Progress Update 2/26/2025

We’re continuing to make great progress. The past few weeks we’ve been focused on getting some basics in place to allow for initial alpha use. This has gone well and we’re probably two weeks away from inviting some of you who are following this process in to begin using and helping guide our development.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

1. New user signup and authentication. Right now we’re doing basic email/pw and have a little bit of work to do for verification, but the core models and workflows are in place.

2. Account and project management. All projects exist inside an account and each account has an owner. All projects have owners as well. For now, we create a new account for all new users when they join and there’s a basic account and project list.

3. Project switching. With the introduction of multiple projects, we now allow switching between them just like Pivotal does.

4. Basic invite process to add users to projects. Still significant work to do for account management and different roles, but the foundation is in place.

What’s next:

1. A bit more account and project management basics

2. Some domain and hosting improvements

3. Alpha invites for users!

Expect an update within a few weeks inviting you to check out our progress. Keep in mind this is a very early version and we’ll use feedback to drive the plan.

Progress Update 1/25/2025

We’ve made significant progress on the core story management experience since the last update. We want to really nail this experience and get it right because much of the beauty of Pivotal is in how the current and backlog column interacts with story states and workflow progression through those states.

Here are the things we completed:

1. Backlog sorting logic (to handle automatically moving in-progress stories up to the top while allowing manual sort within them and pinning completed stories to the top of the backlog)

2. Ability to progress story through the start, finish, deliver, accept/reject workflow from the collapsed card itself.

3. Added icebox and done columns with auto 7 day old move to done (for now until velocity based iteration planning is done)

4. Drag and drop between columns

5. Estimate field

6. Some UI tweaks for column sizing and scrolling

7. Story IDs and copy paste to link to a distinct story and load the page directly to that story expanded (this is actually something different than Pivotal. We’ll see if it stays around or is just an initial approach we abandon)

What’s next?

The above gets basic story management into a pretty good place. We feel like we could use the tool as is for our workflows for now. So we’re going to prioritize user, account, auth, and project management next. Here’s a rough outline.

1. User sign-up, authentication, and creation

2. Project creation and management

3. User related fields on stories (requester and owner)

After those items are complete, we’re going to open things up for an alpha to very early adopters. The goal here is to get people who want to help us shape the product and prioritization decisions we’re making use the product and give feedback. My personal hope is that we get some people to commit to using for personal projects or side projects to help us really refine the story management and user experience. Our plan is still to replicate the core bits of Pivotal but as we go, we’re finding little tweaks here and there to improve on some things that were pretty stale in Pivotal and may deviate from simply copying it sooner than later.

Let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback on the above and don’t forget to sign up below so you can stay up to date when we send initial invites.

Progress Update 1/11/2025

We’re making steady progress on our little Pivotal Tracker replacement. In the last week we’ve added the following functionality.

1. Story deletion

2. Reordering within the backlog

3. Default state to “unstarted” (when adding to the backlog which is the only column we have right now)

4. Removed state selection when creating a story (was stubbed in just to validate that we were setting state properly)

5. Added some coloration to reflect accepted, in-progress, and unstarted

What we’re working on now

1. Backlog sort logic.

2. Allowing progression through state from a button directly on the collapsed story view

What’s next

1. Icebox and done columns

2. Auto move to done after 7 days (incremental step before estimation and velocity planning is built)

3. Small tweaks to story editing UI

4. Basic User management

5. Basic project and account management

Backlog beginning to take shape

Progress Update 1/3/2025

This is our first update. We’ve made some significant progress in starting, but don’t have a lot to show just yet. So far our focus has been on picking an initial tech stack, establishing a backlog with some initial goals, and then implementing the story database model and initial backlog UI. More details on each below:

Tech Stack

We chose to build using Go, Postgress, and React for now. We’ll likely refine the front end decision as we polish things, but for now, we’re just getting basic functionality in place.

Initial Backlog

We’re starting our initial backlog with a vertical slice through story creation and management. The end state here for our team is the ability to start using the product on our own to manage this project instead of using Pivotal Tracker. In the most simple form that means.

1. Story creation and editing with the following fields - Name, Description, State, Type.

2. State management to get the backlog sorting accurate to match Pivotal Tracker. There’s more nuance here than you might realize. Nothing complex to implement, but the details matter a lot so we’re ensuring that we get manual sorting right for anything that isn’t in progress (state = Started, Finished, Delivered, Rejected), then ensure that moving a story to one of the in progress states moves the story above all those not in progress but still allows manual sorting while in that state. And then finally ensuring done (accepted state) stories are sorted to the top by their acceptance date.

3. We’ll work on drag and drop here to ensure that is part of the initial foundation and working really well. There’s quite a bit of nuance here on the drag and drop functionality for Pivotal too. While Jira still struggles to consistently tag a story with the proper epic if dropped on that epic, Pivotal has done that well for over a decade while also allowing for complex movement within the various columns. We think this is an area we might actually expand functionality sooner than later once we’re past the core. You can stay updated on our full plan here. We think it was a missed opportunity for Pivotal to not have a Kanban board UI for state transitions.

Story Models

Not much to highlight here, but we can discuss some of the decisions we’re making early on. Feel free to comment if you have different thoughts. For now, we’re starting with a basic model that includes the project ID, type, name, description, state, and then dates for creation, deletion, updates, and acceptance. We’ve begun to design all of the other models that will be needed to support comments, and users, and labels, but haven’t implemented them yet. We’re only implementing what we need for each phase. While the goal is to build a replacement for Pivotal that is nearly a feature for feature match, we are only going to build what we believe is actually needed at any given point in time so that the project evolves efficiently and we leave the door open for improvements and optimizations on existing features.

Once we get this work done, we should be able to start using this on our own. We’ll have a single backlog column with basic story CRUD and enough state management and sorting for the things to not be chaotic.