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Pivotal Tracker will shut down

pivotaltracker.com

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Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fascinated by how complex JIRA is. We evaluated it in 2008. It seemed fine enough. Looking at it 16 years later, and… what is this nonsense? It’s so customizable that it’s loaded with footguns.

I had some thoughts on Jira: https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects. Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.

> Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.

PM's gotta justify their jobs somehow.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#93
I signed up for Pivotal Tracker a month ago, after a ten-year gap. I loved the simplicity then, and I love it even more now. I'm saying this after using multiple different project management/Agile management apps.

I still use all the terminologies I learnt from PT — Icebox, backlog, current — across other project management apps.

Sad, and you will be missed.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#94

Can they open source it?

It should be a legal obligation that, passed a certain threshold of time and user base, you are required to do so.

There should be a very high standard for "the government can force me to do [something]" and it shouldn't be thrown around as casually as, one of a thousand enterprise CRUD apps went away.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#95
post #62

Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team. People often ask: how do I find business ideas? Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away. This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this. All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tra…

The biggest risk: people are going to flock to Linear, which is the next best thing.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#96

man, what would I give to have Atlassian shut down - so much frustration, anger, productivity lost and just absolute misery caused by that terrible company and their horrible products I actually liked using Tracker.

Atlassian's primary sin is listening to PMs for features.

As a subset of users, they seem to want the flexibility of Excel, except it also has the specific workflow they want out of the box (which is different for every PM).

Every product that's chased that rabbit down the hole has ended up with something customizable enough that (a) users need training to actually use it & (b) nobody is ever trained on it.

I'm sure Jira is great... if I and everyone else at the company went to a two-week training course on configuring and using it. But none of those people, nor I, am ever going to do that.

Tl;dr - project management/tracker tools should have a complexity feature cap, defined by what a reasonable person can intuit in the course of normal use over a month.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#97
post #96

man, what would I give to have Atlassian shut down - so much frustration, anger, productivity lost and just absolute misery caused by that terrible company and their horrible products I actually liked using Tracker.

Atlassian's primary sin is listening to PMs for features. As a subset of users, they seem to want the flexibility of Excel, except it also has the specific workflow they want out of the box (which is different for every PM). Every product that's chased that rabbit down the hole has ended up with something customizable enough that (a) users need training to actually use it & (b) nobody is ever trained on it. I'm sure…

I would rather just use an actual spreadsheet for issue tracking than Jira.

We lost our CTO recently, and he was also the "jira admin" (ie. the only person who knows how the hell to do anything with jira) and it's just been a clusterf*ck ever since.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#98
post #33
post #25

They're not migrating users to another VMware company product? VMware can't sell Pivotal Tracker to some company that will keep it going longer (and perhaps try to migrate customers to their own product)?

Since VMware sold to Broadcom in 2023, they've been cutting jobs and increasing prices to squeeze every bit of profitability possible out of their remaining customers. I'm actually kind of surprised they aren't offering support past April 30 2025 end-of-life date for 50x the current pricing.

Can someone explain to me how Broadcom's plan is supposed to be profitable in the long term?

I don't get it. You buy a company, then deliberately destroy it. How is that profitable? I get that there are tax benefits to being able to show massive losses, but certainly the net at the end is still a loss.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never worked at Pivotal but did work in a 100% pairing cultural (it wasn’t forced but our team did it for three years) and I desperately miss it. It’s so hard to find companies that do it.

I worked with several Pivotal teams, and also really miss it. I've never been as productive or had that much fun at work.

> I've never been as productive or had that much fun at work.

This was my experience as well.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fascinated by how complex JIRA is. We evaluated it in 2008. It seemed fine enough. Looking at it 16 years later, and… what is this nonsense? It’s so customizable that it’s loaded with footguns.

I had some thoughts on Jira: https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects. Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.

it's the super customizable ones that end up adopted across large Enterprises. Flexible workflows I guess. eg Salesforce, Jira
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