Pivotal Tracker is Amazing, Period.: Free Tools, Productivity, Management

It is not very often that I am blown away by software to an (tech)emotional level. Today I was blown away. I honestly believe Pivotal Tracker could change the way I view product development from now on.

It is like someone reached inside my dreams and then made a tracking system based on it. I have even pitched this same type of idea to a business partners before: ticket items based on value-added to the business. Finally, a tracking system that works how I think.

10 Reasons I am Blown Away By Pivotal Tracker

1. Creates charts of time line / deadline against amount of work yet to accomplish.
   
   
   
   Look at how huge this is.. if your manager wants to hit the deadline, he/she has to remove "points", or feature requests and slide them to a new release. There is only so much you can get done in a given time period, and Pivotal Tracker makes that clear.
2. Centered around value-added to the business. Amount of value added in a iteration (week) is the velocity.
   
   • Each new feature is assigned a point value depending on how difficult it is to implement.
   • Project's velocity is based on how many points you accomplish in an iteration (week).
     
   • Chores and bugs are viewed as necessary overhead, but do not add value to the business so they do not contribute to a project's velocity.
3. There is only so much you can get done in a week, realistically. Pivotal Tracker knows this and pushes new items to the backlog, showing management a good idea of what is realistic.
   
4. Team strength adjusts the amount of points able to accomplish in a given week.
   
   Here the client was able to accomplish 9 points in a given week typically. Upon adding me, they adjusted team strength to 175%, allowing for 16 points worth of features to be shown in the weekly cycle. All features above 16 are scheduled for following weeks.
5. The server is polled periodically, allowing you to see changes your team makes without reloading the page.
6. Sortable, drag and drop prioritization of tickets.
7. Clicking, "start" shows that you are working on a particular bug, avoiding team overlap.
8. Make your project private or public.
9. Customizable view-panes and clone existing view panes.
10. Comment and attach files to tickets (stories).

I've always wanted a tracking system that demonstrates the value that I am adding to the business when adding features. Pivotal Tracker does this for me. its feature set is just enough to add to your experience with the tool and not over-complicate things.

Go use it now.