Hi Mitch,
Even though the "Vote" button looks enabled, it doesn't actually fire off a vote until you have selected a story and chosen a size for it. I could always change that.
The main design constraint I have with the app is that there is no way to communicate between moderator and team members in a synchronous way. When the moderator does something, the changes are put into the custom field and then the team members have to reload to get the new set-up. The nearest I could get is to poll the field regularly to find changes, but that might generate a lot of unnecessary network traffic - but then, traffic is usually free! Then I will have the issue on how to deal with all the possible changes that the moderator might make.
When thinking through the useability, I thought the best solution for voting was to allow the team members to go through all the stories on-screen and choose the sizing they thought appropriate for as many stories as they wanted before having to vote on anything. As the discussion progresses, they can modify their size choice without actually voting. When the moderator says: "right, let's vote on US1234", the team click on that story and hit 'Vote'.
You other points are ones that I have considered - some are reasonably easy, others not so. If you add a 'watch' onto my repo, you will get pinged if I get around to adding them. Just firing up my dev environment right now.... ;-)
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 05-14-2020 02:34 PM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
@Nik Antonelli
Backlog grooming went well. Took a few stories for the team to get used to the UI on the tool. One member said she couldn't vote, despite others explaining in detail what to do. Since we are at home at this point, I couldn't look over at her screen to figure out what her issue was.
One team member had some suggestions that I agreed to pass along to you. He thinks a user's voting ability should be disabled until you select a story and a point value. He also suggested that when the moderator selects another story, the votes for the players should reset to disabled. He also thought that the voting cards part of the UI could be made smaller. I really don't have an opinion in that matter since I cannot see that screen.
That brings me to my own issue. As a subscription admin, I could never be able to join a session as a voter. In my own case, that's not an issue, but I can imagine where a delivering team member might also be an admin, and thus unable to be populated in this game. The game will only populate people who are checked off in their profile as being a member of a project. Since subscription admins in Rally have overarching authority, that section of the profile is not enabled. Ideally, I would like to see the ability to ad-hoc add other users to a session. So, it's great that it pre-populates team members, but others should be able to be added it at the discretion of the moderator.
Finally, I would like to see the ability to directly key in a work item ID number to add it to the game. I have situations where conversations in grooming lead to bringing in unexpected work or lead to the creation of new stories on the spot, which need to be pointed. It is too process heavy in a large backlog to then create, identify, re-prioritize in a queue, and reload the game, just to get that voted on in the planning poker page. If the moderator had the ability to type in a story/defect number to import it into the game, that would be great!
Overall, the team was happy with the experience. It was better than using an external tool and getting everyone on that.
Thanks for you efforts!
Original Message:
Sent: 05-14-2020 10:28 AM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Ok, Just figured out that "unscheduled" is null in the query string. Will play with it further. Thanks for quick reply this morning.
Original Message:
Sent: 05-14-2020 10:09 AM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Hi Mitch,
Have you tried (Release.Name = "TBD") ?
https://community.broadcom.com/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=bf9867f6-7e70-4633-b8c7-f23055c40c9d
The 50 limit is only a page size. If you get to resize all 50, then hitting 'reload game' will get you the next 50 unsized stories in the backlog. In talking with a couple of coaches when designing this app, that was the tradeoff. We came to the decision that the backlog should be prioritised and therefore the important stuff is already at the top for the next planning session.
Let me know what sort of alternative scheme would work. I am open to adding options if they make sense.
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
Original Message:
Sent: 05-14-2020 10:00 AM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
@Nik Antonelli, I have a PO that have given the team a list of stories to point today. This team project has multiple releases defined in Rally. When I load the planning poker app it is loading stories from a release that I do not want to look at. I tried configuring the custom app to use a release drop-down but it ignores that. I tried using a config statement of something like this (Release = "TBD") but nothing loads. Is there a syntax I should use for releases in the config statement or any other way you suggest to look at specific stories on the agenda? The app grabbing what it thinks are the top 50 stories isn't working for me with a team that has hundreds of unpointed stories in the backlog. Thanks!
Original Message:
Sent: 05-13-2020 01:21 PM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Just got the latest code. Thanks also for the Stories/Defects check boxes.
Will play with this with my teams tomorrow since I can't see the full experience on my own.
Original Message:
Sent: 05-13-2020 09:49 AM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Unfortunately, that can't be done from the filter. I will have to add a selector for that. I will let you know when I have done it.
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
Original Message:
Sent: 05-13-2020 09:42 AM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Hi @Nik Antonelli, that's great now. The time between the "Team Members Loaded" toaster and the stories coming up is now about 3.5 seconds. Great job at finding that "anomaly" ;-)
I was playing with the filtering in the config, and I can't figure out the syntax if I want to limit the load to only user stories (Type = "User Story" didn't work). I looked in the docs for building queries but don't see that variable. Can you point me in the right direction? Thanks!
Original Message:
Sent: 05-13-2020 05:46 AM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Hi @Mitch Goldman, I found an 'anomaly' in the artifact store config that might be causing an issue. I have uploaded a fix to the repo for it. It seemed to be ignoring the 'limit' of 50 records and fetching everything.
Hopefully you can get time to give it a go.
Thanks in advance.
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
Original Message:
Sent: 05-12-2020 01:00 PM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
The HAR file after it has finished loading is the most relevant. If you can screen-grab the entire timing waterfall diagram, that might be enough to start with. That shouldn't be too big
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
Original Message:
Sent: 05-12-2020 12:53 PM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
@Nik Antonelli I have a HAR file from when the page finished loading. Do you need the HAR file from the load still in progress?
Also, total file size is 48mb. So it's a bit hard to email. I might need to zip across multiple files. First answer the question above before I proceed.
Original Message:
Sent: 05-12-2020 11:05 AM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Hi @Mitch Goldman, would you be able to do me a favour and capture the network accesses whilst reloading the page with the app on in the browser dev tools? It's the waterfall timing chart I am after. If you are using Chrome, then you could just export the log as a har file and email it to me at nik.antonelli@broadcom.com.
I am seeing an odd thing in my system where everything is fetched and then there is an strange long access that gives a 403 error that is not related to my code. I want to see if it is just me or others are seeing the same thing.
Thanks,
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
Original Message:
Sent: 05-11-2020 09:27 AM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
@Nik Antonelli, The "team members loaded" toast message comes up in a couple of seconds, but it takes over a minute for the stories to load. I just ran two tests using different projects; one smaller, the other larger. The load times from the toast message until the stories appeared were 1:08 and 1:09, respectively.
Original Message:
Sent: 05-11-2020 04:31 AM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Mitch, the app is set to only load the first 50 items. It will fetch them based on the priority in your backlog (DragAndDropRank). I added a filter to the config panel so that you can ask it for particular stories, but it shouldn't take more that a second or two to start up for a team member and an extra second or two for the moderator.
Last week, I had two customers mention that apps were running extraordinarily slowly as well as experiencing this myself. It was if the WSAPI access started to transfer data and then just paused mid way through, only to complete some random length of time later.
Can you try it again and let me know if it is still giving the same issue? If so, I will raise it with the support team.
The original idea of the app was that it would only get the top priority, unscheduled, unsized stories........
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
Original Message:
Sent: 05-08-2020 05:47 PM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Could we get a way to choose to add and/or remove members from the poker session? If I want to include someone who is a Rally admin, I don't have the ability to check them off as a team member, so they can't join planning poker. If I want someone to do work on my team that is normally on another team, I would need to make that change in their profile. Find for me in a small organization, but in a large enterprise that might be tough or impossible to get done.
Any way to get the tool to have you give it a list of work item numbers to show, instead of it loading the entire set from the project? The load times are pretty long.
Original Message:
Sent: 05-08-2020 10:07 AM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
That looks better. Thanks. Will report back when I have had a chance to get some people to experiment on it with me.
Original Message:
Sent: 05-08-2020 02:37 AM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
@Mitch Goldman, done. New code in the repo.
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
Original Message:
Sent: 05-07-2020 06:17 PM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
@Nik Antonelli, I have a suggestion. When loading team members, could you have it ignore the users that are disabled?
Original Message:
Sent: 05-07-2020 02:46 PM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
I do get this now on my beautifully plain, white screen.
Original Message:
Sent: 05-07-2020 01:15 PM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Hi @Mitch Goldman
I added an extra flare when the field is not on the project as needed. New code is now in the repo.
If that's what your problem is, then you are not the first! 🙂
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
Original Message:
Sent: 05-07-2020 11:54 AM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
@Nik Antonelli What am I missing here. I created a workspace level custom field for user stories that is a text field named PlanningPokerConfig. I create a custom HTML app and paste in app.html (and later to debug it, app uncompressed) but I only get a blank screen when I load the app. Am I doing something wrong here?
Original Message:
Sent: 05-07-2020 11:24 AM
From: Mitch Goldman
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Playing with this just jumped to the top of my to-do list!
Original Message:
Sent: 05-07-2020 10:34 AM
From: Nik Antonelli
Subject: Planning Poker App for Rally now available.
Hi All,
As a challenge prior to last months Hackathon, I decided to have a go at writing a Planning Poker game. The resulting app is available here:
https://github.com/nikantonelli/Planning-Poker
I have had a couple of people go through it and it seems to be doing a reasonable job. It needs one custom field to be created on the Project artefact type (as described in the web page), so you may need to get an admin to set that up. The README is fairly comprehensive, so give it a thorough read before asking me a question, but, of course, I could have missed something!
The same app is used for both moderator and team member. Get an admin (project or higher) to add it to a page and share it with everyone. Each Project node can have its own moderator, but you do need to set up your team members correctly as these are fetched from the Project node and used to decide who gets to vote.
Le me know your thoughts - good or bad.
Thanks
------------------------------
Nik
Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
------------------------------