IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) is an end-to-end engineering solution used to manage system requirements to design, workflow, and test management, extending the functionality of ALM tools for better complex-systems development.
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Pivotal Tracker
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.”
The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.
IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS former IBM Rational DOORS profits very much from the mighty market position it had till today. It had been the most favored requirement engineering tools suite with the highest investments in the infrastructure concerning hardware, software, and knowledge sources. It was embedded in knowledge sources of test stands, hardware labs, and knowledge database servers. It allowed for some of the highest profit changes and made the fame with it. But the paradigms of requirements engineering change. If not were superseded by completely different approaches for the target solution worlds. The foremost position in the selling tables is unstable if changes are not solved or coped with by the strategist at IBM and their customers. Since the highly successful alternative suits are already at the market, and some are from IBM already the lifecycle for IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS is at the later highs. But the suite is still at the very top and very popular. There are still many problems unsolved and many wishes at the customers to make the use more comfortable and efficient at the overall level. If the time of setting up the software package is passed the adoption get more extended and complicated. There is a lot of work at the stage around and the expertise will be required for a long time from now.
The UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.
Easy to use with well defined template and user defined fields. New team can setup a project area easily by copying an existing template and adding customized fields for their special needs.
It can be used during almost the whole project cycle and give us a better view and control on the projects.
Wireframes are quite basic. If you need intuitive and interactive wireframes to elaborate the requirements. you probably need to define outside the tool and then upload as image.
ER (define data dictionaries) modeling is not there.
Use case modeling is quite basic. You can visualize the use case and actors relation but the tool does not enforce the rules.
In-story task management is still a weak point. The ability to @mention users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress' would go a long way.
Epics do not span projects. This becomes troublesome when scaling Pivotal Tracker's agile methodology to multiple teams.
Splitting stories is often confusing for team members as there is no concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off of it. There are only two levels: Epic & Story.
At the moment we are required by contract to continue to use the IBM DOORS software for our current client. Given that it can be expensive, if we were to use it after our current client's needs were met, we would have to secure other projects in order to justify the continued use of the software.
The UI is terrible and not intuitive. Users need training in order to complete tasks. Much like SAP, it's not the clearest tool. The tracing feature is especially complicated because you must write the scripts yourself. There is a learning curve. Also, even the setup, installation, and logging in each time takes a considerable amount of time.
It works good enough. I didn't have many problems with that. The user interface is a bit confusing though. The team took some time to understand where some configurations were.
It does a basic job and has the potential to complete some robust reporting tasks, however, it really is a clunky piece of software with a terrible user interface that makes using it routinely quite unpleasant. Many of our legacy and maintenance projects still use DOORS but our department and company use many alternatives and are looking for better tools.
We've never had to request support in the 5 years I have been using it. A solid solution! Everything I have had questions about is on the website. New features are in their newsletter with more details on their website. Often I am using the new features within a few minutes of reading the article.
It was easier to do all the change management-related activities, even configurations were handled very effectively. New process definitions and initiatives made it easier for better project deliverables. Effective resource allocations and better reporting and defect management. The overall cost of the tool is great too and well within budget.
We have had employees in the past look at Drupal, and other open source project management tools to assist in our needs. Unfortunately each solution took too much time to implement, design and configure that we could not stop the work we were doing for clients to complete a full set up of a project tracker. Thankfully Pivotal is a predefined solution with no configuration needed. Simply input your projects, design your Stories with Tasks and begin your tracking.
Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.
