Product Blog

We’ve all done it.

How can we not? It’s human nature to customize our world. Cars, burgers, World Peace… you name it, we’ll customize it.

Unsurprisingly, the team here at Rally loves customization. The same way we love foosball, Agile revolutionaries, and finely-crafted home brews. And some of the custom dashboards and pages that have been created around here are quite frankly, ridiculous. And by ridiculous I mean of course, fantastic.

Recently, in coordination with the announcement of the Rally Platform and the app-building frenzy of the RallyON 2012 Hack-a-thon, we made it much, much easier to customize your Rally world. Take a look at the bottom of the sub-menu popup that comes up when you hover over a navigation tab… see that button that says ” + New Page ? ” Hit that thing and see what happens.

Give your new personal page a name, select the layout, and….

Apps!

Rally Apps are pieces of functionality that you can use to personalize your Dashboard and build custom pages in Rally. Apps display data, let you edit data, show graphs, or do just about anything else you can think of.

We have a ton of pre-built apps for you to select from in the App Catalog. We have a bunch of community-built Apps that we’ve looked at and approved for use in the Rally Platform. And best of all, YOU have great ideas on what kind of apps you’d like to see in Rally!

“How can I use this?”

• If you’re a Product Manager, build a page of apps showing your features in a portfolio kanban so you can track delivery status
• If you’re a Project Manager, build a page of apps that show the release status for each of your projects all on one page
• If you’re a Developer, build a page of apps showing your tasks for each project, and toss in a kanban board for your primary project
• If you’re a QA Engineer, build a page of apps showing lists of defects by severity, release status for each project, and some charts showing trends over the last 3 months

Want to build your own App? Join our developer community and dive into the Rally Platform and AppSDK! As our recent Hack-a-thon at RallyON 2012 showed, you can build a great new app that works seamlessly right within Rally – in just a day or two.

The combinations are endless, and the more community-built apps that become available the more you’ll be able to create that perfect set of pages to make your Rally truly “yours.”

Popularity: 12% [?]

Ladies and gentlemen, we have the winners of the RallyON 2012 Hack-a-thon!

All of the customer/Rally engineer pairs put out an incredible set of brand-new Apps based on the Rally Platform – making 15 Apps in just a day and a half! The energy of the Hack-a-thon room was crackling – probably as much from the caffeine-laced root beer as from the spirt of collaboration that each team brought to the Hack-a-thon. As the teams rolled up their sleeves and dove into the AppSDK 2.0, everyone helped each other make the best App they could in the short time frame they had. A couple of the teams couldn’t tear themselves away, and ended up hacking the night away – coding for 30 hours straight!

For the attendees of Rally’s annual RallyON conference, choosing the winner was a hard-fought, knuckle-dragging brawl that resulted in not one, but two first-prize winners. Both first place teams basked in the glow of victory, in the glow of their new iPad and epic RallyON Hack-a-thon trophy.

Winning App #1: The Kanban Time-Machine (Mark and Chris)
This App uses the card board component of the updated App SDK 2.0 and a preview of our new Analytics API. It lets users see what the Kanban Board looked like in the past. Click to a time on the time slider, enter a date directly, or let the slider cycle through the dates by itself and watch the cards animate themselves between the various columns. Sweet.

Winning App #2: Plan Plan Palatable (Andrew and Ken)
The Plan App makes it super-easy to plan iterations and releases by putting a hierarchy of stories within your structure of Portfolio Items on the left side of the screen, and showing your releases and iterations on the right side. Using the tree component of the AppSDK, drag-and-drop stories from your Portfolio Items right into your release. While you’re at it, if you feel like dragging-and-dropping your stories to re-parent between Portfolio Items… go for it.

First Runner Up App: Enhanced Portfolio Item Burn-up Chart (Ben and Justin)
How are your big projects going along? Rally Portfolio Manager gives you great visibility into this question, and this fresh new App makes it super-easy to see a Burn-up chart for a selected Portfolio Item. Using the tree component and the standard reports of the App SDK 2.0, click an item, see the chart. The Portfolio Items are shown in their hierarchy, so finding what you want to see is a snap.

Overall, the Hack-a-thon was a grand success, bringing together Rally customers from a wide variety of industries to work together and build a tremendous variety of Rally Apps. Congratulations to all the Hack-a-thon participants!

Popularity: 26% [?]

Hack-a-lack-a-ding-dong! The RallyOn 2012 Hack-a-thon has begun!

After a couple-hour workshop yesterday on the new Rally App SDK and Analytics API, and a great visit from our new social coding community partner GitHub, the hacks at RallyON 2012 have been unleashed. Lock up your valuables, stock the fridge, and cover your children’s eyes – it time to crack open a fresh new can of innovation.

The day started in classic “a-thon” fashion with plenty of coffee and yawns after a stellar evening of entertainment last night by the Highland Ramblers at the Boulder Theater. Once our eyes came into focus, we reviewed the smattering of “app idea” post-it notes on the white board from yesterday’s workshop and each hacker picked an app to work on.

After the apps had been chosen, Rally Developers paired up with each hacker and the teams were set. The race to glory and bragging rights (and, of course, two new iPads) had begun! Within 10 minutes the group had taken over two rooms at #RallyON2012, set up monitors, connected laptops, and started building apps.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the cool apps being built by our hacking pairs:

“We are building a kanban board time machine. Its already got a snappy title. What you do is specify a date, and the board reflects what the board looked like on that date. We’re using the new Analytics API – we could not have done this app before this API. Now, we can see what cards change both when and where just by sliding a date bar. So far we’re learned a lot – it’s been awesome fun.”
- Chris & Mark

“What we’re trying to do is create a new dashboard that helps plan iterations based on the changing priorities of Portfolio Items. So far it’s going good!”
- Ken & Andrew

“We’re working on an epic user story app that shows a hierarchy of the stories exactly the way we want to visualize it. Then we can generate statistics on work competed, work to do, etc. This will be great for estimating and planning. With the App SDK, we’ve already done in 210 lines of code what took 1,600 lines of code to build from scratch in the past.”
- Phil & Burke

All RallyON 2012 attendees will vote on the completed apps after a conference demo tomorrow, and we will announce the winner of the Hack-a-thon right here in the product blog, on Twitter at #RallyON2012 and our Facebook page.

Stay tuned!

Popularity: 19% [?]

Sometimes, you just don’t get to every story in your iteration. Hey, it happens. But what to do with that pesky story that’s not done? Or, the story that is mostly done but still has 1 task and 2 defects on it?

This is the kind of thing that makes a ScrumMaster sweat and the analytics people stay up at night. Move the story into the next iteration? Close it out and create a new one?

Today in Rally, we’ve redone the way story splitting works. Your feedback and passion around this feature has been tremendous – as our #3 most-promoted idea in Rally Ideas, we’re pleased as punch to share this with you.

So, how does this bad boy work?

Check out this video by Rally Engineer Stephanie T. for an overview and demo of the new feature:

Some highlights include:

• You can split tasks, defects and test cases from one story into two stories
• You have the ability to edit the name, iteration, and plan estimate field for both stories
• A parent is created to ensure a link between the unfinished and continued story
• The continued story shares the same ID as the original story

What else are you looking for when you split stories? Head over to Rally Ideas and help us brainstorm how to make this even better.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 50% [?]

As we mentioned in last week’s blog about our 2012.1 release, since our December 2011 Agile Portfolio Management launch events we have continued to make great progress on Rally Portfolio Manager. We have gathered a ton of feedback from early adopters on what key items you need to take your planning to the next level. Based on your input, we are happy to share with you a key enhancement to the Portfolio Timeline.

You told us that the Timeline needs to allow you to view the portfolio on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly time frame. We heard you, and are happy to announce the release of a “zoom” option on the Portfolio Timeline:

We’ve already seen some great comments in Rally Ideas around Timeline Zoom: “Saw the zoom feature in the portfolio timeline… you nailed it! Thank you!”  We’re excited to share this with you, and think Timeline Zoom will make it even easier to view and share your portfolio timeline across your organization. Any user in your subscription can look at the Portfolio Timeline, select their zoom level, and instantly see what has started, what has completed, what is currently in progress, and when work is expected to complete. If you want to share with a non-Rally user, it’s easy to take a screenshot to share your roadmap via email, embed in your corporate wiki, or distribute however you like.

Have you checked out Rally Dashboards? This is the place to personalize and customize your Rally world. You can also add the Portfolio Item Timeline dashboard panel to any dashboard page. And if you’re a Rally administrator, for example, you can easily add the Timeline panel to a custom dashboard filled with Portfolio-related data, and then share the dashboard to your entire workspace. Keep everyone on the same page with Portfolio Items, Dashboards, and sharing.

Timeline enhancements are perfectly aligned with the primary focus of Rally Portfolio Manager – bringing better visibility into agile development work. More timeline enhancements are in the works, and we want to hear from you in the Portfolio Management category of Rally Ideas.

We are also actively working on step two of your Agile Portfolio Management adoption: limiting the number of projects and initiatives going into development. Stay tuned for the upcoming Portfolio Kanban!

Popularity: 44% [?]

As we try to shake off the chill of winter, the Rally Product Team is excited to bring you some sunshine with the highlights of our 2012.1 Release.

There are three product areas we’d like to talk about today:

• Agile Portfolio Management
• Agile Project Management
• Integrations

In December 2011, we were thrilled to launch Rally Portfolio Manager, the industry’s first Agile Portfolio Management solution to seamlessly integrate the strategic side of your business with execution. We have continued to make great progress in this area, gathering a ton of feedback from early adopters on what key items you need to take your planning to the next level. We clearly heard the need to be able to easily link user stories to portfolio items, which you can now do today from the Page Tools menu of a Portfolio Item.

Rally Portfolio Manager comes with three levels of planning “out of the box”, but remember you are free to create as many levels as you desire. If your organization has five levels of planning, create all five levels! You can also rename all of the levels to match your company environment exactly – with Rally, you are not limited in any way. Finally, for those of you that already have structured hierarchies for your User Stories, you can easily convert your top-level User Stories to Portfolio Items by selecting “Convert to Portfolio Item” from the ‘Actions’ menu of a User Story.

If you haven’t yet gotten started with Rally Portfolio Manager, contact Rally Support to activate it for your subscription.

Agile Project Management

On the Project Management side of the house, we’ve got lots of smokin’ hot improvements to share with you that will make your work faster, more intuitive, and more collaborative.

• Rally in multiple tabs and windows
  Our number one request in Rally Ideas is done! Running Rally in multiple browser tabs has been a long-standing request, and we’re thrilled to bring you the flexibility of working how you want in your favorite browser. Many of our customers tell us that they routinely have 10 or more tabs of Rally open simultaneously, keeping track of things like Portfolio Items, Iteration Status, and Defects, for multiple projects, all in a single browser window. We have even heard of users dedicating one browser to Rally, and setting the browser “home” to be multiple Rally tabs, effectively bringing up their whole Rally world with the simple opening of a browser. Awesome.

• Direct URL for Rally pages
  Related to this, every page in Rally now has its own addressable URL. Take a peek at the address bar in Rally, and if you’re feeling inspired go ahead and copy that thing. Once you have the URL you can do all sort of crazy things: email it to a co-worker, include it in a discussion thread on a user story, link to it within internal chat sites, or post it in your intranet as a list of linkable Portfolio Items. Go nuts with it.

• Share custom dashboards across the workspace
  Rally dashboards are ridiculously powerful. And they practically scream out for personalization. If you are technically-inclined, you can even build panels and dashboards that query Rally web services, fold in custom applications (or Rally catalog applications), and simply display the data you want, where you want it. Subscription and Workspace Administrators can now share dashboard pages, and all users can copy a shared dashboard to their personal workspace for even more personalization. We’ve also seen teams who have built role-based dashboards so that when new people start up in Rally, they can take the standard role dashboard, copy it, and personalize.

  

• Dashboards scoped to Iteration or Release
  This can be a powerful time saver, especially for managers who are living in multiple iterations and releases on a daily basis. With this feature, you can add dashboard panels that adhere to a drop down that contains a list of iterations or releases, making it very simple to refresh your dashboard without touching the dashboard settings.

  

Rally Integrations

We have a bunch of PPM integrations that communicate with Rally. Joining our existing integrations with Primavera, Daptiv, and Planisware, we have a new Rally Integration joining the family as part of this release: CA Clarity. The integration eliminates the duplication of entries for time, resource, project and task, and allows you to report the status of agile projects into CA Clarity.

We also are announcing a new Requirements Management integration with Jama Contour. This integration is an ideal solution for organizations practicing a hybrid approach to managing requirements; Agile development teams work with user stories while product teams review and approve requirements with remote stakeholders. This is especially valuable for organizations that need to formally document requirements to meet regulatory compliance and contractual commitments, common in the medical and government industries.

We also have lots of great features in the oven, and our teams are working hard to deliver enhancements as soon as they are available. One of our core principles is to deliver early and often, gather feedback, and continue to deliver. In that spirit, many of these features you have already seen here in the Product Blog, and within the Rally products. We look forward to bringing you more and more great things as they are finished.

Stay tuned for an incredible 2012!

Popularity: 45% [?]

Is there someone on your team who can effortlessly create custom dashboard pages? They write filter queries to create custom views of Defects or Portfolio Items, they integrate multiple popular Rally Apps (like a Kanban board) into one dashboard, and even have home-grown charts embedded into custom panels. The end result is an amazingly valuable dashboard page that, sadly, only one user can see.

As an administrator, how can you get these high-value custom dashboards to show up for everyone? It used to be a matter of taking screen captures of settings, emailing them to the team, and then updating them each time you make a change. In the worst case scenario, you have to log in as each user and personally set up their panels one-by-one. Not fun.

As of Saturday, January 21st, that pain is history. Rally now has the ability for administrators to share dashboards with all users in a workspace. As an admin, you can even create a shared dashboard to be used as a template, from which each user can copy and manage as a personal custom page.

Click the video link below to see a demo of this uber-cool and uber-collaborative function:

Create. Share. Enjoy.

Popularity: 92% [?]

Popularity: 63% [?]

While the engineering chefs in the Rally kitchen are busy cooking up some big meals, they also tend to toss out a few tasty product appetizers from time to time. The last few weeks have seen a couple of these delicious bits make their way into Rally: email notifications when a work product gets recycled, and for Rally Quality Manager users, the ability to add Tasks to Test Sets directly from the Iteration Status page.

Notify me

Did you know you can have Rally email you a notification when an artifact field value changes? Yep! Click on Setup in the upper right corner of your Rally screen, then “My Notification Rules”, and build your notifications just like you build an iTunes play list. Super simple. You can even add a panel that displays your notifications right there on your dashboard. And now, there’s a new condition to experiment with – Recycled. This is a powerful notification and can be used for any artifact type that goes to the Recycle Bin when deleted. Another great suggestion from Rally users via Rally Ideas!

OK, who cares?

Have you ever wondered where a Defect went, only to find it in the Recycle Bin because someone thought it was a duplicate? Do you work with globally distributed teams, where email communication across time zones sometimes results in crossed wires? Things happen. Your team tries to do the right thing and *poof* there goes a nice hierarchy of stories into the bin. Instead of freaking out and wasting a bunch of time, you’re all set because your notification email gave you the heads up. Head on over to the Recycle Bin and restore that thing. Give it a try!

Tasks on Test Sets? Crazy talk!

If you’re like many of the teams using Rally, you have become very good friends with the Iteration Status page. However, for our Rally Quality Manager users, it was always irritating that you couldn’t add Tasks to a Test Set. Guess what? You can now add Tasks directly to a Test Set, right from Iteration Status! Whoo hoo!

And now that you can put Tasks on Test Sets, you can also take advantage of all the Rally goodness that goes along with it. Estimate your Tasks and see them rolled up to the Test Set estimate. Track progress against the Tasks, simplifying cross-team status updates. Get a heads up if blocked Tasks are putting your iteration at risk. Bring your Test Set Tasks into Time Tracker. As an added bonus, your Tasks for Test Sets now show up right alongside your other tasks on the “My tasks” dashboard panel.

In-line saves time

Sitting in a planning meeting, brainstorming tasks for your Test Set? Quickly add them in-line, using the action buttons to the right of the test set. Adding tasks in-line looks and feels just like adding tasks to a User Story, including the ability to drag & drop re-rank and double-click edit. Prefer a pop-up editor for each task so you can put in more details? There’s a button for that, too.

Have fun with these features, and let us know what you think in Rally Ideas!

Popularity: 51% [?]