We've made some minor changes to Pivotal Tracker this week, and added a few new features. As always, we look forward to you feedback on Satisfaction.
Ability to Override Length of an Iteration
Teams that use longer iterations occasionally run into situations where a particular iteration needs to be of a different length than the rest. One example is a Scrum team, running 3 weeks sprints, that decides to cancel a sprint in the second week. To keep Tracker iterations aligned with real-world cycles/springs, it's now possible to override how long a particular iteration is or will be, in # of weeks.
Click on the iteration start date to override it's length, or revert an override. An iteration's date range will appear in yellow if it's been overridden. Also, Tracker will automatically adjust how many points worth of stories fit into a longer (or shorter) iteration.
Explicit Project Start Date
Normally, the first iteration of a project begins the week of the date of the first accepted story. For multi-week iterations, it's sometimes desirable to specify exactly when the project started. You can now do this, using the Start Date field in your project settings.
If a start date is specified, your project will start on that day, or the date of the first accepted story, whichever is earlier.
Preview Balloon for Story Descriptions
Based on popular demand, the preview balloon is back for stories that have a description (but no comments). Note - you can see a preview for all stories by hovering over the story type and estimate icons.
Story Labels on the Left
We've moved the story labels back to the left of story titles. The motivation for moving the labels to the right (in the previous release) was to align story titles vertically, for easier visual scanning. However, we received a lot of feedback that this made it harder to see groups of related stories, for which labels are commonly used for.
We may introduce a way to either hide labels, or configure where they appear, but for the time being, we've moved them back where they used to be.
Enhanced Project Export
It's now possible to export a subset of the stories in your project, by choosing whether to include done stories, stories in current/backlog, or the icebox.
Current Day in Points Breakdown Chart
The points breakdown chart now includes data for the current day. Previous day counts are all based on a nightly snapshot, but the current day counts reflect the current state of the project.
Ask for Help
"Has anyone used Unicorn"
No one present is using Unicorn. Some wondered how it differs from Thin.
This raised the question:
"Is there a road map for mongrel and rails? Mongrel uses CGI and Rails 2.3 has removed CGI."
In the Ruby on Rails 2.3 Release Notes, there is the statement
...but if you use CGI, don’t worry; Rails now supports CGI through a proxy interface...
We know many users have been very frustrated by Tweed lately. Tweed has had problems connecting reliably to Twitter. While other clients, be it mobile or desktop, have also had problems connecting to Twitter, Tweed does seem to be more frequently affected.
The conundrum is that it is intermittent and seemingly arbitrary. Some users are just fine, others seem to never have a working Tweed. For ourselves, we occasionally have problems with Tweed as well, but not nearly as often as some users, which has made diagnosis and resolution hard.
These problems seem to have started after the recent DDoS attacks on Twitter. Before that, Tweed seemed to connect fine and we haven't changed our integration. Perhaps something changed in Twitter's API implementation that is at odds with Tweed -- we don't know.
At the very least, please know we are actively working on it. While we are also working on making Tweed functionally better (true photo upload, more photo viewing options, full size profile pic viewing, ...), we are devoted to make Tweed as reliable and as fast as we can.
As always, you can reach us vai @tweed on Twitter,or via email at tweed-support@pivotallabs.com.
Sometimes I accidentally git add files. Or more often, I do git add . and get a huge changelist and then realize I want to move certain files to a different changelist or a different branch. I could do a git reset which, absent --soft or --hard, pulls all the changes out of the index (aka dircache aka staging area) but leaves them in the filesystem (aka working tree). But wouldn't it be nice to leave all the files in the index except the few I want to keep out?
Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of Scrum, has just posted a new blog entry in his Scrum Log: Pivotal Tracker: Now with a Burndown Chart!
I first met Jeff when we were both presenting on Agile process to a forum of OpenView Venture Partners portfolio companies, and have been a big fan of all he has to say about the adoption and effectiveness of agile practices in the wild.
Many thanks to Jeff for his help to make Tracker a better tool for scrum. We'll keep working with him to make sure Tracker is the best scrum tool it can be.