Story Mapper is Release Planning for Pivotal Tracker

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Alon Salant

We’re proud to announce the release of Story Mapper, a project we have been working on at Carbon Five to support an Agile project planning technique called story mapping.

We use Pivotal Tracker to manage our feature backlog and the day-to-day activities of tracking a feature from estimation through delivery and acceptance. However, we find it easy to lose the big picture in the detail-oriented view Tracker provides.

Story Mapper uses your project data from Tracker to provide a higher level view geared toward release and milestone planning. This view is based on Jeff Patton’s story mapping techniques and provides the ability to see how the different components of your project will evolve across successive milestone.

Story Mapper Screenshot

All you need in order to use Story Mapper is a Tracker project with a backlog of stories and a subset of labels that represent user activities or components of your system. If you have a large project and have not been using labels in this way, you may have some work to do in Story Mapper before you have a story map that makes sense.

Try it out, let us know what you think, and tell us how to make it better. Comment here so others can see your thoughts or by contacting us directly.

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  • http://bitfission.com Will

    Are there any plans for just putting in the API key instead of my username and password?

  • alon

    Will, that’s a good idea as it will help with the general concern of “who are you guys and do I really want to give you my login info?” We went the username/password route for the sheer usability of it – “log in to Story Mapper just like you log in to Tracker.” Note that we do not store your login information and use it only to get an API token from Tracker that we then use for all subsequent API calls.

    We’ll add your idea to the list of items to consider for future enhancements.

  • Jon

    We’re using Story Mapper a bit, but we’re experiencing some frustrations that center around how Pivotal handles releases. Unfortunately, there’s no way in PT to tell it about branches or multiple teams, so we’re sort of faking it with labels. Unfortunately, there’s no way in Story Mapper to tell the tool to hide everything that doesn’t match a particular label (we use multiple labels that represent different domains), or to hide the activities that don’t fall into the labels that are being used to represent the various efforts in progress.

    Something else we’ve noticed is that a particular story will only show up under the first label assigned to it, with those labels being sorted alphabetically. We have a few cases where it’d be really valuable to represent a story under multiple labels (since it’s tagged with more than one label, and those labels really do apply).

    One last thought – it would be really nice if the tool remembered how you feel about bugs and chores…if you want/need to have them included in your view of the project, you need to check them every time you reload the page.

    Just some feedback on what would be useful to us and how we are currently using the tool. Overall, we like the tool and find it to be useful.

  • Andrew de Andrade

    I also second using the project ID and API Key as well.

    Two more stories:

    I, as a product manager, would like to be able to manage labels from within Storymapper, adding and removing labels (i.e. high level tasks).
    (short-term desire)

    I, as a product manager, would like StoryMapper to manage/create labels for me by allowing me to define Personas and the high-level tasks for the personas.

    For example, the Pivotal Tracker team may have high-level labels like:
    “Owner – Manage Users”
    “Owner – Administer Project Setting”
    “Owner, Member, Viewer – View Story Details”
    “Owner, Member – Change Story Priority”
    “Owner, Member – Comment on Stories”

    I would actually prefer to see you guys to integrate StoryMapper into Pivotal Tracker, because this would be phenomenally useful if it was seamlessly integrated.

  • Andrew de Andrade

    Also, I would like to be able to change the order of the columns or at least have them ordered alphabetically.

    Thx.

    Andrew

  • Alon

    Andrew, thanks for your comments. A couple responses:

    Re: logging in w/ API key
    We’ll switch to using OAuth when it is available for Tracker. I believe it is in their backlog.

    Re: labels/columns
    The ‘Settings’ link at the top of the story map provides a configuration screen to identify which labels are activities and drag-n-drop reorder the activities selected. Many people are not noticing this link so we’re thinking about how to surface label/activity config better.

    Re: personas
    We’ve heard a desire like this a couple times. We’ve also heard a related desire where people would like to group labels by other criteria – like, for the current release, only these 4 out of 8 activities are relevant so I don’t want to see the others on the story map. We’re considering how to support these desires. One is to expand the settings page to allow defining groups of activities which you can then use to view the story map.

  • http://twitter.com/noahthorp Noah Thorp

    It seems like login should be over https.

  • Anonymous

    Am I the only one who can’t access the service anymore? since a few days ago http://www.trackerstorymaps.com leads to a message “www.trackerstorymaps.com will be ready soon” … ??

    • http://twitter.com/mwynholds Michael Wynholds

      Sorry, there was a f***up by our DNS provider while everyone was nursing their NYE hangovers… We’re back up now. You may need to shift-reload to flush your browser cache.

      • Anonymous

        thanks, michael, works fine now!