We recently launched epics, to make it easier to plan and track progress of large features at a high level. Whether you are in the early stages of defining your product or have a Pivotal Tracker project you are working in already, epics can help you manage your work more effectively. In this article, we’ll show how to create epics, for a hypothetical shopping site project.
Bugzilla is a popular Tracker integration and fairly straightforward to set up. In general all you need is here: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/integrations?version=v3#bugzilla
But if you do receive an error message instead of bugs loading in your Bugzilla integration panel, here are some tips to get past them. The following also applies to other error messages, but these are the most common:
"Unable to load bugs - Please check your URL and remember to include http:// and exclude the xmlrpc.cgi."
or
"Unable to load bugs - There was a problem processing your request."
You can take the first error literally, but there are also some other causes for it which aren't obvious.
We only support versions 3.4.x and above. That said, at the time of writing, we're looking into an issue with the the 4.2.0 release and possibly some preceding minor versions and release candidates.
If you haven't changed the integration's "Bug 'Status' values to exclude" (currently RESOLVED, VERIFIED, CLOSED), these defaults could be trying to pull in too much data and hence failing. To check, log in to your Bugzilla instance and use the advanced search options to find a small number of bugs, to help you change the default values to exclude all but those, and see if they'll be pulled in.
You may need to install one or more optional Perl modules, i.e. SOAP-Lite and possibly Test-Taint. To determine if you have them installed (or to get the commands necessary to install them), go to the directory where you installed Bugzilla on your server and run the checksetup.pl script. It will tell you what modules are installed, and what optional modules can be installed (and what they will enable). Check to see if these modules are there and if not, install them.
Once that's done, you can test it using the following. To run this you'll need access to a machine that has the CURL command. Create a file called version.xml with the following text:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>Bugzilla.version</methodName>
<params>
</params>
</methodCall>Then run this curl command:
curl -X POST -H"Content-Type: text/xml" -d @version.xml <url of Bugzilla server your>/xmlrpc.cgi </url>To see a successful version request, run the command against the Bugzilla "Landfill" test server. For example:
curl -X POST -H"Content-Type: text/xml" -d @version.xml https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.0-branch/xmlrpc.cgiIf all is well, the response should look like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><methodresponse><params><param /><value><struct><member><name>version</name><value><string>4.0.2</string></value></member></struct></value></param></params></methodresponse>If the response printed by the curl command accessing your Bugzilla server is like this, then the Tracker integration should be able to access your Bugzilla server. If this is not the kind of response you get, then your server is still not setup correctly. In general the response's content should help you troubleshoot. For example, if contains, "The XML-RPC Interface feature is not available in this Bugzilla." it means you need to enable the XMLRPC interface on your Bugzilla server.
However, if you are using version 4.0.5, a bad response (such as "Application failed during request deserialization: 32612: When using XML-RPC, you cannot send data as text/xml; charset=utf-8. Only text/xml and application/xml are allowed.") could be the result of the following Bugzilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=731219 It's been fixed in the patch referenced in the bug, but by the time you read this, there may be more recent updates.
Another problem can be with the data that is being transferred to Tracker, if there are one or more bugs which contain multibyte characters in the description or comments. This is usually a result of pasting text into a bug from rich text email or office documents. These characters cause the length of the data stream that the web server sends to us to be incorrect, and we are unable to parse the XML on our side. In that case, determining if your bugs have any multi-byte characters and removing them, should resolve the problem. We can provide steps to help you with this if you need them.
The above should cover the most common problems. Hope it helps.
Finally, we get asked if you can integrate Tracker with Bugzilla if it's behind your firewall. Yes, we have 2 API servers that you can allow through your firewalls for Pivotal Tracker integration with your Bugzilla server, "api.pivotaltracker.com" and "api2.pivotaltracker.com". Please refer to our Integrations help page for more information: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/integrations
If you have any questions, or there's something this doesn't cover, please send email to: tracker@pivotallabs.com
We're moving Pivotal Tracker to a new, faster database server with solid state drives tomorrow, and performing some other maintenance that requires downtime. To minimize disruption during work hours in as many parts of the world as possible, we're planning this maintenance for tomorrow, Saturday, March 31, at 9am Pacific, and we anticipate it to take approximately one hour.
To get the latest updates, and real time status of this maintenance, please follow @pivotaltracker on Twitter.
It’s official - Pivotal Labs, the company that made and owns Pivotal Tracker, has been acquired by EMC, and we are thrilled! You can read all about it at Pivotallabs.com/emc.
What does this mean for Tracker, and more importantly, all of our great customers around the globe? In the near term, it’s business as usual.
Tracker has grown in popularity beyond our wildest expectations these last six years, and we owe that to our extremely loyal and passionate user community. Up until about a year ago, our work on Tracker was focused on our own needs at Pivotal Labs, to allow us to work more efficiently with our clients, and to promote our brand of software development. In other words, we’d been more Pivotal-focused than customer-focused.
That said, we’ve been changing that for a while now. We want to build more of the features you are requesting, we want Tracker to be in more languages than just English, we want to offer more integrations... and the list goes on. Of course, all that takes resources.
Now, we have EMC in our corner. A company with a great reputation, and plenty of resources. They know they’ve acquired a great product as part of the deal, and they are eager to see Pivotal Tracker grow to be the best Agile project management tool in the market.
To all of our customers - thank you! This is a new beginning, and we look forward to serving you better.
Last week, we launched a complete redesign of stories, as part of our ongoing effort to make Tracker easier and more enjoyable to use. We've received a great amount of feedback about what's working well in the new design, as well as what could be improved. As a product team, we're extremely lucky to have users who time and again have shown such passion - thank you, we really couldn't do this without you!
The redesign was a big change and involved some significant behind-the-scenes investments for big upcoming features. There were a few bumps after the release, and we've rolled out a number of fixes over the last week as well as some design tweaks based on your feedback. See below for the complete list.
Stories in Pivotal Tracker have been given a serious upgrade. For the most part it’s all pretty self explanatory - the functionality you’re used to is all there, just in a format that’s more intuitive, user friendly and hopefully you’ll agree, more appealing. Our advice, play with it and then come back and read the rest of this post, especially if anything is confusing.
You’re back, so let’s continue!
One of the goals of Tracker has always been to make collaboration around your story backlog as easy as possible, so that your team spends less time managing your project and more of it actually building things. We think there’s room to make that not just easier, but more enjoyable, even fun! So to that end, great usability and user experience are major themes in our backlog for 2012, starting with this story redesign.
See below for all the highlights.
We're working on a new version of the Pivotal Tracker developer API, with a long list of improvements. The release of this is a few months away, but to prepare for it, we're removing the old version (V2) of the API. This change (removal of V2) is tentatively planned for January 27, 2012, just over three weeks from today.
If you're using the API, please make sure that you're using the current version (V3), as requests to V2 will no longer work.
To see which version you're using, look at the URLs of the requests you're sending. If you see "v2" in the path, for example /services/v2/projects, you're using the old version, and will need to upgrade to the current API version.
If you have any questions, or could use help figuring out how to make your code work with the V3 version of the API, please send an email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.
Apigee, a company that helps you use and develop APIs, just announced a number of new API consoles, including for Pivotal Tracker. The Pivotal Tracker API Console allows you to explore the API from within your browser, and makes it easy to test and debug your code that uses the API. Check it out!
For the rest of the new consoles, see the Apigee announcement blog post.
We're planning the first of an on-going series of Webinars for Pivotal Tracker users for next Wednesday, Dec 21, at 11:00am PST (19:00 GMT).
This is going to be a 1 hour session, via GoToWebinar. Anyone is more than welcome to join, but this particular session will be geared towards new Tracker users. We'll go over the agile concepts behind Tracker, show how to get started with your first project, and give you a tour of the most commonly used features. At the end, there will be an opportunity to ask plenty of questions.
Please register in advance, at the following URL:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/520854266
Instructions for how to join the Webinar will be emailed to you after you register. Since GoToWebinar requires you to download and install an app to join, we suggesting connecting a few minutes before 11:00am on Wednesday.
See you there!
Hojoki is a new collaboration app that promises to "make all your cloud apps work as one", by integrating many of the most popular services that your team uses daily (including Pivotal Tracker, of course) into a personalized activity stream.
Once configured, your Hojoki activity stream shows you when a story is created, edited, started, finished and deleted. Hojoki also shows you all of your project members, and allows you to search for who created a story, who requested it, and who is responsible for implementing it.
