I recently added a couple of new tools to my project workflow, Hoptoad and Pivotal Tracker.

Hoptoad is a Rails plugin that acts a replacement for the exception_notifier from the wonderfully talented Thoughbot team (of Paperclip and Shoulda fame). Hoptoad is a hosted solution that keeps track of duplicate bugs, frequency, and resolution. This is a huge improvement over the current exception_notifier process which simply fires off an e-mail (or a few hundred while out of town one weekend). Instead, Hoptoad will differentiate new exceptions from reoccurring exceptions and allow you to track everything in a much more manageable way.

After attending a talk by Chuck Phillips on agile planning and estimation, I started looking for a more agile project management tool. I ended up going with Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal Tracker is a story-based project planning tool that gives teams a fluid platform for agile development. One of the coolest things about Pivotal Tracker is that it is velocity based meaning each story is assigned a point rating and then progress is estimate by historical velocity.

Have you recently added a new service or process to your workflow? Let me know in a comment.