Technical Meetup New York Style – Pivotal Labs

Posted: July 2nd, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Cloud Computing |

Spent a few quality hours on Wednesday evening July 1st at a Meetup sponsored by Pivotal Labs to discuss their Tracker Project Management tool.
Quintessential New York style just off of Fifth Avenue on 27th Street in a Class B or perhaps C building that probably served as a garment manufacturing
facility back in the day when those streets were chock full of hand driven garment tracks.

No, this is not quite the view from the 18th floor of their loft space as I was there to work and learn and not act as a photographer but in fact their view was better with the Chrysler Building and the rest of Gotham glistening as the sun set over the Hudson River. No office space surrounded by quadrangle seas of green in this City unless you include the very public Central Park and the other architecturally renowned parks sprinkled throughout the boroughs.
Pivotal Labs is a software company originating in San Francisco with a major outpost here in the Big Apple with a focus on providing Technical Software Engineering services to clients. Think of like an Agency but with Developers. That is not how I came to know them though. As Software Engineers, they architected and engineered for their own use an internal Project Management Tool to manage their Agile development process and eventually made it available as what I would characterize a Cloud Service. What can be better then that as a start? A project Management tool where the initial customers for the feature set were developers. Though I have no way of verifying , they did say they have to date about 100k users and they have at least one because we at Jittr use it.

What is Tracker? First don’t call it Pivotal Tracker as I did , it is just plan Tracker as the principals like to reinforce.
Well if you are conversant with Agile Story definition and management tools like Rally that provide a fundamental utility to manage and coordinate Agile Development in all it’s phases, that is what it is.
You define a story , describe it, and leave it in the “ICEBOX” which is a metaphor I find attractive. You have a planning session with the team and here a team is small (6 or at most 10) move the estimated in terms of amount of work accepted stories into the Backlog. It uses simple estimation based on either 1,2 and 3 or fibonaci sequence. The fact is they are relative measures. You don’t estimate so much like “this widget will take 23 hours” to build

This product is apt for those shops that want something powerful because of it’s simplicity and focus, cheap (we use the free version because of our current small size), and who want to be able to influence an open group of developers in furthering the efficacy of the existing product.

Who is it not for? Well, if you have money to burn and like paying license fees for the fine dinners or box row seats you may garner by signing a wide expensive perpetual site license. If you are so process driven that without integration with every conceivable project management package or if you need specificity in the estimation activity bordering on creating mirages that you can present as verifiable fact because the tool say’s so.
On the other extreme if anything more disciplined then redacted napkins with the feature descriptions or endless email threads with point -counter point to describe a feature, then the tool is not for you.

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