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How to group or tag work products within Rally.
<updated 8/26/09 to include removing tags>
With the 2009.3 release, Rally is introducing tagging as a way to group or identify collections of work products.
On the edit page of defects, defect suites, test cases and user stories you'll see a new "Tags" field located directly beneath the Name.
The drop down box next to this field will allow you to create new tags on-the-fly or use the case-insensitive search to locate an existing tag and the check boxes will allow you to add or remove existing tags from your work product.
These tags will be visible in custom views and allow you to filter for specific tags and will also be searchable through the normal Search page within Rally.
A couple of items to note:
- This first iteration does not include the ability to delete tags. You can remove tags from the work product, but not from the list itself. As of 2009.4 after a tag has been removed from all work products it will now be removed from the list of available tags.
- Because tags are case-insensitive, you will not be able to create duplicate tags. (Example: Regression and regression)
- Only letters and numbers are accepted characters. (We are considering the inclusion of dots and dashes for future implementation.)
- Like custom fields, tags are Workspace specific and unlike custom fields, tags are not work product specific. A single tag exists within the workspace it was created in but can be used across defects, defect suites, stories and test cases.
We're very interested in customer feedback on this new feature. Please see the original feature request for Tagging and feel free to create additional requests for added functionality as well!
Comments
This is an excellent feature, but I think "private" tagging mentioned in the release webinar is even more useful. This would allow users to tag any work item they wish and create notification rules to receive automatic status changes. It would be an easy way for departments to delegate work when changing ownership is not practical or allowed. Unfortunately, trying to use public tagging for this in an organization with 100+ projects in Rally and 250+ users is impractical. It may be too complex, but I feel a "scope" for each tag would be useful, such as (Workspace|Project|Private). Again, when a large organization uses any feature and it's scope is the entire workspace, it quickly becomes unmanageable with too many uncoordinated and duplicate entries.
Also, adding the "delete tag" enhancement is very important. I am reluctant to experiment with tagging, knowing that I have no way to remove the tag. I would suggest restricting the delete to the "owner" (creator) of the tag or a Rally Admin.
I don't like the limitations on the Notification Rules filter for 'Tags'. It only allows 'Tags changed' as a condition, which I'm not even sure I would ever use. I wanted to use a condition to notify me when Stories with a certain Tag are 'Completed'. I don't know why the Notification Rules do not support the same conditionals as Views?
Ken, I agree with you wholeheartedly and I'm sure others do as well! Please post these topics in the Feature Request hive so we can get some visibility on how important these functions are for our community to help with prioritizing our backlog.
I was thrilled to hear about the implementation of Tags, and then we discovered that the number of views where they are present is so limited as to be essentially useless to us.
There are so many views where "Tags" are not visible, and these views are those where our teams would expect to be able to use them the most. The views include many of the tracking pages (Iteration Status, Release Status, and Work Product Status) and the Plan view.
I understand there is limited UI real estate, but I see a fair bit of what appears to be inefficient use of the space where "Tags" might just fit and in locations where it would be used more frequently than in the User Stories and Backlog view. There are locations where "Package" still exists and yet Rally folks suggest that it is essentially deprecated, this is one location where "Tags" could be substituted.
Will these locations be given any consideration?
Hi Michael,
Thanks for that feedback. We are working to update all of our pages in Rally to the new page framework (which can be seen on the Backlog Beta page), and those other pages you mentioned--Iteration Status in particular--are high on the list of the next pages to be addressed.
In the meantime, as Beth suggest above, please consider posting a Feature Request for this.
I would like to have the capability to edit a tag in a user story/task using the multi-edit in a view. The feature is there it is just not possible to apply to all.
I am looking forward to using tags in order to group related stories without having the pain of child parent relationships, but would it not be just as easy to extend the custom field functionality to allow a free format custom field which you can filter and search on?
Hi Fergal,
Great suggestion! It doesn't appear we have an active feature request to ehance custom field functionality. I recommend you visit http://agilecommons.org/hives/4b79034e53/summary to submit a new one, so other customers can vote on the feature.
Hi,
maybe it's already present as a Feature Request, but I think that filtering by tag is what I need more about tags.
Thanks
Edoardo
Edoardo, we do have an existing feature request for filtering on tags. Please add your comments and vote up this request. Please also note that you can include tags as part of your conditions for custom views so this may give you the functionality you need in the interim.
I desperately need to be able to assign tags quickly to a subset of stories. Please let me do one or more of
1. Get multi-edit support
2. Filter and apply tag
3. Select (checkbox, etc) and tag
Google has some good web tag models in blogger.
John, we're working on functionality to bulk edit tags. Check out our Work In Progress hive and under the "Current Work in Progress" section you'll see we've added details for the first page that will include this feature.
Can we get an estimate for when bulk tagging will become available in a useful manner? I understand I can bulk tag in the backlog page but most of our stories are assigned to iterations already so we need a more powerful way of tagging in order for tags to be useful.
Hi Thomas,
We built this functionality into the Plan>Backlog page first, because that location uses the new page framework. That grid view also gives the other ease of use functions, like being able to add a column for almost any field, and control the sorting/size of each column. One of our other major development undertakings this year is to bring this new framework to the other Rally summary pages, like Plan>User Stories and Track>Iteration Status.
When we complete our work of bringing the page framework to the other locations within Rally, the ability to bulk tag will also be included. Please stay tuned to our Work In Progress page Beth links to above, for updates on this project as we get closer to public release.