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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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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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February 18, 2022
Perfect project management tool.
Pivotal tracker tool is Very easy to use and can be used for smaller and medium projects . In pivotal tracker the best is detailed tracking which is really helpful for me when i need to cross verify my work from previous months. Pivotal tracker allows us to keep track of every tasks, add notes anytime and update their status on time. Pivotal tracker is mainly Used for Agile project management.
- It allows us to keep track of every tasks.
- Pivotal tracker is very easy to use .
- In pivotal tracker you can add the points to a task anytime.
- Pivotal tracker is not a flexible tool.
- In pivotal tracker doing Customisation is bit difficult.
- In Pivotal tracker there is lack of Configurability.
March 11, 2020
Pivotal Tracker is a steep learning curve but one of the best Software Development tracking tools out there
Pivotal Tracker is used across the whole organization - maybe minus 2 people - so 8 or so. It helps us track software development work into compartmentalized tickets. Almost every ticket is touched by everyone that uses Pivotal Tracker in some way. I.e. there's a problem we are trying to solve, someone creates a ticket, someone picks up the ticket to start the software development, someone does the software development work, someone checks their work, someone tests their work, someone passes the ticket, someone checks the work of the person who passed the ticket, etc.
- Constant updates - you can always see who touches the project as a whole.
- Clean, concise ticket structure.
- It's not user friendly at first. But very powerful once you understand the tools.
- It's nice that you can customize your lanes (columns).
February 13, 2020
Pivotal Tracker Delivers on Tracking Development Projects
We use Pivotal Tracker to track the development and MIS teams' work and ongoing support of software and infrastructure they have built for the company across about a dozen projects/solutions. These solutions range from infrastructure, eCommerce, internal custom software, and mobile applications. We use it to track features, chores, and bugs for each of these areas. We have from time-to-time exposed it to external vendors for project collaboration and centralized project management of those projects. It is an excellent tool for keeping track of the work and being able to quickly prioritize work, check the status, and re-prioritize tasks based on changing requirements.
- Project task tracking
- Visibility of work
- More project management features like Gantt Charts
- More reporting
February 13, 2020
A Wonderful Tool for Team Project Management!
Pivotal Tracker is used to manage project task flow through utilizing "Pivotal Stories" to track project status, communication, priority level, file sharing, etc. amongst my marketing team! It is used across the pharma marketing department and it solves the issue of task flow management and project tracking.
- Helps keep track of tasks in your queue.
- Prioritization.
- Visuals (platform looks a bit cluttered).
- Automated task flow (doesn't exist).
November 19, 2019
Great for software devs teams
We used Pivotal Tracker because our head developer preferred it to other project management/dev tools. The most important function is for helping developers to prioritize dev work. Developers don't always prioritize the highest priority items so it worked well to have a project manager owning the roadmap while the devs had a consistent checklist of priorities to work on each sprint.
- In my opinion, it's geared more towards developers and was useful for them to be using a tool they like.
- It allows for gauging the estimated time required for each task so that a project manager can correctly weight how much time each task will take.
- It's more specialized in its application than a number of other project management software that are for more general project management.
- The UI isn't very appealing. For many, this isn't important but I appreciate using software that is appealing to the eye.
- This isn't necessarily a negative, but it isn't a good general project management software, which in my opinion is a strength that they've chose to hone in the focus of their product.
November 13, 2019
Pivotal Tracker gets the job done
We used Pivotal Tracker as a list of engineering bugs, tasks, and backlogged items for the engineering team. We eventually moved off of Pivotal Tracker but while using it, it allowed us to prioritize the tasks and bugs logged by our users as well as the product management team. They did so by utilizing the points feature.
- Adding points to a task.
- Ease of use, friendly UI.
- Identifying/categorizing the type of item created.
- Assigning multiple people to a task would be helpful.
- Allowing more of a list feature from a UI standpoint (see: monday.com).
- Connection to GitHub.
November 07, 2019
Software project management made easy with Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is a SaaS project management tool that is used by software development teams and stakeholders to track software projects using an agile methodology. The Ventus Software Development team uses this application extensively to track multiple software projects including but not limited to new features, bugs, chores, epics, and releases. Where Pivotal Tracker really excels is its usability. The layout of the project and the view of the 'stories' within it makes it really easy to organize iterations and have a clear understanding of what everyone is working, what you have to work on, what has been completed, and what has yet to be completed. Where Pivotal Tracker can improve is on the management of stories. It's not impossible, but as often happens on software projects, developers start something and move to other things if they get stuck or need to address something more pressing. I feel that there need to be some controls around starting and 'pausing' stories and clearly identifying that they've been put on pause. Not a big deal. Pivotal Tracker integrates into other applications like Slack, Git, Bugzilla, Usersnap, and a plethora of others.
- Managing multiple software projects using an agile methodology.
- Usability of creating and managing 'stories' within the projects.
- Lots of integrations into other applications.
- Rich reports and analytics to track project progress.
- Mobile app makes it very easy to check project status and update it on the go.
- Managing active vs. temporarily inactive tasks/stories.
October 08, 2019
Keep Your (User) Stories Straight with Pivotal Tracker
We use Pivotal Tracker to manage the maintenance and extension of many different web-based applications. Other departments in our organization use JIRA for software development project management, while still others (who focus on break/fix and help desk support) use ticket-based systems. Pivotal Tracker is a good fit for our department because we are an agile shop, and the application is intrinsically designed to support agile methodologies.
- Pivotal Tracker makes it relatively easy to manage project team members, including inviting new members, as well as managing existing member roles.
- I appreciate how Pivotal Tracker supports the planning and estimation aspects of agile project management, including support for linear and Fibonacci sequence point systems for effort estimation on tasks.
- Analytics are just a click away with Pivotal Tracker, making burndown chart spreadsheets and manual tallying a thing of the past.
- While Pivotal Tracker takes a lot of the drudgery out of managing agile-type projects, it can be an "opinionated" product, which can make end-users feel like they have to conform their workflows to the product, rather than the other way around. Automated velocity reporting is one example of this.
- Pivotal Tracker has a lot of features, and while this is generally a good thing, it makes the product a challenge to master, for many, regardless of end-user technical abilities.
- The visual interface is extremely information-rich, requiring lots of drill-downs and accordion expansions. It would be nice to see a simplified interface for general use, akin to the old-school Scrum board and Post-It notes.
August 12, 2019
A highly capable tool to implement a process
We used Pivotal Tracker some months ago when we decided to implement scrum inside the team. I used Pivotal tracker for some time around 2011 and I knew you have to use the "pivotal way" to be able to enjoy the tool. This is the main advantage and also the main flaw of the tool.
- If you're implementing a new process on your team and you like what Pivotal Tracker provides, it works well.
- The kanban view is good and compact.
- It was not expensive for our use case.
- If you find out that you prefer to work in a different way, the tool starts to fall apart. You have to follow its way of working.
- It's not flexible at all. You have some configurations to do, but it is what it is.
- The web app feels heavy, it's not simple at all
February 13, 2019
Pivotal Tracker: Does what it says on the tin and so much more
We used Pivotal Tracker in our company to maintain our product backlog as an agile project management tool. It was primarily used by our Product Development and IT team. It really helped us keep things organized and plan out our weekly sprints with a prioritized backlog.
- It's great for tracking milestones and reporting team velocity per sprint.
- Maintaining a prioritized backlog that is sharable with different members of your team is relatively simple.
- There's a free version of the product for up to 3 collaborators working on 2 projects and the starting price for larger packages is relatively low.
- Trackability of related stories is a little difficult and unclear unless they're in an epic. Establishing a hierarchical relationship between stories isn't an easy process.
- Customization is difficult. Changing up/personalizing the milestones for projects isn't easy to achieve.
- Reporting is still a little minimalistic and it would help to be able to take a deeper dive into our team's performance.
Pivotal Tracker is used daily by Moffitt's Collaborative Data Services Core, which facilitates access to clinical, tumor and biospecimen data for high-impact translational research. The CDS Core uses Pivotal Tracker as a project planning tool to form realistic expectations about when work might be completed based on the team’s ongoing performance.
Other Moffitt departments also use Pivotal Tracker for bug tracking and as a shared team-level 'to-do' list.
- Pivotal Tracker helps our team visualize our projects in the form of stories (virtual cards) moving through our workflow. This encourages us to break down projects into manageable chunks and have important conversations about deliverables and scope.
- The forced-prioritization allows our team to have a shared understanding about what is most important and make collective decisions about what our team will work on next.
- By dividing future iterations by our team's velocity, Pivotal Tracker accurately predicts when we will complete future work.
- 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.
May 17, 2018
Great for tracking sprints and being organised
We have been using Pivotal Tracker (PT) to track and manage our sprints. It allows us to simply place all of our work and assign it to specific engineers. One of the key things it helps us do is track the stage and age of tasks to help get a good understanding of where things are.
- The stages a task can go through i.e. Deliver and Accept are great at helping you keep track of what is going on
- The integration with Slack is useful so that our team is notified when specific aspects of a task changes
- The burn down charts are not something we use, I think this feature isn't 'culturally' useful for our team since we do not work in this way
- I would like to be able to bundle the tasks under specific releases within a sprint and not have them move around based on their status
March 15, 2018
Pivotal Tracker; Simple to use fantastic to see
Currently, Pivotal tracker is being used by my graphics and technology department to track their work tasks on their day to day work. We have been able to successfully monitor and track work to ensure there are no dropped or missed items. Currently, we are looking into expanding to use this software with our support service team to track additional client work. At this moment, the difficulty in expanding this software across our entire business is the fluidity of categorizing stories to look for matches in the system.
- Track Projects; this system allows you to create multiple projects for different large tasks. This is easily labeled and displayed for ease of use and identifying.
- Multi-user assignment; I can assign a task to multiple team members at a time. This works well when they are working together to make a deadline and letting everyone in the team know where they are at.
- History tracking; When it came down to auditing time, the history tracking and exporting has been a fantastic tool. We were able to export our notes into a readable Excel format for documentation submission.
- Categorization of Stories. It would be nice to have the ability to create our own custom categories on top of the backlog, ice box and my work sections.
- Time lines; although we can put in stars for level of difficulty; it would be more beneficial if we can add in due dates, benchmarks and time lines into the system. This would allow us to easily calculate projects and the resource allocation.
- Reports; although we can export and review our history, it would be nice to have the ability to pull reports on progress, % of story completion, and success rate.
January 17, 2018
Fun Scrum Software
We primarily use Pivotal Tracker (PT) for development of iOS, Android and web applications for our company. We work in regular sprints and each major application uses their own board for epics, icebox, stories and task management. It is maintained by our product lead.
- Tasks are very easy to view and update. Adding descriptions, attachments and notes are very good for difficult tasks.
- Subtasks are especially useful for our engineers as each task can be broken down into smaller steps.
- Assigning and sharing tasks and the approval process is very good as each area QA's their specific task.
- Prioritizing larger initiatives is very simple as they are constantly changing based on customers needs
- I think it could use a bit more customization. It seems to want you to work in a very specific way and that does not work for all teams.
- Approvals are great, but can use more of a QA process that can be implemented if needed.
- Bugs are not counted as points, and sometimes we feel we are not getting a true velocity of our teams performance.
December 14, 2017
A streamlined approach to task management with Pivotal Tracker
We use Pivotal Tracker in our agency to manage client projects through user stories and epics. It's used across all teams, starting with sales and project management to organize tickets, then over to the production team to estimate and complete tickets. For our team, it makes organizing sprints much easier and able to give a high-level view of the progress being made across all client projects.
- User story creation and management (discussions around stories)
- User story estimations
- Grouping stories under epics to show progress
- Add blocking tasks or tickets to stories
- No native desktop app - would love to see one implemented well for Mac
- Custom estimation point system (let teams define their own units)
Our product team - dev and design - use PivotalTracker as their primary project management tool. Our QA, UI/UX, Product Management, and Engineers all coordinate on projects in PT. We use to to track product roadmaps, feature development, bug fixes and QA, and even for some recruiting and other projects. It primarily helps our product team and related teams coordinate and manage their workflow and projects.
- Project management - helpful for tracking the overall project as well as sub-projects associated with it, thanks to Epic/Story/Mini-Epic/etc breakdown of items
- Cross communication - each posting (story, epic, etc) allows for commenting and communication regarding the topic so all communication can be logged under the task
- Analytics - PT shows you the speed at which project statuses change and are completed so you can track your team's efficiency.
- I imagine some people won't care for the post-style interface and would prefer more GANTT chart style PM software, but I'd say it's a matter of preference and project reqs.
June 07, 2017
A great solution that has been around for a while.
Pivotal is used across our engineering department as a way for individual teams to organize the features they are working on and split them into smaller chunks, aka "stories." It's useful as a roadmap to see where we are in a project, both in showing what needs to be done and what has already been accomplished. It also ties teams together as each team has a tracker, which is transparent across the organization so everyone can see what everyone else is working on.
- Good at allowing organization of tasks
- The UI receives updates fairly frequently
- The UI is dynamic, allowing some degree of customization for each user
- Flexible system, a variety of different ways to use it
- The UI has been buggy (maybe releasing too quickly without adequate QA).
- There is some rigidity in the UI which limits what it could be
- Lots of features...some which aren't particularly useful in every scenario (velocity) which could be omitted by option to make the app simpler.
December 13, 2016
A tool that encourages good development practices
It is used across the whole organization, for software development, IT tasks, managing clinical research studies, and even for managing administrative work.
- It's simple to use, which makes it really easy for managers and users outside software development and technology teams to participate.
- It requires virtually zero configuration, aside from inviting new users. I used to spend hours managing complex workflows with other products, but not any more.
- It encourages teams to follow a sound Agile process.
- The UI is beautiful, which sounds trivial, but I have it open all the time, so it's nice.
- The biggest strength of Pivotal Tracker is also its biggest weakness -- lack of configurability. The simplicity of administration means you can't create a bunch of complicated, custom workflows. But in my experience, you're better off not doing that anyway. Unless you want to spend a bunch of time managing complicated, custom workflows.
- The burndown chart recently moved off of the main page of a project and into its own Analytics tab with a bunch of new reports. That's cool for scrum masters and project managers, but it means the team is not looking at the burndown on a regular basis. I wish they'd bring the burndown back to the main page, in addition to deeper reports for manager-types.
August 11, 2016
The ease of using Pivotal Tracker
We utilized Pivotal Tracker as part of tracking for our engineering team and utilized it for the Marketing team. Pivotal was an easy solution. It's simple enough for us as the size of the company I worked for that required a tool that was easy and got the job done. We needed a tool to track our tasks and provide visibility for the rest of the organization. This was important as some of our stakeholders had not used Pivotal Tracker before, but it was simple enough to where we didn't have to explain how to use it. It's pretty self explanatory.
- Easy to create tasks/stories - not a lot of required fields, or fields that we don't generally need to fill out.
- Simple UI. Unlike other tools I've used in the past, Pivotal Tracker has a cleaner UI making it relatively simple to find something you're looking for.
- Predicting dates based on estimates - this is useful for stakeholders who generally ask "how far along are we, what is the remaining time."
- Not enough reporting capabilities
- Mobile app isn't as user friendly. Seems like they haven't solved for the mobile experience yet.
August 05, 2016
Really flexible but maybe overkill
It was used to track sprint progress in our development department. It seemed to serve its basic purpose for our needs but had some limitations in how we were able to break out our stories and progress.
- It gives you a ton of features to track and manage a team and the projects
- Having native apps for different devices make it much easier to track your project and keep up to date with your team
- Notifications and color coding each task is very helpful when trying to quickly the state of the project tasks
- The board does not seem to have an intuitive flow which can become strange
- The learning curve is a little bit high for some one who does not have a lot of experience with boards like these
- The flexibility can be great if you need it but confusing and cumbersome if you do not need it or have not used it
July 29, 2016
Pivotal Tracker Review
Engineering and Product teams use this tool. We use it to track releases, new features, builds, and bugs. Product writes stories in tracker, stories are attached to epics and designs are attached to epics, stories are pointed with the engineering team, assigned and delivered. It helps us track our product lifecycle.
- Easy interface that aligns with writing stories and assigning them to epics and team members
- Tag feature allows for easy filtering of stories
- Tracking feature allows PMs to know when stories are being worked on and delivered
- Icebox and backlog functionality allow you to move stories around when they are ready to be worked on
- Would like to be able to move stories around in a filter view and not just in backlog
- Autosync and refresh of updates would be nice
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 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.