It's not that designers and developers don't or can't get along. What the team at Redline realized is that they speak a different language. So to facilitate the communication between these two life forms they created this tool It's simple to set up, simple to use and simple to incorpo...
I recently wanted to make it easier for contributors to ActiveHash to test their changes against multiple versions of Rails, with multiple versions of Ruby. My stories looked like this: As a contributor I want to be able to run `bundle install`, then quickly run the suite spec suite a...
Ultimately the goal is to go to a treadmill desk (for reasons outlined here ), but before sinking the money and effort into that endeavor, I'd been meaning to try out a standing desk. It was never really a priority and I was working at a client-site (which inhibited my ability to requ...
(Due credit to Trung Lê 's article on which all this is based) We recently moved our project's CI from a TeamCity server onto Travis CI's new private CI-as-a-service program. We compared several other hosted CI services and found Travis to be the easiest to use, and with the help of T...
Two weeks ago, JRuby 1.7.0 was officially released. Here are a few reasons why you might want to upgrade: Bug fixes JRuby 1.7.0 fixes many compatibility issues with ruby 1.9. Also, JRuby 1.6.8 is no longer being maintained so fixes from 1.7.0 are not getting backported. Support for in...
An easel. A marker. Sometimes the most effective and immediate way to capture thoughts and collaborate is also the most tactile, visual, and simple. But easels and markers have their limitations: information is difficult to digitally preserve, and they don’t scale to large teams. In 2...
I've been working with my client, Unpakt , for a while now. One of their core values is making people's lives easier. They're specifically focused on making it easy for people moving to a new home or office to find a mover, compare prices and book their move online. As a development t...
I'm really excited about a collection of new techniques I've been experimenting with over the past few weeks. They're an evolution of the in-browser design approaches I've been using for the past few years, and taken together they help my team build better designs with less waste in a...
In order to improve the build time of a recent project, we took steps to identify and split out our build based on an emergent testing strategy. I will try to outline that strategy based on things we tried and thoughts we had. In an attempt not to descend into a discussion over tools ...
If you've ever used a UITextField in an iPhone project (or, I suppose, an NSTextField in a Cocoa project) you know that you pass it a delegate object in order to respond to events. Handling the "Return" key press from the on-screen keyboard may look something like this (probably imple...
is a fabulous new tool for Product Managers to manage and filter product development ideas. Now that they’ve integrated Tracker (We’re flattered to be their first third party integration), it’s borderline alchemical, transmuting raw ideas into stories is simple and seamless. What Wazo...
Writing Well-Formed User Stories I've worked closely with the Product team on about a dozen projects in the past few years, and rigorous story-writing is one of the most common areas for low-cost, high-gain improvement. I encourage every team to adopt (or at least consider) these tech...
If you have done any development for iOS in the past few years you have at least some familiarity with ARC . The overall response to ARC since Apple released it with iOS 5 has been little short of orgasmic. You can’t swing a dead internet cat without hitting a blog post from someone e...
As if you haven't found enough excuses to buy a new iPhone 5, here's another: Pivotal Tracker for iOS version 1.5.2 was released today and includes support for the iPhone 5! With the extra screen space, you're able to see an extra story and a half per tab without scrolling: This relea...
Often when working on ruby projects that use Bundler , I see Gemfiles that look like this: gem 'rails', '3.0.15' gem 'rest-client', '1.3.0' gem 'subexec', '0.0.4' gem 'uuidtools', '2.1.1' The string on the right hand side of each gem specification is a fixed version specification. If ...
I've been trying to learn RubyMotion recently, using Ruby to develop iOS appeals to me. I have no prior Objective-C or Cocoa API knowledge besides the basic HelloWorld. I've been using this tutorial and have learned more about Cocoa API faster using Ruby than with Objective-C. There i...
Upgraded to git 1.6.3 yet? You should, and Jason Rudolph says why (and if you're on a Mac, Rob Sanheim says how .) Sadly, after you do upgrade, when you start doing "git push", your console will start to be littered with the following oddly patronizing message: warning: You did not sp...
Today we released the latest Pivotal Tracker iOS app to the App Store. This is a major release that includes support for creating attachments, dynamic iteration calculation, and significant performance enhancements. We have also dropped support for iOS 4.x, which less than half of one...
Airbrake is a great tool for identifying errors generated by other apps all in one place. I guess if you're the offending app you might call it a rat, snitch, stool pigeon or fink - but to the rest of us it's the canary in the coal mine that can save your butt. As of today you can vie...
When you're running East and the project goes West, it's time to reorganize the backlog. This can be painful but Tracker comes to the rescue with multiple story selection and cloning panels. Here's a little cheat sheet! Dan Podsedly covered this in a blog post last year, here's an exc...
If you notice that your classes have more than one responsibility, you can easily split them up into multiple, more cohesive classes using Ruby's DelegateClass. Let's say that you have a Person class, and that people in your system can sell things and/or publish articles. You can't us...
About a year and a half ago, I made two posts on the "Best Remote Pairing Settings". The world has moved on, and so has the state of the art in remote pairing. I work remote 75% of the time, so this is an important topic for me. The setup we have now is working pretty good, so I wante...
In Tracker support, I take delight in answering support requests we get from people on teams who are thinking through the way they make software and how Tracker fits into that process. Recently, a customer asked us if Tracker can support their team’s switch from a more Scrum-focused p...
I recently started building a Rails 3 app that will function as an internal REST service. I wanted it to be as lightweight and fast as possible, both to test and to run. Here are a few ways I configured the app to be a bit faster: Defined a limited route set Removed ActiveResource Rem...
Last week, we made a slight tweak to how velocity is calculated in Pivotal Tracker , to handle team strength overrides in a simpler, more explainable way. As a result, if your project has an adjusted team strength in a recent iteration, you may be seeing a slightly different velocity....
Today's screencast is about understanding workflow in Tracker, with a twist of organization. The Current panel shows you all of the stories your team is working on this week or "iteration", including those that are in progress, as well as stories that Tracker thinks you're going to ge...
Chrome slow after click on body While investigating memory leaks in a single page JS app, we found that rendering times increased by ~2 seconds after clicking on the body of the document. It only happens in Chrome, Webkit and Firefox don't have the problem. We don't seem to have any c...
Are you really using the default ctrl-b? I have mapped caps-lock to ctrl, and ctrl-a as the tmux prefix, as I'm sure many others have. It makes it very easy to type tmux commands, because you can just use a single gesture; hit caps-lock and 'a' at the same time with the appropriate fi...
by James Brown on New in Pivotal Tracker: Full Page Stories! by Juri on New in Pivotal Tracker: Full Page Stories! by cheapgifts12, on Pivotal Tracker has a new home within EMC by cheapgifts12, on Pivotal Tracker maintenance this Saturday, Mar. 31 at 9am PDT by Brian T. Nakamoto on Ne...
When it comes to app match ups no-one does it cleaner than Zapier . The way I see it, they're the bread that surrounds a PB&J sandwich. Sure the good stuff is in the middle, but you wouldn't be able to enjoy it without getting your fingers dirty if it weren't for the bread. As Zapier ...
