[teampractices] Experimenting with Pivotal Tracker

[Arthur Richards]

Ok, Pivotal Tracker actually looks pretty slick. You don't get the same
level of customization that you do with Mingle. AFAICT with about 20 mins
of poking around (so I could be wrong about some of this), you cant create
arbitrary card types, enforce arbitrary workflows, create and save custom
views, generate arbitrary reports, create macros to do all kinds of crazy
things like complex graph generation, create custom lanes on the wall,
create different backlogs (eg release vs iteration), etc etc. However,
maybe my account doesn't have sufficient permissions to modify some of
these things and the flexibility is just hidden from me.

It looks to have a LOT of the simplicity you get with Trello, with basic
enforcement of standard scrum-y tenants, basic reporting tools, and simple
workflow management - I think this would probably work well for most, but
some may find it too limiting. Then again, maybe the limitations are a good
thing - it's easy to get carried away in Mingle once you get over the steep
learning curve of managing a project there. Plus, there is no mobile app
for Mingle which drives me insane, and not just because I'm on the mobile
team... I took a quick spin with 'turning point' - one of the few pivotal
tracker apps in the android play store. Seems pretty straightforward and
like you can do a lot of what you can in the webapp.

The API looks robust; but the devil is always in the details - APIs in
practice are usually different beasts than their documentation may lead you
to believe. With a quick glance though the docs, it looks like we would be
able to make tools like bingle and gingle to use the Pivotal API.

>From the feedback I've heard from Tomasz and the apps team, this might
actually be a really good fit for their needs.

I'm really curious to hear from others who have Mingle experience -
particularly to hear if Pivotal Tracker would be an acceptable replacement.

Swalling, I may have goobered a few things up on the Growth board in
Pivotal - I hope it really is experimental and I didn't screw things up for
you guys :p


On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Arthur Richards <arichards at wikimedia.org>wrote:

>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Steven Walling <swalling at wikimedia.org>wrote:
>
>>
>> This brings up a big issue with both FOSS and proprietary tools: how do
>> we get our data out and migrate it if necessary?
>>
>> Trello exports a board in JSON, and Pivotal will import/export CSV. Does
>> Mingle have data export functions?
>>
>
> Yes. Mingle only exports a full project in a proprietary serialized
> format, but you can also selectively export cards into a CSV.  I haven't
> tried it, but theoretically you should be able to create a query that
> returns ALL cards that you have and export them into a CSV. Mingle can
> import from the serialized format or from arbitrary CSV.
>
> --
> Arthur Richards
> Software Engineer, Mobile
> [[User:Awjrichards]]
> IRC: awjr
> +1-415-839-6885 x6687
>



-- 
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/attachments/20131114/a1a3f57f/attachment.html>