Pivotal Tracker

Key Features and Benefits

• Improved visibility into the overall status of projects by using boards to visualize overall project status and WIP (work in process).
• Eliminates the need to manually update the virtual boards, or use brittle point to point integration techniques.
• Synchronizes artifacts across the lifecycle allowing free flow of information between Pivotal Tracker and other tools.
• Implement Lean software methods across your project or just within discipline or team.

Common Integration Patterns

• Sharing Stories and Defects between Dev and Test
• Providing Developers with Early Visibility into Requirements
• Aligning Testing Teams across Testing Tools
• Populating Requirements into PLM Tools
   

Minimal User Permissions & Hub User

We recommend that you create a new user within your external tool, to be used only for your Hub integration. This is the user information you will enter when setting up your repository connection within Planview Hub. By creating a new user, you will ensure that the correct permissions are granted, and allow for traceability of the modifications that are made by the synchronization. 

In general, your user account should have sufficient permissions to create, read, and update artifacts in your repository. However, depending on the use case, your user may need different permissions. For example, if you are only interested in flowing data out of your repository, your user may not need to have full CRUD access, as the 'create' and 'update' permissions may not be needed.

Your user should have a secure password or token. Please be aware that Hub will not allow you to save a repository connection utilizing a weak password/token, such as 'tasktop.'

Before creating a connection to the Pivotal Tracker repository, a user with the necessary permissions must be created if one does not exist already. 

See instructions: 

• For creating an account: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/articles/create_account/
• For adding a project member: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/articles/add_remove_project_members/

The Pivotal Tracker connector requires that the Hub user be a ‘member’ or ‘owner’ for the projects being synchronized, as well as an 'owner' or 'admin' of the instance.

Connecting to the Pivotal Tracker Repository

Standard Authentication

Required Fields:

• Location/Connection URL
  • Example Format: https://www.pivotaltracker.com
• Username 
• Password

Optional Fields:

• Throttling Settings: This field indicates the number of API calls that can be made per minute. See details here.
  • Note: This field should only be set under the guidance of customer care as the ideal value is highly dependent on each customer's unique environment. 
• Connection Security: If checked, insecure connections to this repository will be allowed. See details here.

Learn more about how to set up your repository in Planview Hub here. 

Story - Epic Relationship Integration

You can map Story to parent Epic relationship by using the "Epic" field on the Story.

A sample relationship field mapping would look like this:

Note: Epic link in Pivotal Tracker is a multi-value field, meaning you can have multiple Epics as parents of a single story. If you choose to sync this relationship type, you must be aware that the majority of other tools treat "parent" fields as a single value field. Therefore, if an end user adds a second link to the Parent Epic field in Pivotal Tracker, you may see an error since Hub cannot know which one of the Epic links to insert in the single value option. If you wish to revert the error, remove one of the parent Epic links. 

Attachments

The Pivotal Tracker connector supports two types of attachments: 

• File attachments: these will be supported and turned on as you enable attachment flow. 

• Google attachments (Read Only): these can be synchronized as a Web link fields one way out of Pivotal Tracker. You can choose to either map this field to a Web Link field or a String field in your target repository using the appropriate transformations. For example, you can use a transform to turn this Web link into a string and map it to a string or rich text field. 

  

Learn more about how to configure attachment flow in Planview Hub here.

Person Reconciliation

For person reconciliation, the following fields are available:

Learn more about how to configure person reconciliation in Planview Hub here.

Full Scan

Due to third party API limitations, updates to the following fields may not trigger change detection or cause a synchronization immediately. To ensure these updates synchronize, a high fidelity full scan must occur or another qualifying change must be made to the artifact:

• Fields on Releases: 
  • Points Total
  • Counts Accepted
  • Counts Total
  • Completed At
  • Owner ID
• 'Before' field
• 'After' field
• 'Closed' field
• Labels

Learn more about how to configure change detection and full scan intervals in Planview Hub here. 

Special Features Supported

Supported Work Items

Learn about the difference between containers and work items in Planview Hub here. 

Supported Containers

Learn more about containment in Planview Hub here.