Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.”
The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.
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CucumberStudio
Score 4.9 out of 10
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CucumberStudio, now a SmartBear product since the 2019 acquisition, is a continuous testing platform replacing the former HipTest, supporting agile development with manual and automated code testing, reusable steps, feature history with living documentation, among other features.
The UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.
HipTest is good and helpful to create and run functional regressions but it is more complicated to use this tool to create and run API testing scenarios (it does not mean it can not be done). This tool is definitively not appropriate for running performance testing scenarios.
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.
UX is not too obvious and easy (like generating a data table in a scenario or including a scenario in a test run) but you can get used to it relatively easy by playing around with the options, also the documentation is helpful.
To get extra functionalities you have to pay for them separately.
It works good enough. I didn't have many problems with that. The user interface is a bit confusing though. The team took some time to understand where some configurations were.
We've never had to request support in the 5 years I have been using it. A solid solution! Everything I have had questions about is on the website. New features are in their newsletter with more details on their website. Often I am using the new features within a few minutes of reading the article.
The tool includes a basic but complete documentation that can be very helpful to get started using the tool. The UX sometimes does not feel very easy to understand but after some use you can get familiar without reading the documentation. The webinars are not very useful for using the tool, I have seen a couple of them and they are actually focused on promoting their HipTest product to new users instead of being useful and educational for current users.
We have had employees in the past look at Drupal, and other open source project management tools to assist in our needs. Unfortunately each solution took too much time to implement, design and configure that we could not stop the work we were doing for clients to complete a full set up of a project tracker. Thankfully Pivotal is a predefined solution with no configuration needed. Simply input your projects, design your Stories with Tasks and begin your tracking.
Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.