Our friends at CaseCommons have built TrackerDashboard - a tool to help manage a large team of 25 developers, 2 designers, and 4 product managers as they build a world class enterprise application. It's open source, and available for use to anyone, so check it out!
This is the first of regular featured Pivotal Tracker customer profiles. If you'd like to share your own, let us know!
What does your company do?
Mavenlink is a SaaS application that allows consultants and their clients to manage the full lifecycle of their projects together in one place. Our platform allows for project budgeting, task management, team collaboration, file sharing, time tracking, invoicing, and payments - basically every step of a paid engagement.
The next San Francisco Tracker User Group (SF.TUG) meetup will be on Wednesday, September 28, at 6:30pm, in the Pivotal Labs office in San Francisco.
If you're involved in a startup, you've probably already discovered the transformative Lean Startup movement. The Lean Startup book, by Eric Ries, is coming out in less than a few week, and Eric is running a final pre-release promotion for it - The Last Lean Startup Bundle. The bundle offers various prizes and extras - for things that every startup needs, such as credits for Amazon Web Services, KISSmetrics, Sauce Labs, and of course Pivotal Tracker.
The more books you buy, the more you get - and there are some really amazing prizes such as autographed books, video content, conference passes, and even a one of one session or team dinner with Eric himself.
Pre-ordering one copy of the book includes the Tracker Startup S plan for one year (worth $70). Buy more than one (for your whole team, for example), and you get the Startup L plan for one year, worth $180. These promo codes can be used by new or existing users, but apply to new paid subscriptions only.
Check out all the details in Eric's blog post. And do it fast, since the promotion runs for 2 days only, and the bundles are limited.
Pivotal Labs is a DevZone partner at Dreamforce, and we'll be there to talk agile and Pivotal Tracker. If you're attending the conference, come to the DevZone in the Cloud Expo and say hi. We'll be doing demos, showing upcoming features (including Epics), and entering visitors into a daily prize drawing.
I'll also be doing a 30 minute talk on agile development and Tracker in the Lightning Theater. It's this Wednesday at 6pm, in the DevZone. Stop by!
We've just published a new video that introduces the concepts behind Pivotal Tracker. It talks about the agile process that works best with Tracker, including story breakdown and estimation, prioritization, and workflow. If you're new to Tracker, or would like to make sure you're getting the most of out of the tool, this should be 8 minutes well spent!
Happy Friday! We've just rolled out some changes to Pivotal Tracker, which we're hoping will have a very noticeable impact on usability, especially for those of you who manage large projects. You can now select multiple stories with a few clicks, using shift-click, and drag them together to a new location. Also, iPad usability has been greatly improved - for example, story panels can now be scrolled with one finger, and you can move stories via drag and drop
Dragging Multiple Stories
Changing business priorities on large projects has always been a bit painful for us, having to drag stories one by one. Cloning panels helps with this, but really, what we've always wanted to do is just select a whole group of stories, and drop them in their new place in the backlog or the icebox with one action. You can now do this, and it's even possible to drag stories that are in-progress to the backlog or icebox and it just does the right thing (un-starts them).
Click on the screenshot above to see a larger version.
To select multiple stories, use the small checkboxes to the right of story titles. If you'd like to select a range of stories, select the first story in the list, then shift-click on the last story. This will select all in the range, and allow you to drag them together, or use some of the other actions in the Stories drop-down, such as export to CSV or move to another project. Note: range select with shift-click only works in a single panel at a time, but you can select multiple ranges of stories across the whole project.
The Stories drop-down menu has been changed - it now shows the number of selected stories more prominently, and we've removed the old bulk story move actions (move to icebox, etc), since this is now possible (and easier) with drag and drop. Note - the Stories menu allows you to unselect all selected stories, which can be useful if you're moving a lot of stories around in steps.
Note: We realize the that the checkboxes are a bit small, and hard to click on - we'll be addressing that in an upcoming release. Also, in certain panels and/or browsers, shift-clicking on a checkbox highlights text on the page, we'll be fixing that as well.
iPad Usability
We've addressed most of the major usability issues on the iPad, and Tracker (the web application) now supports one-touch scrolling of panels, drag and drop, easier expanding and collapsing of stories, and displays properly in both orientations.
In horizontal orientation, you can see up to 3 panels at one time, and 2 panels in vertical orientation. But, you can open others, and the panel section will slide sideways to reveal newly opened ones. Dragging sideways will move the panels left and right.
To drag a story, touch it for a brief moment, until it turns yellow, then drag it.
Possible Issues
One of the reasons that all these usability changes were possible, and fairly easy, is because we've changed the underlying drag and drop library that Tracker uses. We've tried to test thoroughly, and there are some minor issues, but there is fairly good chance that you'll find some as well. Please let us know, by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com, in the comments here, or over at Twitter.
We'd love your feedback on these changes. There are more new features lined up!
Team collaboration with Pivotal Tracker just got better - you can now post comments to stories right from your inbox by replying to any story notification email. That's not all that's new in this update - we've also added the ability to delete unwanted story comments, you can add extra notes like company address or tax ID to your billing receipts, and there's a new public projects directory.
Continue reading for details.
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.
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!