Round trip export/iimport

[Ari Davidow]

I am using the Agile Central Excel plug-in to view groups of user stories in Excel. Is it possible to round trip data from Excel back to Rally? What I'd like to do is use Excel when I need to do, say, cleanup, so that I don't need to go User Story by User Story, and can, instead, modify metadata as is needful in Excel in a batch, then import the revised US metadata back to Rally.

This is very easy to do between Excel and Microsoft TFS, but in Jira (to use a different example), importing revised stories creates NEW stories - not what is needed in this use case, at all.

[Stephanie Goodson]

The Excel plug-in imports new data into Rally. Once the items (e.g. user stories, defects, etc.) are present in Rally you can use the Bulk Edit (aka Bulk Actions) to update fields. It may be possible to update user stories via Rally API.  NOTE: Rally API requires developer skills.

[Ari Davidow]

After speaking with our local Rally wizard, it appears to be the case that there is no way to update stories from Excel. In this case, behavior is simlar to what happens in Jira. "Import" will only create new stories (with the changes you have made, but without any metadata that wasn't exported). The better solution in many cases, is to use Rally's own, rather robust tools for editing groups of stories from the list view. It doesn't give you all of the advantages of working in Excel, but eliminates the export, and the need to round trip.