Exporting From Rally to task cards--the Power Point method

Exporting from Rally is possible though not pleasant. I spent at least 2 hours trying to work it out the first time with someone's help. Even after I got the the process down, it still takes about one hour. In theory, I think I could do it in fifteen or thirty minutes, but every time I try, something comes up that I need to react to. (Like printing off the wrong backlog.) So I'd practice this once and then give your self at least an hour before the planning event to get ready.

Here are the tools you need:

• Rally -- This contains the backlog. You'll need to create a custom view to get the "Description" on the card. We'll use the CSV export feature.
• Excel (or OpenOffice) -- Use this to clean up any formatting HTML that rally has exported, read in the CSV and then copy past the rows into Word.
  
• Word (or OpenOffice) -- Use Word to create a .doc file.
  
• Power Point (haven't tried this with OpenOffice's Present) -- Read in the word doc which will covert the content into slides, and then print the slides.

The steps to get a Rally backlog into cards/paper:

Export to CSV

You need to show your backlog on a Rally view. My favorite is at "Backlogs & Schedules"->"User Stories" because it seems to be the most flexible with filtering. If that isn't good enough, you can create your own custom view.

When you select Action->export to CSV, Rally will export whatever you are showing, in the order you are showing. So if you are missing a column of information, like the story's description, you'll need to create a new view (see the icon with the plus above the Release column in Rally, circa 8/22/2008, use this to add what columns you need). You'll probably want to sort by the *Rank* column.
Columns I like to have in my custom "Export to CSV" view are : Rank, Formmatted ID, Name, Schedule State, Blocked, Description, Release, Plan Estimate, Notes, Iteration, Owner, Last Update Date.

Processing the CSV with Excel

In Excel, open the CSV that you've exported.



Cleaning the RTF-markup from the Story Description
If you've exported the story description, there is always some work in cleaning the data of rich-text markup. Take a look at the description column and you'll see what I mean.
If you've never used any of the rich-text features (bullets, underlining, copy and pasting from a rich-text document such as MSWord) then cleaning up any remaining formatting is tractable.
Using Find-Replace-All, you can clean up the markup. Replace the following with nothing:

Replace the following with a space: " "
Look over the Description column and remove more choice bits of markup cluttering your data:

Other things to do:
If you exported the Blocked field from Rally, you'll want to select that excel column and do a find-replace-all on "True" to "blocked", and "False" to nothing.

Make a Word Document

Swap the excel columns so they show up in an order that makes sense, and delete the columns that you don't want. Highlight the rows you want to print out, copy/paste them into a word processor, and then save the file to a MSWord .doc.

Adjust the layout in Power Point

In Power Point (I'm using power point 2007), the name of the game is adjusting the format of the font so that it fits on the slides without pushing into the next slide. When you get it looking pretty, print it. What I do to get things looking good is edit the master slide to be one big text box and change the font size to about 20. Then I leave the master slide view, go to the left hand slide selection area, do a ctrl-A, click on Layout->select my theme. And then all the slides are using my theme.

Power point is great if you are OK applying one formatting style to the whole slide. Ideally, you want to produce something like in this:


But I don't know how to apply different formatting to different sections of the slide using this method. The only way I know how to do that is using Mail merge which I'll post about later. With this method, you can get a backlog out of Rally and onto paper and then tape the paper on the walls for your agile planning events.

If you know of any refinements to this or any other ways to get data out of Rally and onto cards or paper, then I beg you to comment!

A Tale of Tasks Boards and Electronic Project Planners

Using electronic tools for agile planning initially seems like a great idea:

1. You have access to it anywhere you have access to the InterWeb,
2. You save environmental resources because you don't have to print things out,
3. You can quickly search through requirements since there is a DB,
4. Auditing and revision tracking can be applied so you can see what changed and pose the question to someone--why did you change to that?
5. You have a backup.

The problem with electronic planners is that:

1. They are easier to ignore than a big task board.
2. They are hard to use by a group during a meeting.
3. They don't allow spacial organization where task boards can have layout schemes that fit the problem at hand.
4. They suck the energy out of the users. The activity of getting up out of your chair and moving things around on a wall gets the blood and energy flowing.
5. They aren't as flexible. Task boards are limited to the imagination where electronic tools are limited by the code.

When I started doing eXtremeProgramming in 1999, we only used a task board. Today, many projects I work on use tools like Rally because nine times out of ten, we work with an off site product owner. This sucks and slows us down, but using Rally gives the product owner a way to manage the backlog.

Using Rally becomes an impediment to teams which are co-located. When the product owner and team can meet face to face to do release planning, backlog grooming, or sprint planning, physical cards allow work to get done faster and with more energy than an electronic tool. Remember a principle of agile is interaction over documentation, and fiddling with Rally is much less interactive and quickly feels more like a document review than a discussion over acceptance criteria on a story.

It's critical that electronic planning tools make it easy to convert to physical collateral which can be worked with in our three dimensional space where it can be slapped on a wall via a sticky, (or a card with tape) and moved around.

This isn't easy to do in Rally. But it is possible. Watch for my upcoming posts on this topic.