It doesn't seem so. I tested all I could find, LiteTracker seems the best, but still extremely buggy even in the initial demo project changing task status fails. The rest appears either half-finished, untrustworthy or has a very sketchy interface. But would really like to be surprised.
I am very rarely willing to pay for software and this is one case I really want to, but cannot find anything.
This thing kinda feeds my pet theory that the art of making functional software has been lost by late 2010s. People say Linear is fast but it's nothing compared to how well Pivotal worked. Any half-skilled indie dev could have made a killing on making a good replacement, but no one has been able to?
My company switched off Pivotal Tracker because it would slow to a crawl and require several seconds (!!) to load the page, with individual actions causing a DOM cascade that frequently hung browsers. Maybe it worked at small scale but it definitely didn’t work at a large scale.
I hate to say it, but my immediate guess is that your company was using it in some fashion that it wasn't intended for. That was the real problem with the tool. Unless you actually worked at Pivotal, you never really got to learn how to use it the way they intended. The documentation was good, but nothing beats going to the source.
What is your best guess for why it got so slow?
Color me shocked
That said, pairing has its ups and downs. I think as other folks have said, you miss out on being able to go deep on problems that require ruminating. You also lack overarching reviews that help to keep architecture clean. The code might be clean, but the architecture might get really messy really fast.
Though for the times I paired, it does help for easy/medium problems, but for me it is absolutely a no-go for things you need to "sit and think about" (check docs, or keep more than two or three things in your head at the same time)
This gets combined with how they "fire" people there. If your pair isn't keeping up and contributing enough, then people stop wanting to pair with them and they get rotated out to another team or entirely. That effectively means that the person sitting next to you, can actually help you.
It does get really intense because if you're having a hard day or week say in your personal life, you still have to be on your game or you have to explain your situation as best as you can. But the thing is, everyone who walked into the door of Pivotal, knew the rules ahead of time. You were there, because you wanted to be there, not because it was just another job.
I liken it a lot to joining the military, which is what it felt like. A bit cultish too. All-in-all, I had a great experience there, learned a ton, and it changed my thinking forever.
We haven't been planning to release it commercially, but if you're interested in trying it out, please reach out via singlebrook.com/contact and I'd be happy to set up a test account for you. If you happen to really like it, we can probably figure out an arrangment for you to use it.
Are there particular attributes, behaviors, or properties you feel are important that you can't find elsewhere? I see you mentioned latency, for example — what else is key to you?
I think a lot of "Pivots" are still in bereavement over Pivotal and Pivotal Labs being gone.
I disagree with your 2010 theory, back then it would have been even less fruitful to make a viable alternative with the limited time and resources available. Especially as things like the UI state handling and some of the architecture was unheard of back then, years ahead of its time and even linear now does not fully match many aspects.
Similarly "Any half-skilled indie dev could have made a killing on making a good replacement" is just wrong, a) you need to be a really great developer to make something that even nearly matches PT, there is more than is obvious to someone not deeply familiar with the internals of the product and 15 year of refinements that went into it. A few of the cloning teams were some of these indie developers who thought it would be fun and easy which was obviously very naive.
b) "Make a killing" is equally misleading. I would be surprised if its possible at all to break even on something like a pure PT clone. There are maybe 200 original users who are super loud and "in love" but this can easily mislead to thinking there are millions of users that would be immediately jump on and start paying. It takes probably 2 orders of magnitude more addressable market to make the financials work just by providing a PT clone (Which is why lanes.pm is focusing on making what tracker would need to be today not just catching up on what it was.)
Just give it a bit more time, there are at least 2 teams including lanes working on this and we all decided not to launch something half baked and buggy that loses your data.
If your cycle ends with a bunch of work undone, it rolls into the next cycle. If that cycle already a full capacity of work planned, well, now your cycle is at 150% or whatever. Repeat. The solution, presumably, is to stop creating new cycles.
But what PT would do, and seamlessly at that, is rebalance the sprints. Your project manager wants to move a number of stories to the top of the backlog? Great, but now that item projected for three sprints out is now four sprints out. The velocity and the projections were extracted from reality, not mandated from on high.
I asked Linear if they could add this -- a cycle rebalance. I was told, no, this simply isn't something they want to do, but maybe I could do it with zapier. Trying to get them to understand why I wanted this was like trying to explain air to a fish. It simply did not compute.
I love that it is just GH issues under the covers though, that's smart.
(I jest, I jest.)
What is your use case? (how many users, for what type of project?). Asking because tracking building a CRUD app is different than building an OS, a movie, a video game, building, etc..
[1] https://app.velocitytracker.co/
2. Screenshots.
"10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement" -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378925
We are launching in 2 weeks.
I would love give a demo to anyone interested. Email is in profile.