At Pivotal Labs, our clients, customers, and developers love Pivotal Tracker; after all, we wrote it and selfishly kept it to ourselves for 2 years! With that much history, some of our Tracker projects have built up thousands of stories, and keeping these stories organized is a challenge. Luckily, we designed Tracker with a simple yet powerful organizational tool: Labels. Here are some labeling patterns we find useful.

Label Stories with Feature Set Name

How many Stories, Bugs, and Chores make up that big Facebook integration feature set, anyway? Which stories are related to the big UI version 3 update? Simply label everything related to a feature set with an easy-to-remember name. This is especially helpful when different pairs or teams are focused on certain groups of features.

Bug Priority Labels

It’s true that Tracker doesn’t have the traditional bug categories of P0, P1, P2, to PN. We tend to simply prioritize the most important or critical bugs higher than those less critical, but you can simply create the Labels for bug priorities. That said, there is one Label we almost always create to categorize a subset of bugs — want to guess what it is? If you guessed “ie6″ then you feel our pain!

Labels for Communication

We often use labels to communicate the state of a Story beyond it’s delivery status. For example, a Story we don’t understand that was added by a remote project manager can be labeled “needs discussion.” A bug that we can’t duplicate might be labeled as such. Designers will want to know which UI stories “need assets.” Team leads and project managers are especially interested in seeing any Story labeled “blocked.” Of course, Labels are not intended to replace actual person-to-person communication — talk to each other!

Watch out for Label Spam

While Labels are a powerful tool to quickly view the state of the world, don’t go too Label crazy. Labels are not intended to be a discussion forum, flame war, or dumping ground for thoughts.

Labels and Saved Searches Panel

The Labels and Saved Searches panel brings this all together; activate it at View => Labels and Searches. A picture’s with a thousand words, so check out the following screenshots to see just how powerful Labels are for organizing your project.

I came across an interesting post on Overcoming Bias today about the Planning Fallacy. In short, the evidence shows that individual predictions generally occur in a rosy inaccurate world where everything goes according to plan, even when interruptions and setbacks are inevitable:

Buehler et. al. (1995) asked their students for estimates of when they (the students) thought they would complete their personal academic projects. Specifically, the researchers asked for estimated times by which the students thought it was 50%, 75%, and 99% probable their personal projects would be done. Would you care to guess how many students finished on or before their estimated 50%, 75%, and 99% probability levels?

• 13% of subjects finished their project by the time they had assigned a 50% probability level;
• 19% finished by the time assigned a 75% probability level;
• and only 45% (less than half!) finished by the time of their 99% probability level.

As Buehler et. al. (2002) wrote, “The results for the 99% probability level are especially striking: Even when asked to make a highly conservative forecast, a prediction that they felt virtually certain that they would fulfill, students’ confidence in their time estimates far exceeded their accomplishments.”

But it seems one can overcome this bias towards optimism by getting an “outside view” on the problem as it relates to the timelines on previous similar projects:

Buehler et. al. (2002), found that Japanese students expected to finish their essays 10 days before deadline. They actually finished 1 day before deadline. Asked when they had previously completed similar tasks, they responded, “1 day before deadline.” This is the power of the outside view over the inside view.

So there is a fairly reliable way to fix the planning fallacy, if you’re doing something broadly similar to a reference class of previous projects. Just ask how long similar projects have taken in the past, without considering any of the special properties of this project. Better yet, ask an experienced outsider how long similar projects have taken.

Pivotal Tracker, unlike other project management software, is built on exactly this idea of the outside view, via points and emergent iterations:

Tracker calculates future iterations based on historical performance. Focus on prioritizing and completing your stories; let Tracker take care of planning future iterations, based on actual progress.

It’s gratifying to see that the emergent iterations are not just easier for the user, as there’s no need to manually specify them – they’re also more likely to be accurate, as they’re based on an external view of your own progress. Yet another reason to look to Tracker for your project management needs.

Interesting Things

• Pivotal Tracker tip: as the Holiday Season approaches, you can edit your Team Strength to account for vacationing team members. For example, if you are missing 1 out of a team of 4 next week, set next week’s Team Strength to 75%

  

• Rescuing inside a transaction: ActiveRecord relies on catching a Rollback error in order to perform transaction rollbacks. If you are performing a begin..rescue block within a transaction, make sure you either (a) specify the Exception or Errors you want to catch, or (b) re-raise the Rollback error if caught.

• Bring it! The Pivot Pong Tournament of Champions is on! Games will be played on the Pivotal breakfast tables/ping pong table.

  

Ask for Help

“What is the life-cycle of test fixtures when using transactional fixtures?”

1. The testing framework clears the database of all data within tables that have fixtures files defined.
2. A test/spec file is loaded and all fixtures declared within it (or all if fixtures :all is declared) are loaded into the database.
3. A transaction is started.
4. The test/spec runs.
5. The transaction is rolled-back.
6. Repeat!

Here’s a hot Fluid icon for Pivotal Tracker. Thanks, Ted!

Check out a couple of other icons in this Flickr upload.