191–200 of 271 posts
Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least. It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done. It limited customization down to a sane level. And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
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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’d rather have a tool that’s more customizable. You think you would, until you do, and by then it's too late. It's important to have good processes, but the point of all those processes is to help you make things more efficiently. Anything that leads to you spending extra time serving the process directly reduces the amount of real work you can do.
I think this viewpoint -- that these processes somehow could increase efficiency if only they were good -- has a lot to do with why engineers dislike systems like Jira, because they will never see the increased efficiency they are looking for.
Let me restate it in a way that I think is a little more nuanced:
The point of systems/processes is to lessen the amount of inefficiency in a group of people working together as that group a) gets larger, and b) experiences turnover.
Nothing's ever going to be as efficient as a single engineer that can build everything with all the details in their head at that very moment. But there's a limitation on size of problems you can solve doing that! So many people working on large problems hate their processes, because each individual person is doing less than if they were in a tiny, stable team, and they can feel this, even if the organization is making great progress.
(And then, at the largest sizes of organization, it's almost impossible to stop the org from crumbling from the weight of its own complexity. People do spend an awful lot of effort trying, though).
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I know managers love Jira — a poster child for customizability — esp product managers, but I have yet to meet a software engineer who does. It simply slows everyone down, but when it's your only tool for tracking work, it's still better than nothing. Now, the problem with Jira is not necessarily customizability but that it's dog slow, complex, integrations suck, and permissions system is chaotic. Still, I have yet to…
Honestly this is a bit like saying that the dishwashers don’t like the food being served at the restaurant. Project management software isn’t made for the benefit of engineers, that’s on purpose. The customer is the business, not the engineer who works there. Any issues with the engineers have with workflow really aren’t the fault of the software, it’s the fault of the project managers/engineering managers’ configura…
I've seen many custom JIRA workflows, where you define specific states that can progress to other states. Nearly all of them, over time, were modified so that any state can move to any other state.
And if you engineers don't use the tool you provide, the data in it is useless. Engineers are typically very smart and will just twist any tool they don't like.
Declaration: In order to have accurate state between projects and bugs, everything needs to be tracked in JIRA.
Result: 70% of your Jira stories are now "This JIRA tracks an issue stored in the Github repo, see the repo for current status"
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> And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch. Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit (Hint: they exist) Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high…
All true, but I think we might underestimate the amount of data sitting in Pivotal.
RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I use these skills every single day. You will b…
I heard this from other people that worked on Pivotal. Must have been a cool eng team.
RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I use these skills every single day. You will b…
> How to polish a turd over time. You mean iterating and pivoting.
It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at least we tried our best.
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PT's concept of velocity isn't just tracking a number. It is tracking what work will get done within a period of time based on the average amount of work done previously. It allowed PM's to actually estimate when a feature would be completed and how adding or removing stories (or people!) would impact future feature deadlines. Initial velocity was meaningless and only developed over time as an average value of a team…
That concept of velocity is in the original Extreme Programming practice, which predates Pivotal, and it was indeed done with racks of index cards. It's explained pretty clearly in the first edition of Extreme Programming Explained, but i can't find a copy of that online right now. The second edition was absolutely ruined for some reason, but still contains a rough description of it: > Whichever units you use, hours…
Doing what PT does, with index cards, would have been a nightmare on any sufficiently large project.
Shortcut ( https://www.shortcut.com/ ) is a solid alternative to Pivotal Tracker. I work as an Engineering Manager there and helped build an importer for Pivotal Tracker data into Shortcut ( https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivota... ). Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.
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What hosting providers would you recommend?
Both OVH and Hetzner offers unmetered connections for their dedicated servers, only had good experience with both so far (besides when one of OVH's data centers burned down, but hoping that was a exceptional situation)
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All true, but I think we might underestimate the amount of data sitting in Pivotal.
I don't think you'd have to consider migration all the data from Pivotal, but lets assume 10% just in case? Lets say that's 100TB in total (on disk), which you could host with 10x storage boxes from Hetzner, 24 EUR each per month, so 240 EUR in total, which includes 10 unmetered connections (1 per box).