Yesterday we held a TUG over lunchtime at our San Francisco offices. The subject was "Tracker 101". Thanks to all those who came; some good questions came up, and we hope you found it useful!

As Ian just posted, Pivotal Tracker won a Jolt award tonight. Here are some early pictures from the event.

The Jolt award for Pivotal Tracker

Edward with the Jolt award for Pivotal Tracker

Ian with the Jolt award for Pivotal Tracker

Matthais Marschall at AgileWebOperations.com posted an interesting article the other day comparing Pivotal Tracker to Thoughtworks Mingle. He recognizes that the two tools have a very different philosophy when it comes to configurability: Mingle supports a huge number of different configuration options, whereas Tracker is intentionally very simple and more prescriptive about process. His take is that the simplicity of Tracker is fact a good thing. He likes Tracker's backlog management, its simple UI, and the way that the tool fits naturally into the agile process:

Where Mingle is more like an assistant, whom you can tell to put a card on the wall or give you this or that report, Tracker is more like an agile coach, making sure all the administrative tasks like iteration tracking are "simply there".

Chris's recent post called The Tracker Story points out that simplicity and ease-of-use has always been one of Tracker's core design principles:

Tracker embraces simplicity. It should make managing projects easy, rather than make its users slaves to maintaining the plan. It should give every user of the system more information back than they put in. Tracker doesn't have a huge list of features, because it tries to stay true to its core purpose.

Thanks for the post, Matthais, and we're glad you're finding Tracker to be a good fit for your development process.

Kevin Matheny, Senior E-Biz Architect at Best Buy, has an excellent article today on BusinessWeek.com about Best Buy's take on Agile software development and Best Buy's experiences as a client of Pivotal Labs. As he mentions in the article, Pivotal Labs has been helping Best Buy build "Remix", an API for the BestBuy.com product catalog. Kevin describes the agile methods that Pivotal Labs uses and how they've helped with what he calls "Corporate Agility", which he describes as "working components instead of complete solutions, expecting and responding to change instead of trying to eliminate it, and trust rather than control." He also describes how Pivotal Tracker fits into Pivotal's agile process:

For example, I recently added a story to the tracker for Remix that read simply "flag products as new if their start display date is less than 30 days in the past." That's all the up-front documentation needed for Pivotal Labs, a development company that specializes in agile software development, to code that function into Remix. Any additional information can be gathered in the daily 15-minute team meetings or in a longer follow-up if more time is required.

Thanks for the mention, Kevin, and we're very glad that the project is proving to be successful. Pivot Steve Conover is at the helm.