Product Blog

Rally App Catalog

If you attended Agile2010, you probably heard some buzz about the Rally App Catalog. Since then, many of you have asked, “What is this App Catalog and how can I access it?” The Rally App Catalog is simply a new and improved version of our former Mashup Catalog. This catalog contains dozens of applications that extend Rally’s functionality by providing custom features, displays and reports created by both Rally and its customers.

It turns out that many of our users were unaware that these powerful extensions to Rally are available at no charge to all Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers. All of these Apps are fully tested and supported by Rally and can be installed with just a couple of clicks from the Rally Reports tab. We are in the process of re-branding and improving this catalog, and we will be highlighting several of the most popular Apps over the next few months.

Which brings us to today’s announcement. This Saturday, September 4th, Rally is adding a new App to the App Catalog – the Epic Progress App. The Epic Progress App displays a high-level view of the children associated with epic stories in a selected release.

Epic Progress App

Use this App to help you determine whether:

• The work is logically divided between the iterations
• There should be a reallocation of the User Stories to other iterations
• The Epic is progressing as expected
• Any stories are blocked

Improved Setup and simplified Time Zones

We are also adding two more updates this weekend that improve accessibility and usability. Workspace administrators will now enjoy quicker access to the Users and the Workspace & Projects tabs because access to these tabs is no longer dependent upon your global workspace scoping. Additionally, we have simplified the list of Time Zones and sorted them based on Greenwich Mean Time (instead of alphabetically), making it much easier for distributed teams to locate and specify their local Time Zone.

As always, check out the What’s New section for more details on these new capabilities. For those who have not accessed the Rally App Catalog, the What’s New page also explains how to install the new Epic Success App.

Popularity: 6% [?]

For customers with a large number of users in your Rally subscription, assigning ownership to work items is about to get much easier.

Currently, the Owner drop down list displays all workspace users regardless of their access level to the current project.  For customers with a large number of users, searching for the user to which you wish to assign ownership can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. You reported this as an issue in this Agile Commons feature request, so we took action!

Starting this Saturday (8/28), the Owner field will only list users that are either Team Members for the selected project or users with Editor permission for that project. Users with Viewer access for the selected project will no longer be displayed. We made this change because it simply does not make sense for someone to own an artifact yet not have permission to edit it.

The Owner field will also list the users in an intuitive order: first the project Team Members, who are most likely to own project artifacts, followed by “Other Users”, those with Editor access on the project but who are not Team Members. This will make it much easier to locate the desired Owner when working on projects where hundreds of users have Viewer access, but only a fraction of those users are Editors or Team Members.

Owner Dropdown list

In a true agile fashion, we are delivering this value as it becomes available. This weekend, the change will take effect on all pages except the Backlog Page, Dashboard Panels and Custom Report Filter.

Popularity: 13% [?]

We are celebrating the end of July by rounding out the user administration enhancements we have been focused on for the past few months. In this weekend’s release (7/31), you will see a Print option and an Export as CSV option on the Users pages in the Setup area of Rally:

Users page for subscription and workspaces:

Subscription and Workspace users

Users page for projects:

Project users

These options should greatly facilitate managing large number of users. If you use the User Lookup mashup, we encourage you to switch to the new Users page. Tip: the total number of active users is reflected at the bottom of the Users pages.

By the way, this mashup is a good reminder of the power of using our Web Services API to add functionality to Rally. We wrote this mashup to quickly deliver value to our customers while keeping our product team focused on our product roadmap. We then incorporated the mashup functionality in the core product when many users reported value from its use. We encourage you to share any mashups you have created by adding them to the mashup dropbox in Agile Commons. Our product team will review them and post them to the Mashups page, and you’ll get a chance to be listed on the Mashup Developers Hall of Fame

BTW, wanna know about an upcoming mashup? the Story Deep Copy mashup. It will allow in one click to copy a story, its children stories and tasks. It will be available shortly, and we will announce it on the Product Blog when it is completed.

We have also added Programs to the custom report designer on the Reports tab. If you use Rally programs, you can now slice and dice defect and story information for a specific Program. If you use Time Tracker timesheets, your timesheet reports can be scoped to a program. Pretty nifty.

As a reminder, Agile2010 (in Orlando, FL) is less than two weeks away! We will have some exciting new capabilities to demo, so be sure to stop by the booth! And, don’t forget to install Rally for the iPhone so you can stay in touch with your teams’ progress while you’re at the show.

Long live July… Please August, be a little cooler for Agile’s sake!

Popularity: 23% [?]

Need to check status of Rally projects while out of the office?

The Rally Team is pleased to announce the availability of Rally for the iPhone, providing a mobile view into your Rally ALM projects, anytime, anywhere. This may be familiar to some users, Rally recently acquired Scrumaway from Blue Hole Software, the first application to provide mobile access to Rally data via the iPhone. We have re-released Scrumaway as Rally for the iPhone. Rally for the iPhone App is FREE and easy to download at the Apple’s App Store. The App supports Rally Community, Enterprise and Unlimited editions.

Technology is continuously evolving, allowing us to check our e-mail, Skype and manage our schedules whether we are in the office or at the airport. Now, you can add your Rally ALM projects to the list of the things that can be done from your mobile device. Allowing you the ability to monitor the health of your projects, view and edit stories, defects and tasks – and quickly determine if anyone on your team is blocked and needs your help anytime, anywhere. With this rich access to data in Rally, even if you are on the road, you will be able to remove road-blocks.

Immediately after downloading the App, you will have real-time access to your Rally ALM projects, being able to view and edit the health of projects, edit blocks and statuses; as well as ability to edit, re-rank and create new stories or defects. Rally for the iPhone allows you to conveniently check into your projects and teams efficiently while away from your computer, helping to make your Agile development projects…just that much more Agile.

Rally for the iPhone Feature Highlights

• Search for projects, select from a list of recent projects or immediately access tasks assigned to you
• See release and iteration health at-a-glance, including progress bars showing accepted stories and tasks versus remaining work
• Scroll through releases or iterations, create, edit and re-rank stories and defects and drill-down to update the status of work items and tasks
• Manage your backlog of stories including editing and re-ranking

We welcome your feedback on Rally for the iPhone – please post your comments and suggestions on AgileCommons. Enjoy!

Availability and Specifications

Rally for the iPhone is available via FREE download from Apple’s App store at http://bit.ly/Rally4iPhone. The app is compatible with iPhone and iPod touch®. Rally for the iPhone requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later and supports iOS 4, the newest version of the mobile operating system.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Did you know that non-Rally users in your organization can benefit from the information you track in Rally?

You can radiate the status of your Rally projects throughout your organization by displaying Rally standard reports and mashups in wikis, corporate dashboards, portals and plain old Web pages. This provides executives, managers and non-Rally users a convenient way to view status and health of development projects from applications that they use every day.

Below is an example of a Rally report (Iteration Burndown) embedded in a SharePoint page, clearly showing that this project is in great shape and is proceeding as expected:

Many times business executives are interested in knowing when a roadmap feature or initiative will be completed, rather than focusing on individual stories and projects. In this case, the Story Burnup chart (shown below) can be embedded into a corporate dashboard, providing non-technical users with a forecasted completion date and an up-to-date summary of work accepted and work remaining.

Want to learn more? See the specific examples for SharePoint and Confluence on Agile Commons.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Tag – you’re it!

As we discussed in a previous post, the goal of tags is to provide a simple and flexible way to group work items. The key properties of tags is that work items can have more than one of them and they can be created or managed by anyone. We see tags being used in a variety of ways. Often they are used to track cross-cutting initiatives like supporting a new platform or localization.

With this weekends’ release (6/19th) we have added the ability to set tags on multiple items at once on the Backlog page. After selecting multiple items on that page, select the bulk action menu to apply or remove existing tags, as well as create and add new tags to all of the selected items. Once you import a group of stories, you can tag them in one brush.

Calling on All Bugzilla Users

We have revamped our original (and free) connector to provide more flexibility in integrating Rally with Bugzilla. When linking Bugzilla bugs with Rally, you can now create an issue in either Rally or Bugzilla and they will be synchronized.  You can also determine which fields you wish to map between the two applications, and whether you wish to create a story or a defect from a reported Bugzilla bug. The connector will be released in beta and if you wish to be a part of this program send an email to betas@rallydev.com.

Speaking of betas, are you taking advantage of our current betas? We invest considerable effort in validating new features and user-interface changes with our user community before releasing them as GA. Check out the Beta Programs list on our Agile Commons Work In Progress page to join any of our active Beta programs.

And, to all the fathers out there, Happy Father’s Day!

Popularity: 52% [?]

Last week, we announced the availability of a new offering, Rally Idea Manager, in conjunction with our press release on the new Rally Unlimited Edition.

Building the RIGHT things

Too often development teams are so focused on improving the way software is developed, that they lose sight of the bigger picture. Are we building the right things? It’s a tough question to answer, but a very important one. While there certainly are plenty of sources of waste in software development, few are bigger than delivering unused features. Much of the intrinsic motivation software development professionals feel is a direct result of 3rd parties using the fruits of their labor. We all love the stories of happy customers getting value from our software. Failure to receive this feedback hurts and demotivates a team.

This is the next big challenge for Agile teams. By adopting Agile, development teams succeed at reducing user feedback loops, deliver better quality software and shorten time to market. Now the challenge shifts to product owners and product managers to ensure that the right features are being shipped. We’re passionate about providing solutions for product managers to address this.

Another stop on the journey

Rally began this journey in 2007. First, we announced the creation of a new online community, Agile Commons ( www.agilecommons.org ). With Agile Commons, we were the first Agile ALM vendor to provide an online resource for customers to submit and vote for features. This was our internal solution to help us build the right features.

A month later at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce Conference, we announced connectors with Salesforce.com. The first of their kind, these connectors provided a new connection between customer-facing organizations ( sales and support ) and product development groups. These products provide vital data and feedback loops in helping teams determine the right features to build. We continued our innovation on this platform well into 2008 with the release of Rally Support Manager and Rally Product Manager.

So while Rally Idea Manager is a new Rally offering, the concepts are rooted and inspired by years of experience and knowledge. We now have over 11,000 users and 800 features with over 2,000 comments on Agile Commons. This product offering benefited from the feedback and learning we acquired through this community and our other offerings in this area. The graphic below illustrates our current offerings for product managers.

Innovation through partnership

A key highlight in this announcement is the partnership with Brightidea. Our brand promise is “Scaling Software Agility”. When evaluating options on delivering best-in-class idea management, it became evident that our best alternative was partnering with Brightidea, an established leader in the innovation management marketplace. While this solution is new to Rally, the core technology and platform has years of development and is built to scale. Even better, customers whose needs scale beyond our offering, will have an upgrade path with Brightidea WebStorm.

Availability

It is available now for Rally Unlimited Edition customers. Please contact sales to enable it in your subscription.

For more information, check out the new Idea Management section on the website.

Popularity: 54% [?]

Summer has arrived, and we’re pleased to announce the availability of a number of some hot new features in this weekend’s (6/12/2010) update.

Change Username

Yes, that “Change username”. Thanks for your patience. Remember that this feature is solely for subscription administrators at this point.

Web Services API now supports case-insensitive search

We’ve added a new Web Services API version, 1.18, and the “contains” operator is now case-insensitive. This is a really useful enhancement and makes searching for any Rally artifact a whole lot easier. Interestingly, we use our WSAPI a lot in our product. This means that areas in the product that used to say “case-sensitive” have now been switched to be “case-insensitive” ( e.g. custom views, custom grid panels, story chooser in story canned reports, and others ).

We took extra care to ensure this does not break any custom mashups or integrations. We did not increment the ‘current’ option in the API to point to 1.18 and will not. As a matter of fact, we are now recommending that you explicitly specify a version when using the API. The reality is that we want to continue evolving our API, and we do not want to break anything. The safest way to ensure this is to take advantage of the versioning in our API.

Text Filtering on Backlog and Project Users page

We continue to enhance the new page framework with filtering. A new top-row filter option now appears on all columns with String fields on the Backlog page and Project Users page. Of course as this page framework continues to be adopted across the application, other pages will benefit from this new capability.

User Administration – Users page

Speaking of continued adoption, we have converted the Users page (Setup/Users) to the new page framework. The Users page now boasts robust in-place editing, column filtering and column selection that come for “free” with this awesome framework. We are releasing this page as Beta, so you can switch back to the old Users page by clicking on the Beta icon and choosing “Switch back.” From the beta icon, access the AgileCommons feedback post to report your feedback on this page.

We have also made a minor change to the Project Users page, renaming the ”Copy Users from…” button to “Add Users from…” to better reflect the operation that this button performs.

As always, check out the What’s New page for details regarding each of these features.

Btw, we got some questions about the “silence” of the past few weeks. If we say nothing here, no new features were released. Do not fret – we will not forget about you.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 55% [?]

Rally Software partner Codesion is the leading provider of web-based source code management services centered around Subversion. In response to numerous customer requests, Codesion has developed an integration to Rally which provides traceability and visibility between Rally stories, tasks & defects and Codesion source code checkins.

The Codesion/Rally integration takes the check-in or commit message and updates the Rally artifact’s discussion with a list of files affected. There is also an option to update the state of the Rally artifact. This feature extends Codesion’s commit integration system and is currently available (in beta) for Codesion’s Professional Edition.

For example, to update task TA1 in Rally, enter the following into the Codesion commit log message:

>svn commit -m “fug bixen [t:TA1]” README

The Codesion/Rally Integration will automatically update task TA1 with a discussion referencing the Subversion (or CVS) checkin.

For detailed information on the Codesion/Rally Integration, check out Codesion’s blog post or our Codesion Post on Agile Commons.

Popularity: 65% [?]

For all the auditory learners

If you’d prefer to hear about this release rather than read about it, I’d encourage you to listen to the recording of our customer preview webinar we conducted last Tuesday, May 11. For those who did attend, we again apologize for the audio difficulties we had at the beginning.

Different kind of release

This is a different kind of release. Over the past 8 weeks, we’ve delivered 6 features — almost 1 per week. On average, you received new features 38% faster than our typical rate of delivery. This means that the 2010.3 release is likely less newsworthy for you since you hopefully have been using many of the features that were included as part of the release. Even so, we do have a few more new features we’d like to introduce that will be available this Saturday, 5/15.

Tags are cool and getting cooler

We introduced tags in late 2009, and the goal of tags was to provide a simple and flexible way to group work items. The key properties of tags is that work items can have more than one of them, and they can be created or managed by anyone. We see tags being used in a variety of ways. Often they are used to track cross-cutting initiatives like supporting a new platform or localization.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback since the release of tags and wanted to start evolving this powerful feature. We now have added the ability to inline edit tags on the Backlog page. Simply double-click in the Tag column, and you can select or deselect the appropriate tags.

Here’s the kicker: this feature is also available on any of the grid-based dashboard panels including My Tasks, My Defects, etc. This is the huge value of the new page framework we began rolling out last year.

Notable defect fix

We fix several defects per week which are included in our weekly releases, and we don’t feel the need to blog about them. This Saturday, we’re fixing a long-standing defect that may be of particular interest. If the size of the revision history became too large, it was replaced with a less than useful message “DESCRIPTION Changed from [value too long to display] to [value to long to display].” After Saturday, we’ll be using a differencing algorithm to ensure that a more useful message is displayed.

Timesheet reports continue to improve

Reporting is a key focus of our time tracking solution, and we’re continuing to invest in this area. We will be delivering a beta test of aggregating by Top-Level stories. For those companies who use Rally’s story hierarchies to represent features or products, you can measure the total time logged against these  initiatives. For more information see this post on AgileCommons.

Enjoy, and as always keep an eye on the Work In Progress page to get a sense of what’s coming next.

Popularity: 78% [?]