Pivotal Labs has been at the forefront of agile development since it's early days. We've taken what we've learned by applying agile concepts on a countless number of real world projects, and honed these skills into a very effective way to build software. Along the way, we also built a great project management and collaboration tool - Pivotal Tracker.

Not only does Tracker serve as a critical component of our own development process, it's also relied on by thousands of teams out there in the world, from open source developers, to fast growing startups, and high profile, established companies.

It's a great app, yet we have lots of ideas for how we'd like to improve it. Want to help us? If you're a Ruby on Rails developer, enthusiastic about agile development, and want to help us to take Tracker to the next level, read on.

We're currently looking for developers in the Denver/Boulder, Colorado area. Familiarity with Ruby on Rails is important, as are strong Javascript, CSS, and overall web UI skills. At Pivotal Labs, we pair and test drive 100% of the time, so any experience with pair-programming and/or test driven development would be a huge plus. We're also big on aggressive refactoring, so be ready to roll up your sleeves.

If you're interested in working with us, please send your current resume to tracker-jobs@pivotallabs.com, and tell us a little about yourself. Principals only, please.

Our friends at Carbon Five have just announced Story Mapper, a release planning tool for your Pivotal Tracker projects. Story Mapper uses the Tracker API, and allows you to plan and manage your project milestones and releases at a high level. We've already begun to use Story Mapper on our projects at Pivotal Labs, and are excited about how well the tool complements Tracker and our planning process.

Check out Carbon Five's blog post on Story Mapper to find out more, and to start using it today.

SnapABug, a tool that allows you to embed a screen capture help widget on your site, has taken advantage of the recently released new version of the Pivotal Tracker API (V3) to improve the integration between SnapABug and Pivotal Tracker. SnapABug can now automatically upload web page snapshots as Tracker story file attachments.

Read more about this feature and other improvements here.

We've added Zendesk to the list of applications that Tracker integrates with. Zendesk is a "beautifully simple", on demand customer support help desk system. This integration allows your development team to prioritize and collaborate around Zendesk tickets as linked Tracker stories, bringing development and support closer together in your organization.

Pivotal Tracker will be down for an upgrade tonight, Friday (2/12/10), starting at 7pm PST. We anticipate to be back up within about an hour.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

This Pivotal Tracker update allows you to see GitHub or other SCM commits in your stories, your project activity in your team's Campfire chat room, and introduces the first wave of integrations with other bug/issue tracking applications including JIRA, Lighthouse, and Satisfaction.

There is also a new version of the API (V3), with support for moving stories, file attachments, as well as activity web hooks. The first version of the API (V1) is no longer available.

Continue reading for more details on what's new.

We are planing to do a Tracker upgrade (with new features including API V3 and some integrations) tomorrow, Saturday Jan 23, at 5:30pm PST. We expect the upgrade to take under two hours.

Also, Engine Yard will be performing some maintenance and upgrades our hardware cluster on Sunday, from 10:00am to 1:00pm PST.

Sorry for the inconvenience. If you need access to your project data during the downtime, we recommend you export your project(s) beforehand:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/help#howcaniexportstoriesfrommyproject

Also, as a reminder, the first version of the API (V1) will be disabled as part of tomorrow's release. More information on that here.

If you've been looking for a way to turn emails into Tracker stories, take a look at tgethr. It's an email collaboration service for groups, and it now integrates with Pivotal Tracker.

Read about it in this tgethr blog post.

We're planning a Pivotal Tracker upgrade on Jan 23. As part of this release, we will be introducing a new API version (V3), which will make it easier to follow project activity, allow you to add file attachments, move (re-prioritize) stories, associate source commits with stories, and more.

The current API version (V2) will not change, but V1 will no longer work. If you're still using V1, you will need to change your client code to use V2 or V3.

To find out what's changing in V3, continue reading.

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.