Product Blog

Rally is introducing powerful new capabilities that extend the functionality of our award-winning Agile ALM platform at RallyON 2012. Stay tuned for more news and details in the next two weeks. Today, we’d like to tell you about a key event at RallyON — a customer App Hack-a-thon. This event showcases just how easy it is to access and display your data to customize the Rally Agile ALM platform to meet your needs.

Become part of the Rally developer community

• Do you want to build custom pages, right within Rally, that do exactly what you want them to do?
• Are you excited about working with a social coding community to solve technical problems and collaboratively build, enhance and share open source apps?
• Want to learn about our freshly updated tools and Analytics engine that make building custom pages super easy?

This is the first in a series of blogs that highlight the RallyON 2012 Hack-a-thon. To begin, we will focus on how to use the Rally developer platform to turn your ideas into reality.

Hack-a-thon

The spirit of a Hack-a-thon is to collaboratively build features and applications, with engineers coming together to work in an area of personal interest with little to no restriction around the direction of the programming. Every three months, Rally engineers get eight working days to Hack. From this great work, we have numerous new innovations and features you use every day. To see an example of this, check out our recent blog post announcing Rally’s new Story Splitting feature.

We’re introducing some new platform extension capabilities at RallyON 2012. To demonstrate the range of innovative solutions you can create, we are bringing together a community of developers to hack out some new apps by pair programming with Rally engineers. Training, pizza, energy drinks and beer will be supplied during the Hack-a-Thon, with trophies and a new iPad 3 awarded to each member of the winning team.

Meet the Hackers

Let’s meet some of the Rally engineers who will be pair programming with customers at the Hack-a-thon:

Andrew Andrew has been at Rally for a year as a UI developer working on our new Rally Portfolio Manager product. One of his recent hack-a-thon projects was to prototype support for inline editable detail pages.

Ashly Ashly has been working on the Rally AppSDK and UI components for over a year, focused on interactive design and becoming a Javascript expert. One of her favorite hack-a-thons was a new UI component for advanced filtering that builds out query strings to display Rally data.

Burke Burke is almost an old timer, having coded at Rally for four years. Burke works on our UI infrastructure and component design, and is a wizard with JavaScript. He recently hacked on a prototype for customizable tab sets in Rally.

Kyle Kyle has been at Rally for two years as a UI developer focusing on the Rally AppSDK. Kyle proudly built an add-in for Excel as one of his hack-a-thon projects at Rally.

Mark Mark has been at Rally for a year as an application developer on our new analytics API. Mark’s weapons of choice include Java, Groovy, Javascript, ExtJS and MongoDB. His favorite Rally hack-a-thon was a Rally Mobile App, where he built a prototype of Rally that runs on mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.

Will Will is a certified Rally old-timer, having been with us for 8.5 years. Will’s ‘Skillz that Killz’ include full stack development and testing, UI architecture, Java, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. He once built a prototype of a card based view of the Rally UI during a Hack-a-thon.

Sample ideas for the RallyOn Hack-a-thon

Here is a small sampling of new app ideas some of the Rally Engineers have come up with for the event:

“I’ve been kicking around an idea to build a timeline interface into the detail pages. With the new Analytics API’s we can easily see what a story looked like yesterday, or a year ago! Why not let the user scroll through time to see when it changed and who changed it?”

“An interactive chart showing a sort of cumulative flow for the count of defects of various ages vs priorities over time, with the ability to drill down into specific defects. I will call this a Defect Composition Evolution Chart.”

“I’m interested in exploring new Apps that add or enhance social features, such as better discussions, better notifications, chat, etc.”

“A Kanban board with a timeline slider that allows you to see the state of your kanban board at any point in time, maybe call it a ‘Kanban Time Machine.’”

What are your ideas?

The ideas for new apps are endless, and we’d love to hear yours! They may even be created at the RallyON Hack-a-Thon! Please share your ideas with us, and vote on submitted ideas at Rally Ideas. Click on the category (appropriately-titled:) “Apps.”

Lastly, stay tuned to future blogs when we will share the exciting results from the RallyON Hack-a-thon, and for more information on our soon-to-be announced platform and developer community solutions.

Popularity: 29% [?]

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% [?]

Are you hearing what your users have to say? Do your users even have a way to voice their input? This is a case of: “If you build it, they will come.”

In the era of LinkedIn and Facebook, product managers seem to miss out on the value of crowd-sourcing in staying connected with their users. Idea sites, like Rally Idea Manager, provide a social conduit for users to converse with product managers and among themselves about product ideas (think “conversations over contract negotiation!” in the Agile manifesto). Reciprocally, these sites create a feedback loop to submitters of ideas, keeping users informed of the evolution of their ideas. Idea votes are also an underestimated value to creating quantitative business cases.

Rally Idea Manager Multisite:

This week, we are expanding our Rally Idea Manager offering to provide you with more than one social site to engage with users. Up until today, product managers using Rally Idea Manager to collect a continuous flow of user input could organize ideas into categories in a single site. If you are a large organization with very diverse products, it makes sense to have a fully dedicated idea site for each product.

With Rally Idea Manager Multisite, you can setup individual sites to manage ideas by product or by input source for a product (for example: strategic customers, partners, vertical markets, geography, etc.)

The sites all integrate with Rally, so from an Enterprise view, your development work can link to all sources of ideas with each source being tracked in a separate site.

Usage Tips for Existing Users:

If you already got your feet wet with Rally Idea Manager, here are some tips to leverage more of Rally Idea Manager:

• To spell check idea description, use the new spell checker option in the idea description field. You asked for it on Rally Ideas, we delivered!

Spell Check

• To show the most voted features for an idea category, select the Category from the Categories panel on the right, then click the Most Promoted tab.
• Vice-versa, to show the ideas expected to be delivered soon for a specific idea category, select a status from the Statuses panel on the right, then click the status-specific tab (your administrator can enable status-specific tabs from Setup > Ideas > Idea Tabs)

Most Promoted

• To embed a graphic in an idea submission, attach a PNG or JPEG file type and the graphic will show in place in the idea description. Other formats (GIF, TIFF, etc..) are simply attached to the idea post.
• To track the progress of ideas from one state to another, download the all ideas report and filter by “Days in status”
• To report on ideas a specific customer is interested in, download the “idea by interest report” and filter by the specific customer name (see steps here).

Idea by Interest Report

Need a Booster to Get Started?

If you have not already adopted Rally Idea Manager (which comes included in your Rally Unlimited Edition) and are tempted but wonder where you’ll find the time to get your site up and running, do yourself a favor (you deserve it consider the Rally Idea Manager workshop. In a 2 day hands-on session, we will fill you in on all the best practices to leverage your site (we have been using ours – Rally Ideas for over a year) and you will leave with your site ready and some best practice techniques.

For those of you in the Denver area, come hear about Rally Idea Manager at Product Camp Denver on Oct 29!

Catherine Connor

Popularity: 47% [?]

Rally’s 2011.2 release will be available to all subscription customers this Saturday, April 30th. Here is a link to the webinar recording that reviews all the features included in this release. Since many of the features described in the webinar have been released incrementally over the last 8 weeks, this post will only discuss the features that are new this weekend.

New Kanban Board available this Saturday, 4/30

One of the most popular Apps in Rally is our Kanban board. Rally’s Kanban board provides a simple way to visualize the status and flow of work through a software project. This weekend we are releasing a powerful Enterprise Kanban board with an improved user-interface, greater flexibility and advanced reporting capabilities.

The updated Kanban board includes all the standard capabilities you expect in an electronic Kanban board, including: customizable WIP limits with color-coded status indicators, drag and drop ranking/state changes, display stories and/or defects, ready to pull/blocked icons that can be edited in place, etc.

Additionally, you can customize the Kanban board for each project, choose which Kanban states you wish to display on a per-project basis and can create custom WIP (Work-in-Progress) limits for each Kanban state by project. And, most importantly, you can map these states to Rally’s standard states – which is where the true flexibility of our Kanban board becomes apparent.

Kanban Configuration Screen

You can now view status and progress across multiple projects/teams – whether you are using Scrum, Kanban, or a custom hybrid approach that you have created for your team. Because you have the ability to easily map your Kanban states to Rally’s default states, you can aggregate and roll-up data across teams using different methodologies – and the results still make sense. Of course, our project scoping control works as it always has, so you can view a single project or scope to any level you want – and the data automatically rolls-up – just as you expect it to.

Kanban Scoped at Different Project Levels

Support for Hybrid/Mixed Methodologies

But, wait – there’s more! We have added both Cycle/Lead Time and Throughput reports so you can gain valuable insight into how many work items were completed in a given time period or the average time that it takes a work item to pass from one state to another.

Throughput Report

Cycle/Lead Time Report

And finally, you can run the the Cycle/Lead Time and Throughput reports across all of your Rally projects, regardless of whether your teams are using Kanban, Scrum, or a custom methodology. The new Kanban Board can be installed by clicking the + icon on the Rally menu and then choosing the Kanban Board from the App Catalog. And, for those of you who have been using our current Kanban App, here are instructions on how to convert them to the new Kanban board.

Correction regarding yesterday’s webinar

During yesterday’s 2011.2 Release Webinar, I mentioned an upcoming addition to the Web Services API for a Workspace/Project scoping object. First of all, that change is NOT shipping in the 2011.2 release. And, when introducing this feature I stated that in the past some query results were not constrained by user permissions. This was 100% incorrect. All WSAPI queries have always been, and will continue to be, constrained by user permissions. I apologize for any confusion this statement may have caused. FYI – we chose to re-record the 2011.2 Release Webinar without this error, so the webinar recording link at the top of this post is accurate.

Cheers,

Greg

Popularity: 100% [?]

2011.2 Release Webinar: Wednesday April 27th at noon ET, 9:00 AM PT

Join us for the 2011.2 Release Webinar next Wednesday where we will review the new capabilities in this release. Our Product Group will also be available for a Q & A session. Register here for the webinar.

Improved Transparency

Just as we continuously inspect and adapt to improve our development process, we do the same with our customer communications. We fix defects in almost every weekly release, yet we have received feedback that it can be difficult to find out which defects have been fixed and when they were completed (unless you had submitted a Support Case against that defect.) Not anymore.  We recently made the decision to list defect fixes each week along with our new feature descriptions.

Rally "This is New" page

You can view all new features and a list of defects for every weekly release by clicking on the Learn More link from the Rally Login screen.

"Learn More" link on Rally Login Page

This links to our “This is New” page, which is the most complete source of record for updates to Rally SaaS customers.

New capabilities available this weekend

This Saturday, April 23, we are adding several enhancements to Rally.

First is an update to Rally’s Build Status Indicator, which is located on the upper right of most Rally pages and provides status on the results of your continuous builds. We have added a Show/Hide button which lets you control which Builds you wish to monitor.

Select which Builds to Display

Finally, we have updated the Rich Text Editor to support re-sizing of fonts and the optional removal of text formatting when text is pasted into detailed Description fields. As mentioned above, additional details on this weekend’s new features are available on the “This is New” page.

That’s all for this weekend – hope to see you at the the 2011.2 Release Webinar next Wednesday!

Cheers,

Greg

Popularity: 54% [?]

Planned vs Actual Release Burndown App

Burndown charts are one of the most popular ways to gain visibility into a software project’s status. While the concept is quite simple – display the work remaining within an iteration (sprint) or a release – it is an extremely powerful tool. Everyone can see the team’s progress and quickly determine if they are on track to meet their release commitments.

Planned vs Actual Release Burndown App

We have received many customer requests to plot the Planned versus Actual Burndown trends on the same chart – so we created one. Select the Release that interests you in the dropdown at the upper left and the App immediately refreshes. We have also included a Summary Table that displays additional details on the Burndown data.

Release Dependency App

Larger organizations with multiple teams are often dependent upon work being completed by other projects or teams before they can begin their work. This App provides a convenient way to track dependencies across multiple teams within a selected release.

Release Dependency App

Select the release of interest from the dropdown and the App displays dependent user stories, their status and the teams/projects responsible for those stories. The dependent stories are displayed in the central column, flanked by predecessor stories on the left and successor stories on the right. Clicking on the story ID’s allows you to drill down to view details of each story.

Connectors: Enterprise Integration Framework Updated

All of our Enterprise Integration Framework (EIF) Connectors are being updated to allow more flexibility in specifying which work items to synchronize. Currently, you can only specify a single selection criteria when choosing which work items to synchronize. For example: ‘State = Open’. In the next release of our Quality Center, Clear Quest, Bugzilla, JIRA and TFS work item connectors, you will be able to specify multiple criteria. For example ‘State = Open and Priority = High’. In fact, any number of selection criteria can be added together; giving you far greater control over how you implement your EIF-based synchronizations.

Popularity: 54% [?]

For all the auditory learners

If you’d prefer to hear about this release rather than read about it, I’d encourage you to listen to the recording of our customer preview webinar we conducted last Tuesday, May 11. For those who did attend, we again apologize for the audio difficulties we had at the beginning.

Different kind of release

This is a different kind of release. Over the past 8 weeks, we’ve delivered 6 features — almost 1 per week. On average, you received new features 38% faster than our typical rate of delivery. This means that the 2010.3 release is likely less newsworthy for you since you hopefully have been using many of the features that were included as part of the release. Even so, we do have a few more new features we’d like to introduce that will be available this Saturday, 5/15.

Tags are cool and getting cooler

We introduced tags in late 2009, and the goal of tags was 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.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback since the release of tags and wanted to start evolving this powerful feature. We now have added the ability to inline edit tags on the Backlog page. Simply double-click in the Tag column, and you can select or deselect the appropriate tags.

Here’s the kicker: this feature is also available on any of the grid-based dashboard panels including My Tasks, My Defects, etc. This is the huge value of the new page framework we began rolling out last year.

Notable defect fix

We fix several defects per week which are included in our weekly releases, and we don’t feel the need to blog about them. This Saturday, we’re fixing a long-standing defect that may be of particular interest. If the size of the revision history became too large, it was replaced with a less than useful message “DESCRIPTION Changed from [value too long to display] to [value to long to display].” After Saturday, we’ll be using a differencing algorithm to ensure that a more useful message is displayed.

Timesheet reports continue to improve

Reporting is a key focus of our time tracking solution, and we’re continuing to invest in this area. We will be delivering a beta test of aggregating by Top-Level stories. For those companies who use Rally’s story hierarchies to represent features or products, you can measure the total time logged against these  initiatives. For more information see this post on AgileCommons.

Enjoy, and as always keep an eye on the Work In Progress page to get a sense of what’s coming next.

Popularity: 52% [?]

Six weeks ago we introduced the Rally Product Blog. In our first post we described our experiments with releasing features as they became available – rather than batching them up and releasing them at the end of an 8-week release cycle. Our goal was to provide more value (new capabilities) to our customers as rapidly as possible. These experiments have been well received, and as a result Rally users have been able to take advantage of several new capabilities 4 to 6 weeks earlier than previously possible.

In that first blog we also promised to continue presenting release webinars at regular intervals to introduce and demonstrate new functionality. Our 2010.3 release will be available soon, and to prepare for it we invite you to register for the 2010.3 release webinar on May 11. We will be reviewing all of the features that have been released over the past few weeks as well as several new ones that are forthcoming.  All of the Rally Product Owners will be present to answer any questions you have about the upcoming release.

Copy Iterations/Releases to Child Projects

In the meantime, the new features keep coming. This Saturday (May 8th), whenever you create a new child project, you will have the option to copy all of the current and future iterations from a parent project to a child project.  This will be a huge time saver for organizations that have mapped out all of their iterations and releases far into the future and then decide they need to add a new child project. To learn more about this feature, take a look at our What’s New support page. And, as always, you can review our Work in Progress page on Agile Commons to see what features are currently under development.

Popularity: 45% [?]

In the 2010.2 release we debuted the new Users grid accessible via the Project Details page, and you’ve incrementally seen improvements to this page over the past few weeks. We’re really excited to announce the latest new feature in Rally – Copy User Permissions.

This Saturday (5/1), you will find a new button to copy user permissions from another project to the currently selected project. Let’s say for example you create a new project that’s a child project of an existing one. Very often you want all the users in the parent project to have access to the new child project — now this can be done with the click of a button. User permissions can be copied from any project, so you can easily establish a project as a template to quickly set-up new projects.

Popularity: 47% [?]

4/17/2010 Release:  Auto-suggest in Project Users page

We are continuing our work on enhancing Rally’s administration capabilities. During our scheduled maintenance outage for this Saturday morning (4/17th) we are updating the auto-suggest capabilities when granting users access to projects.

When administrators search for existing users in the Project Users page, the auto-suggest menu will intelligently process searches that include both the first and last name of an existing user.  For example, entering “Mike Jones”, “M Jones”, or “Mike J” will all return a user with the name “Mike Jones.” This makes it much easier to find the person you are searching for when working with a large number of users.

You can read about upcoming features currently under development on our Work in Progress page on Agile Commons.

Popularity: 50% [?]