Rally Release 2008.4 - August, 2008

With Release 2008.4, Rally demonstrates the value of our emerging collaborative lifecycle services platform. Customers can build any custom mashup, chart, report or view and display it in Rally. For example, Rally has built the task board, a virtual Agile whiteboard, that customers can display in a Mashup Tab and use to manage iterations or discuss during daily stand-up meetings.

For a demonstration of these new features, watch the on-demand 2008.4 webinar or one of the demos below. If you have additional questions about Rally Release 2008.4, please contact .

What’s New in Release 2008.4

• Task board (watch demo)
• Filter on iteration or release (watch demo)
• Test folder hierarchy (watch demo)
• Portal login
• Password lockout
• Search Discussion Text
• Rally Connector for Eclipse: Mylyn 3.0 compatibility
• Development and testing sandbox
• Rally Connector for HP Quality Center: Version 2.0
• Rally Connector for Jira: Beta version

Task board

A new visual task board gives your team a quick and concise view of your iteration, just as if you were looking at your whiteboard and sticky notes. Refer to the task board in Rally to see and update tasks for your daily standup.

Special instructions to use the task board: The task board is an optional application that you can download from the Rally Mashup Catalog on Agile Commons, a place to contribute custom mashups, reports, charts or views for Rally. This web site provides instructions to create a Mashup Tab in your Rally workspace and add the task board as a custom view (the task board is available at no additional fee).

Filter on iteration or release

Narrow down your results in both custom views and email notifications with expanded filtering options that include iteration or release.

Test folder hierarchy (for Rally Quality Manager only)

Manage your complex regression test plans in Rally with a new hierarchical or nested test folder structure. You can create any number of child test folders and associate them to a parent test plan in order to manage and track your test coverage in one view, even if the test plans are occurring across iterations or teams.

• Inline controls allow you to create a child folder with one-click on the Test Plan page.
• Move a child test folder to a different parent test plan at any time during your project.
• Visual dashboards display a summary of test results contained in a child or parent test plan.

Portal login

Access Rally in fewer clicks by adding the Rally login to your portal, company intranet or any web page. Users can bookmark the login page to make it easy to login and update the status of their tasks on a daily basis.

Password lockout

Rally administrators gain further protection and control over their development data with additional password security features. Password lockout prevents unauthorized access to your subscription by locking out a user after a string of unsuccessful logins. In addition, administrators can limit the number of times a user may choose a password they have used previously.

If a user is locked out, only the subscription administrator can reset the user’s credentials.

Search Discussion Text

Save time locating any user story, task, defect or test case with Rally’s expanded search capability - which now combs through content in the work product’s discussion. A discussion is a useful requirements management tool to document customer requests, design or team interaction.

Rally Connector for Eclipse: Mylyn 3.0 compatibility (for Rally Enterprise only)

Customers that update their Rally project tasks in the Eclipse IDE now get the benefits from the Mylyn 3.0 update, including faster work product opening and more interactive notifications. The Rally Connector for Eclipse uses the Mylyn component so that you can update tasks and defects offline.

Development and testing sandbox (for Integration Hub only)

For customers considering a Rally pre-built connector or any integration to an existing development system, Rally now makes a separate sandbox environment available to test the integration prior to deploying it to your subscription in production. The development and testing sandbox, combined with the expertise of Rally’s integration engineers, ensures that your team will be successful with your new collaborative workflow.

• The development and testing sandbox is included with your purchase of the Integration Hub subscription module.
• Use the sandbox to test out any pre-built connector or any integration you create using Rally’s multi-protocol web services API.

Rally Connector for HP Quality Center: Version 2.0 (for Integration Hub only)

Rally continues to improve team collaboration and project visibility with the Version 2.0 release of the Rally Connector for HP Quality Center. Integration Hub customers that use Quality Center for test management can now:

• Setup the connector and communication workflows faster and more simply.
• Maintain security with encrypted password storage.
• Support for connecting through proxy servers

Rally Connector for Jira: Beta version (for Integration Hub only)

Maintain consistency between your Agile projects in Rally and your defects in Jira with Rally’s enhanced bi-directional connector for Jira, now available for a limited customer beta program. One possible use case is to create and assign defects in Rally, and use Jira to manage the defect to resolution.

• No effort wasted duplicating defects in both systems.
• Set up a periodic data refresh schedule.
• Map the most critical fields, such as priority, status and description.