[teampractices] Experimenting with Pivotal Tracker

[Diederik van Liere]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 10:01 PM, Steven Walling <swalling at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> In previous discussions, we've leaned toward calling Trello and Mingle a
> pair of complementary tools, with the former being good for small teams and
> the latter being good for large teams. I think this is probably true.
>
> Tomasz said that he's already running in to the limitations of Trello for
> teams more invested in Scrum processes like points estimation, burndown (or
> up) charts, velocity, and so on. He showed me a little bit about how
> they're using a browser extension to hack this stuff in to Trello, but that
> he's still having to manually calculate velocity which is a pain.
>
> Growth is still a very small team, but we're starting to venture down the
> path of more Scrum process. This week I did some work to simplify our
> Trello board, and reduce it to "Backlog", "Current To Do", "Doing" and
> "Done" lists of cards. You can view our current board at
> https://trello.com/b/FdtPTV2y
>
> In the future, I can definitely see Trello breaking down for a larger team
> doing sprints, even if you're like me and not particularly interested in
> things like velocity. However, I want Mingle to die in a fire, so I
> experimented with creating a Pivotal Tracker board, which is public at
> https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/955210
>
> I have a little experience with Pivotal from working at a startup with
> Ward, where their dev team had 100% adoption of this tool. I was outside
> the Scrum as a writer, but it was interesting for sure. Beyond the better
> usability, mobile apps, etc., I think this is a good tool if we commit more
> to Scrum practices. In particular, it does a few things I think are
> different than Trello...
>
>    1. Burndown or up charts can be generated automatically. There are
>    also other charts and progress reports about points delivered etc. and you
>    can get RSS feeds of it all.
>    2. It seems to have bi-directional integration with any Bugzilla
>    instance, and API access, so we could create Gerrit integration as well.
>    3. It's geared toward having a story requester and owner, and the
>    product owner explicitly accepts or rejects delivered work. Trello has
>    pretty much no set roles, by comparison.
>    4. Unlike Trello, the card lists are set for you. There's Icebox
>    (holding area for new stories), Backlog (stories ready to start), Current
>    (which actually auto-fills from Backlog based on your velocity). Pivotal
>    also finally made Epics make sense to me. Epics are created from labels you
>    put on stories, and you can see them in their own list and they have
>    progress bars etc.
>    5. Stories have set types of feature, release, bug, or chore.
>    6. Stories get point estimations of course. By default points are not
>    assigned to bugs or chores, though you can change this. There are different
>    scales you can set for points, when iterations start/end, iteration length,
>    and you can either let your velocity get set for you or set it manually.
>
> *TL;DR: *to me it looks like Pivotal Tracker does everything we need from
> Mingle, and is a helluva lot easier to use and understand for people new to
> Scrum or only lightly in to it. Please play around, and if you want I can
> invite you to be a member of our Growth project there so you can try it
> out.
>
Please invite me :)

>
> A logistical point: Pivotal is proprietary. It's a small company based in
> SF and owned by VMWare. However, they officially give free unlimited access
> perpetually to public projects and non-profits.
>
Would it be an idea to make a shortlist of serious alternatives to Trello
and Mingle, both open source and proprietary tools, and compare them?  For
example, I would like to have a look at kanbanery.com but I am sure that
other people would have other suggestions as well.

D

>
>
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