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.

Story Assignment Notification

In the typical Tracker workflow, stories stay unassigned as they move their way up the backlog and into the current iteration. When a developer frees up, he or she starts the next unstarted story, and becomes that story’s owner.

There are times when it makes sense to assign a story to a particular person before it gets started by someone else, for example when the story calls for certain skills or specialization, like design or UX work.

With this new notification, when you make someone other than yourself the owner of a story, that person will receive an email, saying that the story has been assigned to them. As with all story notifications, it’s possible to reply to that story right from your email inbox, in order to initiate or continue the evolving conversation that the story represents.

This notification is enabled by default, but can be turned off on your Profile page. Look for the Assigned stories checkbox, in the Email Preferences section.

API Enhancements

We’ve added the following information to the projects API response: project start date (if specified in project settings), the exact date/time the first iteration started (based on the date of the first accepted story, or an explicit project start date), current iteration number, and whether tasks are enabled.

Also, iterations now include team strength, all list elements should now include the type=’array’ attribute (to make ActiveResource happy), and you can retrieve the current iteration and all iterations in the backlog in one call, like this:

 curl -H "X-TrackerToken: TOKEN" -X GET http://www.pivotaltracker.com/services/v3/projects/PROJECT_ID/iterations/current_backlog

See the API help page for details and examples.

Note: We’re planing on making more significant improvements to the API soon, as part of a new API version (V4). Look for more information on that in the next few weeks.