productivity

A collection of 155 posts

productivity

How Can Analytics Help You?

Now that Analytics are out of beta, you may be thinking, “Shiny! But how does this help me?” We’ll start to answer that by digging into some ways you can use the project Overview page to understand your team’s performance and identify areas for improvement. Here are some

productivity

Principles of Effective Story Writing: The Pivotal Labs Way

Different teams across projects and companies have different styles of story writing. Ultimately, it is up to you and the team to figure out what is most effective given the goals and context of the project. However, the core principles that guide our story writing here at Pivotal Labs can

productivity

Spring Cleaning: Finding Dead Code with istanbul.js

Many cultures have the ritual of spring cleaning, a deep clean to get areas that aren’t normally covered—scouring the oven, dusting the blinds, and getting rid of your old junk. At Lite Tracker, we decided to do a little spring cleaning in our code base to kick off

productivity

A Day in the Life: Testing on the Tracker Team

The Tracker team as a whole takes responsibility for building in quality and making sure that necessary testing activities are done along with other development tasks. But we testers bring our own special value to the party, and we’re seeking another great tester to help us as we work

productivity

Guidelines for Agile Development Using Tracker

When you’re bogged down working on your day-to-day chores and features, it can be tough to stay focused on the broader goal of smooth agile development. And while we don’t pretend that we have all the solutions, Tracker is, after all, designed to facilitate precisely that goal. Luckily,

productivity

One Weird Trick to Switch from Polling to Push—with Zero Downtime!

Lite Tracker is an always-up-to-date tool that you leave open all day. When Tracker was young, the only way to accomplish that was some variation of HTTP polling. But the web has evolved since then, and so have the protocols. Websockets are supported by every major browser, and server-sent events

Integrations

How to Use Zapier to Integrate Lite Tracker with GitHub, Trello, Harvest, and More

On its own, Lite Tracker is a robust tool for collaboration and planning. When it has the opportunity to play well with other apps, however, it can really shine. Our friends at Zapier have made that linking process easy by putting together the definitive guide for integrating Lite Tracker with

productivity

Migrating to Lite Tracker from a Third-Party Tool

Welcome to everyone who recently started using Tracker! If you were using a different project management tool previously, you probably have tickets or stories you’d like to get into your Tracker projects. One convenient way to migrate them over to Tracker is to place them in a CSV file

productivity

A Commitment is Not a Guarantee

If your team uses Scrum as a development process, the team decides which of the next most important items it can complete by the end of the iteration. However, this “commitment” is often used to hold the team accountable for the amount of work that will be shipped by the

productivity

Tracking Multiple, Related Projects

Lite Tracker was originally created in the days when agile teams and their products tended to be small. All these years later, those teams have grown, and larger companies have adopted agile values, principles, and practices. Managing multiple projects, often among multiple teams, brings a new set of challenges. We

productivity

Customer Support—The Tracker Team’s Approach

Next to improving and maintaining an awesome application, supporting the people who use it is key to success. We’d like to share how we ensure our customers are cared for on the Tracker team. Tools help us get there First and foremost, it’s important that we have a

productivity

Cycle Time Report—An Example Script Using Trackers API

Tracker’s API can provide information that’s not currently available through the Tracker web application. Read on to learn how to use the API to compute cycle time. Cycle time defined for Tracker Lean software development has given us some useful metrics to help identify problem areas in our

productivity

Getting the Most Out of Tracker with Team Strength and Velocity Override

Being that we’re all human, sometimes things happen that might disrupt a project’s “normal” flow: we get sick, we take a vacation, we put in extra hours to make a deadline, etc. When life happens, it’s good to reflect that in Tracker so we can depict the

productivity

Workspaces FTW

A workspace is a group of projects that you view all together on one page. Everything that you can do in an individual project—and then some—can be done in a workspace. You can estimate stories, plan iterations, attach documents, and accept or reject to your heart’s content.

productivity

Working with Iterations in Tracker

If you’re new to Tracker (or Agile in general), our methodology might seem a bit strange at first, especially when it comes to the behavior of Tracker’s iterations (i.e., sprints) and how your stories move through them. Hopefully this will serve to answer any questions related to

productivity

Epic Tips for Epics

We’ve had epics out for quite some time now and I’d like to share some tips I’ve learned from teams at Pivotal Labs and Cloud Foundry. Prioritize your epics Just like stories, you should prioritize your epics. Is epic X more important than epic Y? Reorder your

Updates

New Navigation and More Workspaces

As we move ever closer to coming out of beta with the new Tracker UI, we’ve changed how you navigate Tracker in the header, making it consistent for everyone. Where’s my cheese? All the items in the header are click-able, and most have dropdowns with more options. For

productivity

The Wonders of Workspaces

Visibility is a wonderful thing. Making your team’s work transparent lets every stakeholder judge current status and progress at a glance. This transparency also reveals impediments—is one story blocked by another? Is something holding up progress? Are some activities turning into bottlenecks? Seeing a snapshot of a team’

productivity

A Guide to GitHub’s Service Hook for Tracker

GitHub’s service hook for Lite Tracker makes it easy to link your commits to Tracker stories. Setting up GitHub’s service hook Step 1. Decide which Tracker user’s API token you’d like to use for the service hook. Typically we advise to create a ‘pseudo’ user whose

productivity

More, Better, Faster—CSV Import/Export Now with Epics!

Though your stories look gorgeous in Tracker, exporting to CSV is a handy way to make a backup, share a different view of particular stories, do bulk updates, make a report, or create a project template. To make getting stories into and out of Tracker easier for you, we’ve

productivity

Crunch Time—A Pivotal POV

To truly understand Tracker you need to appreciate how Labs does what is does. Onsi Fakhouri does a great job explaining just that. Here’s an excerpt from his blog post. CRUNCH TIME by Onsi Fakhouri It comes up on almost every consulting project I’ve worked on as a

productivity

Generative Testing

The Tracker Team spent the last week working on individual projects to improve the product. This post is the first in a series about what we did, and how it went. We at Tracker use TDD on a daily basis to make sure the code we write is correct. We

productivity

Take Control of Your Lite Tracker Notifications

Email notifications allow you to stay connected with your project when away from Lite Tracker, and respond quickly when needed, for example to answer questions in story comments or accept delivered stories. On busy projects, though, the volume of notifications can be a little overwhelming. And with in-app notifications, introduced

productivity

Bugs and Chores: To Estimate, or Not to Estimate?

Most of us prefer to spend our time developing new features for our customers. But we usually have some overhead in the form of bugs and chores that takes some of our time. Since Tracker started out life on greenfield projects, it has a default setting that bugs and chores

productivity

A Healthier Approach to Estimating and Velocity

Tracker’s mission in life is to give teams an up-to-date snapshot of where they are and where they are headed. When we look at our project(s) in Tracker, we know for sure what we’ve done and what’s currently in progress. Tracker uses that information to help