Written by our friends at Hashrocket, Slurper lets you create stories as plain text files and import them into Tracker via the API. Also, if you use Vim, check out slurper.vim, a Vim companion script with syntax highlighting and key mappings.
Adam Lowe's blog post talks about these really useful new tools in more detail.
For other Tracker tools, see the 3rd Party Tools page.
MobiTracker, written by Steven Nie, is a new iPhone app for Pivotal Tracker. It uses the Pivotal Tracker API, and supports off-line reading and editing of stories, search, email, and more.
MobiTracker is available for download now on iTunes.
Perhaps you have heard about Pivotal Tracker but you don't know if it's a good fit for your organization. Perhaps you are a new user with some questions about how best to use the tool. Perhaps you've been using Tracker for a while but are curious about more advanced features. If you're in San Francisco next Tuesday we can give you answers in person.
The San Francisco Tracker Users Group is having a lunchtime meeting next Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. at the Pivotal Labs office on Market St. Please register on the Meetup site, as seating is limited.
Edward Hieatt, Principal at Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Tracker developer, will give an overview of the idea behind Pivotal Tracker and the common features. Based on time and interest, Edward will go into more detail about advanced features, upcoming features, and the philosophy behind Tracker. We hope to see you there!
Beverages will be provided, but please bring your own lunch.
The Pivotal Tracker API has now been available for just over a year, and we're really pleased with the rich variety of tools and applications that our user community has built with it, to extend Tracker's functionality. There are now integration tools, wrappers for various programming languages, mobile apps, an IRC console, and many more on the way (see the 3rd party tools page for a comprehensive list).
We're continuing to improve the API based on your feedback. Recently, we've added the ability to create projects, manage project members, and search for stories based on created and last modified dates. For the next API release, we're adding ability to move a story relative to another story, add file attachments, and get current project velocity and all labels. We're also adding support for Github post-commit hooks, so you can do things like "finishes #123456" in your commit messages.
The most exciting new feature that we're working on, though, is a push webhook, which will allow your applications to listen to activity in your Tracker project(s). You'll be able to register a URL, per project, to which Tracker will post all story changes to (as XML). With this webhook, we're hoping to enable a whole new class of 3rd party tools and applications, for example to facilitate 2 way integration with bug tools.
Most of these enhancements will be part of a new version of the API (V3), which we hope to have ready at the end of the year. As part of this release, we will also be turning off the first version of the API (V1), so if you're still using that version, you'll need to update your client code to V2 prior to that. V2 is the current version, documented on the [API Help page]. For the exact date of this release, watch this blog, or follow @pivotaltracker.
As always, your feedback is welcome. If you have ideas for other things that would be useful to add to the API, or have built a tool you'd like to share, let us know!
dan
Koombea announced the release of the Track-r application for iPhone, a mobile client for Pivotal Tracker. Track-r is a free, open source application, and was developed using Rhomobile's RhoHub and the Rhodes "write once and run on many" framework. Trackr uses RhoSync to sync data to your device allowing you to manage your work whether or not you have an internet connection. All of your data is synced with Pivotal Tracker the next time you get a connection.
Track-R uses the Pivotal Tracker API, which has allowed developers to create dozens of tools and applications to help extend the functionality of Tracker.
More information about Track-R is available in Koombea's press release:
To get the app, and get updates on the latest version, see the Track-r page on Koombea's site.
Pivotal Tracker has been nominated for Best Internet Application in this year's Crunchies Awards. If you're a fan of Tracker, please help us win the award by voting here!.
There's a new Mac OS X Dashboard widget available that allows you to create Pivotal Tracker stories easily, right from your desktop.
It's written by Thomas Vie, and posted on his blog here:
http://techpolcook.blogspot.com/2009/11/widget-for-pivotals-tracker.html
The widget uses the Pivotal Tracker API. For other user contributed tools and applications, check out the 3rd party tools page.
We've made some minor changes to Pivotal Tracker this week, and added a few new features. As always, we look forward to you feedback on Satisfaction.
Ability to Override Length of an Iteration
Teams that use longer iterations occasionally run into situations where a particular iteration needs to be of a different length than the rest. One example is a Scrum team, running 3 weeks sprints, that decides to cancel a sprint in the second week. To keep Tracker iterations aligned with real-world cycles/springs, it's now possible to override how long a particular iteration is or will be, in # of weeks.
Click on the iteration start date to override it's length, or revert an override. An iteration's date range will appear in yellow if it's been overridden. Also, Tracker will automatically adjust how many points worth of stories fit into a longer (or shorter) iteration.
Explicit Project Start Date
Normally, the first iteration of a project begins the week of the date of the first accepted story. For multi-week iterations, it's sometimes desirable to specify exactly when the project started. You can now do this, using the Start Date field in your project settings.
If a start date is specified, your project will start on that day, or the date of the first accepted story, whichever is earlier.
Preview Balloon for Story Descriptions
Based on popular demand, the preview balloon is back for stories that have a description (but no comments). Note - you can see a preview for all stories by hovering over the story type and estimate icons.
Story Labels on the Left
We've moved the story labels back to the left of story titles. The motivation for moving the labels to the right (in the previous release) was to align story titles vertically, for easier visual scanning. However, we received a lot of feedback that this made it harder to see groups of related stories, for which labels are commonly used for.
We may introduce a way to either hide labels, or configure where they appear, but for the time being, we've moved them back where they used to be.
Enhanced Project Export
It's now possible to export a subset of the stories in your project, by choosing whether to include done stories, stories in current/backlog, or the icebox.
Current Day in Points Breakdown Chart
The points breakdown chart now includes data for the current day. Previous day counts are all based on a nightly snapshot, but the current day counts reflect the current state of the project.
We've added a new report feature to Pivotal Tracker, to help you analyze how smoothly your project is progressing. It's based on this popular idea, shared in our Get Satisfaction powered support community.
These new Points Breakdown charts help you visualize the progress of your project as stories move through different stages of completion. Stories start out as "Unstarted", then move on to "Started", "Finished", "Delivered", and then "Accepted" (unless they get rejected). The different colored bars show the point totals of the stories that are in each state at the end of each day. As days pass, you would expect the number of unstarted to go down, and the number of accepted to go up. If any of the other groups are especially big, the chart may help you identify bottlenecks in your workflow.
This breakdown is available for both the current iteration and the previous one. You can also use it to visualize the development of your entire project for the last 15, 30, or 60 days.
To access the Points Breakdown charts, click the Reports link on top of the page, or navigate from your project via the Reports option in the View menu.
At Pivotal Labs, we like to keep our Tracker stories as small as possible, so that each story describes a single, concrete feature that delivers incremental value to our project's customer. With small stories, there is rarely a need to break things down further, but sometimes it's still useful to keep a to-do list while working on a story. This helps keep track of all the little things you have to do, and lets everyone else on the project know exactly what's left.
To enable story tasks for your project, go to project settings, and check the 'enable tasks' option under Experimental. You should then be able to add tasks to stories, under the description field. Hover over a task to edit it, delete it, or move it up and down. You can also check off a task when it's complete, but task status does not affect overall story status.
Story tasks can be viewed and updated via the API.
As always, we look forward to your feedback. If story tasks are popular, we'll enable them for all projects, by default.