At Pivotal Labs, our clients, customers, and developers love Pivotal Tracker; after all, we wrote it and selfishly kept it to ourselves for 2 years! With that much history, some of our Tracker projects have built up thousands of stories, and keeping these stories organized is a challenge. Luckily, we designed Tracker with a simple yet powerful organizational tool: Labels. Here are some labeling patterns we find useful.

On April 29, 2009 Pivotal Labs hosted the inaugural San Francisco Pivotal Tracker User's Group. It was a great success! As an avid Pivotal Tracker user (and sometimes developer) for over 3 years I am very interested in making Tracker a better product and teaching others how to use Tracker to improve their organization.

Here are a few thoughts I took away from the meeting, and a few tips and tricks.

As a developer of web apps, I'm inevitably running 3 or 4 browsers, each with 10 tabs open containing my application under development, Google searches, gotapi (pronounced "got a pie?" of course!), design wireframes, and all kinds of other very important stuff. And in one of those tabs, somewhere, is Pivotal Tracker. Browsers and tabs are great, but sometimes you just want an Application -- notice the capital "A."

Fluid to the rescue! Fluid lets you create Site Specific Browsers, which "provide a great solution for your WebApp woes." In a nutshell, Fluid makes a custom WebKit browser that, when launched, opens just the site you configured it to open, such as Gmail, Pandora, or even Pivotal Tracker. I love that I can maximize the Pivotal Tracker app and boost the font 3 or 4 levels, filling a screen with Tracker goodness without the clutter or navigation buttons, bookmark bars, or tabs. And where is Tracker? Just command-tab!

Here's how to create a Fluid application for Pivotal Tracker.

1. Download and install Fluid
2. Download the Fluid Icon for Pivotal Tracker
3. Launch Fluid
4. Enter the following:
   • URL: http://www.pivotaltracker.com
   • Name: Pivotal Tracker
   • Location: pick one!
   • Icon: pick 'Other...' then find the tracker icon you downloaded earlier
5. Click Create, then launch it!

Once launched, open the Pivotal Tracker preferences and change the Window Style to "HUD (Black)" under Appearance Preferences Why? Because it looks cool.

Update

Here is the Fluid icon, upon request.

Interesting Things

• Pivotal Tracker tip: as the Holiday Season approaches, you can edit your Team Strength to account for vacationing team members. For example, if you are missing 1 out of a team of 4 next week, set next week's Team Strength to 75%

  

• Rescuing inside a transaction: ActiveRecord relies on catching a Rollback error in order to perform transaction rollbacks. If you are performing a begin..rescue block within a transaction, make sure you either (a) specify the Exception or Errors you want to catch, or (b) re-raise the Rollback error if caught.

• Bring it! The Pivot Pong Tournament of Champions is on! Games will be played on the Pivotal breakfast tables/ping pong table.

  

Ask for Help

"What is the life-cycle of test fixtures when using transactional fixtures?"

1. The testing framework clears the database of all data within tables that have fixtures files defined.
2. A test/spec file is loaded and all fixtures declared within it (or all if fixtures :all is declared) are loaded into the database.
3. A transaction is started.
4. The test/spec runs.
5. The transaction is rolled-back.
6. Repeat!

Here's a hot Fluid icon for Pivotal Tracker. Thanks, Ted!

Check out a couple of other icons in this Flickr upload.