January Rally Office Hours Recap
As a follow-up to our January 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 on Thursday, February 25, at 12PM ET for our February Session (add to calendar or view upcoming sessions). We look forward to connecting with you!
January Session Recap
Discussion topic: New Badge Program and Updated Search Experience
Discussion lead by Michele Kubicek, Tonia Sharp and Chris Pola
For this month's update, Michelle and Tonia introduced the new Broadcom Badge Program:
- What is the Badge Program?
- A digital credential indicator of accomplishment, skill, quality or interest that can be earned through multiple learning environments (to be shared soon).
- The badges can be shared across applications such as LinkedIn, Facebook or in email signatures to identify skilled experts with verifiable, timely and portable credentials.
- To learn more or if you are interested in providing feedback please contact Tonia Sharp at tonia.sharp@broadcom.com
We ended the discussion with a quick demonstration of the new search experience coming soon. See this post for additional information on the new search experience.
Questions and Answers:
Responses from Chris Pola, Michele Kubicek and Pam Wilder
- Can you explain the difference between test sets v. test folders. Also how to search for test folders.
- Test sets are a collection of test cases (optionally stored in test folders). Test sets allow you to group and schedule regression tests into iterations or releases. You can work with test sets from the Iteration Status page, Team Board page, Work Views page, or the Release Status page. Learn more here.
- Does Rally have an OKR add-in? If so, where can I find it?
- Currently there is no OKR add-on or custom app for Rally. However, we are working on adding this functionality to the Rally core product and currently have a small group of customers participating in the alpha/prototype phase of development. Once we complete the prototype phase we will move into the beta phase.
- How can we get involved in the prototype of the ORKs?
- We are currently at capacity for participation in the prototype phase. If you are interested in participating in the OKR beta when the time comes please reach out to the Rally Product Team.
- When you were demoing the search updates, I didn't see the test options in work item types. Will that be included?
- The new search update does not include support for any additional work item types that are not currently supported. Please submit feedback through the app once the new search is released to suggest this enhancement. It will help us prioritize in the future.
- Is there a way to cascade a custom view (like in portfolio kanban) to child projects?
- Currently the sharing functionality of a Custom/Saved and Shared View is limited to the following options: Not Shared, Shared with Project, Shared with Workspace. We encourage you to 'Submit a new idea' through the in-app feedback button and provide details for Product Management to review.
- Is there a plan to support ticket creation without having to create a separate Broadcom account? The current process discourages a lot of people from reporting issues.
- Thank you for your feedback on this. We understand your frustration with the current process and will share this feedback with our broader Broadcom leadership team.
- When making a custom query in Rally, how do you grab the iteration that has been selected in the iteration dropdown?
- We discussed that only certain Apps will honor a Timebox dropdown filter on the Custom Page. Custom Pages can be set up with a Timebox filter: None, Iteration, Release and Milestone. When you set up a Custom Page in this manner, then when adding a Custom App, check the checkbox that filters Apps that utilize that page filter (Timebox dropdown). For an App running a Custom Query or other types of reports, if it does not honor the Timebox drop down you will likely have to customize it to do so.
- Can you reduce the FTE factor for vacation time in Insights?
- Rally does not support the ability to reduce the FTE factor in Insights. The concept of FTE in the Insights functionality is not intended to account for capacity but instead for the number of team members. See more in this community post.
- There are few teams that will be managing work at a portfolio level vs. at a team level in Rally. Hence they want to report feature throughput, and the time it takes for features to be completed based on the start and end dates, the progress of a feature based on story points, and changes to a feature (estimate, date changes, and size based on stories being added). Do we have any apps that we can explore to achieve this? Thanks!
- Rally's value proposition is definitely around the ability to track the flow of work at the portfolio and program levels. My general advice is to create a Custom Page and add Apps from the category Portfolio/Program Management. Specifically the Portfolio Item Throughput/Velocity and Cycle Time charts for looking at a program of Feature work. To see a visual history and the flow of work for an individual Feature or higher level Portfolio Item chose the Portfolio Item Cumulative Flow and Portfolio Item Burnup charts. These are fantastic to get an understanding how the backlog of work associated with the Portfolio Item changes over time, and how the work gets completed. You can understand a lot about the 'health' of how work flows through the teams/portfolio via a Cumulative Flow Diagram, we would be happy to dive deeper into that on another call. We explored the use of the Portfolio Item Timeline too on the call, and using the RAG status you can report and analyze on the progress of the feature according to the planned start/end dates, the amount of work still in the teams backlog and how work (User Stories) are actually being planned relative to the planned start/end dates all within the timeline view. The revision history on any work item in Rally will give you a detailed audit of all changes too. There are other Apps that you can explore in the Rally Community GitHub repo or talk to us about more specific Use Cases in the next Office Hours.
Suggest a Topic!
We want to hear from you! Are there any topics you would like to discuss during our opening discussion? If so, comment on this post, and we will take it into consideration for our future sessions.
On Feedback and Feature Requests
We know that there is always a desire to submit Feedback and Feature Requests during these sessions. The best way for our product team to receive feedback and feature requests is through the Feedback button in Rally (via the upper right hand corner of any Rally page).
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Product Marketing Manager
Rally Software
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