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Pivotal Tracker will shut down

pivotaltracker.com

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Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#201

Post by latchkey »

skybrian wrote: post #151
latchkey wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, that’s basically how we did it. Though not formally accounting for vacation days; there were four of us and we didn’t have people coming and going much. We only did it once a week during the retrospective. It’s not hard to add up story points for the week and remember what you did in previous weeks. You could enter it into a spreadsheet if you want to get fancy. The concept comes from Extreme Programming. Softwa…

> I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you need a larger team for it to matter.

My buddy and I built what ended up being an $80m/yr gross revenue business entirely using PT for ourselves. We shipped a MVP exactly to the week we predicted. It helped that we both worked at Pivotal and knew exactly how to use PT correctly.

You certainly were early with the process and I applaud you for that! PT wasn't released until 2008.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#202

Post by dboreham »

mikehollinger wrote: post #38
pwenzel wrote: post #30

We have to use Jira at my current workplace and it's so complicated. Pivotal Tracker, which I used at previous workplace, was so simple and focused. Sad to hear it's shutting down!

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 have a theory: Back in 1996 Bugzilla worked very well. It had been designed, and honed, by a bunch of senior developers who also wrote the bug management system. So lots of dog food eaten. iirc it was written in Perl.

Then, someone I believe decided to make a "Bugzilla in Java", because they didn't like Perl (reasonable).

But whoever that was didn't have the deep knowledge of how the thing was supposed to be used. Lacking that insight, they created a "Swiss Army Chainsaw", implementing simultaneously everything, and nothing.

Next, some MBAs got hold of the thing, and made everything 10X worse.

Meanwhile, Bugzilla is still the same and still the best software project management tool, if you know how it's intended to be used.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#203

Post by hinkley »

elwebmaster wrote: post #183
hinkley wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked at a couple places that made the mistake of thinking they could charge a premium for artisanal hand crafted web pages. You get all the customers with deep seated control issues, willing to pay a premium to have everything exactly how they like it, and one by one sticker shock works as therapy and the price they will pay per artisanal, hand crafted webpage slowly declines until it costs you more to run the…

Can you please elaborate more on this? Price they will pay for changes? Not getting it, is it that the target market is slow forcing owners to lower the price? Doesn’t explain “costs more to run” part.

To a first order approximation, Wikipedia serves everyone the same page. So the cost of pages in Wikipedia is proportional to the rate of edits, not the rate of page clicks and inbound links. Because once I hit Save, the page they display is pretty much the same one they'll show you when I send it to you to ask your opinion.

If I show each user of a website a highly customized, user- and workflow-specific page for the same url based on context and previous activity, then I have to generate it every time ("hand crafted, artisanal web pages") so the weight of the backend is now proportional to traffic.

Amazon.com tries to split the difference. You and I see the same bones of a page for an Apple Watch 10, but little bits load in and show you laundry detergent and me pickles. But Amazon makes more money every time I click on pickles and add to my cart, so there's an expectation that the fractional penny they pay to load the page fragment results in more sales. That doesn't work the same for SaaS applications, so you need to use even this trick sparingly, not build your whole product value statement around it.

For the control issues crack, the paying customer (not their users) is attracted by all the levers and dials, but cannot appreciate the cost using them exposes them to. The development cost can amortize over time, increasing your profit margins and letting you recoup the R&D costs, but the cost of keeping a cluster running cannot. And you've painted yourself into a requirements corner you can't get out of. Eventually their eye drifts to competitors with fewer high-cost, high-value features in favor of low-cost.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#206

Post by jmartin2683 »

kjksf wrote: 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…

It just went out of business for… reasons. There are better tools out there nowadays, apparently. Why emulate a sunken ship?

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#207

Post by ilbeeper »

hinkley wrote: post #203
elwebmaster wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please elaborate more on this? Price they will pay for changes? Not getting it, is it that the target market is slow forcing owners to lower the price? Doesn’t explain “costs more to run” part.

To a first order approximation, Wikipedia serves everyone the same page. So the cost of pages in Wikipedia is proportional to the rate of edits, not the rate of page clicks and inbound links. Because once I hit Save, the page they display is pretty much the same one they'll show you when I send it to you to ask your opinion. If I show each user of a website a highly customized, user- and workflow-specific page for th…

What you write seems very interesting, but I'm afraid I'm not fully grasping it. There are few immediate counter examples I can give, and I wonder if I'm missing a point and those are not really counter examples.

Is Gmail a highly customized website? What about Atlassian suite?

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#208

Post by SalientBlue »

N_A_T_E wrote: post #5
raverbashing wrote: post #4

I remember their (pivotal) culture was very unique. Maybe the developers have tired out of mandatory pairing

I recall the mandatory pairing as quite popular among some devs during that era. I wonder if anyone is actually still working in that manner.

I work at what used to be Pivotal, now Broadcom via VMware, and do pair programming every day. It was a bit of an adjustment, and I do sometimes miss solo dev work, but pairing does have some real benefits. It is really nice to have another set of eyes to catch mistakes you miss, and it's fantastic for spreading knowledge and onboarding new developers.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#209

Post by necovek »

dangus wrote: post #176
necovek wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I ask my Jira admins to enable a set of people to do something on a project, they struggle.

When I create a ticket and don't open it right away before the popup is gone, poof, it's gone into the depths of that project backlog.

If I want to create a multi-project board, oh, now tickets don't have the same statuses, set up a mapping first.

Or figuring out the artifical limits between epics, tickets and subtasks.

And slowness, don't get me started there.

Yes, just like you are blaming the paint shop for only having the basic colors, I too can blame the paint shop for having 1M green hues to choose from.

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