

Generating realistic-looking stories in Pivotal Tracker  - joncooper
http://blog.carbonfive.com/2011/11/16/generating-realistic-looking-stories-in-pivotal-tracker/
A Ruby script to fill a Pivotal Tracker project with some reasonable looking stories.<p>This is useful for:<p>- Experimenting with workflows on a tracker other than your production one
- Teaching clients how to use tracker without exposing another clients' stories
- Learning to use Justin Smestad's pivotal-tracker gem<p>Cheers,
Jon
======
nupark2
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one that can't _stand_ Pivotal Tracker and
agile project management "stories".

Pivotal Tracker de-emphasizes the things I think are _most_ important:

* A clear, long-form description of the problem or requirements

* A long-form description of the likely solution or potential issues around the idea.

* A simple one-at-a-time view of a _specific_ issue. If I'm working on a specific feature or bug, I don't want to see every other feature or bug sitting around.

Pivotal Tracker seems to push these things to the edges, and instead focus
your attentoin on extremely small/quick/poorly-considered "story" entries, in
a huge list of entries.

In contrast, I'm a huge fan of JIRA and Apple's (internal) Radar. Do I just
not understand something critical about the agile project management approach?

~~~
mwynholds
There's a pretty long answer to that question. User stories are a critical
piece of XP (eXtreme Programming), and Tracker is a project management tool
targeted directly at XP teams.

But you have to buy in to XP in order to see the value of User Stores or
Tracker.

~~~
nupark2
Fair enough. Reading this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story>

I'm trying to get my head around "buying into XP". At what point do you
describe the thing that you're about to build?

I don't believe huge requirements gathering phases, requirement documents, or
any heavy weight processes are required. However, I don't know how an engineer
can write code without at least being able to fully understand the problem,
and then in english, explain the problem and propose a solution.

Often, I find just writing out the bug (and describing how I'm going to solve
it) is enough to clarify in my own mind the correct solution. I could do that
in my own head, but putting it on "paper" forces me to not skip any steps, and
more importantly, provides a paper trail for future developers (or myself) in
trying to understand my choices.

~~~
apolzon
The piece thats missing for me with tracker is the conversation. As atomical
points out, there are times where you want the story to have some vaguer
requirements to allow it to breathe and evolve on its own. During times like
these, it grows through the conversation and chair-spin between developers,
product owners, etc.

On tracker, the comments system is abysmal, so you either end up with a long
unreadable conversation (god forbid there be more than 2 people discussing
something at once -- thats a nightmare) that noone wants to read, and thus the
curated requirements for the story are missing and would take 30-45 minutes to
find. OR the comments system is abandoned, and you lose the ability to "track"
this part of the process. Epic lose.

Can't wait to see jcooper's work-of-art chrome extension. ;)

~~~
zalambar
I see Tracker as a prioritization tool first and a way to capture stories
second. It is highly opinionated about and focused on prioritization but
leaves the details of story writing and the conversations apolzon is looking
for up to you.

I like this balance and aim for brief story titles with descriptions which
include the "As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>" style
requirements, implementation concerns, and other acceptance criteria. I could
certainly see a place for a more opinionated story writing tool though.
Especially for team who struggle to produce actionable stories.

I also see a Tracker story as a placeholder for a conversation which needs to
happen. Not as a good tool for mediating that conversation in the story
comments and attachments.

