Comment by hyggetrold

No, Pivotal Tracker did not invent this paradigm. For background, I started working around 2005.

Before tools like Tracker or JIRA, people who were doing agile development did everything with physical index cards. There was a lot of controversy even about digitizing those workflows back in the day - "we lose human connection and conversation by putting it in the machine!" Nobody has those conversations anymore as far as I'm aware.

Like others have mentioned on this thread, the true innovation of Tracker was to have a single view where stories are ordered vertically in a single column and grouped by status. This really changes the conversation around what is top priority. Everything can be urgent and have a high level of priority, but if you put something at the top, something else must shift down in compensation. No more doing that thing where there are five number one priorities at the same time.

The Agile view in Jira actually owes some inspiration to Tracker, if you can believe it. I know because I was there. I was a client on a Pivotal Labs project way back in the day, back when Tracker was still not publicly available, but only available to clients of Pivotal Labs. Our PM loved Tracker and wanted to use it but knew we could not get approval for it back home, all other teams were on JIRA. So our PM found a JIRA plugin called Greenhopper, tracked down the developer, and fed this person feedback to try and turn Greenhopper into the most Tracker-like thing possible. Greenhopper eventually got absorbed into Atlassian and turned into what is today known as Jira Agile.

Tracker felt like such an amazing breath of fresh air and forward looking technology at the time when it came out. Tracker used Ruby on Rails and did sexy AJAX stuff on the frontend (big wow factor back then, this was the age of IE6).

I loved Tracker for many years. I could sing its praises all day long. That said, the people who worked on the product had some philosophical things that got in the way of the product evolving. Reasonably, they did not want to turn into a huge enterprise tracking tool. Problem was, there were never any more features built into Tracker that really gave a good view for people who were higher level than the daily boots on the ground folks. So no good visualizations or features for projects where multiple teams must execute in tandem, and there are complex interdependencies between the teams. So while Tracker was awesome for the folks on the dev team, it wasn't very helpful for people in middle or upper management who needed birds-eye visibility easily and at a glance.

So although I am sad to see this announcement in a way I'm quite hopeful. There are so many people who love this tool and will miss it, now there's no excuse for them not to go build something better!