Pivotal Tracker encourages a practical, agile project management process
August 02, 2018

Pivotal Tracker encourages a practical, agile project management process

Craig Comperatore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pivotal Tracker

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.
  • Improved communication
  • Accurate/realistic estimates
  • Shared team understanding

We selected Pivotal Tracker because of its simple, elegant workflow. This is the ideal; it's where we want to be. So we continue to improve, and as we get better, we get more out of the software.

The other software products we evaluated were too complex, and we found that allowing us to design our own workflow was not a good idea. That allowed us to get comfortable and engrain our bad habits. We like that Pivotal Tracker forces us to be better.


Pivotal Tracker is based on the XP (eXtreme Programming) philosophy & best practices. If your team is following this methodology, or working towards those best practices, Pivotal Tracker is a dream to work with. However, if your team is following a "less-than-ideal" workflow, you may find Pivotal Tracker challenging. It does not easily allow you to modify the workflow, and the reports assume you are following those best practices.