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Rally Office Hours Recap - August 18, 2022

By Michael Lentini posted Sep 01, 2022 10:42 AM

  

Rally Office Hours August 18, 2022 Recap


As a follow-up from our August 18, Rally Office Hours session, we’d like to share some highlights in addition to the questions that were asked, along with their respective answers. 

Rally Learning Corner: Update on Work Rules

Thank you to all who joined us live. We appreciate your feedback and participation in the last session and are looking forward to our next one. If you were not able to attend, there is always an opportunity to ask questions here on the Rally Community discussion board and we'll do our best to answer. 


Join us every Thursday, at 12 PM ET (register for upcoming sessions). We look forward to connecting with you!


August 18, Session Recap

Q: Will you be able to copy Work Rules to child projects. (cascade them)?

A: There is a cascade option for work rules. If you apply it at the time you created the rule then it will apply to all children projects. If not, then you may need to delete and recreate the rule using this option.


Q: When utilizing the Custom List 2.0 app on a dashboard, can it honor the page filter; Iteration vs Release?   I want to show the Iteration Burndown app and a custom list app that identifies the Accepted Stories without making the user switch iterations in the custom list 2.0 app to match the iteration burndown which is managed by the page filter.  How can I do this?

A: Custom List 2.0 does not comply with a custom page timebox filtering. You will need to use Custom List 1.0. In the app's settings page you will see a Query field. You can include any valid WSAPI filter and that will constraint your page results. That Query filter is on top of the filters inside the app which you can use to further constrain your results. So, you can include a filter such as (Iteartion.Name = "My Iteration") to filter for a specific iteration. You can create a more dynamic filter such as: (Iteration.StartDate >= "today-30") , this will filter on all iterations that have started in the last 30 days. You can adjust this Query filter as you need to constrain your results to the context you need them.


Q: Is there any way to look up past suggestions we submitted through the megaphone?

A: You can follow up with our product management team to learn the priority and progress of yours as well as any enhancement requests.


Q: I've inherited a large backlog of items. There are defects, defect suites, user stories, and tasks.

I'm trying to clean it up now and I'm wondering what the recommended way of going through a big list of tickets?

I'm looking at the Backlog view. The challenges I'm encountering are:

  • The user stories don't have priorities so I can't easily filter those.
  • The Defects and Defect Suites have different priority options

I'm also looking to prioritize multiple items at a time either up the list or down the list.

A: There is no one answer to this question. In order to "qualify" your backlog you will want it to eventually be ranked correctly. If your backlog is small enough then you may be able to visit each work item and rank appropriately, but it seems this is not your situation. If your unqualified, unsorted backlog has too many items (hundreds or even thousands) then you will want to define a consistent process until you eventually sort it out entirely. This may take time. The process can be whatever you define but you'll want to agree on that with your team/teams so that they will help you.  You may want to start with a 'broad brush' approach where you look for the items that have the highest priority, but the criteria of how to find those depends on you. You may find them by their association to specific features, you may look for them by their Plan Estimates, you may find them by given tags or specific owners. The point here will be to define a specific criteria and a consistent process until you visited and ranked your items appropriately.  As you go along this process you may need to mark for yourself what you already sorted through and is still left. Also here there is no one way to do that. You can choose to create a tag or a set of tags to mark that, you can choose to use a custom field to mark that (later you can retire that custom field), you can create specific views based on filters. Again, the importance here is that you create this consistent "qualification" process of your backlog AND that your teams are aware of it so they will not undo your work as well as making sure they'll create new items to support your process going forward.


Q: do we have a definition of what is included in this backlog page? I would expect it to only include items that open

A: The Backlog page by default includes all work items that can be scheduled into a timebox (i.e: milestone, release or iteration) and have not been scheduled into any. This includes user stories, defects, defect suites. It does not include Tasks. Tasks are not work items that can be scheduled into a timebox and hence they're not part of this page.  You also have filter options on this page to further filter your backlog, create your own custom views etc.


Q: I've got another question - Does the ready check display for users with view only access on the Iteration Status board?

A: We tested and confirmed that a user with Viewer permission to a project should be able to see the Ready flag. We will engage the customer directly to have them demonstrate this issue.

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