A tool that encourages good development practices
Updated December 13, 2016
A tool that encourages good development practices
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pivotal Tracker
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.
- Increased visibility into priorities and work in progress.
- Better understanding of team velocity.
- Better understanding of cost of software features.
- Improved ability to plan future work and predict timelines more accurately.
- Encourages us to lean on the Agile process, especially when resources are limited and timelines are short.
I used to be a huge JIRA fan, until I realized how much time I was spending fixing complicated custom workflows and statuses. I spend almost no time administering Pivotal Tracking. And it turns out, those complicated, custom workflows weren't helping us anyway.