6 ms·

What made Pivotal Tracker so popular? It had story points front and center, was that it?

by porker 2y ago

stevage 2y ago
Huh, I totally forgot about Pivotal Tracker. There was a phase where every project I was on used it. The killer feature was the UI. When the alternative was basically JIRA, Pivotal was so quick and easy to use. That front page view that let you see every task in a compact list, and easily drag things around to reprioritise was pretty revolutionary. Now it seems kind of passé but it really was pretty excellent at the time.
jadbox 2y ago
The UI had very few states/pages. 99% of your time was just on the project page to with every card action 1-click away. It also had an optional feature to cap the number of story-point cards in the sprint column based on an upper estimate of the team's story-point velocity. I.e. if the team can only do at max 10pts of cards per week, that's all you are allowed to queue up in sprint. This could be overwritten to force more cards into the sprint, but in practice it provided a nice safety guard from over flooding a sprint's delivery expectations.
- twic 2y ago
  I think, roughly, Tracker was a ticketing tool for developers, whereas the others are for project managers. Hence they have endless configurability, millions of views, forms, workflows, and whatnot, all of which gives project managers something to do that feels like work, but end up weighing down the people doing actual work. Tracker has the bare minimum, with no configurability, so it can't be used in that way. As a developer, i actually wished Tracker had a tiny bit more complexity (eg i want to be able to track items past "accepted" and into "in production" and "validated with users"). But i would rather have a bit too little than JIRA!
  - gavmor 2y ago
    Yes! Deployed and "validated by users" were on my wishlist, too! Some projects I was on had very large Acceptance queues awaiting various stakeholders. It was a little awkward, and could have been better accommodated. And, of course, the ability to reject a feature which had displeased or been ignored by users? Or failed to accomplish its business purpose? Ah, but these connections are just cute ribbons, and would become repressive if enforced as policy. The story to "Sunset Feature X" needn't be linked to its original implementation, no?
  - petepete 2y ago
    > I think, roughly, Tracker was a ticketing tool for developers, whereas the others are for project managers. This is why I like GitHub Projects. Devs can create and interact with issues and PRs in the normal fashion while project folk drag them between columns and back again all day.
  - jFriedensreich 2y ago
    100% correct. Also great you want the in prod and user validation features as i am building exactly that into lanes.pm. Though this will be a separate view that also includes things like metrics and product analytics that are relevant to evaluate each features success.
  - noufalibrahim 2y ago
    It's been a long time since I used it but I do recollect that it didn't have simple numbers for tickets. It was a bit of a hassle to tell a colleague that "xxxxxxxx is fixed" rather than 42 is fixed.
tombert 2y ago
I haven't used it in a decade, but I always liked it. It was the first issue tracker that I had used that had strong Git integration, and it made very satisfying noises when you would would push a commit. It also just felt slicker than Jira; not the horrible laggy mess that Jira was for most of its history.
gleenn 2y ago
HI personally worked on it while I was at Pivotal Labs (RIP). I loved that the point was to get in, add some stories, aka "bookmarks for conversations", have it opinionatedly setup your sprint by averaging the last few sprints worth of points, and then you got out. I use other tools now and I cringe every time at the complexity. I don't want a swiss army knife of features, I want a tool that does exactly what I need and I don't have to spend hours grooming and configuring and tweaking. Tracker hit that sweet spot.
irjustin 2y ago
Yes it was the first popular tracker that was developer centric, specifically agile (arguably Scrum), with story points being a very key (pivotal? pun) feature. It was also extremely opinionated (i.e. bugs don't get points). This made it very predictable and easy to get started on. I liken PivotalTracker to a Ferrari. It does one thing and it does it well while JIRA is like your 18 wheeler. It'll also get you A-B, but you can bring everything "in case" you might need it and modify it to hell and back. It can even carry your Ferrari. But getting it setup and moving is a nightmare. Even simple searching your history is an exercise in complexity. Of course as with anything opinionated, if you wanted to do something outside of its core philosophy set, you basically couldn't. For better for worse, this really meant you were at least waist deep in agile's. When Agile+Scrum first started becoming popular it was very well received because fundamentally it gave a better framework for business to understand how developers worked other than promising deadlines. But, it's success was its own poison well... that's a different story.
- jFriedensreich 2y ago
  This sounds like there were many more modern dev centric trackers after, did you mean it that way and if yes what are they? Part of the reason we all try to build a replacement is that we feel the whole category of tools died after pivotal tracker.
  - irjustin 2y ago
    Oh sorry no I didn't mean that. I think a more accurate statement was "the first agile centric tracker".

What made Pivotal Tracker so popular? It had story points front and center, was that it?

by porker 2y ago

What made Pivotal Tracker so popular? It had story points front and center, was that it?

Huh, I totally forgot about Pivotal Tracker. There was a phase where every project I was on used it. The killer feature was the UI. When the alternative was basically JIRA, Pivotal was so quick and easy to use. That front page view that let you see every task in a compact list, and easily drag things around to reprioritise was pretty revolutionary. Now it seems kind of passé but it really was pretty excellent at the time.

jadbox 2y ago

The UI had very few states/pages. 99% of your time was just on the project page to with every card action 1-click away. It also had an optional feature to cap the number of story-point cards in the sprint column based on an upper estimate of the team's story-point velocity. I.e. if the team can only do at max 10pts of cards per week, that's all you are allowed to queue up in sprint. This could be overwritten to force more cards into the sprint, but in practice it provided a nice safety guard from over flooding a sprint's delivery expectations.

twic 2y ago
I think, roughly, Tracker was a ticketing tool for developers, whereas the others are for project managers. Hence they have endless configurability, millions of views, forms, workflows, and whatnot, all of which gives project managers something to do that feels like work, but end up weighing down the people doing actual work. Tracker has the bare minimum, with no configurability, so it can't be used in that way. As a developer, i actually wished Tracker had a tiny bit more complexity (eg i want to be able to track items past "accepted" and into "in production" and "validated with users"). But i would rather have a bit too little than JIRA!
- gavmor 2y ago
  Yes! Deployed and "validated by users" were on my wishlist, too! Some projects I was on had very large Acceptance queues awaiting various stakeholders. It was a little awkward, and could have been better accommodated. And, of course, the ability to reject a feature which had displeased or been ignored by users? Or failed to accomplish its business purpose? Ah, but these connections are just cute ribbons, and would become repressive if enforced as policy. The story to "Sunset Feature X" needn't be linked to its original implementation, no?
- petepete 2y ago
  > I think, roughly, Tracker was a ticketing tool for developers, whereas the others are for project managers. This is why I like GitHub Projects. Devs can create and interact with issues and PRs in the normal fashion while project folk drag them between columns and back again all day.
- jFriedensreich 2y ago
  100% correct. Also great you want the in prod and user validation features as i am building exactly that into lanes.pm. Though this will be a separate view that also includes things like metrics and product analytics that are relevant to evaluate each features success.
- noufalibrahim 2y ago
  It's been a long time since I used it but I do recollect that it didn't have simple numbers for tickets. It was a bit of a hassle to tell a colleague that "xxxxxxxx is fixed" rather than 42 is fixed.

tombert 2y ago

I haven't used it in a decade, but I always liked it. It was the first issue tracker that I had used that had strong Git integration, and it made very satisfying noises when you would would push a commit. It also just felt slicker than Jira; not the horrible laggy mess that Jira was for most of its history.

gleenn 2y ago

HI personally worked on it while I was at Pivotal Labs (RIP). I loved that the point was to get in, add some stories, aka "bookmarks for conversations", have it opinionatedly setup your sprint by averaging the last few sprints worth of points, and then you got out. I use other tools now and I cringe every time at the complexity. I don't want a swiss army knife of features, I want a tool that does exactly what I need and I don't have to spend hours grooming and configuring and tweaking. Tracker hit that sweet spot.

irjustin 2y ago

Yes it was the first popular tracker that was developer centric, specifically agile (arguably Scrum), with story points being a very key (pivotal? pun) feature. It was also extremely opinionated (i.e. bugs don't get points). This made it very predictable and easy to get started on. I liken PivotalTracker to a Ferrari. It does one thing and it does it well while JIRA is like your 18 wheeler. It'll also get you A-B, but you can bring everything "in case" you might need it and modify it to hell and back. It can even carry your Ferrari. But getting it setup and moving is a nightmare. Even simple searching your history is an exercise in complexity. Of course as with anything opinionated, if you wanted to do something outside of its core philosophy set, you basically couldn't. For better for worse, this really meant you were at least waist deep in agile's. When Agile+Scrum first started becoming popular it was very well received because fundamentally it gave a better framework for business to understand how developers worked other than promising deadlines. But, it's success was its own poison well... that's a different story.

jFriedensreich 2y ago
This sounds like there were many more modern dev centric trackers after, did you mean it that way and if yes what are they? Part of the reason we all try to build a replacement is that we feel the whole category of tools died after pivotal tracker.
- irjustin 2y ago
  Oh sorry no I didn't mean that. I think a more accurate statement was "the first agile centric tracker".