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:
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)
Ability to progress story through the start, finish, deliver, accept/reject workflow from the collapsed card itself.
Added icebox and done columns with auto 7 day old move to done (for now until velocity based iteration planning is done)
Drag and drop between columns
Estimate field
Some UI tweaks for column sizing and scrolling
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.
User sign-up, authentication, and creation
Project creation and management
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.
