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Pivotal Tracker is a versatile project management tool that has found a wide range of use cases across various departments and …
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What is Pivotal Tracker?
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…
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What is Pivotal Tracker?
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…
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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Pivotal Tracker?
Pivotal Tracker is an agile project management program primarily for software developers. The software organizes projects into “stories,” the goal being to maintain momentum within and between “sprints” of a project within an agile development style. Pivotal Tracker is built to support the Agile development cycle from the ground up, enabling mid-project analysis and feedback based on current progress and development speeds. It also provides a shared priority system so everyone on a given project has visibility on progress and team members’ statuses. It also includes file sharing, project obstacle visibility, and a REST API for customizable integrations.
Pivotal Tracker Competitors
- Jira Software
- Asana
- Rally Software (formerly CA Agile Central)
Pivotal Tracker Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Jira Software and Asana are common alternatives for Pivotal Tracker.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.
The most common users of Pivotal Tracker are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
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- Recommendations
Pivotal Tracker is a versatile project management tool that has found a wide range of use cases across various departments and organizations. Moffitt's Collaborative Data Services Core, for example, uses Pivotal Tracker to form realistic expectations about work completion based on the team's ongoing performance. Other departments at Moffitt employ this tool for bug tracking and as a shared team-level 'to-do' list. The graphics and technology department utilizes Pivotal Tracker to track their work tasks and ensure that no items are dropped or missed. Moreover, the support service team is exploring the expansion of Pivotal Tracker's usage to track additional client work.
In addition to its adoption within Moffitt, Pivotal Tracker is also utilized by agencies and software development teams to manage various projects. It facilitates the implementation of agile methodologies, such as scrum, and effectively manages backlogs and feature roadmaps. Integration with other applications like Slack, Git, Bugzilla, and Usersnap further enhance its functionality. By utilizing Pivotal Tracker, engineers, product managers, testers, and marketing teams collaborate seamlessly. The tool allows for task prioritization, backlog maintenance, progress tracking, and facilitates file sharing among marketing teams. Overall, Pivotal Tracker serves as an invaluable asset in project management for organizations of diverse sizes and industries.
Intuitive and Easy to Use User Interface: Reviewers have consistently praised Pivotal Tracker's user interface, with many stating that it is intuitive and easy to use. Some users have mentioned that they were able to quickly understand how to navigate the platform and create/manage projects efficiently.
Multi-User Assignment for Collaboration: Users highly value the multi-user assignment feature in Pivotal Tracker, as it allows them to assign tasks to multiple team members simultaneously. This functionality has been commended by reviewers for facilitating collaboration among team members and keeping everyone informed of progress.
Exporting Notes into Readable Excel Format: The history tracking and exporting feature in Pivotal Tracker has received praise from users who appreciate being able to easily export notes into a readable Excel format. This functionality helps streamline documentation submission and makes auditing time more efficient.
In-Story Task Management: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the in-story task management capabilities of Pivotal Tracker, stating that it is a weak point. They believe that the functionality could be greatly improved by adding features such as the ability to mention other users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress'.
Lack of Epic Spanning and Parent-Child Story Relationship: Many reviewers have raised concerns about the fact that epics do not span projects in Pivotal Tracker, particularly when scaling agile methodology to multiple teams. This limitation also leads to confusion due to the lack of a concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off from it.
Limited Customization Options for Categorization: Users desire more flexibility in categorizing stories beyond the default sections like backlog, ice box, and my work. They wish for the ability to create custom categories for better organization and classification of their stories.
Users commonly recommend the following for Pivotal Tracker:
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Users should take advantage of the free trial to ensure that it meets the organization's needs before making a purchasing decision. This allows them to fully explore the features and capabilities of the software and determine if it aligns with their project management requirements.
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It is recommended to utilize tools and tutorials provided by Pivotal Tracker to learn the software effectively. The platform offers resources such as user guides and documentation, which help users understand how to navigate the interface, set up projects, assign tasks, and track progress.
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Many users find Pivotal Tracker useful for managing complicated tasks with multiple people involved. The platform offers features that facilitate collaboration and coordination among team members, such as task assignment, progress tracking, and communication channels. This ensures that everyone stays on the same page and contributes effectively to project success.
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Reviews
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July 27, 2016
The gold standard for small-medium dev teams
Pivotal Tracker is the backbone of our software development workflow. We use it to capture new ideas, organize tasks ahead of milestones, and focus on what needs to be done to reach our goals.
- Simple, focused workflow that has all the features we need, and nothing more.
- The ability to group tasks by epics allows us to have multiple focuses at once, not just a single "backlog."
- Setting weekly markers has drastically increased our focus, as it helps us visualize the affect of adding new work to our existing plans.
January 18, 2016
There is no better tool at what it does.
When I worked with it, it was being used across the whole organization. It addressed the problem of keeping track of projects involving agile development.
- The UI is very good. You can have it across multiple platforms too.
- You can track side by side backlogs.
- See cross project collaboration and apply agile methodologies to your projects.
- I thought at some point that if the project got too big, everything would have become clogged. You need to have a very strict convention on how to manage it with multiple people so that this doesn't happen.
January 11, 2016
Pivotal Tracker Review
We use Pivotal Tracker as a tool when building websites, applications, and mobile games for outside clients. It's used by our project managers to keep projects organized, and keep tabs on bugs and features. It's essential for QA since it allows for one streamlined process of registering, discussing, and ultimately, fixing the problem.
- Clearly displays the status of a story, and clears up lines of communication on that front.
- Allows for prioritization of features and bugs.
- Allows for developers to estimate the difficulty and time needed for a story, so that project managers can adequately plan out sprints.
- Used to have a newsfeed-type feature with all the updates from the previous day. They removed it. I liked getting a snapchat of what changed from before.
- When signing up for email alerts, can be inundated with emails for every change to the status of a story.
- Communication on stories through the comment section can be a little difficult, and not very organized.
January 09, 2016
Pivotal Tracker works for all development projects!
Pivotal Tracker is being used by our web development department, QA department, product department, and software engineering team. Our account managers and data entry experts are also in the system so that they can assign stories and/or complete stories that involve CMS updates vs. development work. Pivotal Tracker helps our QA and web development teams keep track of bugs when working on new website projects. Our engineering team uses the system to prioritize feature requests for our products. The company is able to stay very organized and prioritize bugs and feature requests with Pivotal Tracker.
- Pivotal Tracker makes it very easy to prioritize feature requests. It uses a drag and drop interface so you can easily reorder stories.
- You can easily give each story a number of points. By doing this, Pivotal Tracker automatically calculates your project's velocity and determines how many stories you can complete each week.
- One thing that I really love about Pivotal Tracker is that it integrates with several other softwares. We have an integration built out to Zendesk, which is used by clients to submit requests to our team. It was very simple to set up an integration between Pivotal Tracker and Zendesk. The integration eliminates several steps when having to send a ticket to Pivotal and saves our company time.
- If all of your projects are similar, you can create project templates. After creating a new project, you just have to upload the template CSV file.
- There isn't a simple way to view all of your assigned stories across all projects. You can set up a multi-project dashboard, but you have to add each project to the dashboard. If you have a lot of projects, it can take some time and you have to remember to add new projects when they are created.
- There should be an easy way to move stories from one project to another.
- There are some instances where it would be nice to have more than one story owner. It would be great to have that feature.
January 08, 2016
Pivot to Pivotal
Pivotal tracker was used to manage our agile sprints. Our sprints were of 1 week duration. All the stories for that sprint were estimated and were put in the "Current" queue. In addition to this, we also maintained a "Backlog" which had all the stories that had not been prioritized yet. All the new feature requests had the label "Feature" and smaller tasks like re-imaging a server were marked as "Chore". Developers started a story by clicking "Start". When they were done with the changes for a story, they clicked "Finish" and it changed to "Accept/Reject". The story was then tested by the QA team. Bugs found during testing were entered separately into pivotal tracker. Typically, we included steps to reproduce the issue and attached screenshots if applicable. We used the "Bug" story type to mark bugs. Pivotal tracker allowed the entire team consisting of product managers, developers, testers and others like marketing to collaborate on new feature requests. Questions were posted in the comments section and answers were also provided there. It made collaboration easy. As a QA, by checking which stories had "Accept/Reject", it was easy to see which stories needed QA. Overall, a great tool for Agile software development teams!
- Easy to move a story to the appropriate person/team. The Accept/Reject was a nice feature which made it really easy to indicate the outcome of QA. When a story was "Rejected", it automatically moved to "Restart" and was picked up by the developers.
- Collaboration was easy. Product managers could post screenshots of specs in a story. QA could post screenshots of issues that were found. The comments section was easy to read and made collaboration easy.
- The ability to add Milestones was nice. We used this feature to track major milestones. We created a milestone and moved all stories to achieve to milestone before that and gave a date to the milestone. This made it easy to track milestones and made sure we were on track.
- Search feature could be improved. Right now it's hard to find an old story that was completed. The search could have more options like label, milestone, date range etc., to locate old stories.
- Brainstorming board or white board - most of the stories involve a lot of brainstorming. It would be nice to have a whiteboard where the team could brainstorm ideas and include it in the story. Right now, the team brainstorms ideas on a whiteboard, takes a picture of it and includes it in the story and sometimes people forget to do this.
- Ability to link a story to a CI build like Jenkins. In most software development teams, a story cannot be marked complete until a CI build has passed for those changes. It would be nice to integrate Pivotal with Jenkins so that a failed build will show up in Pivotal and could even change the status of the story to an appropriate status.
January 05, 2016
A former web developer at a startup accelerator thinks...
At my startup accelerator called rhubarb studios, I actively used Pivotal Tracker as a web developer. My team consisted of six people where four were developers including myself, one was a UX designer, and the last was our project manager. We had daily standups where the project manager would ask the team what stories can be up on deck. He would then formulate the story so the team could assign story points to them. Our project manage would further groom them and after they are ready, we would start picking them up. Pivotal Tracker was a favorite agile tool advocated by our CEO and as a result the entire company used it. Since the accelerator worked somewhat as a staffing firm where the company would assign developers to startup projects that come through our doors, multiple projects were going on at the same time where Pivotal Tracker was used. This tool was simple enough and had all the necessary functions to run each project using agile methodology. By everyone using the same tool, if a developer or a designer had to be pulled from one project to another they already knew exactly how to use the agile tools.
- The use of columns makes it easier to see which stories belong to what place. I also like that you can customize which columns to display so that the it is easier to see what's important to you (e.g. current, backlog, icebox, my work etc.)
- I like the colors the board used (grey, blue).
- It is easy to upload pictures onto stories.
- You do not have to change the page to make stories or update the descriptions. It can be done without proceeding to the next page.
- This is good for a startup or small groups but if a bigger corporation has to use it, it is more difficult to keep all the data organized. I've seen organizations migrate their pivotal tracker data to JIRA because they are more used to handling bigger amounts of data.
January 05, 2016
Pivotal Tracker is a great Agile tool!
Pivotal Tracker is being used to manage software development projects for our clients. We manage web, mobile, and special projects in Pivotal Tracker. The problems that this addresses is where are we in the development process. If you are following an agile process you still need to be able to report metrics to your senior management and your clients on where you are in the process. We use Pivotal to track user stories (features) and bugs and also scope of work.
- Extremely easy to pick up. I have used many different traditional and agile systems and this was the easiest to pick up by the teams I have used it with.
- Tagging structure is great. Rather than strict hierarchies, Pivotal Tracker allows your teams to create a group of tags and use multiple tags with one story or bug.
- Powerful searching. Pivotal Tracker's search is definitely a huge strength. It allows you to search by date, words, authors, owners, and tags.
- Visual Design. This is directly related to the first item but it bears breaking it out as a separate item. This is a well thought out application.
- If you are looking for configurability, this application would not excel there. You can add users and tags.
- As a web application, you are at the mercy of your Internet provider.
- There are no built-in or user-created workflows. You have to assign items to the next person yourself.