Customize Work Item Types in Rally
Because your Rally workspace supports the agile workflow of everyone in your organization,
there’s no doubt you’ll need to make customizations to work item fields and values
in order to accommodate your practices.
It’s important to carefully consider any potential changes before making them -
they’ll have an impact on all the teams in your workspace.
You must be a subscription administrator or a workspace administrator to customize work item types.
Select the Setup icon to move to the administration area of Rally,
then select Workspaces & Projects.
If you have more than one workspace, choose the workspace for the organization you want to administer.
Select the Fields link in the sidebar to access the fields and values for each work item.
Fields for Defects show by default,
but you can use the work item Type dropdown list to choose a different type of work Item.
On the right pane, you’ll notice there are columns that correspond to the fields for the Defect work item.
This view is a high level summary of the attributes for each field.
The gear icon next to the field provides options to view or edit the field attributes.
You will not be able to edit some fields that are required for Rally to operate
in a specific way, for example, Creation Date.
If you view this field you’ll see more information about it, but you will not be allowed to change any of it.
At a glance you can see what kind of data that the field holds,
whether or not it’s a custom field that was added by an administrator,
whether or not the field is required, if it’s visible on child projects,
and if it’s shared across work items.
You may sort your view by some of these attributes.
You’ll also see a button for adding custom fields and another button for
exporting a list of existing custom fields.
We’ll discuss these in more detail later.
Let’s begin by updating an existing work item field.
The Defect work item type has a field named Priority.
This is often used to indicate the impact of the defect on the user,
and there are usually processes in place that dictate the action that teams should take accordingly.
Let’s edit this field which currently contains four values for a dropdown list.
We may want to add numbers to the descriptions to indicate a priority number
as well as the recommended action to take.
First, select the Drop Down value to edit,
then edit it in the Value text box below.
You may also add an option by typing it in the text box above
the list and selecting the Add Value button.
You can change the order in which the values appear in the list by selecting a value and using the green
arrows to move it up or down in the list order.
You may delete a value by selecting it and then selecting the Trash icon next to the Value.
In this example, you can also make this field required, but first,
be sure that all teams in your workspace will want to require this field.
When you require a field it does add extra steps when creating the work item,
so be absolutely certain that requiring this field will add value
for the entire organization.
You’ll see that you can hide this field if your teams don’t use it.
You cannot require a field that is hidden.
Let’s make it visible, but not require it, then save our changes.
Now let’s see how this field appears in Rally to the teams.
You can see that the Priority field shows the changes we just made to the dropdown values.
Now, let’s add a custom field.
Perhaps your organization wants to indicate when user stories will require changes to the customer documentation.
Let’s add a custom field to the User Story work item to track this.
First, let’s go to the work item fields for a User Story.
Select the + New Field button and enter the Name (to be used internally by the system),
then enter the Display Name (that shows as the labels for the
field in Rally - and these can be the same),
and the Type of field it is.
In this case we just want a True/False, Yes/No value,
or Checked/Unchecked value, so we’ll choose Boolean as the Type.
Let’s start by making it visible for all projects in this example.
(Normally we’d check first to identify any teams that do not want to use this field—
again, to avoid adding unnecessary steps when those teams are managing their work items.)
Now we’ll Save & Close and you’ll see that the field has been created for User Stories.
If we edit the field again, you’ll see that there are 205
occurrences of where this field is now available.
If you are a workspace or subscription administrator, you can see a list of where the custom field appears
using the See Occurrences link.
You can also export the usage of this custom field in the workspace by selecting the link.
You can do the same for all custom fields in the workspace by selecting the
Export Workspace Custom Fields (All Types) button at the top right of the pane.
Once we’ve created this field, users with access to it can see it in their pages,
filter on it and report it.
When you add a custom field, you can show the field for some projects and hide it for others.
For fields provided with Rally, you need to decide to show
or hide the field for all projects, not just some.
To hide a custom field from projects that do not need it or do not want to use it,
navigate to the Workspaces & Projects page,
then select the project that you want to focus on.
Edit the field you want to hide.
Then choose NO from the Visible dropdown list.
Save and Close.
If you select a project where the field is hidden, you will see that it is hidden
in the detail editor, and in other places like Show Fields and in filters.
This declutters field options for projects and helps
team members to focus on information that is relevant for them.
Congratulations! Not you understand how to customize work item types in Rally.
To learn more about Rally and agile practices, check out our blog and community.