Pivotal Reporting

This is a simple ruby script I use to produce a weekly report on what us developers have been up to.

Installation

gem install pivotal_reporting

Usage

pivotal_report -t <pivotal token> -p <project id>

Where <pivotal token> is your pivotal API token available at the end of your profile page, and <project id> is the id of your project (I just look at the URL when I'm examining the project, like in https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/**12345**, 12345 is the project id.)

Output

You'll get four sections: Discussion Items, Story Bullets, PPU Table, and In Progress. The first two are specific to my team's process (we pre- and post- estimate stories to improve our estimation process and create a feedback loop for production tokens). The PPU Table and In Progress sections are probably generically useful.

The PPU Table

PPU is Points Per User. Here's an example table:

            | Elvis | Frank | Ron | Bob | Bill | Reggie |  Total || Feature | Bug | Chore |
client      |     0 |     5 |   9 |   0 |    8 |      3 |     25 ||      22 |   0 |     3 |
fires       |     0 |     1 |   1 |   0 |    0 |      0 |      2 ||       0 |   1 |     1 |
operations  |    10 |     1 |   0 |   5 |    0 |      1 |     17 ||      12 |   2 |     3 |
ops:intake  |     2 |     0 |   0 |   0 |    0 |      0 |      2 ||       2 |   0 |     0 |
performance |     0 |     0 |   0 |   0 |    1 |      0 |      1 ||       1 |   0 |     0 |
servers     |     0 |     0 |   0 |   2 |    0 |      0 |      2 ||       0 |   0 |     2 |
sourcing    |     0 |     0 |   0 |   1 |    0 |      0 |      1 ||       0 |   0 |     1 |
------------+-------+-------+-----+-----+------+--------+--------++---------+-----+-------+
Total       |    12 |     7 |  10 |   8 |    9 |      4 |     50 ||      37 |   3 |    10 |

This table is about the stories in the most recently completed iteration. The first Y axis is the unique labels in the iteration, the X axis is first the developers who contributed and then a breakdown of story type. The numbers in the body of the table are the points allocated to that combination of label and either developer or story type. There are of course a pair of totals columns.

This table is useful in our process of both planning for development capacity and monitoring usage. I take this report and add a column for planned points by label and over/under by label. We then use this analysis to discuss the tech department's future planning and modify our plans and expectations.

In Progress

This is just a sum of the points allocated to stories that are currently started, delivered, or unaccepted. I use this to show the current state of projects in progress during my iteration planning meeting.