Dan Podsedly's blog
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!
We've completed the hosting move, and Pivotal Tracker is back up. We'll post more details about the new environment within the next few days.
In the meantime, if you experience any problems, please try clearing your browser's cache as well as all cookies for the pivotaltracker.com and www.pivotaltracker.com domains. If the issue persists, please let us know!
We have begun the hosting move, and anticipate the entire process to take approximately 6 hours. For most up to date status, please follow @pivotaltracker.
Tracker will be moving to a new hosting environment this weekend. This post contains updated information about this move, and how it will affect you.
The move will occur this Saturday, November 6th, starting at 8:00am PDT. We expect the move to take approximately 6 hours, including testing and site verification. Tracker will be unavailable during this time.
We will be posting updates throughout the move to this blog, as well as to the @pivotaltracker Twitter account.
Pivotal Tracker will be moving to new IP addresses, so if you have any firewall rules related to integrations that access internal resources (for your example your JIRA instance), you will need to update them. Tracker requests will now originate from one of two possible IP addresses: 67.214.214.250 and 208.85.148.45, on ports 80 and 443. Please add rules to allow requests from these IP addresses in advance of the move this Satuday, in order for your integrations to continue working without interruption.
We've set the DNS TTL low leading up to the migration, so we don't anticipate significant DNS propagation delays. If you are in a place where DNS changes take longer to propagate, however, please keep an eye out for this. We’ll help you with workarounds if the issue persists.
Our apologies for any inconvenience caused by this hosting move. Please do not hesitate to contact us by emailing tracker@pivotallabs.com if you have any questions.
Last week a certain new Firefox extension made headlines by making it trivial to hijack sessions over wireless networks, and easily access unsuspecting users' accounts on a long list of major social networking and other websites. Pivotal Tracker had the dubious honor of being on that list.
The plugin author's intent was to raise awareness of the insecure nature of wireless networks, and encourage websites to increase the use of secure (SSL) sessions, which encrypt transmission of data and prevent network sniffing and session hijacking.
Today, most sites use SSL for sign-in, and selected pages that handle sensitive information, but SSL is generally not enabled (or available) site wide. What this means is that after you sign in to Facebook, as soon as you visit any Facebook page that isn't SSL enabled (for example, your private messages page), your session cookie becomes exposed, and allows a hacker (or just any bored person with Firefox at your local coffee shop) to gain full access to your Facebook account.
The recommended solution is for sites to enable SSL for all pages, from sign-in to sign-out.
As of this morning's update, this is now the default in Tracker. After signing in, you should notice that every page is served via SSL (https:// prefix in the URL). If you never access Tracker on shared networks, however, and would prefer to turn this off, you can do that on the My Profile page by un-checking the 'Always Use HTTPS' option.
In addition, you can enable the 'Always Use HTTPS' option for specific projects, which will force SSL for every member of the project who visits the project, even if they've disabled the HTTPS option on their profile.
We have also added a secondary secure session cookie to prevent your session from being hijacked if you accidentally end up on a non-HTTPS page while signed in (via a bookmark, for example). This approach is similar to what Github describes in their blog post about the problem and their solution.
Note: As part of this change, we've had to remove the 'remember me' functionality, so you will have to sign in again after you close your browser. We'll add a more secure version of this feature back to Tracker in the next update, later this week.
The last 2 1/2 years have been exciting for Pivotal Tracker. It's grown from an internal tool we at Pivotal Labs occasionally shared with clients and friends to a mainstay of the Ruby, Rails and Agile worlds. Over this period, Engine Yard has provided us with their top-tier private cloud hosting, free of charge, as a service to the community. For this we are extremely grateful, and we hope our users share our gratitude for their generosity, in this and in so much else in the Ruby on Rails ecosystem.
As we've grown, Tracker has become a mission-critical system not just for us, but for over 140,000 developers, entrepreneurs, product owners, and enterprise clients on over 100,000 projects. The application handles over 50,000 requests per minute now, with peaks above 1,400 requests per second.
To support this level of usage, we’ve increased our level of investment in Pivotal Tracker on a number of fronts. So far, many of the changes have been invisible to our users: we've allocated more resources to Tracker development, and increasingly to Tracker operational support. We’ve also evaluated our hosting needs, including factors such as performance, level of control, and reliability. We’ve considered a number of options, and have chosen a hybrid solution made up of dedicated hardware for our database tier and private cloud for application servers. We think this option will provide the right level of control for our team, and provide the best overall performance and scaling capability.
What does this mean for you?
Specifically, it means that there is a migration coming up. We're planning to cut over to the new hosting environment next Saturday, November 6th, starting at 8:00am PDT. Tracker will be unavailable during this migration, in a planned outage not to exceed 6 hours. We chose this time to minimize downtime during business hours for our customers in 158 countries worldwide. We don't actually expect the move to take this long, but since it's a big move, we want to make sure everything is working correctly before bringing things back up.
Pivotal Tracker will be moving to new IP addresses, so if you have any firewall rules or third party integrations that depend on this information, you will need to update them. We will be publishing the new IP addresses within the next few days, prior to the actual migration.
We've set the DNS TTL low leading up to the migration, so we don't anticipate significant DNS propagation delays. If you are in a place where DNS changes take longer to propagate, however, please keep an eye out for this. We’ll help you with workarounds if the issue persists.
Thanks again to Engine Yard for all their great support. We continue to appreciate all they're doing for the larger Rails community, and the huge investment they've made to support Pivotal Tracker. Tracker wouldn’t be what it is today without them.
Tracker should be fully back to normal as of early afternoon today. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any unusual slowness or connectivity issues.
Our apologies for not being able to access your projects this morning. We continue to investigate, and are waiting for our hosting provider to provide more information about the cause of the outage.
Our apologies for the site outage this morning. We're working with our hosting provider to bring Tracker back up ASAP, and are investigating the cause.
For most current updates on the outage, please follow @pivotaltracker.
Tracker will be unavailable for approximately 3 hours this Saturday, Oct 2, starting at 12:00pm (noon) PDT. We're adding indexes and optimizing DB tables to improve performance.
Pivotal Tracker makes it easy to add stories to you project. Hit Ctrl-A, type a quick sentence along the lines of “As a user, I can…so that…”. On most of our projects, we find ourselves discovering new stories all the time, based on the continuous feedback loop that Tracker encourages. Not all stories end up in the backlog, but it’s liberating to be able to capture new ideas and user feedback as they occur.
The downside of this is that the icebox, where all new and unprioritized stories live, can grow out of control very quickly. It’s not uncommon for longer lived, active projects to end up with hundreds, even thousands of stories on ice.
Yesterday's Priorities
A large and growing icebox can be a burden. Your project takes longer to load, it’s harder to find that story you’re sure you added just a few weeks ago. It becomes harder to focus on the future, due to what feels like ever growing debt of promises and yesterday's priorities.
In our eternal optimism as software developers, we like to hang on to our stories. We know we’ll have more bandwidth just as soon as we get through this month’s big release. Besides, we’re hiring, right?
Story Overflow
The reality is that on most software projects, the rate of new story discovery far exceeds the rate at which stories get completed. Typically, a new story in the icebox either gets prioritized and moved to the backlog fairly quickly (either immediately or in the next planning session), or it ends up staying in the Icebox indefinitely. New priorities have a way of displacing older ones.
Stories are perishable, and get stale over time, even when on ice (so to speak). It’s good practice to clean up your icebox regularly, and delete stories that have been sitting there for a while, and are unlikely to see the light of day any time soon. The old stories may have seemed really important at some point in the past, and involved the whole team spending hours in front of a whiteboard or a table full of cards writing them, but if the feature becomes a priority again in the future, you’re probably better off doing it again, based on all the new knowledge you’ll have by then. The important thing is the conversation and a fresh flow of ideas, not so much the stories themselves.
Export before Deleting
To preserve the ideas and any comment discussion in these old stories, it’s a good idea to export them before deleting them. You can do so by selecting them in the icebox via the selection boxes to the right of story titles, and using the Actions menu to export them. You can also export the entire icebox on the project Export CSV page, which is accessible via the Actions menu in your project.
Another option is to move old icebox stories from your active project to a separate project, which serves as a searchable archive. You can move stories from one project to another via the Actions menu as well.
Icebox as an Inbox
Use the Icebox as an inbox, for continuous review of new stories, rather than a permanent storage device. As new ideas, feature requests, and bugs come in, triage them regularly. If a new story is really important, for example a production bug, you’ll probably drag it into the backlog immediately. Otherwise, review newly created stories with the team at the next iteration review and planning session, and either estimate them and prioritize them (by dragging them to the backlog), or move them into a system better suited for long term storage, like a Google Docs spreadsheet or a more general purpose project management or issue tracking tool, like JIRA or Lighthouse. Tracker has built-in integrations with these tools, allowing you to bring back and link stories easily with drag and drop import.
