Product Blog

My team does daily standup meetings in front of our Kanban Board.  Our standup meeting is different from the Scrum style, though – we work from right to left.  That is, we first ask, “What do we need to do to get those items accepted,” and then ask “What needs to happen to get those items out of test?”

For a long time, you’d see something like this in our “In Test” column:

Why are these two cards still "In Test"?

Why is the top story blocked?  Well, for a long time it was tough to see when defects are filed against a story, so we adopted the convention of marking stories “blocked” to signal that they have defects on them.  This has the unfortunate side-effect of attracting attention and inevitably a coach would come around asking if we needed help with our blocking issue, wasting both their time and ours.

But now the Kanban board supports a new feature.  In the settings panel, you can configure the board to “Show defect status for cards with defects.”  Now it’s immediately obvious what’s going on with your card:

Clicking on the text will take you straight to the part of the detail page that lists the defects, making it easy to get all the details.  (This takes advantage of another quietly shipped enhancement – you can now share direct links to sub-pages of detail pages with your coworkers).

Once you close your defects, you’ll see a cheerful green icon allowing you to savor your success for a little while:

Some teams use tasks as lightweight “checklists” for their Kanban items. You can enable the same feature for task status if you like.

These two features are helping our team already, enabling us to more easily see the work that needs to be done and helping us ensure we handle all defects before accepting work. You don’t have to be a Kanban team to use the Kanban board.  Any team can install this from the app catalog and use it to visualize your work.

I hope you find these features helpful!

Popularity: 70% [?]

On Saturday, Rally’s Kanban Board will add support for tracking team policies.  This means teams will have an easy shared visual for what it takes for items to be ready to pull, ready to leave any column, and when items are done.  Watch this video to learn more.

Popularity: 98% [?]

It can often be tough to get developers to estimate. Estimation takes time away from writing code, and it can be difficult as well as frustrating to estimate work you may not fully understand.

Agile teams often estimate using a ‘Planning Poker’ approach.   But even a team that’s really good at Planning Poker can generally only estimate 15-20 stories per-hour. If you’ve got a project with 60 stories, you need a half-day of Planning Poker to get through them all.

There is a better way.

I just got out of an amazing session with my team where we estimated 20 stories in about 6 minutes, using our new Estimation Board, available via the Rally App Catalog.

Here is how it looks:

The magic comes from how you use the board.  When you start, all of your un-estimated stories appear in the left-hand column.  The team stands up and takes turns, each moving one card per-turn.  I might start by moving a card to the “small” column and if Erika disagrees she might then move it to the “large” column.   The team keeps moving, and if there is substantial disagreement it’s easy for a couple of people to discuss while everyone else continues sorting cards.  Remote team members can participate too.

It’s really amazing how much faster this is than Planning Poker.  It also really helps emphasize the “relative sizing” work because the goal is just to group similarly-sized items, not to assign numbers.  (You can map the S/M/L columns to whatever point sizes you like).

This app is free with all editions of Rally, so install it from the app catalog and give it a try in your next estimating session!

Popularity: 90% [?]

As a product owner, I’m often stopped in the hall by testers.  ”DE11582,” they’ll exclaim, breathlessly.  ”Is that how you really want it to work, or would you prefer the dropdown to close immediately in IE6?”

“Hang on,” I’ll say.  ”I have no idea which defect you’re talking about.”  For some reason, testers seem to have a knack for remembering lots of five-digit ID codes.  I’ve got to look them up before having this conversation.

It used to be a pain to find these items – open Rally, log in, enter the defect ID into Rally’s search bar and look at the defect.  But with our new UI architecture, you can now configure Chrome to search Rally natively.

I just go into Chrome, type ‘r’, enter the defect ID, and hit <ENTER>

and I’m taken right to my defect.

This is easy to configure – just add a search engine to Chrome.  In Preferences or Settings for Chrome, click “Manage Search Engines,” and add Rally like this:

Here’s the specific URL you want to use:

https://rally1.rallydev.com/slm/rally.sp?#/search?keywords=%s

It’s really easy to set this up, and you’ll find you use it anytime someone sends you an IM with a defect or story ID.  Plus, it’s connected to Rally’s search engine, so you can use it to search for phrases or story names as well.

Enjoy,

Alex

Popularity: 72% [?]