Pivotal Tracker Tips and Tricks from SF.TUG

Thursday, April 30, 2009

On April 29, 2009 Pivotal Labs hosted the inaugural San Francisco Pivotal Tracker User’s Group. It was a great success! As an avid Pivotal Tracker user (and sometimes developer) for over 3 years I am very interested in making Tracker a better product and teaching others how to use Tracker to improve their organization.

Here are a few thoughts I took away from the meeting, and a few tips and tricks.

I Created a Project… Now What?

Once someone has created their first Project in Tracker, we don’t give you much guidance on what to do next. People need help getting past the “blank page problem:” faced with an empty project, it’s daunting to get started. Did you know you can create a demo project that’s filled with example Stories?

First, Login and click Create a Project

Next, click create a demo project

Check out the results!

What are These Different Things?

What is the Difference between a Story, Bug, Chore, and Release? When should I use one versus the other? Good questions! To get started, check out the Stories section of the FAQ.

Why Can’t I Move All My Stuff into the Current Panel?

This is one of our top questions. The answer is this: Tracker doesn’t think you can get it done. Or, more specifically, history has shown that your team completes the number of points per iteration indicated by your Velocity. If history shows that you get 7 points done per iteration, Tracker will move the top 7 points worth of stories into the Current panel. Again, more details are available the Velocity and Iterations section of the FAQ.

That’s Confusing!

This might help: to minimize this confusion, you can stack your Current panel on top of your Backlog (future) panel, giving you one big list. Choose View => Include Current in Backlog

What’s in a Name?

At Pivotal, which is a large consulting practice first and a developer of Pivotal Tracker second, we have always refer to the tool as “Tracker.” But, at the user’s group we continually heard people refer to it as “Pivotal.” Interesting!

That’s it for now, but look for more Tracker (or Pivotal) tips and tricks in the future!

Need a Job? Come Work With Pivotal Clients

Parker Thompson

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Today we’re starting a new weekly posting on Blabs for those of you looking for engineering jobs. We hope you find it useful, and if you’re happily employed please ignore this.

At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide is bootstrapping startups, including helping them interview and hire. We currently have clients looking for skilled engineers to build their development teams. This is an excellent opportunity to learn Extreme Programming by working side-by-side with Pivotal’s talented and experienced developers while at the same time getting in on the ground floor of a small and dynamic product team.

Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring. General technical requirements include serious web development experience, and a significant subset of Ruby, Rails, CSS, JavaScript, or MySQL.

Here’s a short description of Honk and Mavenlink, two Pivotal Labs clients currently looking for developers. Their full job postings follow at the end of this post.

Mavenlink is a funded startup that is changing the way people find experts who can help them and is providing the necessary tools to get their work done online. We are founded on the principle that virtually everybody needs qualified professional services that are readily accessible, affordable, and there when they need them. We’ve been working with Pivotal Labs to get our product launched, so we’re serious about being agile and we’ve got the right engineering process in place. This is a unique opportunity to join the Mavenlink team and contribute significantly to the direction of the company. We’re looking for someone who is not only passionate about development, but also shares our vision for the tools and capabilities necessary for making remote work better than working in person for both the client and the maven.

Honk.com is a new online automotive website that will make car shopping fun and social. We will enable consumers to experience a new way to explore new cars. We have partnered with a top social website to deliver this new way of car shopping and are funded by one of the largest media companies in the world. Our small team is made up of an experienced group of humble, efficient, and hyper-passionate individuals who are veterans of the automotive industry and social media space. We are proud of our ego-less culture, one that promotes team thinking, not individual accolades. If you’re interested in helping prove that social media and car buying go hand in hand, social networks serve a bigger purpose than keeping up with one’s day, and a small team can outdo the work of an army – then we may have a seat waiting for you.

If you are interested or for more information please contact each company directly. This is an exclusive service provided to our clients, no external companies or recruiters please.

Full job postings follow.

Mavenlink

We are looking for a Ruby on Rails developer to join our team. We’ve been working with Pivotal Labs to get our product launched, so we’re serious about being agile and we’ve got the right engineering process in place. This is a unique opportunity to join the Mavenlink team and contribute significantly to the direction of the company. We’re looking for someone who is not only passionate about development, but also shares our vision for the tools and capabilities necessary for making remote work better than working in person for both the client and the maven.

Job Description:

Developing Mavenlink’s Ruby on Rails application
Test Driven Development
Pair Programming
Aggressive Refactoring
Using Pivotal Tracker to estimate and knock down stories
Participating in stand-ups and retrospectives to improve

Mavenlink’s product, process, and culture

Additional Skills desired:

HTML/CSS
Javascript & jQuery experience
Experience with rSpec, Webrat, and other testing frameworks
Rails application deployment experience
SQL

Compensation and benefits:

Competitive salary
Equity stake
Full medical and dental

Interested? Send your resume to jobs@mavenlink.com

Honk

Honk.com is a new online automotive website that will make car shopping fun and social. We will enable consumers to experience a new way to explore new cars, focusing on what other real people actually think, not product specifications or biased editorial. Our site will be 100% consumer driven with no journalists or former race car drivers telling you what minivan or sedan you should purchase. Instead, users will find real people like yourself sharing their opinions and experiences. We have partnered with a top social website to deliver this new way of car shopping and are funded by one of the largest media companies in the world. Thankfully, our partners allow (and encourage) us to remain financially independent, unpolitical, and fast-moving… a true start up.

Our small team is made up of an experienced group of humble, efficient, and hyper-passionate individuals who are veterans of the automotive industry and social media space. We are proud of our ego-less culture, one that promotes team thinking, not individual accolades. If you’re interested in helping prove that social media and car buying go hand in hand, social networks serve a bigger purpose than keeping up with one’s day, and a small team can outdo the work of an army – then we may have a seat waiting for you.

Honk is developing a platform of distributed applications and a destination website that will engage consumers’ existing social networks. To be clear, we are not building yet another community or social network. Many of our social applications will reside on our partners’ sites with the intent to drive users to honk.com for a richer experience, including unique content, interaction, and transaction-oriented tools. Our integration with our core partner is currently underway and our beta launch is scheduled for 5/27. We will continue to expand our product over the next twelve months. In addition to deep knowledge of Ruby on Rails and Agile / Test-Driven Development precepts, we hope you have a thorough understanding / are comfortable with:

Amazon S3/SQS/EC2
CSS/Javascript/JQuery
Thin/NGinx/Mongrel
RSpec/Webrat/Selenium
CSV and XML data feed integration

Previous experience working in online automotive or social media is desired, but definitely not required. Honk is currently co-located in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Honk headquarters is currently located in West Los Angeles, right on the border of Santa Monica. Our ideal candidates should reside in one of these two major metro areas, although we are open to “off site” developers who have the right skills and background.

Please send inquiries to Bruce Krysiak, CTO: techjobs@honk.simplicant.com

Standup 04/30/2009: perform_caching and Rails.cache, W3C DTDs and IE, Range#min/max

Pivotal Labs

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Help

Perform_caching is not respected by Rails.cache methods.
config.action_controller.perform_caching does not appear to affect the Rails.cache methods.
Rails 2.1 introduced a new custom caching mechanism:

result = Rails.cache.fetch('key') do
  # create and return item for this key
end

It would be really nice if, for testing, you could set a configuration variable that would force a cache miss every time and always execute the block associated with the fetch. However it appears that, understandably, action_controller.perform_caching only affects the kinds of caching implemented by ActionController (page, action, fragment) and not this caching mechanism that is implemented by ActiveSupport::Cache::Store. Looking at the code, is appears there is no way to disable this caching mechanism other than supplying :force => true to the fetch call to force a cache miss.

W3C refusing to serve DTDs to ‘misbehaving’ clients.
One of our applications that has not been deployed for a while is starting to see issues from IE users. After digging, we found this: W3C’s Excessive DTD Traffic and this w3.org DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd blocks Windows IE users?. To summarize, w3.org got tired of getting slammed with non-cached DTD requests, and cut off misbehaving user agents (ones that do not cache the DTD). IE is one of these.

We have several things so far, none of which work:

Forcing xhtml DTD to be a SYSTEM dtd, and load the DTD files off the local server. This didn’t work – IE serve the pages as raw unrendered html (must
have thought it was XML?)
Use a PUBLIC doctype pointing to the DTD served on our server. Alas, this had the same problem as the SYSTEM doctype in #1 – raw unrendered HTML.
Not using XHTML (e.g. have as root tag). This didn’t work (haven’t
looked into why yet).

Ideas are welcome.

Interesting

Range#min, Range#max: Don’t use them. Use Range#first and Range#last. Min and max are not overridden by Range so fall back onto Enumerable which then converts the Range into an Array first!

Standup 04/29/2009: Shared examples pollute; SWFObjects + Asset Packager

Pivotal Labs

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Interesting

It looks like Rubymine 1.0 is out.
Shared examples pollute! If you import a shared example into an RSpec group, the before :each appears to run for all examples in that spec, not just the ones in the current scope.
SWFObject + AssetPackager = :(
SWFObject stops working on some platforms (IE, FF2 on Windows, and others) when used in conjunction with AssetPackager. This will make you sad; don’t do it.

Standup 04/28/2009: Handling failures in SQS; SF.TUG; Aviary.com; Delicious Monster.

Pivotal Labs

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Help

“Anyone have experience dealing with failures in Amazon SQS?”

Amazon Simple Queue Service is a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. You can place tasks in a queue and have worker systems extract and process them. However processing a queue item does not delete that item; you have to explicitly delete a queue item. The problem occurs when a persistent catastrophic failure occurs during processing of an item, e.g. a process core dump (say RMacick encounters an Image of Death) that does not produce an exception. Eventually SQS will timeout and mark the task as requiring processing again. Eventually all yor workers will try to process the queue item and die. There was a lot of discussion (e.g. communicate task status back to app server – too chatty, not scalable) but no obvious solutions arose that will work in the particular environment.

Interesting

SF.TUG: The first Tracker User Group will meet tomorrow. This one is somewhat exploratory, to see what the community wants out of it, so it is being kept purposefully small.
should_not is not the same as !=. Apparently, it is a feature of Ruby that you can override == but you cannot override !=. Rspec implements == but cannot implement !=. Sometimes you will get objects that will give different results when compared using should != as opposed to should_not. Use should_not.
Aviary.com is an online Photoshop-like too. They also have a vector editor. It is free, however they may reuse images you store on their site.
Pivotal Library:
We are getting a tool from Delicious Monster to automate our library. It will scan barcodes, categorize books and allow people to check books in and out.

Standup 04/27/2009: GemInstaller case sensitivity; wrapping NamedScopes in class methods

Pivotal Labs

Monday, April 27, 2009

Ask For Help

GemInstaller can fail to install either gem if it encounters two gems in the repository that have the same name but differ in case. Don’t ever change the name of a gem or Adam Will Find You.

Interesting Things

Wrapping multiple named_scopes in a class method then attempting to compose that into another list of named scopes works most of the time :( If it is the first method in the new chain of named scopes, then it will work, otherwise, not so much (it forgets about any constraints from prior named_scopes). This pattern is best avoided.
We are pleased to announce the existence of gems.pivotallabs.com, a maintained repository for public Pivotal gems. To see it’s contents try:

gem list --remote --source=http://gems.pivotallabs.com

Cookstr nominated for Webby Awards

Dan Podsedly

Friday, April 24, 2009

Our favorite recipe site Cookstr, developed by Pivotal Labs, has received two nominations, and been named an honoree for the 13th Annual Webby Awards. The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.

Cookstr is a nominee in the Best Practices category, along with NYTimes.com, Digg, WebMD Health, and The Daily Beast. Cookstr has also been nominated for the Food and Beverage category, and has won an Honorary Mention in the Lifestyle Category.

We’d like to congratulate the Cookstr team on this achievement, and encourage everyone who’s a fan to vote for Cookstr in the People’s Choice Awards!

Standup 4/24/2009: libxml-ruby on Windows, pivotal-apdex gem

Nate Clark

Friday, April 24, 2009

Interesting Things

libxml-ruby doesn’t work on Windows (surprise, surprise!). One of our teams discovered that the version of Ruby on Windows has a XML::Parser class, but it is NOT libxml-ruby even if you try to install the gem. A workaround is to rename or delete the libxml.so file, and then you can use the real XML::Parser.
A few Pivots just whipped up a pivotal-apdex gem that allows you to calculate your application’s Apdex performance index via a simple command line tool by parsing Nginx or Apache server logs. Apdex is an emerging standard in measuring application performance. We were inspired by Lew Cirne, CEO of New Relic, who gave a talk about Apdex a few weeks ago at Pivotal’s office.

Standup 4/23/2009: helper methods in view tests, mecached client

Nate Clark

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Interesting Things

memcache-client is broken in the sense that if it fails to connect to your memcached server, it will automatically try a new server. It does this 20 times. Not what one would expect. You can turn off this weird behavior by setting :failover => false

Ask For Help

When writing view specs, is there a better way to include your helpers if all helpers are not automatically included in ApplicationController? Some suggestions from the crowd: mock the helpers (test helpers separately), or reopen the template and define helpers there directly.

New in Pivotal Tracker: labels panel, saved searches, and more

Dan Podsedly

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Pivotal Tracker has just been updated with new features.

Labels Enhancements & Saved Searches

There’s a new panel on the project page that will help you organize and keep track of related stories in your project – Labels and Searches. Open it using the View menu, or with Shift-L. On this panel, you’ll see all labels in your project, as links, with numbers indicating the number of stories that have yet to be accepted. Click on a label to see stories with that label.

You can now save any search, by clicking on the disk icon at the top of search results. Saved searches appear below labels, on the Labels and Searches panel.

The new panel also allows you rename or delete labels, and delete saved searches. Hover over a label or saved search, and you should see rename and/or delete buttons.

Ability to apply and remove labels to selected stories

It’s now possible to apply labels to multiple stories, using the Actions menu at the top of the project page. Select stories using the small checkboxes to the right of story titles. The same action also allows you to remove labels.

Ability to export selected stories to CSV

You can export selected stories in the project, also by using the Actions menu. One possible use of this feature is to move or copy stories from one project to another. Select some stories, export them to CSV, and import that file into another project.

API: Get stories by iteration or iteration group

We’ve made it easier to retrieve stories by iteration through the API. You can get stories based on an arbitrary iteration range, done iterations, the current iteration, or iterations in the backlog.
See the API Help page for more details and examples.

http://www.pivotaltracker.com