Product Blog

Here at Rally, we, on the User Learning team, are excited to announce the launch of our new and improved online help and training system this Saturday, September 17th.

Rally Help - a new look

With the implementation of our new help and training system, we’ve greatly improved the accessibility and searchability across all of our Rally support resources – from help articles to videos and even a Rally coaches corner. Our new Rally help and training site will consolidate all of the content from our previous help to enable better search and access for users. Our new task-driven menu structure, quick links to our most popular content, and articles from our coaches all serve to provide our users with a much more enriching learning experience.

Note: You won’t have to make any changes to access the new help content, all internal links in the Rally product will automatically re-direct! We’re also leaving the old help system up and running for the foreseeable future, so if you’ve bookmarked any links to the old system, they’ll still work.

A new technology!

We’ve switched our help to a much more robust and flexible technology – Drupal – to ensure that we are delivering top notch help and training. Unlike traditional help systems, our new Drupal based help is a dynamic platform that will grow as our content expands. By adding features like advanced search, topic-tagging and filtering, and (in the near future) internationalization, we allow users to explore our help and training content in new and exciting ways. This is our first iteration of this new system and it gives us the fundamental building blocks to continually evolve the way we deliver help and training.

Rally Help and Training...evolved

Smarter Search

Another advantage of switching our help and training to Drupal is the inclusion of new search features like powerful full-text search, hit highlighting and faceted search. Users will be able to locate topics more quickly and with more relevancy.

Rally Help - Search

In the coming months, we will continue to grow our help and training content and roll out new features and changes to better organize and deliver content to our users. We hope that our passion for educating users about Rally and the agile process continues to fuel a desire in those users for perfecting the art of software development through agile and lean practices.

Check it out here.

Enjoy!

- The Rally User Learning Team

Popularity: 37% [?]

This past Saturday, August 6th, we released several enhancements to our kanban board that make it even easier to visualize your workflow and track throughput.

Rally Kanban Board

Visualization Improvements…

When it comes to the successful implementation of the kanban method, one of the fundamental aspects is being able to quickly assess the status of a project. Cards are one of the key components to visualizing the workflow and that’s where we’ve added the following new features:

• Display a short summary of tasks on individual cards within the kanban board.
• Choose to show the age of a card within a column. Aging is calculated based on the last revision when the card was placed in that column. You will see the age displayed on cards that have a column age greater than the amount of days you specify. The age information is appended to the cards after all cards are initially displayed on the board. The age information will not show for the first and last columns listed in the Kanban Settings dialog. (i.e. for the default Schedule State, the columns “Defined” and “Accepted” will not display the age information)
• Add color to card headers by work item type. If this option is checked, stories will be green and defects will be red.

Note: These first three features can be enabled/disabled from the kanban board settings dialog. For more information, click here.

• Filter by (tag) drop-down (located at the top of the kanban board) allows you to filter what cards are shown, by fading cards that do not have the selected Tag applied. When the filter is applied to the board, you can still interact (drag-and-drop, clicking links, expanding tray, etc.) with all cards displayed on the board.

Throughput Tracking Enhancements…

Another powerful addition to the kanban board is being able to granularly see how much work and of what kind (stories, defects) were completed in a given time period (aka – throughput) using tags and creating a throughput chart.  When a tag is chosen, any story matching that tag will be included even if it has children. This allows you to have a layered approach to Kanban and use tags to identify higher levels. For example, at Rally, we use “Feature” as a tag for the level above the actual stories that the teams run through their process.

Click here to read more about how to use the new awesome features!

Popularity: 75% [?]

The responsibility for providing visibility across every project underway in an Enterprise often falls to the PMO. How many projects are in motion? What phase are they in and which resources are involved? How much are they costing us and how are they tracking to their budget and timelines? More importantly, are we working on the projects that are the highest value to the business?

An entire market has evolved around the methodologies & technologies used to answer those questions (and many others) called Project Portfolio Management (PPM).

“Most PPM Tools and methods attempt to establish a set of values, techniques and technologies that enable visibility, standardization, measurement and process improvement.”

The rising adoption of Agile tools and methodologies though can cause friction between the PMO and Engineering Managers who are both trying to deliver projects and applications but doing it using different methodologies, different tools, and sometimes different standards of measuring progress. This can mean that the Agile projects are incompatible or difficult to integrate with the existing PPM solution which causes blind spots for anyone using just PPM Dashboards to evaluate the portfolio. (One solution requires Agile teams to manually enter data in their Agile Project Management tool and then do it again in the corporate PPM solution. It’s an inefficient, time consuming, error prone jury rig.) As the number of Agile projects in an enterprise has been inevitably increasing, so has the size of the blind spots for PPM tools currently in use.

In just the last 6 months though, a number of PPM vendors and integrators have worked with Rally to solve this problem. The result has been the release of integrations to multiple PPM solutions of various types including Oracle, Daptiv,  Planisware. What does such a bridge provide? As Oracle put it, “The integration enables consistent visibility into the entire project portfolio minimizing unwelcome surprises, fostering better decisions, managing risk, and tracking progress.”

Rally was the first Agile solution to be integrated with all of these PPM tools and has the most integrations of any Agile vendor. This week at Agile2011, the trend continues with AgileEVM announcing their integration to Rally and our announcement that next month we will release an integration with CA Clarity.

You can read more of the topic of Agile, PPM and the PMO in recently released reports and white papers such as:

• “PPM and Agile: Realizing the Best of Both Worlds” by Daptiv

• “The PMO In An Agile World: Can’t We All Just Get Along?” by Forrester Research

• “The Yin and Yang of Enterprise Project Portfolio Management and Agile Software Development: Combining Creativity and Governance” by Oracle (available in our booth at Agile 2011)

Popularity: 46% [?]

New Apps Available on January 15th

We continue to expand Rally’s functionality with the addition of several new Apps this weekend. We have seen steady growth in the number of customer-created Apps, likely as a result of Mark Ringer’s App webinar and the expanded help section in the Rally App SDK documentation. If you have created Apps that you want to share with Rally, please submit them here and we will consider them for inclusion in the Rally App Catalog.

Story Map App

A Story Map is used to build a backlog of work based on the activities that users need to perform.  It shows all of the high level activities as themes, and allows you to break these down into the smaller tasks that a user would do as part of each activity.  For example, an auction site might use themes like Create an Auction, Search and Bid. Each of these can be broken down into many smaller actions. You enter the “big-picture activities” as themes which become the backbone of your Story Map. Related activities are entered as children beneath the appropriate theme and can be dragged-and-dropped across themes.

Story Map App

The Story Map App is a great way to interactively build a visual backlog for a project. Thanks to Rally Product Owner, Alex Pukinskis and coaches, Aaron Sanders & Ben Carey for their efforts in creating this easy-to-use App.

Build Traceability App

The Build Traceability App provides a view of Rally artifacts (defects, stories and/or tasks) within a particular build. This App makes it much easier to identify what has changed from one build to the next. Questions like: ‘which defects have been fixed in a build?’ or ‘which stories have been completed?’ are now much easier to answer. This App works with our Subversion, Git or Perforce Source Code Management Connectors as well as our Hudson Plugin.  You can select a build definition and build number from the dropdowns and the table that is generated provides links to the artifact detail page and a link to the changeset in your SCM system. Check out the help for additional details on using this App.

Build Traceability App

Release Summary App

The Release Summary App gives your team an overview of all the stories and defects accepted in a release. Links are included for quick access to the detail pages of the included release, stories and defects. The HTML output of this App can be copied and pasted into emails or Wikis for sharing this information.

Release Summary App

Test Case Pass/Fail History App Updates

The Test Case Pass/Fail History App displays all the test cases associated with a project along with the test case results. It was submitted by a Rally customer who added improvements to our existing App. This App displays the state of each test case for the project and the tester for each test case result.  The Test Case, associated Story and each TestCaseResult include a hyperlink for easy access to more detailed information.

Test Case Pass/Fail History App

Utilization Chart App

The Utilization Chart measures total task hours for an iteration, divided by the estimated capacity for the iteration, resulting in a utilization rating that can be viewed as a percentage. This App was written by a customer and submitted for inclusion to our App Catalog.

Utilization Chart App

The Utilization Chart helps teams zero in on their comfort zone and prevents quality issues that can occur when teams are over-committed. If the team is too far over or under 100% utilization, that information can be used as a cue to make needed improvements to iteration backlog grooming and planning.

Defects by Closer

This App lists defects in a release that have been marked as “Closed” and the person who closed them.

Defects by Closer App

The Defects by Closer App displays all closed defects within the current scope of the project picker (including all child projects). Keep in mind that it will not display a defect that is “closed” but not associated with a release.

Test Plan Page Performance

We’ve made changes to our Test Plan page to significantly improve performance for customers working with large sets of tests. We have also made a minor tweak to the user interface. When the Test Plan page includes more than 500 test cases and folders, you will need to expand folders one at a time.  The “Expand All” control is only available when you have fewer than 500 test cases.

App SDK Enhancements

Two basic components (a button and a link) have been added to the App SDK v1.22 to make it even easier to create rich features using our App infrastructure.

Rally Connector for HP Quality Center now Supports QC Version Control

Quality Center 10 has a new feature that allows Requirements and Tests to be under version control. In the QC user interface, these objects need to be checked out before changes can be made and then checked in after the changes are made. The Rally Connector for Quality Center now supports this method of making changes to QC requirements and tests.

Popularity: 70% [?]

Our 2010.4 Release is going live this Saturday, 9/18^th. If you just can’t wait to see the new features in action, check out this recording of yesterday’s release webinar.

Since we continue to release incremental functionality during our scheduled Saturday morning outages, you are probably familiar with many of the features in this release, but here is a rundown of the brand new features coming out this Saturday.

The Rally Platform

The main focus of the 2010.4 Release was to enhance the Rally Platform to provide greater customization and extensibility for our expanding base of enterprise clients, many with thousands of active users. One of the easiest ways to extend Rally’s functionality is by leveraging an App from our App Catalog. In last week’s blog we announced that we had renamed our Mashup Catalog to the Rally App Catalog to better reflect the functionality and value that most Apps provide.

You will notice that the change from Mashup to App has been reflected throughout the Rally user interface. If you never have added an App, it takes less than 15 seconds -  click the + button on any Rally tab and select the Catalog App option. Scroll through a description of over 35 Apps (along with thumbnail views) and choose the one you want to install, click save – and that’s it – the App is installed!

Adding an App

App SDK with Component Library

We have also updated our App Software Development Kit with a library of pre-built components for adding data-driven dropdowns, pie-charts and tables for building custom Apps. These components are fully tested and greatly simplify the creation of robust and graphically-rich Apps, custom user interfaces and reports. The app SDK also includes the Standard Report component for viewing Rally reports outside of Rally, useful for displaying Rally project data in wikis, corporate dashboards and third-party applications.

SDK Component Library Examples

Build and Source Code Traceability

This Saturday’s release also includes new Build and Source Code objects. These were added to help teams improve source code quality and continuous build integrity by providing enhanced traceability between Build and Source Code systems and Rally project data. Four new reports on the Reports tab provide Build and Source Code metrics to trend the health of continuous build environments and visually see where most defects occur in the code base. We have updated connectors for Hudson, GIT, Perforce and Subversion so that you can begin capturing build and source code metrics – similar to the ones displayed in the sample reports below.

Improved Team Membership Controls

Lastly, we now allow administrators to control Team Membership independently of permissions from the Project Users page.

Improved Team Membership Controls

This new Team Membership option simplifies user administration, and will be most useful for Rally administrators who are managing several hundred to many thousands of Rally users.

That’s everything new in this weekends release – we hope you enjoy using these new capabilities!

Popularity: 60% [?]

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% [?]

We have a blog about Agile, and a blog about Engineering here at Rally, yet we didn’t have a blog about the Rally product.  That ends today.

Welcome to the new Rally Software Product Blog.  As of today, this is the official communication hub for Rally’s products.  If you are interested in staying informed on the latest news about Rally’s products, I’d encourage you to click ’subscribe’ in the upper right corner of the blog.   Here you’ll learn about new features, adjustments to schedules, and even some tips and tricks about using the product.  We hope to do more than simply share the news — we want to share “why”.  Product development at Rally is not unlike product development at your organizations, its a game of trade-offs.  We believe that sharing those trade-offs will lead to enhanced collaboration with our customers and prospects.

What about Agile Commons?
Since it’s launch in 2007, Agile Commons has grown to a thriving community of almost 12,000 members.  Agile Commons is and will continue to be the place to collaborate with Rally and your community of users on Agile and Rally products.  We have added the product blog to increase our level of transparency.  Agile Commons requires membership limiting the audience with whom we can communicate, while this Product Blog is wide open.  Agile Commons is still the place to submit requests for new features and vote on them and will still require membership to participate.

Recently, we’ve heard some feedback about the management of feature requests on Agile Commons. First, our product management organization places tremendous value on the feature requests you have submitted.  We appreciate it, and I promise you that we read every one.  However, the administration and de-duplication of these requests has failed to happen consistently.  This will change.  Over the next few months we are committed to a full-scale clean-up of the feature requests to accurately reflect the status of the requests we have received.

Who moved my Release Commitments?
You may not have noticed, but beginning with the first release of the year, we altered our longstanding tradition of posting Release Commitments.  The Release Commitments page on Agile Commons was renamed “Work In Progress”.  While the naming change may appear subtle, the philosophy behind the change is significant.

We, like all Agile organizations, inspect and adapt to continuously improve.  During the past six months, we’ve performed small experiments releasing features independent of our release time-boxes.  You’ve seen new features delivered over a weekend patch usually reserved for defect fixes.  Generally, these experiments have been successful.  The value to you is getting features delivered in a more timely fashion.  We often complete work in the first or second week of an eight week release, yet it would be held for 6 weeks until it is released.  We can remove this delay enabling us to shorten the feedback loop. You’ll begin to see more from Rally about continuous flow both here and on our Agile Blog.

What does this mean to you the customer?

Our goal is to deliver value continuously without disrupting the 96,000 users we have on the Rally platform.  Here is our communication plan for new features:

• All features in development will be listed on the Work In Progress page.  This page will actively change to reflect the state of development.  Our commitment to you is that we will only post work that’s actually in progress versus work that’s “planned”.
• All incremental features will be released in patches during normal planned outages on Saturday mornings (MT).
• Disruptive features will be batched and released at regular intervals. We will follow 8-week intervals at first for these changes.  We also hope to offer opt-in support for disruptive features as they are rolled out as we did with both the Backlog page and Dashboard
• Two days before the release (Thursdays), features designated for a weekend released will be communicated via an email to all subscription administrators, described here on the Product blog, and listed on the Rally login page.  Our product blog communication will include a screenshot with a description of the feature and may include a link to a document which describes the new feature and provides additional details on its use.
• Following the release, the features will be highlighted as ‘Complete’ on the Work In Progress page for a few weeks.
• We will continue to deliver customer preview webinars at regular intervals to introduce and demonstrate new functionality.

Thank you for support and stay tuned.

Rally’s products are a reflection of the passion and spirit of our user community.  We appreciate all the feedback we receive on a daily basis from our users.  We hope this blog increases the transparency of Rally’s product team and helps facilitate more collaboration with our user community.

Popularity: 53% [?]