Product Blog

OK, maybe not an Oscar. Wrong Industry. But how does one win an Oscar (aka Academy Award)?

Gaining feedback and voting. The mechanism they use is called choice voting. Choice voting with over 5,000 members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The members are split between different branches. The Cinematography Branch, the Directors Branch, Music branch, Actors Branch, Visual Effects Branch and so on, making up approximately fifteen different branches.

What would happen if the votes only came in from the Actors Branch?

The same concept of attaining many different inputs to decide the Oscar winners applies to software development  as well. We know that listening to only one source, while the input is valid, does not get us the information that we need to build the product. But we also know that building the product is not the goal. Rather, building the right product.

How do you know that you are building the right product?

One answer to that question is by utilizing reporting and analytics within a democratic community to gain a clear picture on what is occurring.

“Better measurements and visualization lead to better insights. Better insights lead to better decisions. Better decisions lead to a better outcome,” says Larry Maccherone, Rally Product Owner. In the case of Rally Idea Manager, the decisions are not nebulous. Rally Idea Manager allows organizations to gain the necessary feedback to make strategic roadmap and product decisions, leading to better solutions for not only your business but your customers as well. While Rally Idea Manager does not feed all of the input on what to build, it is an essential source. And one that Rally uses on a consistent basis with our community, Rally Ideas.

As of today, analyzing the data within Rally Idea Manager has just become nearly effortless and more powerful. For those of you that have been using Rally Idea Manager in your own organization, you know that there has been a dashboard activity charts and an Idea by Status diagram. These capabilities have been improved and enhanced with not only a new look and feel but a more robust set of metrics and charts to examine, customize and drill into.

Enhancements to the Rally Idea Manager Dashboard include:

• Activity Metrics with the ability to customize in several ways to view idea, comment, votes and user activity

Activity Metrics

• Category Distribution for a clear picture on the most and least popular areas of your product

Category Distribution

• Fastest Risers for an at-a-glance look at hottest ideas according to votes
• Average Days Per Status to quickly view the average length of time an idea is in a given status

Understanding what your user-base is requesting based on factual data is a powerful mechanism to leverage and bring back into your organization helping to make well informed strategic decisions.

In addition to the above functionality in the dashboard, there is now the ability to turn on the Dashboard Tab  to end-users instead of only Site Administrators for a broader level of visibility. By default, this option will be turned off. The option to enable the dashboard view to end-users is in the Setup Tab under Site > Components.

Dashboard for End-Users

Like voting for an Oscar winner, visualizing and understanding the needs from your many different stakeholders will lead to better product decisions. And as Larry said, “Better decisions lead to a better outcome.”

Engage with other users and the Rally Product Team in our community, Rally Ideas. We may not always implement the idea that is most important to you- but we hear you and we are doing the best we can to listen to all of our stakeholders and build the right things.

So internalize the metrics, share your insights and win an Oscar

Popularity: 27% [?]

While the ground may be freezing at many of the Rally offices, the new features have been heating up over the past few months and now all have been released into orbit, making our 2011.4 release a hot one. As we release incrementally, you have likely seen many of the features already in your subscription.

The last but certainly not least of the features Rally Portfolio Manager, was just made available to Rally customers December 6th, and is included at no additional cost in Unlimited Edition subscriptions. Tuesday, as I was in the office watching and listening to Geoffrey Moore, author of Escape Velocity and Crossing the Chasm, speaking about Agile Portfolio Management at Rally’s live event in Menlo Park, CA; I could not help but be even more proud about this release. While many of my Rally counterparts are physically at the events, the energy around here is contagious. Speakers also included Ryan Martens and Todd Olson from Rally, you can still tune in for the next event, sign up here.

So what is so exciting about Rally Portfolio Manager? Agile Portfolio Management bridges the gap between agile execution and business strategy.

Rally Portfolio Manager helps agile development teams understand the business reasons behind sprint and release-level user stories by connecting development user stories to higher-level portfolio investments. It aggregates development status above the team and user story levels to provide epic, initiative and project status in terms meaningful to those outside development: percent complete, planned start date, projected end date, actual start and completion dates

As a special promotion, all existing Rally Enterprise Edition customers can try Rally Portfolio Manager for free until January 31, 2012! Contact your Rally sales rep or send an email to sales@rallydev.com for details.

We have also added Advanced Security and Administration capabilities, which provides improved security and greater control over user access for Enterprise System administrators. This is achieved through enhanced Single-Sign-On support (SSO) for our On-Demand customers and LDAP Support for On-Premise customers. In addition, we have given system administrators the ability to restrict access to Rally via IP address and to control which file types can be included as attachments.

The 2011.4 release also included an addition to our our ideation solution, Rally Idea Manager. In case you missed the Rally Idea Manager Multisite announcement in October, you can read about it here. Multisite provides Product Managers the ability to engage with end users by product line or by audience (a different site for Partners for example).

Below are additional items that were also included in the 2011.4 Rally Release; which are all included in the Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition:

• New Menu navigation
• Improved Kanban Board: visibility into Task Status, Defect Status and Policies
  
• Ability to copy Custom Views
• Direct URLs to shared Custom Views
• Bulk edit Parent field on the Backlog Page
• Search enhancements: Queries with AND, OR, and ! (not) conditions are now accepted

Resources have been consolidated into one place, greatly improving accessibility and searchability across all Rally help and support:

• Rally Help
• Developer Portal
• Support Knowledge Base

Heat up your lifecycle and launch into orbit with Rally

Feel free to take a deep dive into the details by subscribing to the What’s New. As always, engage and innovate with the Product Team on Rally Ideas.

Popularity: 59% [?]

Yee-haw! We’re delighted out here in Boulder, Colorado. The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming and Rally Idea Manager has been spruced up. For those of you who are not familiar, Rally Idea Manager provides a place for users to propose, vote on and discuss enhancement ideas with product managers.

Search has blossomed
The days of searching through pages of results are over! Search results now include values found in the tags, descriptions, statuses, screen names and idea IDs. Also, search is case-insensitive. Results are relevant, what a concept huh?

Hello??? What’s the status of all those ideas in there?
Now, any user who has submitted an idea or subscribed to an idea, will receive an email notification when its status has changed. Email notifications will state what the change of status was so that you don’t have to go directly to the site to discover the status (the ability to turn notification off is still available).

Hey, who are the most active users in my Rally Idea Manager community?
Reputation management can now be viewed via a leaderboard (seen below). The community can see which of their peers are most active. The point system is defined by the administrators. Giving flexibility of what holds higher value based on submission of ideas, comments, votes and site registration while enticing users to share their ideas and contribute to the ideas of others.

Shake it up a bit!
You can now create custom tabs to help users filter ideas. Tabs include (but are not limited to): Featured, Genius, My Favorites, Most Commented, Recent, Random and by Status. And guess what? Administrators have the ability to change these as it suits their community. So users have the option to view the ideas they are most interested in and administrators have the option to expose the ideas (Featured) they are most interested in highlighting to the community.

Cultivate your community: Link idea(s) to a Rally story and publish Rally status
You’ve been able to create a new Rally story from an idea. You have now the ability to link an idea to an existing story and link multiple ideas to a story in Rally. Each association and dissociation between an idea and a story creates a discussion entry on the story with the URL of the idea, so development team members can read up on users’ comments. What’s more, is that you can map any story state to any idea status, as well as set default values on Rally story fields.

Visit our What’s New in Rally Idea Manager for more information.

Oh, and have you seen our implementation of Rally Idea Manager, Rally Ideas? It is abundant and continuously growing with over 1,100 ideas and nearly 1,700 users.

Engage with your peers and the Rally Product Team here!

Popularity: 46% [?]

For the past 3 years, we, the Rally Product Team, have been grateful for your participation in the ‘Request a Feature’ section of Agile Commons. Receiving product ideas from our users and having the community comment on these ideas has been exceptionally valuable. Though there may not always be a comment from us, we do review every post with careful consideration.

In June this year, we formed a partnership with Brightidea, the global leader in cloud-based innovation management. That partnership led to Rally Idea Manager, an offering specifically designed to track feature and product ideas by categories, user-defined tags and statuses. We are pleased to announce that we will be rolling out our own implementation of Rally Idea Manager – Rally Ideas.

Next week, the Request a Feature option in Agile Commons will change to Share your Idea, taking you directly into Rally Ideas. Feature requests either promoted or recently submitted, along with their comments and votes will be migrated to the new system. And, as many of you have asked, the status of each idea will be clearly displayed so you can easily view where each idea stands on our product roadmap. We are confident that this added transparency will be a healthier solution for all of us.

Rally Ideas will bring many enhancements from the current Request a Feature page:

• Find similar ideas to the one you’re about to post
• View the status of an idea you either submitted or subscribed to
• View all ideas we are actively working on
• Subscribe to a subset of  ideas to be notified about status changes
• Create your own tags to easily locate a set of features

We are chomping at the bit to adopt this innovative and best-in-class technology. While we perform the migration to Rally Ideas, there will be a freeze period during which submissions and commenting will be unavailable for a few days.

We are looking forward to reading about your Rally product and feature ideas!

Popularity: 67% [?]

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: 53% [?]