Sean's dashboard

On the project settings page, under the General section, the current account for the project is listed. Account Owners and people who are authorized to create projects can migrate projects between accounts they control.

In your specific case, identify a user account that is one of your account owners. You can see the list of account owners by clicking the Manage link on the My Accounts page. Once you have identified an account owner on your account, you need to get the consultants to temporarily grant that user project creation rights in their account. They can do so on the Manage Account screen for their account.

Once you have an owner on your account empowered to create projects in the consulting firm's account, that user should see the account name on the project settings page not as plain text but as a link. Click (Change) next to the link and change the account from the consulting firm's account to your account, and then click Save.

I know it's a bit convoluted with the permissions and whatnot, and as soon as you've migrated the project the consulting firm can remove project creation privileges from your account owner. Let us know if you have any problems.

Roger, there is only one velocity and one backlog per project, so if you want to have distinct velocities or backlogs for your two concurrent sprints, it would be most consistent with the tool to split those into two projects. Alternately, you could use labels to track each sprint independently but share a backlog and a velocity, whichever works better for your workflow.

All Started stories always stay in current, since by definition if you've started a story you are currently working on it. If you want to put a story aside, you need to Unstart the story. Open the full story details, click the story state pulldown, and change the story state to Unstarted. The story will no longer automatically stay in the Current iteration, and you may reprioritize it or move it back to the Icebox.

Stephen, there is no tracking of individual velocity, only per-project velocity. Can you provide the project ID where you are seeing the issue? – Sean, on October 19, 2009 20:54

Charles, Tracker has three different point scales. The default is Linear (0,1,2,3), but Tracker also has Powers of Two (0,2,4,8) and Fibonacci (0,1,2,3,5,8) point scales.

You can change the point scale on the Project Settings page. If you have already estimated stories it's non-trivial to change the point scale. There is more than one valid mapping between the various scales, so you'd need to email tracker@pivotallabs.com with the explicit mapping you want and then we will update the project for you.

It is indeed playa in my hair. Better than any gel! – Sean, on October 06, 2009 20:14

Jen,

Right now Tracker does not support more than one owner for stories, so the notification emails are sent to only one address. A possible workaround would be to create an email list that goes to those two owners. You can then create a Tracker user with that email list as the user's email and make that user the owner of the stories. When the stories are delivered, the email notification will go the list and both actual owners will get notified.

When in the project story view, go to the View menu and select Settings. That will take you to the Project Settings page, where you can edit the initial values.

Tiago,

There is an option to include the Current iteration at the top of the Backlog pane. If you go to the View menu and deselect "Include Current in Backlog" you will no longer see the current iteration at the top of the backlog panel.

Currently there are only three levels of authorization: viewer, member, and owner. None of them restrict priority ordering while still allowing work on stories.

Viewers can only see the project, they can't change priorities, make comments, or work on stories. Members and Owners can freely edit everything about a story, including the priority ordering. In addition, Owners can alter the project-wide settings (iteration length, name, etc.)

We find that an active and engaged product/project manager mitigates most of the risk of engineers re-ordering stories. Iteration planning meetings also help. If everyone knows why a story was prioritized or de-prioritized, they are less likely to make changes on their own initiative that are in conflict with the group's goals.

Justin, each story has a checkbox just to the right of the Start button. Check that box for each of the stories you would like to delete. You can then choose "Delete Selected" from the Actions pull-down and it will delete all the selected stories.

There is no trivial way to check the box for all the stories in the Icebox. You will still have to manually check the box for each, but you can then delete them all in one action.

I hope that helps!

Loren, we find that labels, while not ideal, are flexible enough to support just about any workflow. Custom workflows are on the long-term roadmap, but I don't know specifics on when that feature might be delivered.

Benjamin, surround your search with double-quotes and it should work just fine.

Please send your account information to tracker@pivotallabs.com and we will delete the account for you.

Matt, your analysis is right on the money regarding the 8 point story and the 7 point velocity iteration.

Matt, I'm not sure what's going on with the zero point iteration. Team Strength behaves as expected for me. Once the developers finish putting out the fires from the outage I hope they can respond. Meanwhile can you try setting the Team Strength back to 100% and then restoring it to 50% (when all else fails, reboot!)

To your second question, Tracker arranges stories so that the total points in N iterations -- P(N) -- is equal to or less than N times the current velocity -- V -- while being as close as possible to N times the velocity. (Tracker would be awesome at blackjack ;) The average of your backlog iterations will be your velocity, but any given iteration can have a point total above or below the velocity. Let me give an example:

Say you have a velocity of 10 and every story is 3 points. Iteration 1 (N=1) would have three stories for 9 total points. Using the equation P(N) <= N x V gives P(1) <= 10. The fourth story doesn't fit, as it would mean P(1) = 12. However, Tracker implicitly carries over the remainder. For iteration 2 we get P(2) <= 20. P(2) - the 9 points already spent in Iteration 1 gives 11 points to spend. Iteration 2 will still have only three stories for a total of 9 points, since the fourth story means 12 points in the iteration.

Now we get to Iteration 3. P(3) <= 30, therefore P(3) - 9 - 9 <= 12. Aha! Now we can fit four three point stories into the iteration, and so Iteration 3 will have four stories for 12 total points. Here the cycle would repeat.

As you may have deduced, it's possible for any given iteration in the backlog to contain points in the range V +/- (A - 1), where A is the highest point value story in your project (3 for linear, 8 for powers-of-two and fibonacci). The proof is left as an exercise to the reader.