Shortcut.com has it's an importer tool from Pivotal. Give it a go!
https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...
Pivotal Tracker will shut down
131–140 of 271 posts
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#132Checkout Shortcut.com! They have an import tool from Pivotal Tracker.
https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#133Noooo I use tracker for everything. There's no project management software like it in simplicity and function. You'll be missed
I do like the approach Basecamp took to Kanban ("Card Table") - very very simple and clean (https://basecamp.com/features/card-table). We moved off of Basecamp but we found it super effective when we were a smaller team.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#134The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was visibly obvious that there was only one queue. It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions. In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other. It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.
That sounds more like a disastrous missing feature to me. A good productivity tool doesn’t dictate how teams work. I’d rather have a tool that’s more customizable.
I hear Jira is the ultimate in flexibility and widely beloved. ;)
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#135"Yes, that Pivotal."
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#136Pivotal Tracker was the first time I saw a digital kanban board where the workflow was represented as a series of columns you dragged items through. Since then, its become popular paradigm for pretty much every popular project management software UI around. I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.
No, Pivotal Tracker did not invent this paradigm. For background, I started working around 2005.
Before tools like Tracker or JIRA, people who were doing agile development did everything with physical index cards. There was a lot of controversy even about digitizing those workflows back in the day - "we lose human connection and conversation by putting it in the machine!" Nobody has those conversations anymore as far as I'm aware.
Like others have mentioned on this thread, the true innovation of Tracker was to have a single view where stories are ordered vertically in a single column and grouped by status. This really changes the conversation around what is top priority. Everything can be urgent and have a high level of priority, but if you put something at the top, something else must shift down in compensation. No more doing that thing where there are five number one priorities at the same time.
The Agile view in Jira actually owes some inspiration to Tracker, if you can believe it. I know because I was there. I was a client on a Pivotal Labs project way back in the day, back when Tracker was still not publicly available, but only available to clients of Pivotal Labs. Our PM loved Tracker and wanted to use it but knew we could not get approval for it back home, all other teams were on JIRA. So our PM found a JIRA plugin called Greenhopper, tracked down the developer, and fed this person feedback to try and turn Greenhopper into the most Tracker-like thing possible. Greenhopper eventually got absorbed into Atlassian and turned into what is today known as Jira Agile.
Tracker felt like such an amazing breath of fresh air and forward looking technology at the time when it came out. Tracker used Ruby on Rails and did sexy AJAX stuff on the frontend (big wow factor back then, this was the age of IE6).
I loved Tracker for many years. I could sing its praises all day long. That said, the people who worked on the product had some philosophical things that got in the way of the product evolving. Reasonably, they did not want to turn into a huge enterprise tracking tool. Problem was, there were never any more features built into Tracker that really gave a good view for people who were higher level than the daily boots on the ground folks. So no good visualizations or features for projects where multiple teams must execute in tandem, and there are complex interdependencies between the teams. So while Tracker was awesome for the folks on the dev team, it wasn't very helpful for people in middle or upper management who needed birds-eye visibility easily and at a glance.
So although I am sad to see this announcement in a way I'm quite hopeful. There are so many people who love this tool and will miss it, now there's no excuse for them not to go build something better!
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#137Free 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…
Don't people just use Trello instead?
Pivotal is very different from Trello
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#138The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was visibly obvious that there was only one queue. It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions. In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other. It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.
I also loved that it was adamant about having specific, defined states with no customization. The issue is todo, in progress, done, delivered, accepted… that’s it. Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.
> Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.
The nth circle of hell looks like a Jira workflow. https://i.imgur.com/dQE9vWn.png and https://medium.com/@daitcheson/you-can-do-better-than-jira-1...
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#139Pivotal is the company whose CEO went to Burning Man and wrote a 100% unironic blog post about how it changed his life right?
Really? Do you have a link to the blog post?
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Excel-as-a-benchmark is a powerful thought argument.
If something can't be significantly better than Excel, then product specs probably need refining.
It's not that Excel is amazing or perfect in any one thing, but it is a pretty amazing blend of simplicity, flexibility, out of the box features, programmability, and presentation.