Here we are again… again. Pivotal Labs has reinvented itself a few times over the years. But with each change, we’ve matured and expanded our commitment to helping teams produce better software and to do it more efficiently.

Who is Pivotal Labs? We’re a consulting firm located in San Francisco that incubates the engineering efforts of startups and enables Agile software process adoption for mature companies. We started out doing Smalltalk, moved to Java development once that hit the scene, and a year and a half ago, we started falling in love with Ruby on Rails. And we’ve been doing Agile development since before it was called that, and we do it all the way.

We hire bright, talented, experienced folks and weave them into our growing team. We want to work with people we can learn from, people with vision, people with serious chops. Life’s too short not to be working with people like that.

Anyone who works in software knows about missed deadlines, exhausted budgets and death marches. But we do things differently, and we’ve got the track record to prove it. We’ve been producing great software, repeatedly and predictably, for a long time. And while we know there are many great software teams in the industry, few have the ability to transfer “the how they do it” to others.

This makes us somewhat unique. We share our techniques, processes, and recipes, with clients and partners and colleagues. Interaction, collaboration and exchange — in a word, openness — are the core values of Pivotal.

This blog will be an example of that openness. Expect a mix of topics — from technical (AJAX / JSON performance problems, acceptance testing with Selenium), to process (scaling Agile development, how to balance features and infrastructure), to business, always with some Pivotal personality and perspective.

We hope that you will get to know us and possibly benefit from some of our experience. We also want to hear from you; we love sharing ideas and experience, as this type of exchange has been the cornerstone of our success.