Product Blog

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% [?]

I am back from our three Agile Portfolio Management launch events, caught up on sleep, still dizzy from the excitement. Dining with Geoffrey Moore (what a personable and genuine individual) after reading his Escape Velocity book was a treat. Every product manager owes it to themselves to read that book. Meeting many of our customers who have been longing for better visibility into development status was sugar on the cake.

After spending several years researching this market, it was a great feeling to launch Rally Portfolio Manager, the first agile portfolio management solution. But seeing your solution align with recommendations provided by industry luminaries – from Geoffrey Moore to Dean Leffingwell to Dave West – made me realize what a game-changing offering Rally Portfolio Manager is for Rally.

I was both nervous and relaxed before our first event in San Mateo, CA on December 6. Nervous about the complex combined live/simulcast event production but relaxed about the product we were about to announce.  The event production went flawlessly, thanks to our phenomenal marketing crew. After an entire a year of disciplined customer development with the Stratus Preview, I knew the product would hit the mark. No nervousness there. The only missing piece was not to have my product owner experience the excitement live with me. As the great product owner she is, she was holding down the fort, busy staying close to the team (and answering simulcast questions!), as any great product owners does and making sure all the final details were taken care of, including help content and videos. Susan exemplifies the quintessential product owner – one who relies on her product manager’s knowledge of market trends and customer needs to define the right features to build, then build those right in direct collaboration with her exceptional development team(s). It takes both a product manager and a product owner (and of course a great development team) to “build the right things right,” so I really missed not having her at the event.

Speaking of missing the events, if you could not attend, browse the Agile Portfolio Management toolkit for the recordings, nicely cut into digestible portions. Make sure to replay the customer experience presentations and panel discussions. Those were priceless at providing real-life experiences to current strategic planning challenges.

Rally Portfolio Manager

For information on Rally Portfolio Manager, in Rally, click the main Help link.

Unlimited Edition customers, if you are ready to experience Rally Portfolio Manager, have your Rally workspace administration contact support. You’ll be asked to first read the Getting Started guide, so here is the link to save you time.

Susan and I will be tuning in to the early Rally Portfolio Manager feedback sent to rpm-usability@rallydev.com then engaging with users on an on-going basis about feature ideas in the new Portfolio Management category in Rally Ideas.

Agile portfolio management is serious business but we had to have some fun launching it. Check out the two adventurers tackle the alignment of business and development trailer.

Happy strategic planning!

Catherine Connor
Product Manager for Rally Portfolio Manager

Popularity: 65% [?]

All good things come to end, right? We think so, and we think that while good things come to end, there is opportunity for new, better things. Pages. We are deprecating our legacy Backlog page and Users page. The updated versions of these pages have been out for awhile as part of our beta program. Less than two percent of our users are accessing the legacy pages.

With the new Backlog page, you can take advantage of the following enhancements:

• In-place edit: Double click on a grid cell to edit
• Customize your columns: Via the Column component
• Bulk-edit values, including Tags and Parent: Select more than one row to see the Bulk-edit gear
• Quickly add a new work item: Via the + Add New component
• Quickly filter and find existing work items: Via the Filter row
• Access common actions: Via the new gear menu

With the new Users page, Administrators can  take advantage of the following enhancements:

• In-place edit: Double click on a grid cell to edit
• Customize your columns: Via the Column component
• Quickly add a new user: Via the + Add New component
• Quickly find existing users: Via the Filter row
• Copy a user: Via the Actions menu

I would like to thank the users that participated in the beta programs and provided valuable feedback.

Thanks,

Steve

Popularity: 55% [?]

While the ground may be freezing at many of the Rally offices, the new features have been heating up over the past few months and now all have been released into orbit, making our 2011.4 release a hot one. As we release incrementally, you have likely seen many of the features already in your subscription.

The last but certainly not least of the features Rally Portfolio Manager, was just made available to Rally customers December 6th, and is included at no additional cost in Unlimited Edition subscriptions. Tuesday, as I was in the office watching and listening to Geoffrey Moore, author of Escape Velocity and Crossing the Chasm, speaking about Agile Portfolio Management at Rally’s live event in Menlo Park, CA; I could not help but be even more proud about this release. While many of my Rally counterparts are physically at the events, the energy around here is contagious. Speakers also included Ryan Martens and Todd Olson from Rally, you can still tune in for the next event, sign up here.

So what is so exciting about Rally Portfolio Manager? Agile Portfolio Management bridges the gap between agile execution and business strategy.

Rally Portfolio Manager helps agile development teams understand the business reasons behind sprint and release-level user stories by connecting development user stories to higher-level portfolio investments. It aggregates development status above the team and user story levels to provide epic, initiative and project status in terms meaningful to those outside development: percent complete, planned start date, projected end date, actual start and completion dates

As a special promotion, all existing Rally Enterprise Edition customers can try Rally Portfolio Manager for free until January 31, 2012! Contact your Rally sales rep or send an email to sales@rallydev.com for details.

We have also added Advanced Security and Administration capabilities, which provides improved security and greater control over user access for Enterprise System administrators. This is achieved through enhanced Single-Sign-On support (SSO) for our On-Demand customers and LDAP Support for On-Premise customers. In addition, we have given system administrators the ability to restrict access to Rally via IP address and to control which file types can be included as attachments.

The 2011.4 release also included an addition to our our ideation solution, Rally Idea Manager. In case you missed the Rally Idea Manager Multisite announcement in October, you can read about it here. Multisite provides Product Managers the ability to engage with end users by product line or by audience (a different site for Partners for example).

Below are additional items that were also included in the 2011.4 Rally Release; which are all included in the Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition:

• New Menu navigation
• Improved Kanban Board: visibility into Task Status, Defect Status and Policies
  
• Ability to copy Custom Views
• Direct URLs to shared Custom Views
• Bulk edit Parent field on the Backlog Page
• Search enhancements: Queries with AND, OR, and ! (not) conditions are now accepted

Resources have been consolidated into one place, greatly improving accessibility and searchability across all Rally help and support:

• Rally Help
• Developer Portal
• Support Knowledge Base

Heat up your lifecycle and launch into orbit with Rally

Feel free to take a deep dive into the details by subscribing to the What’s New. As always, engage and innovate with the Product Team on Rally Ideas.

Popularity: 59% [?]

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% [?]

Have you ever wished that you could distribute URLs from your shared custom views and recipients could navigate directly to your view?

Now, you can do just that. You’ve created a shared custom view to track a key initiative in Rally. You designate a custom view as shared by selecting the Shared View checkbox in the custom view editor, see below.

Scenario

Things are going well. The team is cranking through stories. You’d like an easy way to share this information your stakeholders. It is now easier than ever. Simply copy and send the URL from your shared custom view. Your stakeholders can simply navigate the link to see that things are going well.

Additionally, your stakeholders can bookmark this link to track progress in real time.

Have a great Thanksgiving,

Steve

Popularity: 63% [?]

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% [?]