Pivotal Tracker & drop.io chat, together as one.

My Tracker has chat built in, and so can yours.

At drop.io, we’re in the process of moving from Lighthouse to Pivotal Tracker. Lighthouse is great for storing bugs, for searching them, and for maintaing a threaded conversation on each one. It works well for the open source development model. That’s basically what we used to do.

Now we’re moving to an Agile model. We create and deliver many small amounts of customer value, we work in an iteration-based rhythm, and we work together as a team, or at least we’re aware of what everyone else is working on. Tracker is perfect for that workflow. But this isn’t a post about how awesome Tracker is. This is a post about how I made it a little more awesome.

We all sit in chat all day, and naturally we use drop.io as our chat service. It works really well, because when it doesn’t, we fix it. I usually keep it up on my laptop screen while I work on my external monitor.

But Tracker updates itself in real time, so it’s nice to keep it up all the time too. So now I want to have it on my laptop screen.

Now I have both.

Requirements

• Firefox
• Greasemonkey

To Install

1. Navigate to the script.
2. If you haven’t created a drop to chat in, create one at drop.io. (One click, no signup.)
3. Go to your Tracker project.
4. From the Views menu, choose “Chat…”.
5. Give it the name of your drop.
6. Enjoy!

GreaseKit

Unfortunately, tracker_chat doesn’t work perfectly in GreaseKit. The chat will appear in Tracker, but with the full chrome you’d see if you viewed the chat normally. In Firefox/Greasemonkey, extraneous chrome is hidden to save as much real estate as possible.

More Info

Check it out on GitHub at http://github.com/Peeja/tracker_hacks.

Update on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 2:26PM by Peter

I’ve added some new features to tracker_chat. The installation instructions above have been updated to point to the new version.