Rally Software is a multi-tenant SaaS platform that enables organizations
to prepare, plan, manage and track work.
With Rally, you can manage work across teams of teams with real-time visibility,
all while staying connected to the company’s most important initiatives, in a single and scalable source of truth.
To get started in Rally, you first have to create your strategy.
Rally has built-in portfolio planning, which means you can create various levels in our Portfolio Items
to plan, break down, and manage your strategic products.
On the Portfolio Items page, you can add as many levels as it makes sense for your organization.
Here we have Strategy, Initiative, Capability, and Feature.
You can name them anything you like to map to your company’s conventions.
Milestones are target dates for events that are important to the business.
A milestone could be a market event, a tradeshow, or a major code deploy.
To add a milestone, navigate to Plan and Timeboxes.
Select Milestones from the drop-down.
Enter a name and date for the milestone.
Select one or multiple projects from the milestone detail page.
To create a workspace-scoped milestone, select All projects in workspace.
Rally allows you to create a hierarchy of projects to represent multiple products,
value streams, or teams, which mirror your company’s development structure.
You can customize your projects by naming them after each team and then identifying team owners.
The great thing about Rally is that all teams across the value stream can live in one workspace,
while operating on different backlogs.
To create a project, go to the Setup button and select Workspaces & Projects.
Expand a workspace and you will see the projects listed within.
Click on Actions and New Project.
To create a Child Project, locate the desired workspace and find the project that you would like to create the child project under.
Click on the “Create Child Project” icon.
A pop-up window will open where you can fill out a name and description.
Subscription and workspace administrators can manage the users and their teams within their Rally subscription,
as well as set up password policies.
To add a user, go to the Setup page, click Users and Add New.
Enter a name in the User Name field and click Add with Details.
On the Create User page, fill out the mandatory User Name and Email Address fields,
and any other fields you wish to complete.
Now, let’s explore some of the Planning features within Rally. Let’s start by creating a capacity plan.
Choose a name for your plan. Click Add Plan and Add Details in the green pop-up bar.
Indicate the start and end release, and the level of portfolio items that you will be working with.
I am going to stick with Feature-level.
Choose the teams that will be executing on the work and indicate how much capacity each team can commit to in this timeframe.
Add portfolio items to this plan.
Prioritize backlog items using the drag and drop capability.
Anything that is brought above the cut line is what the teams will commit to in the specified timebox.
Drag work items to the respective teams.
When you add a work item to a team, its estimate is added to the progress bar.
When the bar exceeds 100%, it will turn red,
indicating you have too much work allocated to a team, given their available capacity.
If a portfolio item is too large for one team to reasonably finish in a release,
you can share, or split it between two or more teams.
Use the Team Planning page to drag and drop work items from the backlog
and schedule them into iterations.
Here you can also add a new user story, defect, test set, or defect suite to your backlog in the same view.
Now let’s discuss the ways you can proactively manage your work in Rally.
The Timeline page shows you how planned work is aligned across an entire release train.
You can also track this work to milestones.
To view work item relationships, navigate to the detail page of a user story or feature, for example.
You’ll see a horizontal ribbon menu across the top of the page.
If there are any dependencies, a number will appear on this button.
Click to see all relationships to the current work item.
You can use Rally to track your risks and associate them to work items.
We created this ROAM board to manage our risks and assign owners to them.
In this example, we customized the flow states to be Resolve, Own, Accept and Mitigate.
Rally not only helps you track your work,
but also provides visibility to others in your organization so they can see how work is progressing.
The Team Board is a flow-based view meant for seeing your team’s work all in one place,
and it’s very easy to set up and start using.
Team members and editors can create, edit, and move cards on the team board,
indicating the flow and progress of work.
You can customize how your board looks by renaming these columns,
also known as flow states, reflecting the process from ideation to delivery.
Here you can add a new user story, defect, test set, or defect suite card to your board.
You can add swimlanes to visualize work items by category or sub-process.
Choose from a number of options that will group cards into respective swimlanes,
based on criteria such as Owner, Iteration, Portfolio Item Parent and more.
Rally connects to your current ecosystem through integrations with third-party tools.
For example, we can show the number of pull requests on a story while viewing the team board.
Track the status of teams and features in a common release from the Release Tracking page.
Select the release you want to track from the drop-down.
You can track the status of work by story points or count of associated stories.
Use the icons in the upper right corner of the page to switch between matrix, chart and dependency views.
On the left side, you can track the status of work that has been planned for the selected release.
Use the Plan Progression page to see which features were added, removed, and completed after a capacity plan is published.
Select a published plan from the dropdown.
The Plan Overview displays the percentage of completed work vs. time elapsed in the release.
The Program Increment Scope Chart shows how a plan is progressing throughout the release.
You can get a visual idea of how the plan changed over time since its original publishing,
which is known as "the baseline".
In addition to using the core pages in Rally,
you can create custom pages to display the data that is most important to you.
For example, we created a Milestone Dashboard that contains the Cumulative Flow Diagram and Burnup apps,
so we can track the progress of our work mapped to a particular milestone.
Custom pages can also be scoped to a release or iteration.
In addition to meeting industry-leading compliance for SaaS platforms,
Rally covers any type of scaling even if you are not practicing SAFe,
and Rally also Integrates with other solutions in the Broadcom portfolio,
such as Clarity PPM,
Continuous Delivery Director
and Agile Requirements Designer.
Through our array of robust features, Rally Software helps organizations prepare, plan, manage and track work,
to connect work and teams to meaningful business outcomes.