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Pivotal Tracker will shut down

pivotaltracker.com

261–270 of 271 posts

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#261
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linear is the one I've settled on, it stays out of my way. For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time before it becomes bloated to justify valuations. https://linear.app/

As soon as the AI features start showing up in Linear, it's time to jump ship. You know for sure VCs are pushing for that in the weekly meeting.

Linear founder here.

We look at AI as capability similar to any other technology. Instead of jumping on the AI bandwagon or thinking AI is a feature, we look if there is opportunity to reduce friction or help the user well in the workflow they are doing. Today like the AI can inform if there is duplicate issues being reported or improve the titles you submit from Slack conversion.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#262
Pouring one out. I remember using Pivotal Tracker back when working in a Ruby on Rails shop and enjoying directness and how optioned it was of it.

Then several years later, after working in large Silicon Valley tech companies, and seeing how they run with Jira, I decided to start https://linear.app

So much team's time and effort went in to configuring their tools instead of actually working on things. We do more than PT did, but aim to keep the experience straightforward and focused, regardless of the size of your team or company.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#263
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this dovetails into my test for whether i’m looking at a good startup idea or not… if existing solutions are all complicated spreadsheets, there’s both a potential market of users, and the problem is complex enough to warrant some code to manage it. ETA: obviously not all good startup ideas fit into that thesis, just the ones i tend to enjoy working on.

It's a good test, but also a trap. Because the relevant follow-on question is "Is it possible to design a single solution that will please most of these people?" Sometimes, the nature of the problem makes flexibility irreducible.

you’re absolutely right! that’s where the art and science of product comes in, knowing what’s possible and whether you can cobble an addressable market by choosing which subset of stakeholders to please.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#264

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…

Same. Out of 15 shops I worked for this was absolutely different (2017-2018) and the only place I've seen pair programming and TDD done right. Once we managed to deploy first version of a trading product with no bugs at all.

When I tried to explain other people afterwards how to do this, they just shrugged, as if I told a fairy tale. I had a chance to demo it maybe a couple more times while migrating other systems, and very successfully (and with very low mental and emotional effort) - itemizing the tests cases first, building fakes, frequent commits, trunk-based development, small stories, incremental improvements.

But it's never been perceived as a designed success, they are typically so prejudiced that they saw it as a fluctuation in the monkey circus of software development they got used to.

Now I'm at the stage we need a support group for ex-alumnis.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#265
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I have been on Pivotal Tracker for over a decade. Still am. Tried Jira and a few others, usually feeling like they are too taxing on the management part. What are alternatives that are light on the customization and day-to-day management?

I’ve been using Github Projects. It’s not as advanced and complex as Jira though, but its simplicity and closeness to code and documentation is a blessing for my hyperactive geek brain

The problem with Github projects is that they don't seem to have a super focused direction. They're trying things and then shutting them down after two years: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39106

I do like conceptually the idea of issue tracking living tightly coupled with the codebase, but unfortunately Github can't seem to get it quite right yet.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#266
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...as well as that they’d migrate only 10% of their data sound preposterous. Ah, I might be unduly affected by some big data (not Big Data, mind you) migrations that I'm currently involved in, where the Powers That Be are telling us that we have to throw away a huge fraction of our historical data. Well, that and the many times we've had to fight beancounters who popped on by to demand we save the company what amou…

I imagine the beancounters have little hope of just making the programmers go away, so they might as well be doing something useful :)

I'm having difficulty understanding your sentence. To whom does the final "they" in your statement refer?

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#267
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…

Challenge accepted!

I've built a bunch of web apps for big companies, and I love the hell out of Pivotal Tracker and am crushed that it is gone. I immediately fired up my editor and took some exports from my pivotal tracker account and am working on building a data model to import them into and move from there to the UI.

The base product is pretty straight forward, but there is a lot of nuance to how some things have developed in it.

I will likely not capture everything in an MVP, and I am wondering if there are some key pieces that might be not thought of for an MVP, but you absolutely love about Pivotal Tracker that would be sorely missed in a new product trying to fill it's nitch.

I also see some things that could be broadened and improved that are common in other project trackers. What are some thing you feel pivotal tracker was missing that really made it a difficult sell in businesses?

Feel free to comment on this thread your feedback. I'll be watching it, and also, if any other competitors want to lock horns on developing it, they can have at your feedback too!

If you want to be alerted to when I release this, as well as other things from me, sign up to my email list: https://mailchi.mp/73f113e474f1/robert-kohrs-blog or just follow my blog's rss feed at https://robkohr.com

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Github Projects. It’s not as advanced and complex as Jira though, but its simplicity and closeness to code and documentation is a blessing for my hyperactive geek brain

The problem with Github projects is that they don't seem to have a super focused direction. They're trying things and then shutting them down after two years: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39106 I do like conceptually the idea of issue tracking living tightly coupled with the codebase, but unfortunately Github can't seem to get it quite right yet.

Thanks for the context.

Ah, I didn’t know/notice any of that, probably because my use case is the absolute minimum:

A project, a few columns, tickets and an assignee field is all I’m using.

I understand most use cases are more complex than mine though.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#270
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…

Well, we took your approach and we'll see where it will take us. We are a company, so we made similar products before in our past, we should be good.
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