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Recap & Q&A from Rally Office Hours - June 25

  • 1.  Recap & Q&A from Rally Office Hours - June 25

    Posted Jul 02, 2020 06:06 PM
    Edited by Caitlin Lam Jul 02, 2020 06:10 PM

    As a follow-up from our Rally Office Hours session last week, below are the questions that were asked during the session, along with respective answers. We appreciate your patience this past week as our team worked to get all of your great questions answered.

    Thank you to everyone who joined us live. We've appreciated the feedback from our first session and look forward to hosting more sessions in the future. If you were not able to attend, you are always welcome to ask your questions here on the Rally Community discussion board and our team will do our best to assist you here.

    Join us on July 23 at 11AM ET for our July session (Add to Calendar) or view all upcoming sessions. We look forward to connecting with you!

    Questions and Answers
    Responses from Chris Pola, Noel Rodriguez, Michele Kubicek and Caitlin Lam.


    1. Need a way to group my Favorite pages. The titles aren't enough to differentiate them. I want to put them into folders, i.e. Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Release Planning.
      • While we do not offer a folder system to save pages, the best way to save your favorite pages is to "Pin" pages to your Personalized Navigation menu. To "group" those pages, we recommend dragging the pinned items in a list order that works for you. For more info on how to enable and use, please visit the Personalized Navigation page on the Rally TechDocs portal.
    2. Are you planning an integration with Tableau?
      • Although we will not be building a native integration, our API will allow an integration with Tableau. If further assistance is needed on setting this up please reach out to your Rally Sales Engineer (SE).
    3. Formatting on user story discussions tab: enter a lot of formatting and nothing persists.
      • Thank you for bringing this defect to our attention. We have created a support case for this to be addressed.
    4. I'd like to see some automated Release/Iteration creation.  (Create 4 Releases of 8 weeks starting on dd/mm/yy and create 4 Iterations of 2 weeks starting on dd/mm/yy).  Currently this is all manual.  (On-Prem v2.0.1)
      • Here is the out-of-the-box automation we currently provide.  When you create a release time box or an iteration time box, you can select "cascade" and Rally will automatically cascade those time boxes to any child projects. 
        If your desire is to define timeframes and have those created for you, you'd need to accomplish this via a custom app using our API.  
        https://rally1.rallydev.com/docs/en-us/saas/apps/2.1/doc/index.html
    5. Any plans to add more filtering capabilities on the parent picker pop-up window as many of our users linking their work to old items since there's no way to filter them out.
      • Thanks for asking and providing feedback. This is something that would certainly enhance the Rally experience; however, not something that is currently planned. 
        The parent picker should show the newest first, but there may be time when you might want to not show items of a certain state, which is currently not offered.
    6. Is anyone aware of a way to quickly unshare milestones from projects? At times I have to manually unshare 200+ milestones froma project as we regualrly recycle projects when they become unused.  TO clean up the project for the new team, it should not have any shared milestones.
      • I'm going to suggest using the new Project editor on the Milestone page. Have you tried it? It now displays the Projects in their tree hierarchy. This provides the ability to hold down the SHIFT key to select or deselect all Child Projects under a branch. Is this helpful or satisfactory? Alternative might be WSAPI.
    7. Program Increment Scope Change Chart - can we discuss this app, how it works and how to use it effectively?

      • This App became an official part of the product via the Plan Progression page. A published Capacity Plan is a prerequisite for having a Plan Progression report (aka Program Increment Scope Chart) display.

        The Program Increment Scope Change app allows you to baseline what Features were planned in a PI/Release, and automatically track what work (Features) were completed, added/removed, etc. This report provides vital decision support data for scope management, and it very useful data to retrospect with. Understanding how planned Features are executed during a PI/Release is invaluable if you want to improve the next PI/Release preparation and planning activities.

        To read the chart, anything above the line is planned worked that is either completed or removed from the plan, and anything below the line is added to the PI/Release timebox after the fact.

    8. I would love to see the newer filters (multi-select) on all pages/apps.
      • This functionality is already on our roadmap and will be released iteratively.  Please stay tuned through the Community to see what's new or what's coming.
    9. What's the plan to update On-Prem to "catch-up".  When's the next expected release of On-Prem.  Currently on v2.0.1  
      • We will be releasing a version on Rally On-Prem that will contain the new UI work, we well as, some security vulnerability fixes. We are anticipating this On-Prem release (2.1) to be ready by the end of August.
    10. Is there a way to mark a User Story obsolete/not needed while preserving the history on that? without deleting it?
      • While there isn't a button to Archive a User Story or mark it as Obsolete, you can Add a New Flow State to the end of your Team Board (Click the grey gear icon in the upper right corner of your screen) and add a Flow State called "Archived". You may configure this Flow State to display the cards infinitely or have them hidden from the Team Board view after X number of days. This way, you can preserve selected User Stories without having to delete them from the system.
    11. It would be great if the cycle time and throughput reports could be switched between weeks and months without needing to mount them.
      • Yes, this is something that Product Management is actively researching and we would certainly like to get your input on this as we move to defining this work for development. 
    12. Is there a better way to manage custom fields in Rally other than using the admin page?  We would love to know where fields exist and who's using them.
      • Here are two suggested Apps for using Custom Fields. They help manage different aspects of Custom Fields. You may tried these Apps or hopefully have not and they provide value. 

        My Custom Fields: https://github.com/RallyCommunity/my-custom-fields

        Allowed Values Audit: https://github.com/RallyTechServices/allowed-values-audit

        I'm looking at other ways to manage Custom Fields at the Workspace level. Plus, I'm adding this tip just for other readers; always limit Custom Fields from the get-go. Note: you can start to Hide the Custom fields or restrict where they are visible (Workspace or Project/Org level). This will be to help phase them out.

    13. Do you support Rally integration with Miro?
    14. I would like to see Points aggregation in Work Views (and also other quantitatives in any work items)
      • Thanks for the feedback and will talk to PM about point aggregation on the Work Views. We'd be interested in understanding from you what other quantitative items would be useful.
    15. I am interested in understanding custom field usage
    16. Is there a timeline on when the Rally webhooks will move from beta to Prod?
      • This is something that we have listed on our Product backlog to move forward. More to come as those discussions happen and we're able to prioritize the work. 
    17. Are there any plans to add filtering to the new Timeline (I think Timeline is currently in beta)?
      • We are currently planning on moving forward with additional development work for the new Timeline in the upcoming PI. More to come on what that all entails as soon as we get through planning!
    18. There is a graphic to see lead/cycle time in a portfolio level? 
      • Have you looked at the Cycle Time or Cycle/Lead Time charts in the App Catalog? Examples include:

        Cycle Time App

        Cycle Time Data

        Cycle Time Chart

        Cycle/Lead Time

        PI Cycle Time Chart

        Also, if looking at the team level, and you have a Kanban team, there are many things in the pipe for cycle-time reporting. We believe cycle-time is a key indicator of team/organizational health. It is not a proxy variable like points or velocity are. There is a lot of enhancements coming to the Cycle Time reports both on Team Board and more.

    19. In the advanced CFD, is there a plan to include checkboxes to include/exclude projects? Also is there a plan to include an Ideal line?
      • Yes, but in the current CFD we don't do that because the team board doesn't see child and parent projects. So it will do that as soon as we develop the CFD in another area of the app. 
    20. We would like to see "Fixed Date" being reportable (today Creation date, opened date, closed date are available)
      • This may be an enhancement request or it may require further clarification. Is the ask for a query to be on a custom date/time field, or a milestone (Object)? May you please provide the Use Case and details on the object this question relates to?
    21. The analytics system seems to be stuck way, way in the past. Will there be any investment to improve the ability to create visual controls with targets and warnings when things are outside of control?
      • We are making a strong investment into Analytics with a whole new platform, and will be iteratively releasing new charts and reporting.
    22. Can you bring back the ability to export into PDF? Since the February Release our users are requesting that the functionality be returned.
      • At this time we are not planning on bringing back export to PDF.


    On Feedback and Feature Requests

    We wanted to thank all of you who submitted the following feedback and requests during our session. At this time, we do not have foreseeable plans on implementing these features in Rally, however we have relayed them to our team as feedback on your behalf. Please note that while we enjoy receiving new feature requests, we encourage you to submit them as Feedback (via the upper right corner of the Rally page).

    Submit feedback
    1. Any plans to update the Team Status board so it's accurate in real-time?
    2. It would be great to make similar UI enhancements to the Rally apps.
    3. Can you expose the Flow State, so we can include it in reports and analysis?
    4. I would like to see more reporting based on LookBack API such as tracking user stories which move from sprint to sprint
    5. I would like to see the following pages be exportable into CSV/Excel
    6. With the shift to more and more folks working from home, are there any talks of an integration with MS Teams (connector)?
    7. It'd be great to have a way to query the revision history to see the state of an artifact as it existed on a certain date
    8. I would love the system to display a warning message that a portfolio item has been marked with State of Done so that team members don't add child items to closed portfolio item. 
    9. Would love to be able to copy a release/iteration/milestone to a new project.
    10. Your Help does a search of all Broadcom products. For example, when I search for "burndown chart" the results are (in this order) - 1. Chassis control reference chart 2. Cumulative Flow 3. PDF [Encrypted Traffic Management Comparison Chart 4 Etc.   None of those results are related to burndown charts.
    11. I would love the system to display a warning message that a portfolio item has been marked with State of Done so that team members don't add child items to closed portfolio item. 
    12. Any discussion to date about allowing programs or teams to have localized WIP limits and exit agreements on the Portfolio Kanban? Not localized flows.
    13. Requested to show anomalies on parent portfolio planned end date while a child's planned end date is greater than the parent.
    14. I would like to see the Test Case Pass/Fail History re-written with current SDK. The existing report is written based upon SDK 1.0. 
    15. Is there a plan to include Multi value drop down fields and milestones in Excel plugins?
    16. Is there a plan to allow editing of work items through excel plugins?


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    Product Marketing
    Broadcom
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