A former web developer at a startup accelerator thinks...
January 05, 2016
A former web developer at a startup accelerator thinks...
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pivotal Tracker
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.
- + Increased employee efficiency - our acceleration went up because completing stories was easier than going step by step for a 3 month goal.
- + Better snapshot of team's role - teammates were always able to see what other teammates were doing through the dashboard with ease.
- - By cutting down the story to the most efficient piece, some features which as an engineer was going to be requested in the near future had to be cut out. This was bad because there were many features where including it in the story would have cut down a lot of time moving forward zs the feature was added at the beginning.
Pivotal Tracker is a one page dashboard where Rally, one has to go to different pages to see everything in more detail or makes edits. In Rally I feel everything is stored away and the dashboard is not as easy to find to figure out the acceleration of group. Rally is used at my current company Connexity and it seems that only the project manager looks at it, but I feel it's better if others could see other data to track our own acceleration thus improving accountability.