Interesting Things
- Pivotal SF will be hosting a Tracker Users Group meetup tonight. Dan Podsedly will be speaking. He will be seeking feedback for a eagerly awaited feature to be rolled out shortly: Epics! Come and mingle with fellow Tracker users, drink some beer and eat some food.
We've added a new email notification to Pivotal Tracker which will let you know when someone assigns a story to you. There are also a few new additions to the API, related to projects and iterations.
TrackerBot, from Vulpine Labs, is a great new app that brings Pivotal Tracker to your iPad and/or iPhone, complete with multi-touch, drag and drop, and off-line support. It's available now in the app store.
We're launching a new public projects directory in Pivotal Tracker this Friday. If you own or use public projects in Tracker, continue reading, as these projects are about to get much easier to discover.
Pivotal Labs has been at the forefront of agile since it's early days. We've honed our skills on hundreds of successful projects, and evolved agile techniques into a very effective, and practical software development process. Along the way, we also built Pivotal Tracker, a very popular project management and collaboration app, which embodies that process.
Not only does Tracker serve as a critical component of our own development, it's also relied on by thousands of teams around the world, from open source developers, to fast growing startups, and many larger companies, including some of the most well-known tech giants.
We're ramping up our efforts, and have a long list of improvements we'd like to make to Tracker, on a number of fronts. Tracker is ready to be taken to the next level - but we need help!
Last week, we announced that we're introducing pricing for Pivotal Tracker. Since then, we've received a great deal of thoughtful and constructive feedback, and we're very grateful that the majority of you have shown support of Tracker’s move to be a paid product. We really appreciate all of your positive comments.
Continue reading below for details about changes to pricing that we're making based on your suggestions, and clarification of some aspects of pricing that may not have been stated clearly, including what remains free.
NOTE: This article has been updated with pricing changes announced on Jan. 28.
First, we'd like to thank all Pivotal Tracker users. We couldn’t be more grateful for all of the support and feedback we’ve received from you.
Today, we're introducing pricing for Tracker. All of the details, including price plans and transition information, are below.
Happy New Year!
Pivotal Tracker has some updates for the new year: we've added a built-in integration with Bugzilla, a popular bug tracking tool, redesigned the My Projects page to make it easier to use, and made the Zendesk integration more flexible. More details on all of this below.
Tracker has a new look!
The Tracker team has been busy since the hosting move last month. We've shifted our focus from improving Tracker's performance and stability, to core product enhancement. This update introduces an updated visual design, as well the first wave of usability improvements. We've also added some new features, including the ability to sign in to Tracker with your Google Account
Reorganized Drop-down Menus
The Tracker project page (above) has a number of visual changes for improved contrast and readability, but it should still be familiar, and just as easy to use. We did, however, re-organize the various drop-down menus to make finding things more intuitive.
The More drop-down menu allows you to access the less commonly used panels such as charts, releases, history, and any integrations you may have enabled for your project.
The new Project drop-down menu contains project level actions such as changing settings, inviting people, configuring integrations, etc. Finally, the Stories menu allows you to perform actions on selected stories, such as deleting, applying a label, or moving to another project.
The Projects drop-down menu has also moved, it's now part of the navigation links on the right. In addition to allowing you to switch between projects easily, you can now also use it to access the All Projects page, where you can see all of the projects you're a member of, grouped by account.
The preference settings for including the current iteration in the backlog panel, and showing the project tabs have moved to your Profile page.
Dedicated Signin Page and Google Accounts
The sign-in form is now on a dedicated, HTTPS-only page. Access it with the 'sign in' link in the top right corner of the new home page, or this URL:
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/signin
Tracker now allows you to sign in via OpenID, using your Google Account.
If you've used your Google Account email address when you signed up for Tracker, signing in with Google will automatically take you to your existing Tracker account.
Disabling Enter Key When Editing Stories
We've also added the ability to disable the automatic saving & closing of stories with the 'enter' key, as a new preference on your Profile page. This should make it easier for our Japanese users to use the 'enter' key to select from kanji words, for example.
Known Issues and Feedback
This is a fairly major update, especially in terms of the visual design. Please let us know if you discover any issues - by email, posting to Satisfaction, or via @pivotaltracker on Twitter. We plan to address these as they arise, and update the site frequently this week. At the moment, we're aware of some layout issues in Internet Explorer 7, which will be fixed within the next few days.
As always, we're looking forward to your feedback!
The last 2 1/2 years have been exciting for Pivotal Tracker. It's grown from an internal tool we at Pivotal Labs occasionally shared with clients and friends to a mainstay of the Ruby, Rails and Agile worlds. Over this period, Engine Yard has provided us with their top-tier private cloud hosting, free of charge, as a service to the community. For this we are extremely grateful, and we hope our users share our gratitude for their generosity, in this and in so much else in the Ruby on Rails ecosystem.
As we've grown, Tracker has become a mission-critical system not just for us, but for over 140,000 developers, entrepreneurs, product owners, and enterprise clients on over 100,000 projects. The application handles over 50,000 requests per minute now, with peaks above 1,400 requests per second.
To support this level of usage, we’ve increased our level of investment in Pivotal Tracker on a number of fronts. So far, many of the changes have been invisible to our users: we've allocated more resources to Tracker development, and increasingly to Tracker operational support. We’ve also evaluated our hosting needs, including factors such as performance, level of control, and reliability. We’ve considered a number of options, and have chosen a hybrid solution made up of dedicated hardware for our database tier and private cloud for application servers. We think this option will provide the right level of control for our team, and provide the best overall performance and scaling capability.
What does this mean for you?
Specifically, it means that there is a migration coming up. We're planning to cut over to the new hosting environment next Saturday, November 6th, starting at 8:00am PDT. Tracker will be unavailable during this migration, in a planned outage not to exceed 6 hours. We chose this time to minimize downtime during business hours for our customers in 158 countries worldwide. We don't actually expect the move to take this long, but since it's a big move, we want to make sure everything is working correctly before bringing things back up.
Pivotal Tracker will be moving to new IP addresses, so if you have any firewall rules or third party integrations that depend on this information, you will need to update them. We will be publishing the new IP addresses within the next few days, prior to the actual migration.
We've set the DNS TTL low leading up to the migration, so we don't anticipate significant DNS propagation delays. If you are in a place where DNS changes take longer to propagate, however, please keep an eye out for this. We’ll help you with workarounds if the issue persists.
Thanks again to Engine Yard for all their great support. We continue to appreciate all they're doing for the larger Rails community, and the huge investment they've made to support Pivotal Tracker. Tracker wouldn’t be what it is today without them.