An intuitive and powerful task planner for software development
December 14, 2017
An intuitive and powerful task planner for software development
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pivotal Tracker
My organization uses Pivotal Tracker to manage development tasks and track project status. Before Pivotal Tracker, we were doing this with spreadsheets and they were becoming increasingly hard to manage. Pivotal Tracker solved this problem for us bringing our project tracking into a clear place with nice features such as epics and labels.
- Summarize and track larger feature and project status with Epics.
- Help easily break down projects into testable, manageable user stories.
- Bring tasks and bugs into one structure.
- Collaboration between multiple developers is simple.
- Structure is very rigid, and we often found we had to force our projects to fit that structure rather than customize the tool to fit how our process was structured.
- Tracking epic progress might not give a very accurate picture into actual remaining effort. It's possible to come close, and I don't think there's much that can be done about this because it isn't a tool for time estimation.
- Pivotal Tracker increased our development efficiency.
- Pivotal Tracker increased our planning time, but also our consistency and the quality of our end product.
- For its minimal cost and great utility, it has definitely had a positive ROI on our business.
Pivotal Tracker, for better or worse, provides a more structured and rigid workflow than most. That makes it easy to get started, but if you have your own workflow you want to integrate into it, it could mean it'll take longer to get used to or customize. It's still more customizable than BugHerd, though. Trello and Clubhouse offer more of a card-based Kanban-style view, and seem to offer more customization options to create your own workflow, but at the expense of actually having to define and customize that workflow rather than just using the system out of the box.