Rally Best Practices
Read, discuss, and share best practices for Rally
Introduction
Rally Product Experts have helped over 100 customers transition to Agile and begin using the Rally ALM to track the status of their initiatives. In many of these engagements Rally Product Experts have been asked to provide some general best practice guidelines as well as provide examples of how most teams are successful using Rally. The Best Practices Hive hopes to serve all of those teams who are looking to build their own organization best practices and tool usage guidelines to scale Agile and Rally.
Please feel free to engage in discussions on our posts if you have questions, need more information, or have an alternative recommendation for a Best Practice.
Getting Started as a Rally Administrator
For best results please watch the Rally Subscription Administrator Viewlet before embarking on setting up your subscription.
Step 1 - Add users to Rally
Step 2 - Create your workspace
Step 3 - Create your projects
Create and manage your product backlog
View best practices that can help your Product Owners, BA's, etc. manage their backlog within Rally. Answer questions like "Should we use story points?" and "Where should I list acceptance criteria?"
View all Backlog Management Best Practices
Using Rally to Plan your Releases and Iterations
Transitioning from whiteboards and sticky notes to a tool can be challenging when it comes to planning. See how other Rally customers make this transition using Best Practices like aligning Iterations and Releases across teams.
View all Planning Best Practices
Track the status of your releases and iterations
Having relevant data is extremely important for tracking the status of a release or iteration. But what information in Rally is relevant and how do we know if we are going to make our release and iteration commitments?
View all Tracking Status Best Practices
View all Metrics, Reports, and Charts Best Practices
Inspect and adapt to improve your Agile process
After any release or iteration timebox it is important to organize your team for a retrospective to inspect and adapt your process. Rally can help to provide metrics and other useful information to help your team understand how they can improve for their next commitment.
View all Inspect and Adapt Best Practices
Filter by Best Practice Tag
Administrator
Backlog
Communcation & Collaboration
Configuration Customization
Data Management
Defect Management
Integrations
Performance
Planning
Program Management
Project Management
Reports & Charts
Requirements Management
Resource Management
Scheduling
Status Tracking
Test Management
Usability
User Stories & Tasks
Web Services API
Other
Top 10 (or 11) Essential Rally Best Practices
- Adopt Rally incrementally
- Keep your product backlog current
- Create release and iteration schedules with velocity (resource) estimates
- Update the tool when new information is available
- Customize Rally (fields, views, My Home, web tabs, reports, etc.)
- Create email notifications
- Add short descriptions to blocked tasks
- Actions button -> printing, multi-edit, importing, etc.
- Utilize the WSAPI and Rally Integrations
- Discuss the use of Rally in retrospectives
- Think outside of the tool - remember to use Rally to support (not drive) your process
Rally Knowledge Links
What guidelines should my organization create for consisent tool usage?
As Agile scales throughout your organization you might begin to establish some general principle or guidelines on how your teams should estimate, plan, track, etc. The key is to be minimal with the guidelines your create and revisit them often. Let the team be part of creating the guidelines and if they do not work try something different.
Well the same is true for Rally ALM. As you begin to scale Rally ALM throughout your organization you will want to consider setting some general guidelines so that you get consistent tool usage and good data rolling up to the Program, Division, or Company level. In our Guidelines to Consider section you will find guidelines that our Rally Product Experts find particularly important to consider in creating your own best practices or Rally guide.
