughts on Jira: https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects. Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    > Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable. PM's gotta justify their jobs somehow.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      I love a good PM. Trust me, you don't want to be responsible for all the reporting and status updates and all that they have to deal with daily. It's just that I've never worked with someone I considered a good PM who loved Jira. The great ones wouldn't care if we did all the planning on papyrus because they were more concerned with getting things done than documenting them in excruciating detail.
  - carimura 2y ago
    it's the super customizable ones that end up adopted across large Enterprises. Flexible workflows I guess. eg Salesforce, Jira

frankjr 2y ago

[flagged]

aleksiy123 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_(computing) Its pretty common. I think the difference is its a shutdown with a timeline.
kawsper 2y ago
dhh have a fun rant about using the word "sunsetting" in regards to products and services going away https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8f639H6dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8f639H6dQ

JasserInicide 2y ago

Pivotal is the company whose CEO went to Burning Man and wrote a 100% unironic blog post about how it changed his life right?

hluska 2y ago
How many companies have you sold?
hu3 2y ago
And who are we to judge what changes someone's life?
- smegsicle 2y ago
  who are we to judge what someone finds funny?
jordinl 2y ago
Really? Do you have a link to the blog post?

cheschire 2y ago

This has been coming for a while. I feel bad for anyone still building on anything Tanzu these days. I expect we will see a similar announcement about some or all of those products in the coming years. It’s gotta feel stressful to those teams relying on these products.

jonheller 2y ago

That's too bad. At one of my companies they were using Trello for all engineering development which I found just too casual of an approach. Jira would have been overkill. Pivotal provided a nice middle ground and was so easy to use with just the right amount of customization and power user functionality. But I always felt like there was a small group of users and it just never got a foothold in companies.

hammerbrostime 2y ago
I find Shortcut to be a nice middle-ground between JIRA and Trello.

alexhutcheson 2y ago

Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project management tools that still have a committed team and forward momentum? I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot, but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step away. My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.

nattaylor 2y ago
https://we.phorge.it/ https://we.phorge.it/ is a community fork that appears pretty active. I was also very fond of Phabricator (all though my team preferred GitHub style pull requests) but I haven't had a need for it recently, so I haven't tried phorge myself.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
acaloiar 2y ago
I've been using Plane (https://github.com/makeplane/plane https://github.com/makeplane/plane), also available as a hosted solution (https://plane.so https://plane.so).
sofixa 2y ago
> Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project management tools that still have a committed team and forward momentum? Taiga.io? > My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS. Especially with the presence of free SaaSes such as Trello, and integrated project management in self-hosted GitLab, yeah.
Terretta 2y ago
Phabricator? OK, how about… Redmine: - https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/repository/svn/show/trunk https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/repository/svn/show... - https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download RequestTracker: - https://github.com/bestpractical/rt https://github.com/bestpractical/rt - https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/releases https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/releases A bit like Phabricator, these are almost frameworks that can do a ticketing UI. // But really, probably something mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Taiga: - https://community.taiga.io/t/taiga-30min-setup/170 https://community.taiga.io/t/taiga-30min-setup/170

aantix 2y ago

The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was visibly obvious that there was only one queue. It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions. In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other. It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.

aquilaFiera 2y ago
+1. It's been 15 years since I used Tracker but I miss that aspect of it.
jadbox 2y ago
I LOVED Pivotal tracker for just this reason- it was way more focused. It was hands-down my favorite task tracker. Since most of my projects were code related, we eventually moved to Github Projects which is honestly very similar in being focused. The downside is that non-technical people may need to get a Github account, but it wasn't that much of an obstacle in practice.
cpeterso 2y ago
An alternative to one big queue is a separate queue for each client (external customers, internal teams, the dev team's own tech debt, etc) as described in "JIT selection from independent streams: An alternative to the “big backlog” of work": https://longform.asmartbear.com/jit-backlogs/ https://longform.asmartbear.com/jit-backlogs/ Each client manages their queue order, so the dev team just needs to focus on the head of each queue. (Of course, the dev team should also work with clients to clarify the requirements for the next few tasks in their queues so the head task will be shovel-ready). The dev team can then choose which queue heads to prioritize and maintain a balance, such as always have one tech debt task and X bug fix tasks in progress in addition to client work.
teeray 2y ago
I also loved that it was adamant about having specific, defined states with no customization. The issue is todo, in progress, done, delivered, accepted… that’s it. Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.

aantix 2y ago

What's the best, open source equivalent?

webdood90 2y ago

I briefly worked on the Tracker team until VMWare bought Pivotal. One of the best teams that I have ever worked on that truly cared about the product they were building. While pairing could be exhausting, it built a really incredible culture there that will be hard to recreate. RIP

semperos 2y ago

Shortcut (https://www.shortcut.com/ https://www.shortcut.com/) is a solid alternative to Pivotal Tracker. I work as an Engineering Manager there and helped build an importer for Pivotal Tracker data into Shortcut (https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivotal-import https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivota...). Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.

aantix 2y ago
Still feels like too many columns, too many states. Pivotal Tracker - ice box, backlog, or current iteration. I see companies in Trello Hell - well meaning, but often conflated, grey area states. There's like 10-15 columns on their boards. It's a hot mess.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I worked on a tool more crowded than this and of late I’m coming around to the idea that these tools are all built for management which is why they get deployed. These drag and drop views aren’t that helpful for engineers. And they just make it easy for someone else to accidentally fuck up the status on your tasks. The task list in Jira is good enough for finishing or marking one task as blocked and starting another. If anyone is using the interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, dragging things around at pace, it’s because people aren’t keeping their tasks updated and a tool can’t and probably shouldn’t try to fix that. You fix that by orienting the UI so devs benefit from using it, not by guilt tripping or lecturing.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  I agree. People who like Pivotal Tracker (like me) for its focus and simplicity would not enjoy Clubhouse.
sergiotapia 2y ago
Woah wasn't this called Clubhouse at one point? I'm getting blast from the past! We used Clubhouse at Papa long time ago.

kjksf 2y ago

Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team. People often ask: how do I find business ideas? Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away. This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this. All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care. You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product. It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone. Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow. Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company. This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.

neshaz 2y ago
Well, we took your approach and we'll see where it will take us. We are a company, so we made similar products before in our past, we should be good.
anonymoushn 2y ago
Given that it's impossible to sign up, it looks like most prospective cloners will have to learn all the features by watching videos and learn about the exported CSV format by asking former customers for their CSVs.
- ericpauley 2y ago
  Most people probably have a PT account lying around or can find a friend with one. I just checked and my account from 6+ years ago is still active.
- aantix 2y ago

hammerbrostime 2y ago

Pivotal Tracker was the first time I saw a digital kanban board where the workflow was represented as a series of columns you dragged items through. Since then, its become popular paradigm for pretty much every popular project management software UI around. I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.

bityard 2y ago
My first tech job was for a small IT consulting company that specialized in open source solutions in the early 2000's. The owner was basically the sales and overall strategy guy, I did consulting and implementations with clients, and most everyone else specialized in either their own low-level tech or business stuff. At our height, the owner started bringing in more projects than our current workflow could handle. Customers started getting angry because their projects would slip through the cracks and get delayed if they weren't calling us up weekly to nag us for status. I sort of became the project manager by default because I touched most of the projects in some way and I was the go-to guy when someone had a question about the status of a project. I wasn't really happy about this because I liked doing tech stuff more than I liked managing projects. In an attempt to preserve my sanity and get back to logging billable hours, I grabbed a deck of blank index cards and wrote down the company name, project name, status and for each project we had. (I didn't like spreadsheets at the time and this was faster than writing code.) That way, I didn't have to actively remember the status of every project. When needed or when asked, I could just grab the card and look. Once a week or so, I would update the status of each project on the card. Not long after, I got to noticing that there was really only four (or five, I don't recall) states that any project could be in and decided to stop writing them on the cards. Instead I placed the cards in dedicated piles that represented the project's status and moved them around as needed. That worked well. Eventually, I thought it would good if everyone on the team could see the projects and their status as well, so I grabbed an old whiteboard, hung it on the wall behind me, drew a column for each status, and taped all the cards into the column corresponding to their status. This was a BIG improvement. I stopped wasting an hour every morning just going over project status with the boss and other employees. Everyone could just walk over to the area near my desk and look at the wall behind me. (It was an open-plan office before those were "cool.") Others could move the cards between columns themselves. When a client called demanding an update, I could just glance behind me. A few jobs later, I took a compulsory three-day seminar on Agile and saw that they called this thing a Kanban board.

sandinmyjoints 2y ago

I will really miss Pivotal. Looks like my org will shift to Jira. People talk a lot about how Jira is so customizable to the point of it being problematic. But would it be possible to customize it to work somewhat like Pivotal, I wonder?

kstrauser 2y ago
Like others have mentioned, if you like Pivotal, check out Linear first. If you end up on Jira, once you get it configured, put the admin password in a bottle and throw it into the ocean. Do not let anyone say "you know, if we made this one little change to our workflow...", because once that dam breaks all hope is lost.

bschmidt1 2y ago

These guys were pioneers who set forth a lot of the patterns used in other PM software (Did they invent "Velocity"?). I hated Pivotal in the early days, but after a couple years on the job I learned to really love it especially as the newer flimsier sprint planning tools were popping up in the early web 2 days. Only Trello really "beat it" fairly - Jira was always top-down forced, and Asana only won with designers because it was pretty while Pivotal was more tactical (not to mention they clung to skeuomorphic UI a little too long). The rest is history. I guess we can say Pivotal was quite pivotal in the AGILE/sprint/PM software race. RIP

skybrian 2y ago
We were doing “velocity” at a startup using a rack of index cards. Software is not strictly necessary when everyone is in the same room.
- latchkey 2y ago
  PT's concept of velocity isn't just tracking a number. It is tracking what work will get done within a period of time based on the average amount of work done previously. It allowed PM's to actually estimate when a feature would be completed and how adding or removing stories (or people!) would impact future feature deadlines. Initial velocity was meaningless and only developed over time as an average value of a team of people working together, taking into account things like vacations and sick days. None of this could be done realtime with a rack of index cards as it was something that happened over many weeks.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    Yes, that’s basically how we did it. Though not formally accounting for vacation days; there were four of us and we didn’t have people coming and going much. We only did it once a week during the retrospective. It’s not hard to add up story points for the week and remember what you did in previous weeks. You could enter it into a spreadsheet if you want to get fancy. The concept comes from Extreme Programming. Software implementations came later. I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you need a larger team for it to matter. Here are some photographs of the team room: https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/ https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/

latchkey 2y ago

RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I use these skills every single day. You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.

makk 2y ago
> How to polish a turd over time. You mean iterating and pivoting.
- latchkey 2y ago
  No, I mean taking a turd, which was the Cloud Foundry codebase that Pivotal inherited (aka purchased), and polishing it to be something that actually worked. It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at least we tried our best.
Dansvidania 2y ago
I heard this from other people that worked on Pivotal. Must have been a cool eng team.
- latchkey 2y ago
  Some of the best people I've ever worked with. Still friends with many of them to this day.
rudnevr 2y ago
Same. Out of 15 shops I worked for this was absolutely different (2017-2018) and the only place I've seen pair programming and TDD done right. Once we managed to deploy first version of a trading product with no bugs at all. When I tried to explain other people afterwards how to do this, they just shrugged, as if I told a fairy tale. I had a chance to demo it maybe a couple more times while migrating other systems, and very successfully (and with very low mental and emotional effort) - itemizing the tests cases first, building fakes, frequent commits, trunk-based development, small stories, incremental improvements. But it's never been perceived as a designed success, they are typically so prejudiced that they saw it as a fluctuation in the monkey circus of software development they got used to. Now I'm at the stage we need a support group for ex-alumnis.

larrywright 2y ago

This is sad to see. I haven't used PT in over a decade probably, but I used it heavily for 3-4 years before that. As a contrast to other "agile" tools, it was a breath of fresh air. So simple, everything was all on one screen, so easy to move things from state to state. My team loved it because they could just open it up in a window and leave it open all day, making changes as needed. I don't think I've ever seen anything since that came close to it. I just logged in for the first time in years and found that I still had two side projects in there. Time to download them I guess.

throwaway918299 2y ago

man, what would I give to have Atlassian shut down - so much frustration, anger, productivity lost and just absolute misery caused by that terrible company and their horrible products I actually liked using Tracker.

ethbr1 2y ago
Atlassian's primary sin is listening to PMs for features. As a subset of users, they seem to want the flexibility of Excel, except it also has the specific workflow they want out of the box (which is different for every PM). Every product that's chased that rabbit down the hole has ended up with something customizable enough that (a) users need training to actually use it & (b) nobody is ever trained on it. I'm sure Jira is great... if I and everyone else at the company went to a two-week training course on configuring and using it. But none of those people, nor I, am ever going to do that. Tl;dr - project management/tracker tools should have a complexity feature cap, defined by what a reasonable person can intuit in the course of normal use over a month.
- throwaway918299 2y ago
  I would rather just use an actual spreadsheet for issue tracking than Jira. We lost our CTO recently, and he was also the "jira admin" (ie. the only person who knows how the hell to do anything with jira) and it's just been a clusterf*ck ever since.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Excel-as-a-benchmark is a powerful thought argument. If something can't be significantly better than Excel, then product specs probably need refining. It's not that Excel is amazing or perfect in any one thing, but it is a pretty amazing blend of simplicity, flexibility, out of the box features, programmability, and presentation.
    - karmajunkie 2y ago
      this dovetails into my test for whether i’m looking at a good startup idea or not… if existing solutions are all complicated spreadsheets, there’s both a potential market of users, and the problem is complex enough to warrant some code to manage it. ETA: obviously not all good startup ideas fit into that thesis, just the ones i tend to enjoy working on.

schnable 2y ago

Their site still has a COVID-era banner about "unusual times." Talk about a neglected product.

leptons 2y ago
COVID is still a thing, and we are indeed in strange times.
- justusthane 2y ago
  When does "strange" become "normal"?
  - leptons 2y ago
    Maybe after the upcoming election? But I'm sure the next election will also make things weird.

constantinum 2y ago

I signed up for Pivotal Tracker a month ago, after a ten-year gap. I loved the simplicity then, and I love it even more now. I'm saying this after using multiple different project management/Agile management apps. I still use all the terminologies I learnt from PT — Icebox, backlog, current — across other project management apps. Sad, and you will be missed.

sub7 2y ago

IMO all of these todo list apps are the same - no moat and not useful enough to be critical for anyone or anything. No idea how Asana is still valued at $3B it's literally just notepad with checkboxes.

geenat 2y ago

Surprised to see this. Still one of my favorite kanban implementations. Mostly just gets out of your way.

j45 2y ago

Ouch. VMware could at least open source it if it's no longer available.

aaronlsilber 2y ago

Wish 37Signals would clone something like this and sell it via https://once.com/ https://once.com/ (pay once, install and host yourself).

nickisnoble 2y ago
They won't because Basecamp has a board view.

dan1111 2y ago

Shortcut.com has it's an importer tool from Pivotal. Give it a go! https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Importing-data-from-Pivotal-Tracker-to-Shortcut https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...

dan1111 2y ago

Checkout Shortcut.com! They have an import tool from Pivotal Tracker. https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Importing-data-from-Pivotal-Tracker-to-Shortcut https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...

mixmastamyk 2y ago

"Yes, that Pivotal."

desireco42 2y ago

I always loved Tracker and it sucks it got sold and resold until they shut it down like this. I am using Linear but it doesn't have simplicity of Tracker tbh. Maybe Tracker belongs in different time that we will not go back to, who knows.

arepb 2y ago

Hate it when the VMware Tanzu division does that

bleonard 2y ago

Just came to say, I still think this is the best balance between the many factors of running a dev team. I keep trying to recreate it in every tool I use.

seattle_spring 2y ago

I could have called this years ago when I found out they exclusively use and enforce pair programming in-house https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to-pair https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to...

quesera 2y ago
> I could have called this years ago when I found out they exclusively use and enforce pair programming in-house No, you could not have. The environment that birthed Pivotal Tracker had the same culture, and the death of PT is a consequence of multiple profitable acquisitions, eventually into a multinational semiconductor corp that has no use for a small SaaS devtools product. You could probably have called it based on the acquisition chain though. Many of us have been hoping to be surprised. Our luck has run out.

grishka 2y ago

I remember using this around 10 years ago and liking it quite a lot, especially compared to Redmine we replaced it with.

edida 2y ago

Shortcut is a good alternative to Pivotal (https://www.shortcut.com/ https://www.shortcut.com/)

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago

If it's really that valuable, someone will offer to buy it.

amai 2y ago

There are many alternatives: - https://www.easyredmine.com/ https://www.easyredmine.com/ - https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/ - https://taiga.io/ https://taiga.io/ - https://www.stackfield.com/ https://www.stackfield.com/ - https://zenkit.com/en/ https://zenkit.com/en/

hyggetrold 2y ago

Surprised nobody has dropped a monday.com advertisement into this thread yet ;)

m25n 2y ago

I was an engineer on Tracker from 2013 to 2020. I’m sad to see it go.

m3kw9 2y ago

Problem with these trackers is that they are by design super opinionated on how your work flow is gonna be once you get past simple reminders type tracking

briantakita 2y ago

I got to work on Pivotal Tracker in 2006 during it's first rewrite. Fun project.

negativeonehalf 2y ago

Pouring one out for Pivotal Tracker. This was an outstanding ticket tracking and project management system, way ahead of its time. Back when I did contract software engineering, Pivotal Tracker made managing client relationships a breeze by giving the client perfect visibility into the impact of feature requests, and allowing them to make the tradeoffs that made sense for their business. "Want to add this new feature, and do it right away? No problem, but as you can see, if I drag it into this week, as a 4-point task, it pushes everything else back by two days, which means we'll have to cut something else or change the launch date." Great UI, great vibes, and was just a delight to use. Even as PT dies, its legacy lives on. Thank you, PT team!

vic40 2y ago

The end of an era. Good Pivotal Labs, was nice working there.

furilo 2y ago

I'm opening my Pivotal Tracker project from 2011... and I'm surprised at how good the UX is/was!!! Visually it looks old, but the UX I think is great: Simplicity is reinforced with a great information density: lots, but not overwhelming. Current design trends make information density super low, forcing you to scroll a lot and spending much more energy/time just to be able to look at things. When you need to "open" an item, you remain in the same screen (no modal, no context change): metadata, description, conversation. Nothing more! In Linear I'm totally lost with projects, cycles, views, projects... I'm stuck with Github Issues/Projects, but I miss Pivotal simplicity!! I've just exported a 10MB Pivotal CSV...

DLRiker 2y ago

Devin from Shortcut here, happy to walk anyone through our API importer capabilities and provide a couple months of our Business plan for evaluation. Details on the importer capabilities: https://www.shortcut.com/blog/importing-from-pivotal-tracker-to-shortcut https://www.shortcut.com/blog/importing-from-pivotal-tracker...

patrickw 2y ago

http://www.centralcm42.com http://www.centralcm42.com https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central > An agile project planning tool and Pivotal Tracker drop-in replacement

gregsadetsky 2y ago

If anyone is still lurking in this thread - how realistic would it be to try to buy Pivotal Tracker back from Broadcom? Is the possible purchase cost below the minimum that Broadcom's legal department even accepts to look at? (i.e. they don't get involved with "small" sub-10M deals..?)

jFriedensreich 2y ago

Its really sad to see the best project management tool ever created fade away. Its not just the best and most intuitive way to do delivery predictions and team capacity planning but also somehow managed to reach peak interface. As development slowed down it felt more like a japanese tea cup that just reached perfection. (except for github integration) would love to make a clone.

enra 2y ago

Pouring one out. I remember using Pivotal Tracker back when working in a Ruby on Rails shop and enjoying directness and how optioned it was of it. Then several years later, after working in large Silicon Valley tech companies, and seeing how they run with Jira, I decided to start https://linear.app https://linear.app So much team's time and effort went in to configuring their tools instead of actually working on things. We do more than PT did, but aim to keep the experience straightforward and focused, regardless of the size of your team or company.