Key to colors?

[Tomo Lennox]

I coach several Scrum and Kanban teams who all color their stories to help keep track of them, and they all use different meanings for the colors.  It is great for a team to be able to optimize their boards, but the coaches, the leaders and the new team members have trouble understanding the colors.   There should be a place where you could store a key or legend to explain the colors.   Like the exit conditions, it is a shared agreement that needs to be explicit.

[Christian J Maldoff]

Hello Tomo,

 

Thank you for you question. Here is a link that explains how the color algorithm was created and includes the algorithm itself.

 

Roadmap Tracking | CA Agile Central Help  

 

Coloring Algorithm

CA Agile Central uses an algorithm that takes the number of stories, story points (if applicable), current date, dates work is set to Accepted, and Planned start/end date fields into account to generate a colored status indicator. Note that the diagram above does not show work that has been accepted prior to the start date. A light gray color would display for that scenario. 

 

Please let us know if this not the information that you are looking for.

 

Thank you,

 

Christian Maldoff

[Tomo Lennox]

Thank you for replying Christian, but that is really not was I was looking for.   A team can add one of a dozen colors to a cart on a kanban board to help them keep track of different kinds of work. It is really useful, and all the teams I work with use color coding, but they all use the colors for different things.  I want a place where you can store what the colors mean.  for one team, red means in teams a code review.  In another team, it means that the story is at high risk of not being delivered by the deliver_by date.  In a third team, it marks a story taken in after the sprint commitment.   I am looking for a place to store the meaning of the color for each team.

 

- Tomo

[Legacy User]

The simplest way that I can think of to do this is to document the key for each team as simple HTML or rich text on the relevant custom pages or dashboards for the teams. You can always write the HTML to do this but there's a handy Rich Text Editor app in the community repositories on Github at GitHub - RallyCommunity/rich-text-app: Basic HTML app that has a rich text editor in the app settings for quickly creati… that makes this really simple. If you need the hex keys for the standard color palette in Agile Central then you can get it by exporting a Custom List that includes the Display Color column.

 

Hope that helps.

[Tomo Lennox]

Thanks Eric, That does sound like a good solution to my problem.   But it requires some advanced skills, so I still wish there were something in the GUI to make it easy for anyone.  If I write some html to put a key on the screen, I will be giving up some of the precious screen space. (The kanban board loves space.)  Is there a way I could put a toggle on it?  And will it need to be static text, or can I make it so that the team can change it?  We were thinking of using the exit agreement on the last column as the place to store the color legend.  That is accessible to everyone, can be hidden, and requires no programming.

 

Please help me with a "for dummies" question.... I think I can create a table in an html page, and it should be even easier with an html editor  And I know how to paste in html to a custom page, but....  Where do I get the source to the kanban page to modify? 

[Legacy User]

OK, there's kind of a lot to unpack here. First off, if you want to use the Exit Agreement in the last column to store a simple text description of your color key then of course that will work. If you want something more elegant then the link I gave you is for an app that makes a simple WSIWYG editor out of a Custom HTML app. This is all stuff that you can do in the GUI- I'm not a coder and I can do quite a lot more than this with just a little practice. I suggest that you use the links listed below (in the order listed) to get comfortable. It seems like a lot but you can probably get through this in less than an hour and it will give you the fundamentals to do an awful lot of customization and enhancement of the system. 

 

1. Create a custom page and pick a layout that suits you. I personally like two columns with a wide left and narrow right for Kanban board pages. Create Custom Pages | CA Agile Central Help 
2. Add a Kanban Board app in the left column and a Custom HTML app in the right column to your custom page. Customize Your Dashboard | CA Agile Central Help and Custom HTML | CA Agile Central Help 
3. Paste the code from this link into the Settings for the Custom HTML app and save it. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RallyCommunity/rich-text-app/master/deploy/Ugly.txt 
4. Now you have a WSIWYG editor, and you can put a Custom HTML app with this code (or whatever code you can find in other community apps) onto any dashboard or other custom page.

[Tomo Lennox]

Ahh!  Thank you for investing your time in laying out the details for me.  It takes a lot of screen space, but is, otherwise, a very good solution to my problem.  I wish I could slide the bar over to make the legend a bit narrower.