8 Pivotal Tracker features that will change your life.
Okay, so maybe the title is a little dramatic. These features will not change your life. However, they will save you time and make you look like a pro in sprint planning meetings, which might actually change other people’s perception of you and as a result change your life. But… I will let you be the judge of that.
The concept for this blog post evolved after introducing Pivotal Tracker to a handful of new colleagues and clients. During a pre-planning meeting a Product Owner apologized for not being as fast as me when creating stories and organizing the backlog.
It’s not that I’m faster than anyone else; I’ve just had a lot of practice. This prompted me to outline a handful of my favorite features that might not be as obvious to a new user.
1. Keyboard shortcuts
First things first. You gotta know your shortcuts. Hit “shift” + “?” to reveal this nifty shortcut cheat sheet.
Add story (A), add epic (E), search (/), save current story (CMD + S), and save comment (CMD + Enter) are just some of my favorite Tracker hotkeys.
2. Collapse columns
Before or during a sprint planning meeting, I prefer working with 2 columns (Current/Backlog and Icebox) instead of 3 (Current, backlog, and Icebox). This view makes it easier to move groups of stories up, down, and out of the list if necessary. Quickly combine your current column with your backlog column with this little button.
3. Increase the font size
Use projector mode in weekly planning meetings to prevent your team from having to squint.
In case the column width becomes too small in projector view, switch the slider at the bottom left from “Auto” to “Fixed” to scale the size of the columns.
4. Move and edit multiple stories at once
Check the first box you want to select, hold “shift” then select the last checkbox.
This is super helpful when you need to move a handful of stories around or assign a label to multiple stories at once.
5. Override velocity
Similarly, when I need to move a group of stories up or down in the backlog it makes it a lot easier if I can see everything in an expanded view.
I manually override the velocity to 40+, so I can see all of the stories in a list view without the date markers.
Overriding the velocity will not impact the project’s velocity for anyone else but you. As soon as you refresh the page, the velocity returns to what it was previously.
6. Link stories
Open up a story and click the link next to the ID. This grabs the URL for the specific story “https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/92474616.”
When you paste it into another story’s description or comment, the ID becomes a clickable link.
7. Clone stories
This will duplicate the story title and description, but unfortunately not the attachments or comments associated with the original story.
8. Pivotal Slacker
This is only available to people using Slack as their team communication tool. If your team isn’t using Slack yet… you are really missing out.
In the Slack channel you are using for your team’s project select “add a service integration.” Find Pivotal Tracker on the Slack integration list and enable it. Then follow the steps to configure your Pivotal Tracker project with Slack.
I recommend only posting the delivered, accepted, and rejected events to reduce the Pivotal Tracker noise you might receive in your chatrooms.
Whether you are new to Pivotal Tracker or a Tracker veteran, I hope you learned something new about this tool and it does in fact change your life. I’m also very interested in hearing about your favorite tools and features for managing agile projects, be sure to share your thoughts and feedback in the comments section.
