Intro to Pivotal Tracker

INTRO TO TRACKER

A simple, story-based project planning tool that allows teams to collaborate and react instantly to real-world changes.

JOANNE WEBB Head of QA + Customer Support jwebb@pivotal.io

BRIEF OVERVIEW

THE TRACKER DIFFERENCE

WORKING WITH TRACKER

WHAT’S NEXT

FOR MORE …

WELCOME TO TRACKER

BRIEF OVERVIEW

Enables collaboration for software teams

Predicts the future based on past progress

Gives a birds-eye view of the project to everyone

Was built to support the Pivotal development process

Works best with and fosters…

Teams with collective ownership

A highly involved product owner and continuous feedback loop

TRACKER …

Software development consultancy, across US and in the UK and Canada

Hundreds of clients/projects, from startups to enterprise

Technology and vertical agnostic, it’s about the “how”

Our agile practice focuses on test-driven development, pair programming, short development cycles, also continuous verification and integration of code

PIVOTAL LABS

Tracker supports our client engagements, where we co-develop software, using techniques such as pair programming and test driven development

Who uses Tracker at Labs?

Each team has a PM, design, dev, and QA

All of our clients, including Twitter, Best Buy, Zendesk, and many more. Typically, clients continue to use Tracker after the engagement.

Why does Tracker work the way that it works?

Tailored to support our agile workflow. We do XP but it supports Scrum and other methodologies.

PIVOTAL LABS & TRACKER

THE TRACKER DIFFERENCE

EASY, INTUITIVE, TRANSFORMATIVE…

“Easy to use, great story management, Super usability experience, just Awesome!”

“I introduced Tracker to my new employer 3 years ago. It has changed the way we work.”

“Tracker has transformed the way we do development projects, it's the first and last app we look at daily, invaluable.”

“It's so much a part of my routine that I hardly even think about it anymore”

Tracker quickly & easily facilitates good Agile practices:

BECAUSE…

Breaking a large project and it’s features down into manageable steps to complete it

Effective iteration / sprint planning

Team estimation

Allowing focus on completing the next priority in the list

Seeing progress & the big picture

Isn’t a replacement for conversations

WORKING WITH TRACKER

TRACKER: The Project Page

1. Provides a birds-eye view of project

2. Is a prioritized list of work (stories)

3. Groups list of work (backlog) into segments of calendar time (iterations)

4. Predicts progress based on historical performance (velocity)

5. Fosters a simple process, continuous feedback loop

AT ITS CORE, TRACKER … VELOCITY

ITERATIONS

PRIORITIZEDSTORIES

STORY TYPES

A feature story describes work that results in direct value to the team’s customer

A bug story represents a defect, that may be related to a feature story

A chore has indirect value to the customer (e.g., Update SSL Certs) and has a simple workflow

A release story is a milestone marker

ESTIMATINGA point is a team-specific metric representing the effort it will take to implement a feature (considering risk)

Features are estimated via a fixed point scale:

Powers of 2 – 1, 2, 4, 8

Linear – 1, 2, 3

Fibonacci – 1, 2, 3, 5, 8

Custom

Bugs and Chores aren’t typically estimated (and it’s best not to)

PRIORITY 20

PRIORITY 1PRIORITY 1

PRIORITY 12

PRIORITIZATIONPosition in backlog is priority

Stories are ordered by business value weighed against development risk

Consider dependencies when prioritizing

It's obvious which item the team will work on next

Use One big list (combine current and backlog)

VELOCITY + ITERATIONS

Accepted stories in current automatically move into Done at end of each iteration

Velocity calculated based on average # of points accepted in recent iterations

Future iterations are projected based on current velocity

Velocity can be overridden locally for “what if” scenarios

Iteration length & team strength can be adjusted for unusual situations - goal is steady velocity (low volatility)

Back-date stories that were accepted “late”... maintains velocity calculation. However, historical data, i.e. the original accepted on date is maintained in Analytics.

VELOCITYVELOCITY ITERATION NUMBER TEAM STRENGTH

ITERATIONLENGTH

OVERRIDE

MANUAL PLANNING

Turn off Automatic Planning on the Project Settings page to control stories in the current iteration; the only stories that will appear there, are any that:

are in-progress you’ve accepted since the start of the iteration you’ve explicitly drag dropped there

Note: Turning off automatic planning only affects the current iteration; you’ll still see future iterations in the Backlog, calculated based on the project's velocity.

RELEASE MARKERSRepresent milestones in the backlog, such as planned releases

Stories for the milestone are above it

Optional target dates, release marker turns red if they won’t hit it (too much scope)

Helps avoid scope creep because impact on milestones is immediate

Progress toward release can be visualized with a Burndown chart

STORY WORKFLOW

1. Customer / PM / PO prioritizes stories in backlog

2. Team discusses and collectively estimates each story

3. Developers start next available story in current or backlog

4. Developers check in code to finish story

5. Team pushes code for new feature to demo/test environment, and delivers stories

6. Customer/PM accepts or rejects story (the feedback loop)

ESTIMATE

TE

ST

FIN

ISH

DELIVER

PRIORITIZE

RE

LEA

SE

DEPLOY

START

DEFINE

DESIGN

TE

ST

REJECT

ACCEPT

How does Labs use Tracker?

DESIGN IN THE FLOW

Makes upcoming design work (in multiple projects) visible

Can be prioritized, discussed and estimated

Can thrash out a lot of detail and decisions before it goes into main project to be brought to life

Dedicated design project

DESIGN IN THE FLOW

Add overall themes and mocks to an Epic

Attach images, assists, Google docs, links to InVision and more

Use labels to call out design specific items, e.g. "needs design", "pair with designer", "design accept"

@mention designer in a comment for help/clarifications

Moving to a project for implementation

LABELSHighlight key information

Click on a label to see all stories with that label, or use search

Labels can be applied in bulk

Can be used to group related stories or for workflow

You can tie stories together, effectively, by having them in an epic or giving them all the same label

Must-have Labels:

• blocked

• needs discussion

• needs design

EPICSRepresent coarse-grained features or feature themes

Order independent of stories in backlog, convey overall big picture priorities

Linked to stories via label

Progress bars show story progress and relative size

Sharing and collaboration around requirements and design assets that span multiple stories

WORKSPACESWork with panels from different projects in one view

Can set color for each

Add any number of projects

Drag stories between projects

Search across projects in workspace

My Work across projects

Shows stories you are working on (as story owner) or delivered stories you’ve requested (as the customer)

Order is based on priority of stories in backlog

WORKSPACES CONTINUED

ADD/REMOVEPROJECTS INWORKSPACE

SEARCH ACROSS PROJECTS

SELECTABLEPROJECT COLOR

SORT

MULTIPLE STORY OWNERSKeep track of who's pairing or working on stories by adding multiple story owners.

Makes My Work more accurate

For now, it's limited to three, for your dev pair and perhaps a tester or designer

SEARCHFull text search with support for wildcards/regex, negatives, boolean expressions

Search by specific fields (state, owner/requester, dates)

Relative dates (“today”, “-2weeks”), with date ranges (“-1w..today”)

Searches can be pinned, saved and shared

Cross-project search in Workspaces

AnalyticsMultiple charts, reports and filtering options

See key metrics

Drill down into individual epics

Raw data can be exported for further analysis

Being improved based on feedback

Join the beta via your Dashboard

Analytics

Available Analytics charts and reports:

Project Overview VelocityCycle Time RejectionStory CompositionBurnup

Cumulative FlowIteration ReportEpics Report Releases ReportBurndownStories Activity

INTEGRATIONSTracker lets you continue to work with your other tools - we integrate with:

• Jira

• Github

• Slack

• Zendesk

• Google

• and more

We also have Activity Web hooks and a comprehensive, well documented API

INTEGRATION FOCUS - JIRA

When you drag from the Jira integration panel, it creates a new story with the title, description & a link to the originating Jira ticket.

After that, Tracker changes e.g. states and added comments are reflected in Jira, but Jira changes are not reflected in the Tracker story. So you would not see workflow state changes in Jira reflected in Tracker.

INTEGRATION FOCUS - GITHUBThe Tracker API supports integration with post-commit hooks of Source Control Management (SCM) systems such as Subversion, Git/Github, etc. (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/community/tracker-blog/guide-githubs-service-hook-tracker)

When a commit is made to the SCM, a trigger can call the Tracker API to add a story comment with the commit ID, author and message. It can also optionally change story state.

USING PANELSPanels / UI

Drag drop to rearrange panels

Choose panel width (fixed vs auto)

In fixed mode double click panel header to fit panels to browser

Clone panels

Split/combine current and backlog

Layouts

Favorite Searches & Epics

STORY VIEWS + OPTIONSHide accepted stories in current

Add stories directly to current, backlog and icebox panels

View history

Story density modes

VELOCITYADD STORY

VELOCITYHISTORY

STORY DENSITYDense:

Normal:

Minimal:

Projector:

MARKDOWNUse Markdown to add richer content such as:

bold/italic

numbered and bulleted lists

code blocks

headers

images

CLICK HERE FOR HOW TO USE TRACKER-FLAVORED MARKDOWN

NOTIFICATIONS SETTINGSGet there via Profile under your user name

In app notifications

Email notifications

Mute notifications per project (though you’ll still get direct mentions)

Email and in-app notifications keep you up to date

You can be @mentioned, @mention others and follow stories

"State changes relevant to me" provides notifications when:

A story you requested is Delivered

A story you own is Accepted or Rejected

Make the customer/verifier the Requester ... they will get email updates for comments and delivered stories

Use in-app notifications for mentions only ... this makes the things you need to see and take action on more visible.

NOTIFICATIONS

IN-APP NOTIFICATIONSMark each notification as read

Mark all read

Reveal the related story

Open your notifications into a panel that persists in your project to have a real-time feed of notifications to easily respond to

Keyboard shortcuts - See under Help & Updates in any project or use SHIFT+?

Multi Select - Click or shift click the selection boxes to the right of collapsed stories

Clone stories - via in expanded story or top left options when you select one or more

Clone Panels - Reorder stories more conveniently by dragging between two views of the same panel, side by side

Combine Current & Backlog - via the Panel Actions menu at the top right of the Current or Backlog panels

Don’t estimate bugs and chores - that option is off by default

Back-date stories - if they need to be in a prior iteration via the date picker in an expanded accepted story

Have a standard set of labels - such as blocked, needs discussion, needs design

Override Velocity - by clicking velocity number in Sidebar for a personal view of the impact of possible velocities or crank it up to temporarily remove iteration markers in your view

PRO TIP ROUNDUP

Link Stories & epics - by pasting their URLs in to another story or epic. Mouse over them after saving to see a preview

Cross project Search & My Work - are one of several reasons Workspaces work for you

Search Hints - click the ? icon to the right of the Search field for a cheat sheet, then SEARCH HELP in that pop-up for more

Projector mode - When you’re sharing your screen or projecting your project make it easier to see via in Sidebar

Move and adjust panels to suit you - e.g In fixed mode double click panel header to fit panels to browser

Make the customer/verifier the Requester - they will get email updates for comments and delivered stories

Use in-app notifications for mentions only - to make them visible. Use email notifications (and email client rules) for the rest

PRO TIP ROUNDUP

FOR MORE …Help menu (when in a project):

Intro Tour

Recent Updates: www.pivotaltracker.com/help/recentupdates

In Help menu & footer - Help Center: help.pivotaltracker.com which includes:

Getting Started articles to get your team up to speed quickly

In depth articles and Tracker details

Where to find the App Bazaar listing of 3rd party tools

Info on integrations with Jira, Github, Slack and more

Comprehensive API Doc

Interesting public project: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/966314

Tips from a customer

How Tracker team manages design work

System Status: status.pivotaltracker.comSupport: tracker@pivotal.ioTracker Blog: www.pivotaltracker.com/community/tracker-blog/Follow us on Twitter @pivotaltracker