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Rally Office Hours Recap - October 27, 2022

By Michael Lentini posted Nov 01, 2022 02:43 PM

  

Rally Office Hours October 27, 2022 Recap


As a follow-up from our October 27, Rally Office Hours session, we’d like to share some highlights in addition to the questions that were asked, along with their respective answers. 


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!


October 27, Session Recap

Q: QQ - is there a way to copy one field to another (i.e. Refined Estimate to Job Size) for a defined workspace

A: We will need to run a script to fix this issue for you.


Q: What is the road map on the Test Run View wrt improvements and hopefully a good detailed print /snapshot feature

A: This is an enhancement request. You can follow the steps mentioned in this document to post your enhancement request.


Q: QQ In a previous session someone showcased a process to plan using tags and views for planning - i cant find it :)

A: Learning Corner: Capacity Planning: https://videos.software.broadcom.com/watch/aUjQptvizXcr44S3HLiguV?


Q: I want to audit the custom reports and custom pages under the reports tab in our Rally workspace. Is there a way to generate a report with the user who created each custom page, creation date, and last edit date?

A: Unfortunately the custom pages aren't exposed to our APIs and as such we can't provide information on them (who created, when, which projects it's shared with, what apps are on a page etc.).

Please however, open a support case because they should be help you figure out more on the utilization of the apps in the custom page.

Q: We have 8000 something tags in our subscription, we need to clean this up. How do we identify tags unused in bulk and delete them? Thanks

A: This app: https://github.com/RallyTechServices/tag-management can help. It will show you the usages of your tags. Once a tag is unused then you should be able to delete it. You can also always Archive a tag so that users can't use it.


Q: We are using Rally to support SAFe setup. Couple of biggest challenge we have is to use Release for capturing PI. When will Rally have a way to add PI as one of the timeboxes? and why are Features captured under Portfolio items?

A: PI is a Release in Rally today. Rally Engineering is working to allow you to rename a Release object and that will allow you name is at: "PI". Features are our lowest level portfolio items. You can change the hierarchy if you'd like, this is done in the workspace settings under the Portfolio Item Type field. 


Q: Export option for Test Run Page would be great.

A: This will need to be an enhancement request. Please follow the process described in this document to post your request.


Q: For higher level Portfolio Items (Theme, for example), the work won't be completely defined and sized at the story level before starting the portfolio item. Therefore, a Theme reporting green and 80% complete while still in the first PI isn’t an accurate status. It doesn’t reflect actual progress of the Theme. We’re currently trying to get buy-in from executives to use the automated color status of portfolio items within the status reports. They prefer to continue with their waterfall style reporting and add manually controlled status fields to portfolio items. How do we explain to them what these percent done fields represent at those higher levels and how do we report on high level delivery status in an Agile/automated fashion?

A: Re: getting a feel for the progress of a higher level portfolio item - I'm a fan of using Preliminary Estimate up front, but also seeing how that compares to Refined Estimate and to Leaf Story Plan Estimate Total over time. Let's say the Preliminary Estimate is large (200 points), there is no Refined Estimate, and at a  point in time the Leaf Story Plan Estimate Total is small (let's say 30 points). Percent Done by Story Plan Estimate is Accepted Leaf Story Plan Estimate Total/Leaf Story Plan Estimate Total but only represents the work for the large item that we have identified and estimated. In this case there's a very good chance we haven't identified all of the work in the large portfolio item.  Or perhaps we over estimated in the beginning? Or something else? If we compare our Preliminary Estimate to the Leaf Story Plan Estimate Total we can estimate what's left to be defined and delivered for the large portfolio item. 


Q: Hi there! Is there a way to automate emails to send out daily reports to my team of the missing fields in User Stories and Features, i.e. owner, estimate, description, etc.? If it's not currently a capability, can we put in a feature request for it?

A: You can use Work Rules to require specific fields be appropriately set at certain points of the work items flow. However, there isn't a daily or weekly email digest as you ask for. What you can also do is Watch a work item and use these email notifications as reminders. It is our recommendation that Work Rules should be the way to solve this rather than the email notifications.


Q: Suggestions on when to utilize the defect suite function and anything to consider between defects/defect suites. 

A: A defect suite is a group of defects. It is not used by all our customers. It is usually used as a way to organize defects, however, as said, not all customers feel they need it, some feel that the defects associations to user stories is already a good way to organize the defects.  If you do want to use defect suites then you will need to model them according to how you want to find your defects, so if you will mostly look for defects by 'theme' then you may want to classify the defect suites by that - as an example.


Q: like to know how we  how can remove or delete tags which are never been used and there is not associations to any work items.  Github code did not work as we don't have lookbck API as of yet.  any alternative solution? 

A: This app: https://github.com/RallyTechServices/tag-management can help. It will show you the usages of your tags. Once a tag is not being used then you should be able to delete it. You can also always Archive a tag so that users can't use it. One advance to archiving a tag is that you can restore it if you need to.


Q: How can i see epics in ranked order when swimlaned? Is this possible or will it always default to number order?

A: Ranking is always general. There isn't a 'reranking' within a swimlane or based on another filter. This means that the order by which you'll see items displayed based on your filters (including swimlanes) will be based on the global ranking. If you re-rank within a swimlane or another filtered view, then keep in mind that you're re-ranking the item globally and that could lead to problems. For example: lets say you have 10 user stories, and you group them into swimlanes. Lets say that in a given swimlane you have stories that are globally ranked 4, 7 and 9. If you then re-rank the last of them (#9) and move it above the first of them (#4), then you are affecting the global ranking. The result of this will be that #9 will now become the new #4. The older #4 will now be globally #5 and all lower-ranked stories will decrease as well.  The filtered view and swimlanes are meant for views, not for re-ranking.

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