We’ve all done it.

How can we not? It’s human nature to customize our world. Cars, burgers, World Peace… you name it, we’ll customize it.

Unsurprisingly, the team here at Rally loves customization. The same way we love foosball, Agile revolutionaries, and finely-crafted home brews. And some of the custom dashboards and pages that have been created around here are quite frankly, ridiculous. And by ridiculous I mean of course, fantastic.

Recently, in coordination with the announcement of the Rally Platform and the app-building frenzy of the RallyON 2012 Hack-a-thon, we made it much, much easier to customize your Rally world. Take a look at the bottom of the sub-menu popup that comes up when you hover over a navigation tab… see that button that says ” + New Page ? ” Hit that thing and see what happens.

Give your new personal page a name, select the layout, and….

Apps!

Rally Apps are pieces of functionality that you can use to personalize your Dashboard and build custom pages in Rally. Apps display data, let you edit data, show graphs, or do just about anything else you can think of.

We have a ton of pre-built apps for you to select from in the App Catalog. We have a bunch of community-built Apps that we’ve looked at and approved for use in the Rally Platform. And best of all, YOU have great ideas on what kind of apps you’d like to see in Rally!

“How can I use this?”

• If you’re a Product Manager, build a page of apps showing your features in a portfolio kanban so you can track delivery status
• If you’re a Project Manager, build a page of apps that show the release status for each of your projects all on one page
• If you’re a Developer, build a page of apps showing your tasks for each project, and toss in a kanban board for your primary project
• If you’re a QA Engineer, build a page of apps showing lists of defects by severity, release status for each project, and some charts showing trends over the last 3 months

Want to build your own App? Join our developer community and dive into the Rally Platform and AppSDK! As our recent Hack-a-thon at RallyON 2012 showed, you can build a great new app that works seamlessly right within Rally – in just a day or two.

The combinations are endless, and the more community-built apps that become available the more you’ll be able to create that perfect set of pages to make your Rally truly “yours.”

Ladies and gentlemen, we have the winners of the RallyON 2012 Hack-a-thon!

All of the customer/Rally engineer pairs put out an incredible set of brand-new Apps based on the Rally Platform – making 15 Apps in just a day and a half! The energy of the Hack-a-thon room was crackling – probably as much from the caffeine-laced root beer as from the spirt of collaboration that each team brought to the Hack-a-thon. As the teams rolled up their sleeves and dove into the AppSDK 2.0, everyone helped each other make the best App they could in the short time frame they had. A couple of the teams couldn’t tear themselves away, and ended up hacking the night away – coding for 30 hours straight!

For the attendees of Rally’s annual RallyON conference, choosing the winner was a hard-fought, knuckle-dragging brawl that resulted in not one, but two first-prize winners. Both first place teams basked in the glow of victory, in the glow of their new iPad and epic RallyON Hack-a-thon trophy.

Winning App #1: The Kanban Time-Machine (Mark and Chris)
This App uses the card board component of the updated App SDK 2.0 and a preview of our new Analytics API. It lets users see what the Kanban Board looked like in the past. Click to a time on the time slider, enter a date directly, or let the slider cycle through the dates by itself and watch the cards animate themselves between the various columns. Sweet.

Winning App #2: Plan Plan Palatable (Andrew and Ken)
The Plan App makes it super-easy to plan iterations and releases by putting a hierarchy of stories within your structure of Portfolio Items on the left side of the screen, and showing your releases and iterations on the right side. Using the tree component of the AppSDK, drag-and-drop stories from your Portfolio Items right into your release. While you’re at it, if you feel like dragging-and-dropping your stories to re-parent between Portfolio Items… go for it.

First Runner Up App: Enhanced Portfolio Item Burn-up Chart (Ben and Justin)
How are your big projects going along? Rally Portfolio Manager gives you great visibility into this question, and this fresh new App makes it super-easy to see a Burn-up chart for a selected Portfolio Item. Using the tree component and the standard reports of the App SDK 2.0, click an item, see the chart. The Portfolio Items are shown in their hierarchy, so finding what you want to see is a snap.

Overall, the Hack-a-thon was a grand success, bringing together Rally customers from a wide variety of industries to work together and build a tremendous variety of Rally Apps. Congratulations to all the Hack-a-thon participants!

Hack-a-lack-a-ding-dong! The RallyOn 2012 Hack-a-thon has begun!

After a couple-hour workshop yesterday on the new Rally App SDK and Analytics API, and a great visit from our new social coding community partner GitHub, the hacks at RallyON 2012 have been unleashed. Lock up your valuables, stock the fridge, and cover your children’s eyes – it time to crack open a fresh new can of innovation.

The day started in classic “a-thon” fashion with plenty of coffee and yawns after a stellar evening of entertainment last night by the Highland Ramblers at the Boulder Theater. Once our eyes came into focus, we reviewed the smattering of “app idea” post-it notes on the white board from yesterday’s workshop and each hacker picked an app to work on.

After the apps had been chosen, Rally Developers paired up with each hacker and the teams were set. The race to glory and bragging rights (and, of course, two new iPads) had begun! Within 10 minutes the group had taken over two rooms at #RallyON2012, set up monitors, connected laptops, and started building apps.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the cool apps being built by our hacking pairs:

“We are building a kanban board time machine. Its already got a snappy title. What you do is specify a date, and the board reflects what the board looked like on that date. We’re using the new Analytics API – we could not have done this app before this API. Now, we can see what cards change both when and where just by sliding a date bar. So far we’re learned a lot – it’s been awesome fun.”
- Chris & Mark

“What we’re trying to do is create a new dashboard that helps plan iterations based on the changing priorities of Portfolio Items. So far it’s going good!”
- Ken & Andrew

“We’re working on an epic user story app that shows a hierarchy of the stories exactly the way we want to visualize it. Then we can generate statistics on work competed, work to do, etc. This will be great for estimating and planning. With the App SDK, we’ve already done in 210 lines of code what took 1,600 lines of code to build from scratch in the past.”
- Phil & Burke

All RallyON 2012 attendees will vote on the completed apps after a conference demo tomorrow, and we will announce the winner of the Hack-a-thon right here in the product blog, on Twitter at #RallyON2012 and our Facebook page.

Stay tuned!

Rally is introducing powerful new capabilities that extend the functionality of our award-winning Agile ALM platform at RallyON 2012. Stay tuned for more news and details in the next two weeks. Today, we’d like to tell you about a key event at RallyON — a customer App Hack-a-thon. This event showcases just how easy it is to access and display your data to customize the Rally Agile ALM platform to meet your needs.

Become part of the Rally developer community

• Do you want to build custom pages, right within Rally, that do exactly what you want them to do?
• Are you excited about working with a social coding community to solve technical problems and collaboratively build, enhance and share open source apps?
• Want to learn about our freshly updated tools and Analytics engine that make building custom pages super easy?

This is the first in a series of blogs that highlight the RallyON 2012 Hack-a-thon. To begin, we will focus on how to use the Rally developer platform to turn your ideas into reality.

Hack-a-thon

The spirit of a Hack-a-thon is to collaboratively build features and applications, with engineers coming together to work in an area of personal interest with little to no restriction around the direction of the programming. Every three months, Rally engineers get eight working days to Hack. From this great work, we have numerous new innovations and features you use every day. To see an example of this, check out our recent blog post announcing Rally’s new Story Splitting feature.

We’re introducing some new platform extension capabilities at RallyON 2012. To demonstrate the range of innovative solutions you can create, we are bringing together a community of developers to hack out some new apps by pair programming with Rally engineers. Training, pizza, energy drinks and beer will be supplied during the Hack-a-Thon, with trophies and a new iPad 3 awarded to each member of the winning team.

Meet the Hackers

Let’s meet some of the Rally engineers who will be pair programming with customers at the Hack-a-thon:

Andrew Andrew has been at Rally for a year as a UI developer working on our new Rally Portfolio Manager product. One of his recent hack-a-thon projects was to prototype support for inline editable detail pages.

Ashly Ashly has been working on the Rally AppSDK and UI components for over a year, focused on interactive design and becoming a Javascript expert. One of her favorite hack-a-thons was a new UI component for advanced filtering that builds out query strings to display Rally data.

Burke Burke is almost an old timer, having coded at Rally for four years. Burke works on our UI infrastructure and component design, and is a wizard with JavaScript. He recently hacked on a prototype for customizable tab sets in Rally.

Kyle Kyle has been at Rally for two years as a UI developer focusing on the Rally AppSDK. Kyle proudly built an add-in for Excel as one of his hack-a-thon projects at Rally.

Mark Mark has been at Rally for a year as an application developer on our new analytics API. Mark’s weapons of choice include Java, Groovy, Javascript, ExtJS and MongoDB. His favorite Rally hack-a-thon was a Rally Mobile App, where he built a prototype of Rally that runs on mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.

Will Will is a certified Rally old-timer, having been with us for 8.5 years. Will’s ‘Skillz that Killz’ include full stack development and testing, UI architecture, Java, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. He once built a prototype of a card based view of the Rally UI during a Hack-a-thon.

Sample ideas for the RallyOn Hack-a-thon

Here is a small sampling of new app ideas some of the Rally Engineers have come up with for the event:

“I’ve been kicking around an idea to build a timeline interface into the detail pages. With the new Analytics API’s we can easily see what a story looked like yesterday, or a year ago! Why not let the user scroll through time to see when it changed and who changed it?”

“An interactive chart showing a sort of cumulative flow for the count of defects of various ages vs priorities over time, with the ability to drill down into specific defects. I will call this a Defect Composition Evolution Chart.”

“I’m interested in exploring new Apps that add or enhance social features, such as better discussions, better notifications, chat, etc.”

“A Kanban board with a timeline slider that allows you to see the state of your kanban board at any point in time, maybe call it a ‘Kanban Time Machine.’”

What are your ideas?

The ideas for new apps are endless, and we’d love to hear yours! They may even be created at the RallyON Hack-a-Thon! Please share your ideas with us, and vote on submitted ideas at Rally Ideas. Click on the category (appropriately-titled:) “Apps.”

Lastly, stay tuned to future blogs when we will share the exciting results from the RallyON Hack-a-thon, and for more information on our soon-to-be announced platform and developer community solutions.

OK, maybe not an Oscar. Wrong Industry. But how does one win an Oscar (aka Academy Award)?

Gaining feedback and voting. The mechanism they use is called choice voting. Choice voting with over 5,000 members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The members are split between different branches. The Cinematography Branch, the Directors Branch, Music branch, Actors Branch, Visual Effects Branch and so on, making up approximately fifteen different branches.

What would happen if the votes only came in from the Actors Branch?

The same concept of attaining many different inputs to decide the Oscar winners applies to software development  as well. We know that listening to only one source, while the input is valid, does not get us the information that we need to build the product. But we also know that building the product is not the goal. Rather, building the right product.

How do you know that you are building the right product?

One answer to that question is by utilizing reporting and analytics within a democratic community to gain a clear picture on what is occurring.

“Better measurements and visualization lead to better insights. Better insights lead to better decisions. Better decisions lead to a better outcome,” says Larry Maccherone, Rally Product Owner. In the case of Rally Idea Manager, the decisions are not nebulous. Rally Idea Manager allows organizations to gain the necessary feedback to make strategic roadmap and product decisions, leading to better solutions for not only your business but your customers as well. While Rally Idea Manager does not feed all of the input on what to build, it is an essential source. And one that Rally uses on a consistent basis with our community, Rally Ideas.

As of today, analyzing the data within Rally Idea Manager has just become nearly effortless and more powerful. For those of you that have been using Rally Idea Manager in your own organization, you know that there has been a dashboard activity charts and an Idea by Status diagram. These capabilities have been improved and enhanced with not only a new look and feel but a more robust set of metrics and charts to examine, customize and drill into.

Enhancements to the Rally Idea Manager Dashboard include:

• Activity Metrics with the ability to customize in several ways to view idea, comment, votes and user activity

Activity Metrics

• Category Distribution for a clear picture on the most and least popular areas of your product

Category Distribution

• Fastest Risers for an at-a-glance look at hottest ideas according to votes
• Average Days Per Status to quickly view the average length of time an idea is in a given status

Understanding what your user-base is requesting based on factual data is a powerful mechanism to leverage and bring back into your organization helping to make well informed strategic decisions.

In addition to the above functionality in the dashboard, there is now the ability to turn on the Dashboard Tab  to end-users instead of only Site Administrators for a broader level of visibility. By default, this option will be turned off. The option to enable the dashboard view to end-users is in the Setup Tab under Site > Components.

Dashboard for End-Users

Like voting for an Oscar winner, visualizing and understanding the needs from your many different stakeholders will lead to better product decisions. And as Larry said, “Better decisions lead to a better outcome.”

Engage with other users and the Rally Product Team in our community, Rally Ideas. We may not always implement the idea that is most important to you- but we hear you and we are doing the best we can to listen to all of our stakeholders and build the right things.

So internalize the metrics, share your insights and win an Oscar

Sometimes, you just don’t get to every story in your iteration. Hey, it happens. But what to do with that pesky story that’s not done? Or, the story that is mostly done but still has 1 task and 2 defects on it?

This is the kind of thing that makes a ScrumMaster sweat and the analytics people stay up at night. Move the story into the next iteration? Close it out and create a new one?

Today in Rally, we’ve redone the way story splitting works. Your feedback and passion around this feature has been tremendous – as our #3 most-promoted idea in Rally Ideas, we’re pleased as punch to share this with you.

So, how does this bad boy work?

Check out this video by Rally Engineer Stephanie T. for an overview and demo of the new feature:

Some highlights include:

• You can split tasks, defects and test cases from one story into two stories
• You have the ability to edit the name, iteration, and plan estimate field for both stories
• A parent is created to ensure a link between the unfinished and continued story
• The continued story shares the same ID as the original story

What else are you looking for when you split stories? Head over to Rally Ideas and help us brainstorm how to make this even better.

Enjoy!

From the various conversations we had with Rally Portfolio Manager early adopters, we know many of you have been longing for a Kanban view of your portfolio. You even told us on Rally Ideas (D1622).

We have been actively working at making that a reality and we did not want you to wait any longer, so a day before April Fool’s, we delivered the first increment of a Portfolio Kanban Board.

Rally Portfolio Kanban

Rally Portfolio Manager users, you may now:

• Define specific Kanban States for each portfolio item type

• View your portfolio items on a Kanban Board

• Prioritize portfolio items from the Kanban Board change portfolio item state by a simple drag-and-drop action on the Board

You can define your portfolio Kanban WIP limits when you define the Kanban state values, but you’ll have to wait just a wee bit longer to view these limits and respective infractions on the actual board. We decided to not delay the delivery of the board any longer so you can start organizing your portfolio items by their state in your idea-to-delivery value stream. It should just be a week or two before you can visualize your WIP limits on the board.

Also, the percent information displays the percentage of stories that have been accepted for that portfolio item. In the near-term, you should have other options on the portfolio item fields to show on the board.

As Johanna Rothman states in her “Manage Your Project Portfolio” book (a great quick read on agile portfolio management), “customers don’t buy or use projects – they buy sets of running, tested features.” Portfolio Kanban is a great technique to help you focus on finishing projects before starting new ones.

Portfolio Kanbans are also incredibly valuable at increasing your development capacity. Why? because the fewer initiatives development works on at the same time, the faster they can deliver those they are working on. If your organization suffers from too much context switching in engineering, you’ll find published data on the cost of multitasking here.

Not familiar with portfolio Kanbans or want to know more about the beast? Read design a portfolio Kanban board, our latest Coaching Corner topic, from our coaching experts.

Questions about the Portfolio Kanban? Read our instructions on how to use the portfolio Kanban Board.

We have a handful of enhancements in mind for this portfolio Kanban board, including listing exit policies above each board column, but we also want to hear from you about this first increment. Please chime in the Rally Ideas Portfolio Management category with your great ideas!

As we mentioned in last week’s blog about our 2012.1 release, since our December 2011 Agile Portfolio Management launch events we have continued to make great progress on Rally Portfolio Manager. We have gathered a ton of feedback from early adopters on what key items you need to take your planning to the next level. Based on your input, we are happy to share with you a key enhancement to the Portfolio Timeline.

You told us that the Timeline needs to allow you to view the portfolio on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly time frame. We heard you, and are happy to announce the release of a “zoom” option on the Portfolio Timeline:

We’ve already seen some great comments in Rally Ideas around Timeline Zoom: “Saw the zoom feature in the portfolio timeline… you nailed it! Thank you!”  We’re excited to share this with you, and think Timeline Zoom will make it even easier to view and share your portfolio timeline across your organization. Any user in your subscription can look at the Portfolio Timeline, select their zoom level, and instantly see what has started, what has completed, what is currently in progress, and when work is expected to complete. If you want to share with a non-Rally user, it’s easy to take a screenshot to share your roadmap via email, embed in your corporate wiki, or distribute however you like.

Have you checked out Rally Dashboards? This is the place to personalize and customize your Rally world. You can also add the Portfolio Item Timeline dashboard panel to any dashboard page. And if you’re a Rally administrator, for example, you can easily add the Timeline panel to a custom dashboard filled with Portfolio-related data, and then share the dashboard to your entire workspace. Keep everyone on the same page with Portfolio Items, Dashboards, and sharing.

Timeline enhancements are perfectly aligned with the primary focus of Rally Portfolio Manager – bringing better visibility into agile development work. More timeline enhancements are in the works, and we want to hear from you in the Portfolio Management category of Rally Ideas.

We are also actively working on step two of your Agile Portfolio Management adoption: limiting the number of projects and initiatives going into development. Stay tuned for the upcoming Portfolio Kanban!

As we try to shake off the chill of winter, the Rally Product Team is excited to bring you some sunshine with the highlights of our 2012.1 Release.

There are three product areas we’d like to talk about today:

• Agile Portfolio Management
• Agile Project Management
• Integrations

In December 2011, we were thrilled to launch Rally Portfolio Manager, the industry’s first Agile Portfolio Management solution to seamlessly integrate the strategic side of your business with execution. We have continued to make great progress in this area, gathering a ton of feedback from early adopters on what key items you need to take your planning to the next level. We clearly heard the need to be able to easily link user stories to portfolio items, which you can now do today from the Page Tools menu of a Portfolio Item.

Rally Portfolio Manager comes with three levels of planning “out of the box”, but remember you are free to create as many levels as you desire. If your organization has five levels of planning, create all five levels! You can also rename all of the levels to match your company environment exactly – with Rally, you are not limited in any way. Finally, for those of you that already have structured hierarchies for your User Stories, you can easily convert your top-level User Stories to Portfolio Items by selecting “Convert to Portfolio Item” from the ‘Actions’ menu of a User Story.

If you haven’t yet gotten started with Rally Portfolio Manager, contact Rally Support to activate it for your subscription.

Agile Project Management

On the Project Management side of the house, we’ve got lots of smokin’ hot improvements to share with you that will make your work faster, more intuitive, and more collaborative.

• Rally in multiple tabs and windows
  Our number one request in Rally Ideas is done! Running Rally in multiple browser tabs has been a long-standing request, and we’re thrilled to bring you the flexibility of working how you want in your favorite browser. Many of our customers tell us that they routinely have 10 or more tabs of Rally open simultaneously, keeping track of things like Portfolio Items, Iteration Status, and Defects, for multiple projects, all in a single browser window. We have even heard of users dedicating one browser to Rally, and setting the browser “home” to be multiple Rally tabs, effectively bringing up their whole Rally world with the simple opening of a browser. Awesome.

• Direct URL for Rally pages
  Related to this, every page in Rally now has its own addressable URL. Take a peek at the address bar in Rally, and if you’re feeling inspired go ahead and copy that thing. Once you have the URL you can do all sort of crazy things: email it to a co-worker, include it in a discussion thread on a user story, link to it within internal chat sites, or post it in your intranet as a list of linkable Portfolio Items. Go nuts with it.

• Share custom dashboards across the workspace
  Rally dashboards are ridiculously powerful. And they practically scream out for personalization. If you are technically-inclined, you can even build panels and dashboards that query Rally web services, fold in custom applications (or Rally catalog applications), and simply display the data you want, where you want it. Subscription and Workspace Administrators can now share dashboard pages, and all users can copy a shared dashboard to their personal workspace for even more personalization. We’ve also seen teams who have built role-based dashboards so that when new people start up in Rally, they can take the standard role dashboard, copy it, and personalize.

  

• Dashboards scoped to Iteration or Release
  This can be a powerful time saver, especially for managers who are living in multiple iterations and releases on a daily basis. With this feature, you can add dashboard panels that adhere to a drop down that contains a list of iterations or releases, making it very simple to refresh your dashboard without touching the dashboard settings.

  

Rally Integrations

We have a bunch of PPM integrations that communicate with Rally. Joining our existing integrations with Primavera, Daptiv, and Planisware, we have a new Rally Integration joining the family as part of this release: CA Clarity. The integration eliminates the duplication of entries for time, resource, project and task, and allows you to report the status of agile projects into CA Clarity.

We also are announcing a new Requirements Management integration with Jama Contour. This integration is an ideal solution for organizations practicing a hybrid approach to managing requirements; Agile development teams work with user stories while product teams review and approve requirements with remote stakeholders. This is especially valuable for organizations that need to formally document requirements to meet regulatory compliance and contractual commitments, common in the medical and government industries.

We also have lots of great features in the oven, and our teams are working hard to deliver enhancements as soon as they are available. One of our core principles is to deliver early and often, gather feedback, and continue to deliver. In that spirit, many of these features you have already seen here in the Product Blog, and within the Rally products. We look forward to bringing you more and more great things as they are finished.

Stay tuned for an incredible 2012!

We’ve been working on our #1 most promoted Idea in Rally Ideas, “Allow multiple Rally screens to be open in different browser tabs simultaneously”. Over the last few months, we’ve been releasing increments of this feature weekly, and we’re excited to say that the final increment of this feature was released Saturday, February 11th. I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but this required a complete overhaul of our front end architecture, and we’re very excited to share the results with you.

The big news is that this new architecture also allowed us to roll out the new menus and dashboard sharing you’ve already seen, and importantly, sets the stage for all sorts of additional cool features we’ll be releasing throughout 2012. For now, let’s talk about what’s in Rally, today:

Short version

• You can copy the link from the browser’s address bar to share your view over email or embed in a web page.
• You can run Rally in multiple browser tabs at once, including different projects on different tabs.

Longer version

• You’ll notice new page titles that provide context when viewing a browser’s tab, bookmark or history.
• Links change as you navigate and include the project scope. You can have tabs open for project A and project B at the same time. For example, you can send a link to project A’s backlog to Karyn and a link to project B’s backlog to Mark.
• Links also contain information from the specific sections of a detail page. You can send a link that will bring Tamara to a view of all the Children associated with a Parent User Story.
• Links contain information about shared custom views. For example, you can send a link to Craig that will bring him to the shared custom view of your choice.
• Links work on pages filtered by Iteration, Release or Program. This effects the following pages specifically: Iteration Status, Release Status, Team Status, Program Status and Work Product Status.

We hope you enjoy this new capability, and are excited to knock off the #1 Idea in Rally Ideas!

But wait, there’s more!

Hot on the heels of releasing the ability to Share Custom Dashboards, we have added the ability for a Dashboard to scoped to a specified time box. This powerful feature lets you set up a Dashboard with time box-scoped panels, allowing you to scroll through Releases and Iterations and see a snapshot of information specific to that release or iteration.

Note that not all panels are time box-enabled. If you have a favorite panel you don’t see in the list, let us know by emailing us at usability@rallydev.com.

This was a lot of work, and our team is thrilled to share it with you.

Enjoy!