Pivotal Tracker is a shared, predictive, collaborative to-do list and project management tool used by thousands of teams for agile software development. It automates aspects of the agile process like prioritizing work, estimating story points, tracking velocity, and integrating with source control systems. Stories represent features or bugs, are broken into tasks, and flow through a workflow as they are developed, tested, and accepted. The tool provides visibility into progress and predicts future iterations based on historical performance.

1. Pivotal Tracker
Chicago Ruby, Aug 3

2. About Pivotal Labs
• Software development consultancy, founded in
1989
• Agile (XP) since mid ‘90s
• Rails since 2006
• Approximately 100 people, and growing (we’re
hiring)
• HQ in San Francisco, offices in New York, Boulder,
and Singapore

3. What is Tracker?
• Shared, predictive, collaborative to-do list for
software development teams
• Free, open to public: http://www.pivotaltracker.com
• User by thousands of teams and companies, over
100K users and over 100K projects
• Used on all of our projects at Pivotal (and then
some)
• Rails app, hosted at Engine Yard (xCloud)

4. (and the only project
management tool with it’s own
song)

5. Typical Pivotal Project
• Small team, 2-8 developers
• Highly involved customer, in the room
• Collective ownership of code
• 100% pairing and TDD/BDD
• Weekly iterations, frequent releases
• 1 team = 1 Tracker project
• Rotation between teams

6. Tracker in a Nutshell
• Automates manual aspects of agile process, without
getting in the way
• Maintains prioritized list of work (stories) broken
down to concrete, estimatable level
• Groups list of work (backlog) into fixed segments
of calendar time (iterations)
• Predicts progress based on historical performance
(velocity)
• Provides birds-eye view of project to entire team
and encourages communication

8. What’s the Story?
A story is a feature that provides verifiable
business value to the team’s customer
• “Shopper can add product to shopping cart”
• “Search for product should take 400ms or less”
• “Ability to add new product via API”
• We estimate a feature on a point scale: “Linear” (1/2/3), “Powers
of 2” (1/2/4/8), or “Fibonacci” (1/2/3/5/8)
• A point is a team-specific metric representing the effort it will
take to implement a feature (and risk)

9. Chores
• A chore is a story that is necessary but provides no
verifiable business value to the team’s customer
• Chores can represent “code debt”, and/or points of
dependency on other teams
• Chores are not estimated

10. Bugs
• A bug is a story representing a defect, that may be
related to a feature story
• Bugs are typically only entered for stories that have
already been accepted
• Bugs are also not estimated

11. Story Workflow
• Developer (or pair) starts next available story in
current or backlog
• Developer checks in code and finishes the story
• Team pushes code for new feature to demo/QA
environment, and delivers story
• Customer/PM accepts or rejects story
• (repeat until backlog empty)

13. Prioritizing Stories
• Position in backlog is priority
• Stories are ordered by business value weighed
against development risk
• Consider dependencies when prioritizing
• The next item for team to work on is obvious!

14. Velocity
• At the end of an iteration, accepted stories in
current automatically move into “Done”
• The project’s velocity is calculated based on point
totals from previous iterations
• Future iterations are projected based on updated
velocity
• Velocity can be overridden locally for “what if”
scenarios

15. (demo)

16. Labels
• You can add any number of labels (tags) to a story
• Space of labels is per-project
• Click on a label to see all stories with that label, or
use search
• Labels can be used to track related stories, for
example a larger feature or theme
• Use them for additional process steps, for example
“needs design”, or “blocked”

17. Helpful Features
• Search
• Saved Search Panels
• Panel cloning
• My Work
• History
• Import/Export

18. Charts
• Velocity chart shows project velocity in past
iterations
• Iteration burn-up shows progress through current
iteration
• Release burn-down shows progress through
chosen release
• Story type breakdown shows work on features vs
chores and bugs by iteration
• Point count breakdown exposes historical process
bottlenecks

24. Multi User
• Project page displays changes in real time
• (why we get 1000+ requests per second)

25. Integrations
• Drag/drop import and sync of stories from JIRA,
Lighthouse, Satisfaction, Zendesk
• Campfire and Twitter notifications
• SCM post-commit hooks (including Github)
• More integrations to come

26. Developer API
• RESTful XML HTTP API
• Read/Write access to projects and stories
• Activity web hook (push HTTP)

27. 3rd Party Tools
• iPhone and Android clients
• Email integration
• High level planning (Story Mapper)
• http://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/thirdpartytools

33. Future
• Tools for managing larger projects (drag multiple
stories, some form of story group)
• Expose release and/or label status outside of
project, for management visibility
• More integrations
• UX/UI overhaul
• Custom workflow/acceptance steps

34. Questions?

35. Thank You
• Chicago Ruby
• ThoughtWorks
• Jon “Lark” Larkowski (@l4rk)
• Wes Maldonado (@wes)

36. Feedback
• Dan Podsedly (dan@pivotallabs.com)
• @pivotaltracker
• http://community.pivotaltracker.com