Pivotal Tracker — quick Templates for your Bugs and Features

2 min readDec 15, 2020

This past summer I began using Pivotal Tracker at work.

I found out quickly just how easy it was to use their template building tools to speed up and standardize story writing for the rest of the team.

If you already use Pivotal Tracker, great! Just sign in and follow the steps!

If you do not already have an account, you will need to create one and create a project in order to begin!

Here are a few easy steps followed by a couple of easy to re-use template suggestions for your Bug and Feature stories.

Creating the Template:

In the top navigation bar, click on ‘More’. If you do not see ‘More’, click on the icon that looks like two arrows pointing downwards, which should then show you the ‘More’ button
Once there, navigate to ‘Manage Templates’ from the sidebar
Here you can ‘Add Template’, give your template a name, add your template in the ‘Description’ box and click ‘Save Template’
Now, jump into your project and click on ‘Add Story’
Select which type of story you want to create (i.e. ‘Feature’, ‘Bug’, ‘Chore’)
Click on the ‘Description’ text field and at the bottom of that box you will see an icon that looks like lines of a paragraph with a plus sign in it. When you click on it, it will populate a drop down menu of sorts where you will find the template you created and when you click it, your template appears in the ‘Description’ box
When adding the text for this template, remember that it uses Markdown. If you need a refresher, you can look up how to use Markdown syntax

Example Templates

Feel free to re-use these and alter as needed

Bug Template:

Feature Template:

Description
— As a User I would like to
Background
— Previously, the User could/could not
Notes/Insights
— A good place to start
— If you need additional help, Jane is a great person to reach out to for a pair as she worked on the previous story associated with this