Dan Podsedly's blog
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.