Product Blog

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% [?]

The Rally Add-in for Excel provides a quick and easy way to export data from your Rally subscription for tracking, reporting, or sharing. The data can be organized in a pivot table or displayed using Excel’s built-in charting capabilities. Multiple Rally object types can be exported into multiple tabs and the data cross-referenced for more complex needs.

It’s a snap to install this great app, just run a simple .exe file.

Defining data to export

What kind of meaningful, relevant data do you want to export? Just define some queries to describe what you want to export from Rally. A good example of a query you might use often is My Defects.
You can even enter sub-object fields. Case in point: if you selected Release in the Columns list, then go and add ReleaseStartDate to the list of fields.

Better yet, use subfields in query clauses: (Release.Name contains “2011 Q3”). Combine query clauses with ANDs or ORs: ((ScheduleState = Open) AND (Release.Name contains “2011 Q3”)). Query-licious!

Filters are another great way to build a strong query. In the above filter, the @Me is actually a magical macro that automatically fills in your user reference when the query runs. How cool is that?

Exporting Rally data

Once you have defined one or more queries, you are ready to export Rally data.
Did you know you can embed queries in worksheets when a workbook is saved?  The Refresh All Queries button runs all queries embedded in a saved workbook, and any pivot charts or tables based on the data are automatically refreshed. Refreshing!

Here is the end result, in all its data-driven, query-licious glory:

Click here for more information, or here to download the connector.

Enjoy,

Jill

Popularity: 83% [?]

Stateless Task Editor

Yep, you heard right, our task editor is now stateless! I know, I know, awesome right? However, you may be asking yourself – “Stateless who in the what now? What does that mean for me?”

Well, Stateful (the way our task editor used to be) meant that our system kept track of the state of interaction by setting values in a storage field designated for that purpose. As opposed to stateless (the way our task editor now works) which means there is no record of previous interactions and each interaction request is handled based entirely on information that comes with it.

Makes perfect sense, right? Right? Well, here’s what it means for users of the task editor:

Let’s say that you’re happily working along editing a task in Rally, then you get distracted by a coworker asking you about your Jump-to-Conclusions mat that you’ve been working on in your spare time. Meanwhile, Bill, who works in accounting down the hall, decides to edit the same task that you have open. Because the task editor is now stateless, when you go to save your task, you will get the following options (below)

Having the task editor “stateless” makes for a much more graceful handling of concurrency issues.

Not only that, storing less state on the server means that the server will require less memory, and therefore result in increased performance for users!

So, there you have it. Stateless task editor…making life easier, one task at a time.

Recently Changed App

The Recently Changed App gives a high level view of tasks, stories, and defects changed in the last working day.

Use this app to get a quick “at-a-glance” overview of what’s been going on with your teams.

Estimation Board App

The Estimation Board visually groups things in Rally together by size. The ability for users to customize options make this an extremely powerful and flexible app. Custom settings include plan estimate sizes as well as adding, deleting and renaming of columns.

The drag & drop function allows you to quickly change the plan estimate of a story or defect. Direct links to stories and defects makes navigating through Rally a breeze.

Rally Connector for JIRA 4.x

We’ve updated our JIRA connector. The Rally Connector for JIRA allows customers to use Rally for Agile lifecycle management while still using JIRA for defect management. The connector provides synchronization capability between JIRA work items and Rally work items. In addition, the JIRA connector is now part of the Rally Enterprise Integration Framework, making it much more flexible.

Permanently delete tags

We’ve added the ability to permanently delete tags on the tag management page so that users can more effectively control the list of available tags.

Delete Tags

Enjoy!

Nate

Popularity: 61% [?]

We are always happy to see partners integrate or deliver solutions on our platform. Today, I’d like to introduce three partners who have recently released connectors or Apps for the Rally platform.

Tasktop Technologies Agile Planning

First, is our long-time partner Tasktop Technologies, the company behind the Eclipse Mylyn ALM integration framework and its revolutionary task-focused interface technology. More than a million developers choose Tasktop’s technology to increase application lifecycle visibility and improve developer productivity. A major part of their 2.0 release is a new feature for federated Agile Planning. Just as Tasktop does not replace your existing ALM tools, they are not replacing your existing Agile planning tool. Instead, they augment it with unique interoperability features.

The most important feature of the Agile Planner is its ability to show plans that span repositories. Planning your user stories in Rally and using another tool for issue tracking is no longer a problem. Depending on another team or an open source project? These dependencies are now visible. Tasktop can display and reconcile state across repositories. All of the cross-repository state is stored in your existing ALM tools as hyperlinks and metadata.

Below is a screenshot of Agile Planner and here is a video demo of Agile Planner being used with Rally.

Agile Planner screenshot based on integration with Rally

Planisware

Planisware is a leading provider of Project & Product Portfolio Management software solutions. Planisware includes Portfolio level (budget, simulation, scenarios and roadmapping) as well as an operational level (project, resource & cost management and collaboration) functionality. When used with Rally, Planisware manages the product development pipeline and synchronizes it with the agile iterative development processes driven by Rally’s Agile project management functionality. The Planisware/Rally integration combines the value and benefits of a structured approach to portfolio and project management with the flexibility of agile oriented software development processes.

Planisware screenshot based on Integration with Rally

Integration flow overview:

• High-level projects and releases are created in Planisware and synced to Rally
• Detailed iterations and stories are created in Rally
• Iterations and stories are synced from Rally to Planisware
• High-level status can then be viewed in Planisware based on real-time story updates within Rally

Programeter

Programeter is an analytics company that provides tools for monitoring trends in quality assurance, project management, coding, test and requirements management at all stages of software development life cycle. They have developed an App that allows teams to track the mean age of open defects in order to help focus your team on the oldest and highest priority defects.

Mean Age of Open Defects App (submitted by Programeter)

The Mean Age of Open Defects App provides a measure of how much time currently open defects stay unresolved. In most cases it makes sense to reduce mean age as this indicates that you don’t have too many outstanding defects and that users of your software don’t have to wait too long for fixes.

We’d like to thank all of these partners for creating these integrations and Apps for the Rally Platform. If you have created a custom App that you would like to share with other Rally users, please submit it to our App Dropbox.

Popularity: 54% [?]

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: 56% [?]

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: 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: 54% [?]