Greg's dashboard

Greg reported a problem in Pivotal Labs on April 24, 2009 16:26:

The latest Tracker release seems to have downcased all labels.

We had labels in our project in a variety of case (such as "Search" or "BLOCKED!"), and with the latest Tracker release, all of these labels have been converted by Tracker to lower case (e.g., "search" and "blocked!"). This seems to me to be a bug with the latest release -- it seems reasonable to me that one should be permitted to have both upper and lower case in a label (and Tracker supported this up until a day or two ago).

Greg replied on March 30, 2009 20:54 to the problem "is pivotal tracker down right now? I can't connect to the website." in Pivotal Labs:

So EngineYard was down for over four hours; this is certainly going to make us re-think (or at least revisit) our decision to switch over to EngineYard in the near future . . .

Greg replied on March 30, 2009 17:33 to the problem "is pivotal tracker down right now? I can't connect to the website." in Pivotal Labs:

Tracker is inaccessible here in San Francisco as well . . . as Wes pointed out, is it an EngineYard problem? GitHub (which is also hosted at EngineYard) is also inaccessible.

Greg replied on March 26, 2009 17:23 to the idea "Campfire-like Chat in a Project Tab" in Pivotal Labs:

It's a great idea; usually all project members have Tracker open on their desktops, and quite frequently you can see remote project members modify a story -- you can watch as they drag around a story, add comments, etc., and you want to holler out to their "ghost" as you watch it perform actions, yet they can't hear you -- it can be quite frustrating! It only seems logical that there would be a persistent chatroom for all project members so that you could maintain an ongoing dialogue, so then you could actually talk to this remote project member, and not just watch them perform actions. It would also be helpful as part of this to be able to post common documents, and perhaps even have a wiki of sorts for project info -- currently we have to use GitHub's wiki for project documents, Campfire for project chat, and Tracker for project story tracking -- Tracker should be the one stop for all information related to a project.

Greg started following the idea "Campfire-like Chat in a Project Tab" in Pivotal Labs.

Greg asked a question in Pivotal Labs on March 19, 2009 02:17:

Chatroom capability for project members who are online

I'd like to be able to chat online with other project members who are also viewing the project. Frequently, all project members have Tracker open all day long (and some are remote); we can watch remote project members edit stories, and it's like we want to yell out to them as we're watching them make edits and move stories around in Tracker, but it's like watching a ghost that you can't actually talk to that's actively editing the project. Since all project members have Tracker open and are using it to collaborate, it makes sense that there should be a way in Tracker to have a running conversation with all project members (and perhaps one on one, too, although the group chat feature would be more immediately valuable).

Greg replied on February 22, 2009 01:31 to the question "How do you add labels via the API?" in Pivotal Labs:

More info about the bug: I figured out via extensive trial and error that if Tracker & the icebox are open in a browser while the story is being created via the API (assuming the new story is going into the icebox), then the labels are not associated with the newly created story; if the project is not open in Tracker (you can even be on the dashboard -- the key is that the project itself not be open in a browser tab), then the labels are in fact associated with the story. This is 100% reproducible (give it a try yourself!), and appears to be a subtle bug with the API. At least I have a work around now -- just make sure Tracker isn't open while I'm doing API operations, but it seems like something you guys should eventually fix.

Greg replied on February 21, 2009 18:55 to the question "How do you add labels via the API?" in Pivotal Labs:

ok, more info: I now see that the API supposedly supports 'labels' (I should have read the API documentation page more closely), but now I think that there's a bug in the API - labels are not actually created when a story is created. I've tried a number of approaches -- I've created the story via curl, updated a story via curl, created a story via ActiveResource, and updated a story via ActiveResource. All of the attributes of a story can be successfully created and updated via either ActiveResource or curl (story name, description, estimate, etc.) with the sole exception of labels (so I'm pretty sure my ActiveResource & curl calls are correct). If I add <labels>Foo</labels> to the XML for a story for curl (or :labels => 'Foo' to the ActiveResource call), the story is successfully created, but the label 'Foo' is not attached to the story. Seems like an API bug to me . . .

Greg asked a question in Pivotal Labs on February 21, 2009 05:12:

How do you add labels via the API?

When creating a story via the API, I'd like to add labels to the story. I would expect for something like the following to work (in Ruby), but it doesn't:

Story.create(:name => 'Story Name', :labels => 'label1, label2', :project_id => PROJECT_ID)

which would add 'label1' and 'label2' to the story. Is there a way to add labels to the story via the API?

Greg started following the question "it would be nice if we could put in due dates and track by date" in Pivotal Labs.

Greg asked a question in Pivotal Labs on February 14, 2009 23:54:

I would like to assign target dates/deadlines to feature stories, not just release markers

It would be great if you could assign a target date or deadline to a feature story, not just to a release marker. We have stories which have drop-dead due dates - they must be completed by a certain time. Ideally, if a story with a deadline is too far down in the backlog, it should turn red, which means you need to move it up in the backlog so that it gets done in time. It's not sufficient to just move this story above a release marker (which has an associated date), as we have a lot of stories each with different due dates - it seems silly to add in a bunch of release markers just to associate a different due dates with particular stories. Can this be done? It seems like it would be easy to do, as you guys already have due dates for release markers.

Greg asked a question in Pivotal Labs on January 25, 2009 18:27:

Can I search by story deadline date?

I'd like to search by story deadline; something like:

deadline: 2009-01-21

or a range:
deadline: "> 2009-01-21 && < 2009-12-31"

Is that possible? Or can it be easily added to the possible search options?

Greg asked a question in Pivotal Labs on November 02, 2008 16:35:

Is there a demo project in Tracker for use in demoing Tracker's features to a new user and/or for training purposes? (there was in fact such a project in Tracker in the past)

Is there still a demo project in Tracker that people can use to play around with stories? Such a project was invaluable in demos and training sessions. It served as a "sandbox" where people could play around with fake stories without messing up their real project.