[HN Gopher] Pivotal Tracker will shut down
___________________________________________________________________
Pivotal Tracker will shut down
Author : sandinmyjoints
Score : 267 points
Date : 2024-09-19 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pivotaltracker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pivotaltracker.com)
| Arubis wrote:
| Truly the end of an era.
| wrl wrote:
| Anybody know any other PM tools that do the auto sprint planning
| like Tracker does?
| jeffnappi wrote:
| Linear
| wrl wrote:
| Looks like it, that's new! I tried Linear quite some time ago
| and it didn't "stick", I'll have to give it another shot.
|
| Thanks for the tip!
| jeffnappi wrote:
| Linear is the best project management for software I've
| ever used, highly recommend. They've added many many
| amazing features this year... Incredible team over there
| that are just a joy to work with.
| jamil7 wrote:
| I really like it too but am worried it will go the way of
| other tools and need to start appealing to enterprise to
| expand.
| t1mmen wrote:
| +1. Linear is a great PM tool, maybe even the best. What
| makes it awesome is their support team. I've been in
| touch with them a handful of times over the past ~5
| years, and each time, they've been excellent -- fast
| response times, with genuine and tech savvy people on the
| other side.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Linear is starting to hit against the boundary of
| enterprise requirements: tracking and compliance where as
| a product company needs to ship great products. The VC
| returns is in the former so it will be interesting to see
| which path they choose.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I remember their (pivotal) culture was very unique. Maybe the
| developers have tired out of mandatory pairing
| N_A_T_E wrote:
| I recall the mandatory pairing as quite popular among some devs
| during that era. I wonder if anyone is actually still working
| in that manner.
| numbsafari wrote:
| Yeah. Now they are pairing with a chatbot.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I do alot of my work after close of business, I don't do well
| in companies that _require_ collaboration to get tasks done
|
| I'll pass all team player marks and metrics, but if there's
| too much custom tooling, distributed knowledge and
| gatekeepers, my performance will suffer more than those that
| pair all day
| Puntergone wrote:
| Funny story, I work out of a small part of Accenture and was
| just today explaining to a client that this is how we work
| (pairing, TDD, etc.). Way back in 2018 or so we had a
| partnership with Pivotal and they taught us a bunch of their
| ways of working. It's been a challenge to maintain,
| especially through Covid, but a lot of the core ideas and
| practices are still alive. It doesn't work on every project,
| but man when it does it's a very nice way to do software.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| When the flow between the pair hits, it's a beautiful
| thing.
| SalientBlue wrote:
| I work at what used to be Pivotal, now Broadcom via VMware,
| and do pair programming every day. It was a bit of an
| adjustment, and I do sometimes miss solo dev work, but
| pairing does have some real benefits. It is really nice to
| have another set of eyes to catch mistakes you miss, and it's
| fantastic for spreading knowledge and onboarding new
| developers.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| I never worked at Pivotal but did work in a 100% pairing
| cultural (it wasn't forced but our team did it for three years)
| and I desperately miss it. It's so hard to find companies that
| do it.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I worked with several Pivotal teams, and also really miss it.
|
| I've never been as productive or had that much fun at work.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| > I've never been as productive or had that much fun at
| work.
|
| This was my experience as well.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| I miss it every time I review a behemoth PR, or another
| engineer proposes a giant design change in a PR.
|
| Those discussions _need_ to happen earlier
| glenjamin wrote:
| I've been asked to review massive PRs that were produced by
| a pair plenty of times.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| People have very different views on this and there are no
| rules, but in my view one of the major benefits of
| pairing all the time is NOT doing code review.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Thoughtworks is exclusively a pair programming org. I went
| through a full interview process with them and ultimately
| declined the offer because it didn't feel like the juice was
| worth the squeeze on all the travel, strict pairing, and low
| salary.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| Worked at CoreLogic Labs, which was 100% influenced by The
| Pivotal Way. It would leave me utterly tired at the end of the
| day from the pairing, but what a way to reduce some silos and
| increase productivity.
|
| 1 computer, 2 mice, and 2 keyboards. Had a few mice wars that
| got frustrating at times, but still loved it. Had my best
| manager there of my career -- Guss.
|
| Quite sad that they're shutting down Tracker as it's just such
| a good tool compared to others.
| twic wrote:
| I remember starting at Pivotal and being shocked by the two
| mice, two keyboards (and two displays, mirrored) setup. At
| the previous XP shops i had worked at, we had one mouse, one
| keyboard, and one display (comprising two monitors) - sharing
| the physical peripherals made sharing and transferring
| responsibility completely natural. It seemed bizarre to me to
| duplicate them, introduce what you call mouse wars, and make
| it impossible to point at something on the screen. But of
| course, everyone at Pivotal insisted that theirs was the only
| way to do it!
| twodave wrote:
| Reminds me of the BitBucket "spooning" video.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wUOUmeulNs
| pknomad wrote:
| I worked at Pivotal (2017-2018) and I'll say pairing culture is
| not for everyone but it was a great experience for me. Much of
| the experience is dependent on finding someone that is at your
| "wavelength". It provided good work structure and reduced
| knowledge silo'ing.
|
| I had good experience with it, fwiw.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the
| least.
|
| It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done.
|
| It limited customization down to a sane level.
|
| And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look
| at Jira).
| uzyn wrote:
| I agree. I have been on Pivotal Tracker for over a decade.
| Still am. Tried Jira and a few others, usually feeling like
| they are too taxing on the management part.
|
| What are alternatives that are light on the customization and
| day-to-day management?
| rboyd wrote:
| end of an era
|
| linear.app seems ok
| fowkswe wrote:
| +1 for linear.app. It's somewhat similar in feel to PT.
| It's very responsive and has vim style key bindings. We
| switched a year ago and haven't looked back.
| Goofy_Coyote wrote:
| I've been using Github Projects. It's not as advanced and
| complex as Jira though, but its simplicity and closeness to
| code and documentation is a blessing for my hyperactive geek
| brain
| semperos wrote:
| I help build Shortcut (https://www.shortcut.com/) and I think
| it fits the bill of light--but not spartan--on customization
| and day-to-day management.
|
| To set up a new Shortcut workspace:
|
| 1. Sign up 2. Invite teammates, group them into teams if
| desired 3. Activate the GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket integration,
| so as engineers work via VCS their work in Shortcut
| progresses automatically 4. Set your workspace's timezone 5.
| Turn on/off Iterations (sprints) based on your process.
| Unfinished stories can be set to automatically roll from one
| iteration to the next. 6. Turn on/off point estimation based
| on your process
|
| Then start writing Stories (tickets/issues) to track work.
|
| Going further: Stories can be grouped into Epics. Epics can
| be grouped into Objectives (with associated Key Results if
| that's your thing). You can put Epics on a Roadmap to "share
| out" what your team is planning to work on. All optional,
| based on how you work and the size of your org.
| ocodo wrote:
| Agreed, as an ex-pivot I really liked PT (relative to Jira et
| al.)
|
| It was clear the VMWare was going to gut the company, and
| Broadcom only made that clearer.
|
| It was once a great company... (Pivotal Labs)
|
| Now it's toast.
| tptacek wrote:
| I have never understood the VMWare/Pivotal thing, to the
| point where I assumed there must be two different companies
| named that for VMWare to have bought a company called
| Pivotal.
| ta988 wrote:
| It was a different company until 2019. And they were doing
| great stuff, but it all went down after the acquisition.
| Texasian wrote:
| Pivotal Labs was acquired by EMC back in the day. They
| bundled it with some cloud foundry work and created
| Pivotal. When Dell acquired EMC they also acquired a big
| share of Pivotal. Dell then decided to squeeze more blood
| from the VMWare stone and forced them to acquire Pivotal
| before selling the whole thing off to Broadcom.
| ineptech wrote:
| Agreed, and I suspect part of what made it great is that it was
| being ignored. I love all the dubious new features it doesn't
| have, and the complex larger platform offering it isn't a part
| of.
| pbowyer wrote:
| Linear is the one I've settled on, it stays out of my way.
|
| For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time
| before it becomes bloated to justify valuations.
|
| https://linear.app/
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| We've been on Linear for a couple years now and like it a
| lot.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| As soon as the AI features start showing up in Linear, it's
| time to jump ship. You know for sure VCs are pushing for that
| in the weekly meeting.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| If it takes the pressure off, then go ahead and add those
| features.
|
| But carve it in immutable, legal stone that there will
| always be a classic (reddit style: old) version of the
| product that's feature-complete but maintained.
|
| ... my suspicion is there's actually legalese somewhere
| that mandates the continuity of old.reddit.com. Otherwise,
| I'm at a loss to explain its continued existence in light
| of aggressive app pushing.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| That's true. They are maybe the only major player who
| went with that approach. I wonder if their users are that
| vocal?
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| it's been there for about a year. you can use plain text to
| search issues, and the slack bot will auto-create titles
| when you create issues from there.
| kstrauser wrote:
| A past job used Pivotal for several years until a new
| employee asked if we'd ever heard of Linear. I think we
| started the migration maybe a month later.
| sofixa wrote:
| > bloated
|
| This is like Excel - nobody needs more than 20% of all its
| features... but a different 20% for everyone. Project
| Management/Tracking needs can vary a lot between orgs or even
| people.
| necovek wrote:
| That's not really true: witness Jira boards which are
| really kanban boards replicated everywhere. Jira, by now,
| is mostly a database of issues with a terrible management
| interface that's only accessed through the "boards"
| features.
|
| At least in the "agile" (actual or lookalike) software
| development.
| fiveten03 wrote:
| We found https://www.shortcut.com less opinionated than Linear
| and a closer 1 for 1 to Pivotal. They're all getting a little
| bloated, wish one would dial it back vs keep adding (which
| feels like the inevitable future for Linear).
| lumost wrote:
| Out of curiousity, what do you dislike about
| spreadsheets/google docs? This has been my primary means of
| tracking progress historically. I've tended to find that all
| other mechanisms just add unecessary overhead.
| quesera wrote:
| Not the person to whom you're responding, but:
|
| Collaborative/online spreadsheets can work. Carefully
| designed, with appropriate field constraints and filters and
| sort templates... especially for smaller lists or smaller
| groups, they can be OK.
|
| A few areas where they break down though: -
| No attachments to stories (test cases, screenshots, etc)
| - No comments/history view or threaded discussions -
| Poor usability of notifications on @mention -
| Inflexible UI/data formatting (cells instead of layout)
|
| I'll often start a project using a spreadsheet, because one
| big advantage is that you can edit several "stories" at once.
| So it's a good rough draft. Inevitably, the missing features
| become more important and I move the data over to a more
| appropriate tool.
|
| Sometimes I keep the spreadsheet for internal stakeholder
| issue reporting. It's a business-familiar tool for gathering
| input, which then gets synced to the more purpose-built tool
| for action.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| Noooo I use tracker for everything. There's no project management
| software like it in simplicity and function. You'll be missed
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| You should try out Taiga.io. Super simple (possibly TOO
| simple), light-weight, open-source and self-hostable.
| cknoxrun wrote:
| I do like the approach Basecamp took to Kanban ("Card Table") -
| very very simple and clean (https://basecamp.com/features/card-
| table). We moved off of Basecamp but we found it super
| effective when we were a smaller team.
| briandear wrote:
| No way!! The best tool ever. Jira and its ilk are designed around
| executives "product managers" who want to micromanage every
| damned thing.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Only 7 months to get their data out and migrated to new provider,
| oof, thats rough.
| briandear wrote:
| Can they open source it?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It should be a legal obligation that, passed a certain
| threshold of time and user base, you are required to do so.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| There should be a very high standard for "the government can
| force me to do [something]" and it shouldn't be thrown around
| as casually as, one of a thousand enterprise CRUD apps went
| away.
| neilv wrote:
| They're not migrating users to another VMware company product?
|
| VMware can't sell Pivotal Tracker to some company that will keep
| it going longer (and perhaps try to migrate customers to their
| own product)?
| jitl wrote:
| Since VMware sold to Broadcom in 2023, they've been cutting
| jobs and increasing prices to squeeze every bit of
| profitability possible out of their remaining customers. I'm
| actually kind of surprised they aren't offering support past
| April 30 2025 end-of-life date for 50x the current pricing.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Oh, not to worry, they will :)
| benzible wrote:
| Actually I think that was the original plan:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607630 Apparently
| not enough interest to justify continuing.
| neilv wrote:
| Broadcom is in my bad-vendor list due to the handling of
| VMware.
|
| Most of my job as a developer now is wading through
| bureaucracy that other people created (e.g., figuring out a
| poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, and poorly-communicated
| third-party API that often would be easier to do myself from
| scratch).
|
| When I do hold my nose and wade through someone else's
| bureaucracy, and become dependent upon it, it had better not
| be pulled out from under me by some coked-up MBA who doesn't
| care what customers think of them.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how Broadcom's plan is supposed to
| be profitable in the long term?
|
| I don't get it. You buy a company, then deliberately destroy
| it. How is that profitable? I get that there are tax benefits
| to being able to show massive losses, but certainly the net
| at the end is still a loss.
| jitl wrote:
| I don't think they're aiming to have massive losses. VMWare
| had $13 billion in revenue and $1.5 billion profit, and it
| seems their aim is to cut way back on costs by laying off
| 40% of engineers etc while maintaining what revenue they
| can, and reap the unrealized profit potential there by
| giving up R&D, future growth in the VMWare product
| categories.
| pwenzel wrote:
| We have to use Jira at my current workplace and it's so
| complicated. Pivotal Tracker, which I used at previous workplace,
| was so simple and focused. Sad to hear it's shutting down!
| mikehollinger wrote:
| I am fascinated by how complex JIRA is. We evaluated it in
| 2008. It seemed fine enough.
|
| Looking at it 16 years later, and... what is this nonsense?
| It's so customizable that it's loaded with footguns.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I had some thoughts on Jira:
| https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html
|
| TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a
| DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a
| more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects.
| Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise
| rational people to build the most baroque processes
| imaginable.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to
| build the most baroque processes imaginable.
|
| PM's gotta justify their jobs somehow.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I love a good PM. Trust me, you _don 't_ want to be
| responsible for all the reporting and status updates and
| all that they have to deal with daily.
|
| It's just that I've never worked with someone I
| considered a good PM who loved Jira. The great ones
| wouldn't care if we did all the planning on papyrus
| because they were more concerned with getting things done
| than documenting them in excruciating detail.
| carimura wrote:
| it's the super customizable ones that end up adopted across
| large Enterprises. Flexible workflows I guess. eg
| Salesforce, Jira
| dboreham wrote:
| I have a theory: Back in 1996 Bugzilla worked very well. It
| had been designed, and honed, by a bunch of senior developers
| who also wrote the bug management system. So lots of dog food
| eaten. iirc it was written in Perl.
|
| Then, someone I believe decided to make a "Bugzilla in Java",
| because they didn't like Perl (reasonable).
|
| But whoever that was didn't have the deep knowledge of how
| the thing was supposed to be used. Lacking that insight, they
| created a "Swiss Army Chainsaw", implementing simultaneously
| everything, and nothing.
|
| Next, some MBAs got hold of the thing, and made everything
| 10X worse.
|
| Meanwhile, Bugzilla is still the same and still the best
| software project management tool, if you know how it's
| intended to be used.
| meesles wrote:
| Yes, _and_ having recently learned it and created my team's new
| board, the first thing I did (and you can to!) is disable all
| the extra features and issue types besides epices and issues.
| Kinda simplifies things.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Pivotal is the company whose CEO went to Burning Man and wrote a
| 100% unironic blog post about how it changed his life right?
| hluska wrote:
| How many companies have you sold?
| hu3 wrote:
| And who are we to judge what changes someone's life?
| smegsicle wrote:
| who are we to judge what someone finds funny?
| jordinl wrote:
| Really? Do you have a link to the blog post?
| cheschire wrote:
| This has been coming for a while. I feel bad for anyone still
| building on anything Tanzu these days. I expect we will see a
| similar announcement about some or all of those products in the
| coming years. It's gotta feel stressful to those teams relying on
| these products.
| jonheller wrote:
| That's too bad. At one of my companies they were using Trello for
| all engineering development which I found just too casual of an
| approach. Jira would have been overkill.
|
| Pivotal provided a nice middle ground and was so easy to use with
| just the right amount of customization and power user
| functionality.
|
| But I always felt like there was a small group of users and it
| just never got a foothold in companies.
| hammerbrostime wrote:
| I find Shortcut to be a nice middle-ground between JIRA and
| Trello.
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project
| management tools that still have a committed team and forward
| momentum?
|
| I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot,
| but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step
| away.
|
| My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted
| solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the
| low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are
| addressed by enterprise SaaS.
| nattaylor wrote:
| https://we.phorge.it/ is a community fork that appears pretty
| active.
|
| I was also very fond of Phabricator (all though my team
| preferred GitHub style pull requests) but I haven't had a need
| for it recently, so I haven't tried phorge myself.
| acaloiar wrote:
| I've been using Plane (https://github.com/makeplane/plane),
| also available as a hosted solution (https://plane.so).
| sofixa wrote:
| > Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project
| management tools that still have a committed team and forward
| momentum?
|
| Taiga.io?
|
| > My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted
| solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of
| the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases
| are addressed by enterprise SaaS.
|
| Especially with the presence of free SaaSes such as Trello, and
| integrated project management in self-hosted GitLab, yeah.
| Terretta wrote:
| Phabricator? OK, how about...
|
| Redmine:
|
| -
| https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/repository/svn/show...
|
| - https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download
|
| RequestTracker:
|
| - https://github.com/bestpractical/rt
|
| - https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/releases
|
| A bit like Phabricator, these are almost frameworks that can do
| a ticketing UI.
|
| // But really, probably something mentioned elsewhere in the
| thread, Taiga:
|
| - https://community.taiga.io/t/taiga-30min-setup/170
| aantix wrote:
| The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was
| visibly obvious that there was only one queue.
|
| It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard
| decisions.
|
| In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new
| feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other.
|
| It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.
| aquilaFiera wrote:
| +1. It's been 15 years since I used Tracker but I miss that
| aspect of it.
| jadbox wrote:
| I LOVED Pivotal tracker for just this reason- it was way more
| focused. It was hands-down my favorite task tracker. Since most
| of my projects were code related, we eventually moved to Github
| Projects which is honestly very similar in being focused. The
| downside is that non-technical people may need to get a Github
| account, but it wasn't that much of an obstacle in practice.
| cpeterso wrote:
| An alternative to one big queue is a separate queue for each
| client (external customers, internal teams, the dev team's own
| tech debt, etc) as described in "JIT selection from independent
| streams: An alternative to the "big backlog" of work":
|
| https://longform.asmartbear.com/jit-backlogs/
|
| Each client manages their queue order, so the dev team just
| needs to focus on the head of each queue. (Of course, the dev
| team should also work with clients to clarify the requirements
| for the next few tasks in their queues so the head task will be
| shovel-ready). The dev team can then choose which queue heads
| to prioritize and maintain a balance, such as always have one
| tech debt task and X bug fix tasks in progress in addition to
| client work.
| teeray wrote:
| I also loved that it was adamant about having specific, defined
| states with no customization. The issue is todo, in progress,
| done, delivered, accepted... that's it. Custom issue states are
| a special kind of hell in JIRA.
| shagie wrote:
| > Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.
|
| The nth circle of hell looks like a Jira workflow.
| https://i.imgur.com/dQE9vWn.png and
| https://medium.com/@daitcheson/you-can-do-better-than-
| jira-1...
| hinkley wrote:
| Your honor, he needed killin'.
| hinkley wrote:
| That fucking state machine page makes me want to shoot
| someone.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes - 100% of the people I saw be annoyed after switching to
| GitHub projects were the people whose projects were
| perennially late but also had a roughly 1:1 ratio of PM
| overhead rituals to actual work. I've come to think of it
| like giving a toddler TikTok - there's a certain type of
| person who cannot resist thinking that one more workflow
| state / custom field will be the secret trick for
| productivity.
| twic wrote:
| 60% yes, but 40% no, because there was nothing after
| "accepted" - so no way to track "in production" and
| "validated with users", which are the most important states.
| You could abuse the earlier states to do that, but then you
| have trouble tracking internal acceptance. Ultimately,
| reality just has more significant states than Tracker
| recognised.
| quesera wrote:
| A model that has worked well for my teams is to track
| story/development state and deployment state separately.
|
| They are fundamentally different things, and you cannot
| always infer one from the other. -
| "Accepted" is the final state. Deployed to prod and
| verified. Story is finished and can be hidden from active
| view. - "Delivered" is set by QA when they
| believe the changes are complete and correct, ready for
| deployment. - "Finished" is set by the developer
| when they finish, push, and create the PR.
|
| Then we use labels for deployment state. E.g. @staging,
| @sandbox, @production, etc.
|
| It happens sometimes that a Finished story is deployed to
| staging in integration build X, but then omitted from
| integration build X+1, for reasons unrelated to the quality
| of the changes. In this case the story stays Finished (or
| Delivered) and we set the @staging label when deploying X
| to staging, but clear it when deploying X+1.
|
| This works really well, especially after writing some glue
| code to integrate Pivotal and GitHub and your build/deploy
| flows.
| dangus wrote:
| That sounds more like a disastrous missing feature to me.
|
| A good productivity tool doesn't dictate how teams work.
|
| I'd rather have a tool that's more customizable.
| aantix wrote:
| I hear Jira is the ultimate in flexibility and widely
| beloved. ;)
| hinkley wrote:
| That's a paddlin'.
| necovek wrote:
| I know managers love Jira -- a poster child for
| customizability -- esp product managers, but I have yet to
| meet a software engineer who does.
|
| It simply slows everyone down, but when it's your only tool
| for tracking work, it's still better than nothing.
|
| Now, the problem with Jira is not necessarily customizability
| but that it's dog slow, complex, integrations suck, and
| permissions system is chaotic. Still, I have yet to see fully
| customizable work tracking system that's better made than
| Jira.
|
| But also, a fixed set of features does not force you to
| ascribe the same meaning to them like the authors intended:
| I've used "bug" tracking systems to manage large projects
| with great success (including big features, enhancements, but
| also big and small fixes).
| dangus wrote:
| Honestly this is a bit like saying that the dishwashers
| don't like the food being served at the restaurant.
|
| Project management software isn't made for the benefit of
| engineers, that's on purpose. The customer is the business,
| not the engineer who works there.
|
| Any issues with the engineers have with workflow really
| aren't the fault of the software, it's the fault of the
| project managers/engineering managers' configurations.
|
| You can't blame the company that makes the paint for the
| choice in paint color.
|
| Personally I think the only way Jira has dropped the ball
| is on page load performance.
| jboy55 wrote:
| And yet every paint manufacturer has hundreds of swatches
| of various colors that their paint 'comes in', even
| though there is practically an infinite possibility of
| colors available.
|
| I've seen many custom JIRA workflows, where you define
| specific states that can progress to other states. Nearly
| all of them, over time, were modified so that any state
| can move to any other state.
|
| And if you engineers don't use the tool you provide, the
| data in it is useless. Engineers are typically very smart
| and will just twist any tool they don't like.
|
| Declaration: In order to have accurate state between
| projects and bugs, everything needs to be tracked in
| JIRA.
|
| Result: 70% of your Jira stories are now "This JIRA
| tracks an issue stored in the Github repo, see the repo
| for current status"
| necovek wrote:
| When I ask my Jira admins to enable a set of people to do
| something on a project, they struggle.
|
| When I create a ticket and don't open it right away
| before the popup is gone, poof, it's gone into the depths
| of that project backlog.
|
| If I want to create a multi-project board, oh, now
| tickets don't have the same statuses, set up a mapping
| first.
|
| Or figuring out the artifical limits between epics,
| tickets and subtasks.
|
| And slowness, don't get me started there.
|
| Yes, just like you are blaming the paint shop for only
| having the basic colors, I too can blame the paint shop
| for having 1M green hues to choose from.
| hinkley wrote:
| I hear that the dirty secret of Salesforce is that it's
| easier to change your company processes to match Salesforce
| defaults than to change Salesforce to match your company
| process.
| jboy55 wrote:
| And before Salesforce the costs were 10x for CRM software
| customization.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > I'd rather have a tool that's more customizable.
|
| You think you would, until you do, and by then it's too late.
|
| It's important to have good processes, but the point of all
| those processes is to help you make things more efficiently.
| Anything that leads to you spending extra time serving the
| process directly reduces the amount of real work you can do.
| structural wrote:
| > the point of all those processes is to help you make
| things more efficiently
|
| I think this viewpoint -- that these processes somehow
| could increase efficiency if only they were good -- has a
| lot to do with why engineers dislike systems like Jira,
| because they will never see the increased efficiency they
| are looking for.
|
| Let me restate it in a way that I think is a little more
| nuanced:
|
| The point of systems/processes is to lessen the amount of
| inefficiency in a group of people working together as that
| group a) gets larger, and b) experiences turnover.
|
| Nothing's ever going to be as efficient as a single
| engineer that can build everything with all the details in
| their head at that very moment. But there's a limitation on
| size of problems you can solve doing that! So many people
| working on large problems hate their processes, because
| each individual person is doing less than if they were in a
| tiny, stable team, and they can feel this, even if the
| organization is making great progress.
|
| (And then, at the largest sizes of organization, it's
| almost impossible to stop the org from crumbling from the
| weight of its own complexity. People do spend an awful lot
| of effort trying, though).
| kstrauser wrote:
| I agree with all of that. I understand why there needs to
| be some kind of rigor applied or else you have a bunch of
| engineers running around like cats. I'm not saying we
| shouldn't have process.
|
| _But_ , I've also worked in shops so hidebound that the
| aim of the organization seemed to be to _Follow The
| Process_ above all else. Didn 't ship anything all
| quarter? Well, at least we Followed The Process!
| Customers are screaming? That sucks, but The Process
| doesn't accommodate their needs this quarter. Principal
| engineers are leaving? They just don't appreciate The
| Process!
|
| In my experience, Jira seems to resonate with PMs who
| adore The Process for the sake of The Process. Lighter,
| more opinionated systems like Pivotal or Linear seem to
| help teams deliver features more quickly than teams using
| Jira to march in line with The Process.
| aantix wrote:
| What's the best, open source equivalent?
| webdood90 wrote:
| I briefly worked on the Tracker team until VMWare bought Pivotal.
| One of the best teams that I have ever worked on that truly cared
| about the product they were building.
|
| While pairing could be exhausting, it built a really incredible
| culture there that will be hard to recreate.
|
| RIP
| semperos wrote:
| Shortcut (https://www.shortcut.com/) is a solid alternative to
| Pivotal Tracker. I work as an Engineering Manager there and
| helped build an importer for Pivotal Tracker data into Shortcut
| (https://github.com/useshortcut/api-
| cookbook/tree/main/pivota...).
|
| Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid
| GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.
| aantix wrote:
| Still feels like too many columns, too many states.
|
| Pivotal Tracker - ice box, backlog, or current iteration.
|
| I see companies in Trello Hell - well meaning, but often
| conflated, grey area states. There's like 10-15 columns on
| their boards.
|
| It's a hot mess.
| hinkley wrote:
| I worked on a tool more crowded than this and of late I'm
| coming around to the idea that these tools are all built for
| management which is why they get deployed. These drag and
| drop views aren't that helpful for engineers. And they just
| make it easy for someone else to accidentally fuck up the
| status on your tasks.
|
| The task list in Jira is good enough for finishing or marking
| one task as blocked and starting another. If anyone is using
| the interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, dragging
| things around at pace, it's because people aren't keeping
| their tasks updated and a tool can't and probably shouldn't
| try to fix that. You fix that by orienting the UI so devs
| benefit from using it, not by guilt tripping or lecturing.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Woah wasn't this called Clubhouse at one point? I'm getting
| blast from the past! We used Clubhouse at Papa long time ago.
| kjksf wrote:
| Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small
| team.
|
| People often ask: how do I find business ideas?
|
| Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a
| product that is going away.
|
| This is a validated product: people were paying for it.
| Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than
| this.
|
| All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally
| market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will
| care.
|
| You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and
| build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the
| product.
|
| It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very
| small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted
| databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone.
|
| Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when
| revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is
| involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or
| when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing
| the profits but they don't grow.
|
| Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a
| profitable company.
|
| This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend
| in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and
| you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and
| hustle.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Given that it's impossible to sign up, it looks like most
| prospective cloners will have to learn all the features by
| watching videos and learn about the exported CSV format by
| asking former customers for their CSVs.
| aantix wrote:
| If anyone is making a clone, feel free to reach out to me.
| jim.jones1@gmail.com
|
| Previous user of Pivotal Tracker - I'll tell you everything
| that I loved and hated about it.
|
| I know a couple other devout users as well that I could
| introduce you to.
| digitaltrees wrote:
| I'll reach out. I am planning to build it for my company
| ericpauley wrote:
| Most people probably have a PT account lying around or can
| find a friend with one. I just checked and my account from 6+
| years ago is still active.
| egorfine wrote:
| The biggest risk: people are going to flock to Linear, which is
| the next best thing.
| regularfry wrote:
| You don't need to capture all of them, just enough to get to
| profitability. That might be a very small number, for the
| right minimal viable replacement.
| j45 wrote:
| Totally, naysayers may be trying to eliminate all risk in
| something by a secret idea no one has done.
|
| When in reality, there is no risk free anything.
| rozap wrote:
| It's been wild to see linear get clunky and slow over the
| last year or two.
| quesera wrote:
| Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning!
|
| I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of
| solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-
| employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January
| 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions.
|
| And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will
| balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
| diggan wrote:
| > And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs
| will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
|
| Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff
| somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit
| (Hint: they exist)
|
| Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming
| bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't
| want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high requirement.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| What hosting providers would you recommend?
| diggan wrote:
| Both OVH and Hetzner offers unmetered connections for
| their dedicated servers, only had good experience with
| both so far (besides when one of OVH's data centers
| burned down, but hoping that was a exceptional situation)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Backup to Backblaze B2, or, depending on architecture,
| rely on their object storage for hot data (depending on
| data cache and tier requirements). They partner with
| Cloudflare for free egress (on the Backblaze side) of
| public content as well.
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-and-cloudflare-
| part...
| dexterdog wrote:
| Cloudflare's subscription agreement for self-serve
| accounts limits serving non-HTML content, including
| "video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures,
| audio files, or other non-HTML content."
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Which seems to be a fine fit for a project management
| SaaS solution. If you have an origin with non text
| content, you can front it with Fastly or pay Cloudflare
| something enterprisey (which you should be able to do
| once you have traction). Regardless, this is an
| inexpensive content distribution and object storage
| architecture available vs AWS egress costs.
| closeparen wrote:
| In Europe. Hosting for North American customers is a
| completely different story.
| quesera wrote:
| All true, but I think we might underestimate the amount of
| data sitting in Pivotal.
| diggan wrote:
| I don't think you'd have to consider migration _all_ the
| data from Pivotal, but lets assume 10% just in case? Lets
| say that 's 100TB in total (on disk), which you could
| host with 10x storage boxes from Hetzner, 24 EUR each per
| month, so 240 EUR in total, which includes 10 unmetered
| connections (1 per box).
| simoncion wrote:
| > I don't think you'd have to consider migration _all_
| the data from Pivotal...
|
| I do. You might not have demands to migrate all data from
| _all_ of your potential customers, but far, far more
| people than you might expect treat their issue tracking
| system as a system of record and external memory for a
| HUGE assortment of things.
|
| One hugely (and obviously) useful query chain that such a
| system answers is "Hey, this customer problem sounds
| familiar. Did we investigate it before? Did we solve it?
| If so, how? If not, why not?". For long-running projects,
| it is impossible to select the correct 10% of data to
| retain to also retain the ability to reliably -er-
| service those query chains.
| diggan wrote:
| Obviously I meant 10% of all customers would
| hypothetically migrate from Pivotal to this new imaginary
| service, not that 10% of the data from each customer
| would be migrated... So 100% of the data migrated from
| 10% of the Pivotal user base, pretty generous assumptions
| I think.
| simoncion wrote:
| > Obviously I meant...
|
| Respectfully: if it was obvious, I wouldn't have come to
| the conclusion I did and written up what I wrote.
|
| > So 100% of the data migrated from 10% of the Pivotal
| user base...
|
| Yeah, maybe. I don't know how large the slice of the
| Pivotal Tracker userbase you'd be able to retain even if
| you had a _perfect_ clone. I bet it would be notably
| larger than you imagine it would be... it 's my
| understanding that it has some pretty rabid fans that
| used it.
| djhn wrote:
| At that price point Hetzner's dedicated storage servers
| with enterprise HDDs are cheaper per terabyte and better
| suited for production work loads.
| dugmartin wrote:
| It might not be as much as one would think. I just looked
| at their export page and you can only get 6 months of
| project history data out of their system - I'm guessing
| that means comments.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Dont OVH and Hetzner offer this? If you dont like bare
| metal perhaps run Coolify for your vercel like platform?
| catwell wrote:
| The best way to pull this off is to _bet_ the tool will end
| up shutting down and build the replacement before it does. A
| good example of this is Pinboard: Maciej knew the product
| inside out, and he knew what being acquired by Yahoo meant.
| So he started building Pinboard in 2009, caught the various
| exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011)
| and ended up acquiring it for $35k in 2017.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm confused. Is Pinboard something that was built by this
| Maciej character? Acquired by him? What was the name of the
| product Yahoo bought and I assume shut down? FYI I don't
| see any mention of him here: https://www.pinboard.com/who-
| we-are
|
| Your comment reads a lot like something you'd say during a
| chat with friends on a sofa in a cafe.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| wrong link: https://pinboard.in/popular/
| mtlynch wrote:
| Not GP but a rewrite based on what I think they mean:
|
| _Maciej knew Delicious inside out, and he knew what
| Delicious being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started
| building Pinboard (a Delicious alternative) in 2009,
| caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the
| later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring Delicious
| for $35k in 2017._
| oblio wrote:
| Thank you for the translation from "person-in-the-know"
| to "clueless-bystander" :-D
| Vinnl wrote:
| I think Maciej worked at Delicious, which then got
| acquired by Yahoo. He then created Pinboard as a
| Delicious competitor, while Yahoo ran Delicious into the
| ground (as he predicted). Then when Delicious users had
| flocked to Pinboard, he acquired Delicious from Yahoo.
| ghaff wrote:
| Developers mostly won't pay out of their own pocket.
| dangus wrote:
| The real reason this won't work is that Pivotal obviously
| isn't making good money if VMWare is cool with shutting it
| down.
|
| If it was some kind of excellent business to be in it
| wouldn't be shutting down.
|
| An analogy would be to say that it would be a great business
| model to clone Redbox now that it's gone. But it's not
| because its competitors ate it alive.
|
| Sure, there are a bunch of Redbox customers that liked the
| product, but that number was declining.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've worked at a couple places that made the mistake of
| thinking they could charge a premium for artisanal hand
| crafted web pages. You get all the customers with deep
| seated control issues, willing to pay a premium to have
| everything exactly how they like it, and one by one sticker
| shock works as therapy and the price they will pay per
| artisanal, hand crafted webpage slowly declines until it
| costs you more to run the system than the customers will
| pay.
|
| And in the most recent case of this I'm aware of, at least
| two different groups got to sell the company to new suckers
| before the bill came due.
| elwebmaster wrote:
| Can you please elaborate more on this? Price they will
| pay for changes? Not getting it, is it that the target
| market is slow forcing owners to lower the price? Doesn't
| explain "costs more to run" part.
| hinkley wrote:
| To a first order approximation, Wikipedia serves everyone
| the same page. So the cost of pages in Wikipedia is
| proportional to the rate of edits, not the rate of page
| clicks and inbound links. Because once I hit Save, the
| page they display is pretty much the same one they'll
| show you when I send it to you to ask your opinion.
|
| If I show each user of a website a highly customized,
| user- and workflow-specific page for the same url based
| on context and previous activity, then I have to generate
| it every time ("hand crafted, artisanal web pages") so
| the weight of the backend is now proportional to traffic.
|
| Amazon.com tries to split the difference. You and I see
| the same bones of a page for an Apple Watch 10, but
| little bits load in and show you laundry detergent and me
| pickles. But Amazon makes _more_ money every time I click
| on pickles and add to my cart, so there 's an expectation
| that the fractional penny they pay to load the page
| fragment results in more sales. That doesn't work the
| same for SaaS applications, so you need to use even this
| trick sparingly, not build your whole product value
| statement around it.
|
| For the control issues crack, the paying customer (not
| their users) is attracted by all the levers and dials,
| but cannot appreciate the cost using them exposes them
| to. The development cost can amortize over time,
| increasing your profit margins and letting you recoup the
| R&D costs, but the cost of keeping a cluster running
| cannot. And you've painted yourself into a requirements
| corner you can't get out of. Eventually their eye drifts
| to competitors with fewer high-cost, high-value features
| in favor of low-cost.
| ilbeeper wrote:
| What you write seems very interesting, but I'm afraid I'm
| not fully grasping it. There are few immediate counter
| examples I can give, and I wonder if I'm missing a point
| and those are not really counter examples.
|
| Is Gmail a highly customized website? What about
| Atlassian suite?
| elwebmaster wrote:
| Thanks for explaining and I am sure you have more
| experience with this type of scale but wouldn't you say
| that ChatGPT is an example of "hand crafted artisanal
| page", where not only every person sees a different
| answer but every interaction with the page results a
| different response. Of course they have a ton of VC money
| to burn but could it be that technology optimization
| (especially on the backend and hosting provider) could be
| the solution to this cost issue as opposed to blaming
| product features?
| dangrossman wrote:
| "Good money" to a company with $13B revenue a year is a lot
| different than "good money" to a solo developer. If you can
| pick up six figures a year in revenue and keep things small
| enough to run solo, it's a good business for you.
| dangus wrote:
| If solo developers could make enterprise-grade work
| management systems we'd sure have a lot more of them
| around.
| kelnos wrote:
| Why? Maybe the market just isn't there for that many work
| management systems. Or maybe it's not a fun and exciting
| product to create, so a solo developer isn't as likely to
| pick it up.
|
| Remember we're not talking about the general case here.
| We're specifically talking about the feasibility of
| seeing a specific product being shut down, and then
| building a clone of it on a small resource budget in an
| attempt to snatch up their soon-to-be-former customers.
| nbardy wrote:
| Dude billing never a problem. People wanting to pay you is
| the point of a business
| henning wrote:
| Don't people just use Trello instead?
| anamexis wrote:
| Pivotal is very different from Trello
| j45 wrote:
| This genuinely is an opportunity as you're saying lol
|
| As someone who's built and launched something this big in a few
| months once upon a time, it feels like way too many
| technologies, it increases cycle time in ideation land.
|
| This would need to just be a postgres server, extended maybe by
| things like hasura and supabase, and a single codebase front
| end for all platforms. If postgres can't do it, don't do it.
|
| Front end... might be flutter. Could be svelte.
|
| Still, being a polyglot agnostic, for the dollar, in speed of
| development and more importantly iteration, per feature or
| update, in not needing to create an entire build, environment,
| nothing really seems to be as complete or as fast as Laravel,
| as much as it can shock to hear (I am not a heavy user, but
| considering it).
|
| Different strokes though, its just about speed of iteration.
| jph wrote:
| Great idea! If you're reading this and want to connect about a
| clone, I'm joel@joelparkerhenderson.com.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very
| small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted
| databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone
|
| The core product is relatively simple. But software packages
| like Pivotal aren't sold on their core functionality, they are
| sold on their value-adds like integrations, automations etc
| which take much longer and much more manpower to build.
| jmartin2683 wrote:
| It just went out of business for... reasons. There are better
| tools out there nowadays, apparently. Why emulate a sunken
| ship?
| hammerbrostime wrote:
| Pivotal Tracker was the first time I saw a digital kanban board
| where the workflow was represented as a series of columns you
| dragged items through. Since then, its become popular paradigm
| for pretty much every popular project management software UI
| around.
|
| I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They
| were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.
| bityard wrote:
| My first tech job was for a small IT consulting company that
| specialized in open source solutions in the early 2000's. The
| owner was basically the sales and overall strategy guy, I did
| consulting and implementations with clients, and most everyone
| else specialized in either their own low-level tech or business
| stuff.
|
| At our height, the owner started bringing in more projects than
| our current workflow could handle. Customers started getting
| angry because their projects would slip through the cracks and
| get delayed if they weren't calling us up weekly to nag us for
| status. I sort of became the project manager by default because
| I touched most of the projects in some way and I was the go-to
| guy when someone had a question about the status of a project.
| I wasn't really happy about this because I liked doing tech
| stuff more than I liked managing projects.
|
| In an attempt to preserve my sanity and get back to logging
| billable hours, I grabbed a deck of blank index cards and wrote
| down the company name, project name, status and for each
| project we had. (I didn't like spreadsheets at the time and
| this was faster than writing code.) That way, I didn't have to
| actively remember the status of every project. When needed or
| when asked, I could just grab the card and look. Once a week or
| so, I would update the status of each project on the card.
|
| Not long after, I got to noticing that there was really only
| four (or five, I don't recall) states that any project could be
| in and decided to stop writing them on the cards. Instead I
| placed the cards in dedicated piles that represented the
| project's status and moved them around as needed. That worked
| well. Eventually, I thought it would good if everyone on the
| team could see the projects and their status as well, so I
| grabbed an old whiteboard, hung it on the wall behind me, drew
| a column for each status, and taped all the cards into the
| column corresponding to their status. This was a BIG
| improvement. I stopped wasting an hour every morning just going
| over project status with the boss and other employees. Everyone
| could just walk over to the area near my desk and look at the
| wall behind me. (It was an open-plan office before those were
| "cool.") Others could move the cards between columns
| themselves. When a client called demanding an update, I could
| just glance behind me.
|
| A few jobs later, I took a compulsory three-day seminar on
| Agile and saw that they called this thing a Kanban board.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| No, Pivotal Tracker did not invent this paradigm. For
| background, I started working around 2005.
|
| Before tools like Tracker or JIRA, people who were doing agile
| development did everything with physical index cards. There was
| a lot of controversy even about digitizing those workflows back
| in the day - "we lose human connection and conversation by
| putting it in the machine!" Nobody has those conversations
| anymore as far as I'm aware.
|
| Like others have mentioned on this thread, the true innovation
| of Tracker was to have a single view where stories are ordered
| vertically in a single column and grouped by status. This
| really changes the conversation around what is top priority.
| Everything can be urgent and have a high level of priority, but
| if you put something at the top, something else must shift down
| in compensation. No more doing that thing where there are five
| number one priorities at the same time.
|
| The Agile view in Jira actually owes some inspiration to
| Tracker, if you can believe it. I know because I was there. I
| was a client on a Pivotal Labs project way back in the day,
| back when Tracker was still not publicly available, but only
| available to clients of Pivotal Labs. Our PM loved Tracker and
| wanted to use it but knew we could not get approval for it back
| home, all other teams were on JIRA. So our PM found a JIRA
| plugin called Greenhopper, tracked down the developer, and fed
| this person feedback to try and turn Greenhopper into the most
| Tracker-like thing possible. Greenhopper eventually got
| absorbed into Atlassian and turned into what is today known as
| Jira Agile.
|
| Tracker felt like such an amazing breath of fresh air and
| forward looking technology at the time when it came out.
| Tracker used Ruby on Rails and did sexy AJAX stuff on the
| frontend (big wow factor back then, this was the age of IE6).
|
| I loved Tracker for many years. I could sing its praises all
| day long. That said, the people who worked on the product had
| some philosophical things that got in the way of the product
| evolving. Reasonably, they did not want to turn into a huge
| enterprise tracking tool. Problem was, there were never any
| more features built into Tracker that really gave a good view
| for people who were higher level than the daily boots on the
| ground folks. So no good visualizations or features for
| projects where multiple teams must execute in tandem, and there
| are complex interdependencies between the teams. So while
| Tracker was awesome for the folks on the dev team, it wasn't
| very helpful for people in middle or upper management who
| needed birds-eye visibility easily and at a glance.
|
| So although I am sad to see this announcement in a way I'm
| quite hopeful. There are so many people who love this tool and
| will miss it, now there's no excuse for them not to go build
| something better!
| sandinmyjoints wrote:
| I will really miss Pivotal. Looks like my org will shift to Jira.
| People talk a lot about how Jira is so customizable to the point
| of it being problematic. But would it be possible to customize it
| to work somewhat like Pivotal, I wonder?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Like others have mentioned, if you like Pivotal, check out
| Linear first.
|
| If you end up on Jira, once you get it configured, put the
| admin password in a bottle and throw it into the ocean. _Do
| not_ let anyone say "you know, if we made this one little
| change to our workflow...", because once that dam breaks all
| hope is lost.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| These guys were pioneers who set forth a lot of the patterns used
| in other PM software (Did they invent "Velocity"?). I hated
| Pivotal in the early days, but after a couple years on the job I
| learned to really love it especially as the newer flimsier sprint
| planning tools were popping up in the early web 2 days.
|
| Only Trello really "beat it" fairly - Jira was always top-down
| forced, and Asana only won with designers because it was pretty
| while Pivotal was more tactical (not to mention they clung to
| skeuomorphic UI a little too long). The rest is history.
|
| I guess we can say Pivotal was quite pivotal in the
| AGILE/sprint/PM software race. RIP
| skybrian wrote:
| We were doing "velocity" at a startup using a rack of index
| cards. Software is not strictly necessary when everyone is in
| the same room.
| latchkey wrote:
| PT's concept of velocity isn't just tracking a number. It is
| tracking what work will get done within a period of time
| based on the average amount of work done previously. It
| allowed PM's to actually estimate when a feature would be
| completed and how adding or removing stories (or people!)
| would impact future feature deadlines. Initial velocity was
| meaningless and only developed over time as an average value
| of a team of people working together, taking into account
| things like vacations and sick days. None of this could be
| done realtime with a rack of index cards as it was something
| that happened over many weeks.
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, that's basically how we did it. Though not formally
| accounting for vacation days; there were four of us and we
| didn't have people coming and going much. We only did it
| once a week during the retrospective. It's not hard to add
| up story points for the week and remember what you did in
| previous weeks. You could enter it into a spreadsheet if
| you want to get fancy.
|
| The concept comes from Extreme Programming. Software
| implementations came later. I think Pivotal Tracker does
| something useful, but you need a larger team for it to
| matter.
|
| Here are some photographs of the team room:
|
| https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/
| latchkey wrote:
| > I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you
| need a larger team for it to matter.
|
| My buddy and I built what ended up being an $80m/yr gross
| revenue business entirely using PT for ourselves. We
| shipped a MVP exactly to the week we predicted. It helped
| that we both worked at Pivotal and knew exactly how to
| use PT correctly.
|
| You certainly were early with the process and I applaud
| you for that! PT wasn't released until 2008.
| twic wrote:
| That concept of velocity is in the original Extreme
| Programming practice, which predates Pivotal, and it was
| indeed done with racks of index cards.
|
| It's explained pretty clearly in the first edition of
| Extreme Programming Explained, but i can't find a copy of
| that online right now. The second edition was absolutely
| ruined for some reason, but still contains a rough
| description of it:
|
| > Whichever units you use, hours or points, you will need
| to deal with the situation where actual results don't match
| the plan. [...] If you are estimating in points, modify the
| budget for subsequent cycles. A simple way to do this,
| dubbed "yesterday's weather" by Martin Fowler, is to plan
| in any given week for exactly as much work as you actually
| accomplished in the previous week.
|
| Tracker uses some kind of rolling average rather than just
| last week's number, but it's the same idea.
| latchkey wrote:
| I never implied that PT invented the concept. I was just
| explaining the concept in relation to PT.
|
| Doing what PT does, with index cards, would have been a
| nightmare on any sufficiently large project.
| latchkey wrote:
| RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed
| my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud
| Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and
| products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair
| programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to
| velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I
| use these skills every single day.
|
| You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.
| makk wrote:
| > How to polish a turd over time.
|
| You mean iterating and pivoting.
| latchkey wrote:
| No, I mean taking a turd, which was the Cloud Foundry
| codebase that Pivotal inherited (aka purchased), and
| polishing it to be something that actually worked.
|
| It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at
| least we tried our best.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| I heard this from other people that worked on Pivotal. Must
| have been a cool eng team.
| latchkey wrote:
| Some of the best people I've ever worked with. Still friends
| with many of them to this day.
| larrywright wrote:
| This is sad to see. I haven't used PT in over a decade probably,
| but I used it heavily for 3-4 years before that. As a contrast to
| other "agile" tools, it was a breath of fresh air. So simple,
| everything was all on one screen, so easy to move things from
| state to state. My team loved it because they could just open it
| up in a window and leave it open all day, making changes as
| needed. I don't think I've ever seen anything since that came
| close to it.
|
| I just logged in for the first time in years and found that I
| still had two side projects in there. Time to download them I
| guess.
| throwaway918299 wrote:
| man, what would I give to have Atlassian shut down - so much
| frustration, anger, productivity lost and just absolute misery
| caused by that terrible company and their horrible products
|
| I actually liked using Tracker.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Atlassian's primary sin is listening to PMs for features.
|
| As a subset of users, they seem to want the flexibility of
| Excel, except it also has the specific workflow they want out
| of the box (which is different for every PM).
|
| Every product that's chased that rabbit down the hole has ended
| up with something customizable enough that (a) users need
| training to actually use it & (b) nobody is ever trained on it.
|
| I'm sure Jira is great... if I and everyone else at the company
| went to a two-week training course on configuring and using it.
| But none of those people, nor I, am ever going to do that.
|
| Tl;dr - project management/tracker tools should have a
| complexity feature cap, defined by what a reasonable person can
| intuit in the course of normal use over a month.
| throwaway918299 wrote:
| I would rather just use an actual spreadsheet for issue
| tracking than Jira.
|
| We lost our CTO recently, and he was also the "jira admin"
| (ie. the only person who knows how the hell to do anything
| with jira) and it's just been a clusterf*ck ever since.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Excel-as-a-benchmark is a powerful thought argument.
|
| If something can't be significantly better than Excel, then
| product specs probably need refining.
|
| It's not that Excel is amazing or perfect in any one thing,
| but it is a pretty amazing _blend_ of simplicity,
| flexibility, out of the box features, programmability, and
| presentation.
| karmajunkie wrote:
| this dovetails into my test for whether i'm looking at a
| good startup idea or not... if existing solutions are all
| complicated spreadsheets, there's both a potential market
| of users, and the problem is complex enough to warrant
| some code to manage it.
|
| ETA: obviously not all good startup ideas fit into that
| thesis, just the ones i tend to enjoy working on.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's a good test, but also a trap. Because the relevant
| follow-on question is "Is it possible to design a single
| solution that will please most of these people?"
|
| Sometimes, the nature of the problem makes flexibility
| irreducible.
| schnable wrote:
| Their site still has a COVID-era banner about "unusual times."
| Talk about a neglected product.
| leptons wrote:
| COVID is still a thing, and we are indeed in strange times.
| justusthane wrote:
| When does "strange" become "normal"?
| leptons wrote:
| Maybe after the upcoming election? But I'm sure the next
| election will also make things weird.
| constantinum wrote:
| I signed up for Pivotal Tracker a month ago, after a ten-year
| gap. I loved the simplicity then, and I love it even more now.
| I'm saying this after using multiple different project
| management/Agile management apps.
|
| I still use all the terminologies I learnt from PT -- Icebox,
| backlog, current -- across other project management apps.
|
| Sad, and you will be missed.
| sub7 wrote:
| IMO all of these todo list apps are the same - no moat and not
| useful enough to be critical for anyone or anything.
|
| No idea how Asana is still valued at $3B it's literally just
| notepad with checkboxes.
| geenat wrote:
| Surprised to see this. Still one of my favorite kanban
| implementations. Mostly just gets out of your way.
| j45 wrote:
| Ouch. VMware could at least open source it if it's no longer
| available.
| aaronlsilber wrote:
| Wish 37Signals would clone something like this and sell it via
| https://once.com/ (pay once, install and host yourself).
| dan1111 wrote:
| Shortcut.com has it's an importer tool from Pivotal. Give it a
| go! https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/205965835-Import...
| dan1111 wrote:
| Checkout Shortcut.com! They have an import tool from Pivotal
| Tracker.
|
| https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| _" Yes, that Pivotal."_
| desireco42 wrote:
| I always loved Tracker and it sucks it got sold and resold until
| they shut it down like this. I am using Linear but it doesn't
| have simplicity of Tracker tbh.
|
| Maybe Tracker belongs in different time that we will not go back
| to, who knows.
| arepb wrote:
| Hate it when the VMware Tanzu division does that
| bleonard wrote:
| Just came to say, I still think this is the best balance between
| the many factors of running a dev team. I keep trying to recreate
| it in every tool I use.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| I could have called this years ago when I found out they
| exclusively use and enforce pair programming in-house
|
| https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to...
| quesera wrote:
| > _I could have called this years ago when I found out they
| exclusively use and enforce pair programming in-house_
|
| No, you could not have.
|
| The environment that birthed Pivotal Tracker had the same
| culture, and the death of PT is a consequence of multiple
| profitable acquisitions, eventually into a multinational
| semiconductor corp that has no use for a small SaaS devtools
| product.
|
| You could probably have called it based on the acquisition
| chain though. Many of us have been hoping to be surprised. Our
| luck has run out.
| grishka wrote:
| I remember using this around 10 years ago and liking it quite a
| lot, especially compared to Redmine we replaced it with.
| edida wrote:
| Shortcut is a good alternative to Pivotal
| (https://www.shortcut.com/)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| If it's really that valuable, someone will offer to buy it.
| amai wrote:
| There are many alternatives:
|
| - https://www.easyredmine.com/
|
| - https://www.openproject.org/
|
| - https://taiga.io/
|
| - https://www.stackfield.com/
|
| - https://zenkit.com/en/
| hyggetrold wrote:
| Surprised nobody has dropped a monday.com advertisement into this
| thread yet ;)
| m25n wrote:
| I was an engineer on Tracker from 2013 to 2020. I'm sad to see it
| go.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Problem with these trackers is that they are by design super
| opinionated on how your work flow is gonna be once you get past
| simple reminders type tracking
| briantakita wrote:
| I got to work on Pivotal Tracker in 2006 during it's first
| rewrite. Fun project.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-19 23:01 UTC)