At ZEFR we are using Pivotal Tracker to help us with our Agile workflow. Its a great tool, but we created a couple of command-line utilities that help us with our process. We have found these to be real time-savers and helped up tighten up our process.

We have collected these utils into a python package pivotal_tools. The 4 most useful utilities for us are:

• pivotal_tools scrum : helps facilitate and visualize our daily scrum meetings
• pivotal_tools planning: (aka pivotal_tools poker) : helps facilitate our weekly estimation sessions
• pivotal_tools changelog: generates a changelog for all of delivered stories
• pivotal_tools create (bug|feature|chore): creates an a story

To install:

1

pip install pivotal_tools

If you are a screencast person — have a watch (5min), alternatively there are screenshots and descriptions below the fold:

Sample Project

Lets say you have project like the following:

pivotal_tools show_stories

Lists the top 20 stories. Useful if you are looking for what story to pick up next

pivotal_tools poker

also can be run with pivotal_tools planning. Iterates over your unestimated features, giving you a minimalist view of the feature. Prompting the team for an estimate.

pivotal_tools scrum

We use this tool for our daily scrum. Simply shows what each member is working on.

pivotal_tools changelog

During the release process, we use this to generate a change log that keeps our business owners in the loop. We also use this during our scrum, to see what has been delivered in the current iteration.

Feedback

Hopefully this will be a useful utility for others. Feel free to fork and comment. The repo is on github (here)