Pivotal Tracker Blog

New in Pivotal Tracker: Improved Stories!

Dan Podsedly — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0800

Stories in Pivotal Tracker have been given a serious upgrade. For the most part it’s all pretty self explanatory - the functionality you’re used to is all there, just in a format that’s more intuitive, user friendly and hopefully you’ll agree, more appealing. Our advice, play with it and then come back and read the rest of this post, especially if anything is confusing.

You’re back, so let’s continue!

One of the goals of Tracker has always been to make collaboration around your story backlog as easy as possible, so that your team spends less time managing your project and more of it actually building things. We think there’s room to make that not just easier, but more enjoyable, even fun! So to that end, great usability and user experience are major themes in our backlog for 2012, starting with this story redesign.

See below for all the highlights.

New Look and Feel

Like we said, stories look different, and are hopefully a lot easier to work with now. It's a complete redesign, with a color scheme that fits better with the rest of the Tracker UI, and that's intended to make the important information in a story stand out more - such as the story title, description, comments, code commits, and file attachments.

Besides visual appeal, we’re aiming to reduce clicks - for example, when creating a new story, it only takes one click to choose a story type or point estimate value. And, you can now start, finish, deliver, or accept/reject an expanded story with one click, with the familiar buttons.

Click to Copy ID and Story URL

We heard your feedback about having to scroll down in stories to find their IDs, to copy them to your commit messages (you are using the source commit integration, right?). So, we've moved the ID to the top of stories, and made it so that you can copy the ID to the clipboard with one click (on the ID button).

The same is true for the story URL, for when you need to send someone a link to the story. Just click the link button in the top left corner, and the story's full URL will be copied to the clipboard. Note - you’ll need Flash enabled in your browser for these to work. If you don’t have Flash, you’ll see the full URL on a separate line, so you can copy it the old way.

Less commonly used actions, including delete and view history, have been moved to the “More” menu, which is where we’ll be adding some other convenience actions soon.

File Attachments on Comments

One big change in this redesign is that files are now attached to stories as part of posting a comment, rather than as a separate list. This is because files are commonly uploaded and shared in the context of an on-going conversation, and it’s so much easier to refer to a file that’s actually part of that comment (e.g. “Here’s that icon”) rather than having to say “see the file named foo.gif at the bottom of the story”.

You can still drag and drop files from your desktop to stories, and entering an actual comment when adding files is optional - just drop your files on a story and close it.

View All Images and Comment Filtering

The truth is, thumbnails of mockups attached to a story can be indistinguishable from one another. Sometimes you just need to see them all full sized, on one page. Now, with just one click of the View All Images link above the Activity section, you can.

We’ve also made it easier to find what you need in a long-winded (all of it beautifully clear and vital) comment conversation - just use the filter dropdown menu at the top right of the Activity section to show just file attachments, just source commits, or all comments without commits.

Feedback

This redesign of stories is the first step in an on-going usability overhaul. We’ve got much more coming over the course of this year, but we’d like to incorporate your feedback at every step, so please let us know what you think so far, in the comments here or by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.

Pivotal Tracker Maintenance this Saturday (Feb. 4) at 9:00am PST (17:00 UTC)

Dan Podsedly — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:34:00 -0800

We've got a major update of Pivotal Tracker planned for this weekend, which requires downtime while we run a fairly major database schema migration.

The update is planned for Saturday, Feb. 4, at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time (PST), or 17:00 UTC, and we expect it to take approximately one hour.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but we're hopeful that you'll like what we're rolling out!

For real time status updates, please follow @pivotaltracker on Twitter.

Pivotal Labs has new opportunities in web, mobile, and at Tracker

Ash Hogan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:03:00 -0800

At Pivotal Labs, 2011 was an amazing year. And we want you to help us make 2012 even better. We're currently hiring for the following positions across our San Francisco, New York City, Boulder, Denver and Singapore campuses:

Software Engineer - Mobile
Software Engineer - Web
Software Engineer - Tracker
Sr. Software Engineer

Want to know more? Click here for full job descriptions, and to apply.

Pivotal Tracker API V2 To Be Removed on Jan 27

Dan Podsedly — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:59:00 -0800

We're working on a new version of the Pivotal Tracker developer API, with a long list of improvements. The release of this is a few months away, but to prepare for it, we're removing the old version (V2) of the API. This change (removal of V2) is tentatively planned for January 27, 2012, just over three weeks from today.

If you're using the API, please make sure that you're using the current version (V3), as requests to V2 will no longer work.

To see which version you're using, look at the URLs of the requests you're sending. If you see "v2" in the path, for example /services/v2/projects, you're using the old version, and will need to upgrade to the current API version.

If you have any questions, or could use help figuring out how to make your code work with the V3 version of the API, please send an email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.

Apigee Pivotal Tracker API Console

Dan Podsedly — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:53:00 -0800

Apigee, a company that helps you use and develop APIs, just announced a number of new API consoles, including for Pivotal Tracker. The Pivotal Tracker API Console allows you to explore the API from within your browser, and makes it easy to test and debug your code that uses the API. Check it out!

For the rest of the new consoles, see the Apigee announcement blog post.

Pivotal Tracker Introductory Webinar Next Wed (Dec 21) - Register Now!

Dan Podsedly — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:18:00 -0800

We're planning the first of an on-going series of Webinars for Pivotal Tracker users for next Wednesday, Dec 21, at 11:00am PST (19:00 GMT).

This is going to be a 1 hour session, via GoToWebinar. Anyone is more than welcome to join, but this particular session will be geared towards new Tracker users. We'll go over the agile concepts behind Tracker, show how to get started with your first project, and give you a tour of the most commonly used features. At the end, there will be an opportunity to ask plenty of questions.

Please register in advance, at the following URL:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/520854266

Instructions for how to join the Webinar will be emailed to you after you register. Since GoToWebinar requires you to download and install an app to join, we suggesting connecting a few minutes before 11:00am on Wednesday.

See you there!

Hojoki - activity from Pivotal Tracker and your other apps in one place

Dan Podsedly — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:40:00 -0800

Hojoki is a new collaboration app that promises to "make all your cloud apps work as one", by integrating many of the most popular services that your team uses daily (including Pivotal Tracker, of course) into a personalized activity stream.

Once configured, your Hojoki activity stream shows you when a story is created, edited, started, finished and deleted. Hojoki also shows you all of your project members, and allows you to search for who created a story, who requested it, and who is responsible for implementing it.

To welcome Pivotal Tracker users, Hojoki if offering some cool robot-playing-basketball shirts! There are only a few available, though, so they'll go to the first 10 people who comment on this blog post, below.

More info on the Pivotal Tracker integration, including how to get started, in the Hojoki welcome blog post.

New in Pivotal Tracker for iOS: Search, My Work, New iPhone Interface

Dan Podsedly — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:36:00 -0800

Version 1.1 of the Pivotal Tracker for iOS app is now available in the iTunes App Store. This update adds the Search and My Work panels, a redesigned iPhone interface, and many overall usability improvements. All the details after the jump, below.

Search and My Work

You can now find and filter stories quickly with the new Search panel, which supports all of the Tracker search syntax that you're used to. The new My Work panel shows you all of the stories that you're currently working on, that are assigned to you, or that are waiting for your acceptance.

Add Stories Anywhere

Adding stories is easier now, just tap the new story button at the top right corner, regardless of where you are in the app (on the iPad or the iPhone).

Faster Access to Story Panels

Switching between panels on the iPhone is now much faster with the new tab bar at the bottom. It even works while dragging a story - tap the desired target panel with the other finger.

Similarly, the iPad version now has a row of panel buttons at the top right, tap them to reveal a given panel quickly or just swipe the panels side to side as before.

Story States on iPhone

Story states are now displayed for in-progress stories on the iPhone, and easily changed by swiping a story to the left.

Other Improvements

Drag and drop and scrolling has been significantly improved, particularly on older iPhone and iPod Touch models. We've also updated the app for iOS 5, and added many detailed interface tweaks to make stories easier to find and work with.

Feedback

We're committed to bringing the best of Pivotal Tracker to the your iPhone and iPad, while taking full advantage of all the user experience and portability features of the iOS platform. Many more improvements are on the way, but we'd love to know what you think so far! Give us a shout at tracker@pivotallabs.com.

By the way, we're thrilled to see all the positive reviews in iTunes. Thanks everyone, and keep them coming!

New 3rd party tool: pWidget - Embaddable Tracker Widget

Dan Podsedly — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:50:00 -0800

pWidget is a new 3rd party tool for Pivotal Tracker. It's an embeddable widget, that can be shown in any iframe, and shows stories from multiple projects. Configure it via URL params to show stories matching a search result, from specific projects, in label-specific priority order, and more!

Check out the pWidget page for more details.

For other helpful tools, see the Tracker 3rd party tools directory, and subscribe to the RSS feed to stay on top of new ones as they're added.

Scheduled Pivotal Tracker Maintenance this Saturday

Dan Podsedly — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 08:02:00 -0700

We're planning database server configuration changes and maintenance work for this Saturday, Oct 29, at 2pm PDT (21:00 UTC). Tracker will be unavailable for approximately one hour.

For the most up to date status information, please follow @pivotaltracker.