Rally Software

Hi guys, 

JohnStreeter's reply on the Discussion Rank information indicates that Rank is defined on the Work Item itself.

And the above reply from Edwin Aragonaraed02 says that Rank is relative, and hence specific to the context of the page or view you're dragging it up or down (or right-clicking and select Rank Highest, Rank Lowest, Move to Position 10 etc.) 

So does this mean that moving a Work Item to the bottom of one view -- like one team's current Iteration Status screen -- will affect its single Rank value which is also interpreted relatively in whatever other pages or views it might appear?
And therefore that other users might suddenly see it as lower priority than before, in their own other views too, without anyone having intentionally changed it there?

I fear we might have a scenario that that could (a) turn into a recurring tug of war, or (b) lead to serious misunderstandings of different colleagues' attitudes to our work.  If I can share some knowledge of how the system really works -- and I've been asked to do it in layman's terms(!) -- we may all be able to work along with this.

Thanks in advance, 

--Nev.

P.S. This was originally a Comment on https://communities.ca.com/message/242002736-re-rank-issue-in-rally, which was an Question at the status Assumed Answered, and might have lower visibility.  I apologise for the noise, but it would have been better as a new Question, i.e. here.  :-)

Hi Nev,

Let's take the following scenario:

You have 2 projects, Project Alpha and Project Beta

• Project Alpha has 1 defects; DE1
• Project Beta has 2 defect; DE2 and DE3

You have two users, Adam and Brian.  We'll say

• Adam has access to Alpha and Beta
• Brian only has access to Beta

So currently the rankings will be as follows

• Project Alpha DE1
• Project Beta DE2
• Project Beta DE3

Adam sees this ranking

1. DE1
2. DE2
3. DE3

Brian sees this

1. DE2
2. DE3

Now, Adam moves DE3 above DE1 so Adam sees

1. DE3
2. DE1
3. DE2

Brian, doesn't have access to Project Beta so what he sees is slightly different

1. DE3
2. DE2

Now, let's say that Brian wants to re-rank DE2 to be the highest ranked artifact he can see, so he moved DE2 above DE3.  Now he sees this:

1. DE2
2. DE3

Since we're ranking above DE3 Adam sees this:

1. DE2
2. DE3
3. DE1

So the ranking is set according to what the user sees on their screen at that time; whether that's by permissions or view.   You could accomplish the same scenario above by setting up two Work Views for your account where you showed 3 defects on one and 2 on the other and ranked them while switching between the views.

Layman's terms -- nailed!

Thank you so much for setting it out like that, DavidLeDeaux.
I can see from how that example works that my impression of the underlying mechanism must be right too.  I can now definitely get everyone to the same understanding of how drag and dropping an item up and down one view can result in it being moved up and down in another one.

I feel it's worth expanding on our context, in case it is informative to anyone else.
We have a ranked list of priority work (a sub-category of the Product Backlog) that is controlled by one group.

The view of those items is still checked on by the group controlling it, even as individual work items are put into any of several Scrum teams' specific Iterations.  Within those Iterations, a work item might be of relatively low priority, not to be tackled till towards the end of the Sprint, and moved down accordingly -- with misleading implications for where it's ranked on the master view.
Once everyone understands the real implications, we can deal and move forward.

Thanks again,

--Nev.

P.S.  That's all assuming I'm right that there was a simple slip:

I think towards the end, the line "Brian, doesn't have access to Project Beta so what he sees is slightly different" should read "Brian doesn't have access to Project Alpha so..." or "Brian only has access to Project Beta so..."