Generating realistic-looking stories in Pivotal Tracker

We are heavy users of Pivotal Tracker here at Carbon Five, and each project evolves workflows around its use. I recently spent some time writing a Chrome extension to help support some of the common interaction patterns that come up in our workflows.

This blog post is not about that.

I started to write up a post about the Chrome extension and how I developed it (forthcoming), but realized that I needed to show screenshots. Unfortunately, I can’t use images of a client’s production tracker. Hmm.

I quickly whacked together a Ruby script to generate realistic-looking stories in a tracker project. Here it is!

github: Lorem Tracker

A populated tracker looks like this:

This might be a useful starting point if you need to

• Teach a friend, client or coworkers how to use tracker without touching production data
• Import a bunch of stories that you wrote in a text file
• Dump a bunch of stories for analysis in Excel

I use Justin Smestad‘s lovely gem, pivotal-tracker. This gem provides an ActiveRecord-ish wrapper around the Pivotal Tracker API.

Adding a story using his gem is as easy as:

Also check out the pivotal-tracker gem’s API docs for more details on how to use it. Anyway, here’s the source, if you’re interested:

Cheers,
Jon