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Pivotal Tracker will shut down

pivotaltracker.com

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Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#181

Post by mtlynch »

oblio wrote: post #177
catwell wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to pull this off is to bet the tool will end up shutting down and build the replacement before it does. A good example of this is Pinboard: Maciej knew the product inside out, and he knew what being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring it for $35k in 2017.

I'm confused. Is Pinboard something that was built by this Maciej character? Acquired by him? What was the name of the product Yahoo bought and I assume shut down? FYI I don't see any mention of him here: https://www.pinboard.com/who-we-are Your comment reads a lot like something you'd say during a chat with friends on a sofa in a café.

Not GP but a rewrite based on what I think they mean:

Maciej knew Delicious inside out, and he knew what Delicious being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard (a Delicious alternative) in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring Delicious for $35k in 2017.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#182

Post by quesera »

twic wrote: post #179
teeray wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

60% yes, but 40% no, because there was nothing after "accepted" - so no way to track "in production" and "validated with users", which are the most important states. You could abuse the earlier states to do that, but then you have trouble tracking internal acceptance. Ultimately, reality just has more significant states than Tracker recognised.

A model that has worked well for my teams is to track story/development state and deployment state separately.

They are fundamentally different things, and you cannot always infer one from the other.

  - "Accepted" is the final state. Deployed to prod and verified. Story is finished and can be hidden from active view.

  - "Delivered" is set by QA when they believe the changes are complete and correct, ready for deployment.

  - "Finished" is set by the developer when they finish, push, and create the PR.
Then we use labels for deployment state. E.g. @staging, @sandbox, @production, etc.

It happens sometimes that a Finished story is deployed to staging in integration build X, but then omitted from integration build X+1, for reasons unrelated to the quality of the changes. In this case the story stays Finished (or Delivered) and we set the @staging label when deploying X to staging, but clear it when deploying X+1.

This works really well, especially after writing some glue code to integrate Pivotal and GitHub and your build/deploy flows.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#183

Post by elwebmaster »

hinkley wrote: post #149
dangus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real reason this won’t work is that Pivotal obviously isn’t making good money if VMWare is cool with shutting it down. If it was some kind of excellent business to be in it wouldn’t be shutting down. An analogy would be to say that it would be a great business model to clone Redbox now that it’s gone. But it’s not because its competitors ate it alive. Sure, there are a bunch of Redbox customers that liked the pro…

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.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#184

Post by jboy55 »

hinkley wrote: post #156
dangus wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 that the dirty secret of Salesforce is that it’s easier to change your company processes to match Salesforce defaults than to change Salesforce to match your company process.

And before Salesforce the costs were 10x for CRM software customization.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#185

Post by kelnos »

dangus wrote: post #173
dangrossman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good money" to a company with $13B revenue a year is a lot different than "good money" to a solo developer. If you can pick up six figures a year in revenue and keep things small enough to run solo, it's a good business for you.

If solo developers could make enterprise-grade work management systems we’d sure have a lot more of them around.

Why? Maybe the market just isn't there for that many work management systems. Or maybe it's not a fun and exciting product to create, so a solo developer isn't as likely to pick it up.

Remember we're not talking about the general case here. We're specifically talking about the feasibility of seeing a specific product being shut down, and then building a clone of it on a small resource budget in an attempt to snatch up their soon-to-be-former customers.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#187

Post by twic »

latchkey wrote: post #86
skybrian wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were doing “velocity” at a startup using a rack of index cards. Software is not strictly necessary when everyone is in the same room.

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 or points, you will need to deal with the situation where actual results don't match the plan. [...] If you are estimating in points, modify the budget for subsequent cycles. A simple way to do this, dubbed "yesterday's weather" by Martin Fowler, is to plan in any given week for exactly as much work as you actually accomplished in the previous week.

Tracker uses some kind of rolling average rather than just last week's number, but it's the same idea.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#188

Post by mvdtnz »

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's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone

The core product is relatively simple. But software packages like Pivotal aren't sold on their core functionality, they are sold on their value-adds like integrations, automations etc which take much longer and much more manpower to build.

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#189

Post by oblio »

mtlynch wrote: post #181
oblio wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. Is Pinboard something that was built by this Maciej character? Acquired by him? What was the name of the product Yahoo bought and I assume shut down? FYI I don't see any mention of him here: https://www.pinboard.com/who-we-are Your comment reads a lot like something you'd say during a chat with friends on a sofa in a café.

Not GP but a rewrite based on what I think they mean: Maciej knew Delicious inside out, and he knew what Delicious being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard (a Delicious alternative) in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring Delicious for $35k in 2017.

Thank you for the translation from "person-in-the-know" to "clueless-bystander" :-D

Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down

#190

Post by Vinnl »

oblio wrote: post #177
catwell wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to pull this off is to bet the tool will end up shutting down and build the replacement before it does. A good example of this is Pinboard: Maciej knew the product inside out, and he knew what being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring it for $35k in 2017.

I'm confused. Is Pinboard something that was built by this Maciej character? Acquired by him? What was the name of the product Yahoo bought and I assume shut down? FYI I don't see any mention of him here: https://www.pinboard.com/who-we-are Your comment reads a lot like something you'd say during a chat with friends on a sofa in a café.

I think Maciej worked at Delicious, which then got acquired by Yahoo. He then created Pinboard as a Delicious competitor, while Yahoo ran Delicious into the ground (as he predicted). Then when Delicious users had flocked to Pinboard, he acquired Delicious from Yahoo.
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