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Pivotal Tracker will shut down

pivotaltracker.com

231–240 of 271 posts

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#231

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 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.…

In fact, the name “Jira” is a reference to Bugzilla. Atlassian says:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile?cont...

> We originally used Bugzilla for bug tracking and the developers in the office started calling it by the Japanese name for Godzilla, Gojira (the original black-and-white Japanese Godzilla films are also office favourites). As we developed our own bug tracker, and then it became an issue tracker, the name stuck, but the Go got dropped - hence JIRA.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#232
post #47

The 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.

Agreed, every time I clone an issue tracker or to-do list on the go, the first thing I do is deleting the "priority" column.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#233

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.

It should be a requirement for receiving copyrigt protection in the first place. The whole point was that things end up in the commons.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#234
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…

This happened when Mint shut down and a lot of other companies started advertising themselves as a Mint alternative. I'm building something similar too for my own needs (but open source, self host able); sadly it's still very early on so I didn't quite catch the migration wave.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Government doesn't need to force you, they can just not grant you copyright protection if you don't escrow your code for eventual release.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#236
I'm opening my Pivotal Tracker project from 2011... and I'm surprised at how good the UX is/was!!! Visually it looks old, but the UX I think is great:

Simplicity is reinforced with a great information density: lots, but not overwhelming. Current design trends make information density super low, forcing you to scroll a lot and spending much more energy/time just to be able to look at things.

When you need to "open" an item, you remain in the same screen (no modal, no context change): metadata, description, conversation. Nothing more!

In Linear I'm totally lost with projects, cycles, views, projects...

I'm stuck with Github Issues/Projects, but I miss Pivotal simplicity!!

I've just exported a 10MB Pivotal CSV...

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#237
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've never used Pivotal Tracker, but at my dayjob we're moving from Jira to Azure DevOps (ADO) - due to supposedly high Jira license costs...Now, historically i have been quite critical of Jira - because its always felt so complicated for me. But, now having lived in ADO for about 6 months, i hate it! I hate ADO with a passion! At first, i thought that its simplicity was great...and then started running into loads of walls - even for simple things. I never thought i'd live to see the day when i wish to go back to Jira. Then again, as others here have noted, maybe the complexity of Jira is not necessarily native, and simply a fact that jira *allows* for way too much complexity, but that, it can be made more sane/sensible (such as by shutting off a bunch of customization, etc.). And, who knows, maybe the crappy over-simpleness of ADO that i'm painfully living through might also be a thing that was poorly customized at my dayjob...But regardless, i guess right now I *prefer* the pain of Jira vs the pain of ADO. Clearly, there must be other products that sit in the happy Goldi locks middle (not as complex as Jira, but not as simplistic as ADO) that help teams actually get work done, and that are not so costly, etc.!

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#238
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously I meant 10% of all customers would hypothetically migrate from Pivotal to this new imaginary service, not that 10% of the data from each customer would be migrated... So 100% of the data migrated from 10% of the Pivotal user base, pretty generous assumptions I think.

> Obviously I meant... Respectfully: if it was obvious, I wouldn't have come to the conclusion I did and written up what I wrote. > So 100% of the data migrated from 10% of the Pivotal user base... Yeah, maybe. I don't know how large the slice of the Pivotal Tracker userbase you'd be able to retain even if you had a perfect clone. I bet it would be notably larger than you imagine it would be... it's my understanding…

> Respectfully: if it was obvious, I wouldn't have come to the conclusion I did and written up what I wrote.

Sorry about that, I think I assumed some familiarity with moving data around/migrations, and moving 10% of a customers data around from a legacy service to new service wouldn't make much sense in that context.

> I bet it would be notably larger than you imagine it would be

I think being able to capture 10% of existing users is already a very large guess, realistically it would be closer to 1%.

But, without any numbers from Pivotal and actually trying to launch a cloned service, all we can do is guess :)

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#239

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.

Respectfully, i am not sure that i agree with that. I think if it were allowed to slip into, say, public domain, then, yes, i agree.

HOWEVER, on a slight tanget from that point...If this company and its software have ever received any sort of taxpayer funds, then my opinion is that from the beginning, such software should have been open sourced. Publicly-paid software should be publicly available. Of course, said business has every right to earn profits from providing the service such as hosting said software for convenience for customers. But, every citizen who paid taxes has a right to see (and access!) all the code...well, that's my belief anyway. ;-)

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#240
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

In Europe. Hosting for North American customers is a completely different story.

You can use IOFlood for something similar to Hetzner (if a much smaller operation).
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