Rally Software

We work with the following portfolio items Features, Capabilities, Initiatives, and Themes. We have a customer that would like to be able to see the Release(s) that their capabilities are linked to.  Is there any way to do this without having to create a custom field?

Hi Sheri,

It seems I can only associate the lowest level of portfolio items to a release. I also am finding this page in the documentation that suggests the same:

Release Planning Board | CA Agile Central Help 

So, if I'm correct about this then in your portfolio hierarchy only Features will be able to be associated to a release.

grama23 , am I correct about this?  If so, perhaps you can explain a bit more on why a release can only be associated with the portfolio's lowest level only?

Thanks,

Sagi

Conventionally, the timebox of a task is a day, of a story an iteration, of a feature a release (technically, a program increment).

I assume from the way this is phrased that the customer already knows that Features are conventionally bound to Releases and that Capabilities and other portfolio items are not. I interpret the ask as how to see which Releases the Features within a Capability are scheduled for.

It's not that hard to do this in certain contexts. For example, on built-in page Portfolio > Portfolio Items, you can select Capabilities from the drop-down to see all the Capabilities in scope. Once you've done that, you can open any Capabilities you want and thereby see the Features that are children of the Capability. Each Feature row shows the Release that the Feature is scheduled for. You can sort by the Release column, too.

For Portfolio Items that are higher in the hierarchy, you'll have more twisty triangles to open.

Thanks Kelly, I was able to follow your steps and it would be so great if this would meet their needs, however, I believe they would like to filter on the release, which wouldn't be possible at the Capability Level.  I was looking at the 

user-story-ancestor-grid which is super cool.  It allows you to select a value for a field on any work item and then displays the user stories that are connected to those work items.  This custom view would be great if I could just have it display capabilities instead of user stories.  It allows me to select the release on the features and displays those user stories connected the features.  Just need to get it to allow me to select what work items I want displayed.  Thanks so much for looking into this!

In Agile Central, I'm not aware of out-of-the-box functionality that allows you to filter on values from any of the child elements.  i.e:  Starting from Capabilities, filtering on a Feature or User Story attribute.

But in spreadsheets, you can do anything.   

For example, there's a really cool community app called "Custom List with Deep Export" that allows you to export your Portfolio Hierarchy, User Stories, and Tasks to a CSV file.

In the example below,

1. I updated I configured the app to start from the parent of my features (Business Epics in my subscription).
2. I exposed all the fields I need for reporting, including the Release column.
3. Exported my Portfolio Items, Imported into my spreadsheet tool.
4. Selected all my data, loaded it into a Pivot table.
5. Pivot table settings:  Rows:  Business Epics, Name ; Columns:  Release;  Values:  Count(a) Business Epics

If you use Google Sheets, you can export your Pivot table to an iFrame, and display it in Agile Central using the Custom HTML app.

Hope this helps.

Great information Gio!  We have this app installed in our Subscription and love using it!  I will provide this information to our customer even though we try to keep them within the tool for everything!  Much appreciated!

Keeping people in Agile Central is very important.

I achieve with most users by using the Google Sheets - iFrame export / Agile Central import.  With that feature, as soon as someone updates the Google Sheets datasheet, all Custom HTML - Agile Central apps are updated.

The way I see it, Agile Central is an Agile Lifecycle Management tool.  It's not a data visualization/reporting tool.  So I use Google Sheets to merge Rally data with other data sources to build proper dashboards and metrics.  And most of our end-users don't even know the difference since they remain in the Agile Central platform.

If only someone can write an integration between Google Sheets and Agile Central.  hmmm.. any takers?  : )

Sheri,

If Giovanni's answer helped you with this question, would you please mark it as correct?  I realize it is not all within Agile Central, but, hopefully, it helped.

Michael