Rally Office Hours:
February 26, 2026

Summary

Product Announcement

• The Rally MCP (AI Coding Assistance Integration) server is generally available in the US (03:51).
• For all US subscriptions, the MCP server was available yesterday and the documentation is published (03:58).
• Customers do not need the AI customer data module turned on because Rally is not providing the Large Language Model (LLM); the LLM is on the customer's side (04:14).
• Customers use their own organization-approved AI agents (e.g., Cursor Cloud, GitHub Copilot) which have the MCP client (04:31).
• The MCP client gets data from Rally data and APIs through the Rally MCP server (04:57).
• This integration enables interaction with Rally directly from an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) (05:15).
• The current focus is on developer and Quality Assurance (QA) personas (05:21).
• Developers can interact with their organization's LLM and do work without opening or logging into Rally (05:24).
• Developers can read Rally data like user stories, tasks, and features, and execute these work items or generate code using AI agents (05:39).
• Currently, the connection between Rally and AI coding assistance is done by API key, but OAuth authentication will be available in a couple of months (05:59).
• A Rally team member will turn on a new conversational mode for creating child artifacts with AI assistant today, replacing the previous silent mode (06:25).
• The new conversational mode allows users to break down existing artifacts, such as a feature, get a preview before creating child items like user stories, and use attached documents as context (06:42).
• Users can talk to the AI to change things, which significantly reduces refinement time (07:05).
• The conversational mode works on every level of hierarchy in Rally, such as breaking down initiatives into features, features into user stories, or user stories into tasks (08:52).
• When creating the new stories, the system uses the project's current template or a best practice agile template if none is set (10:44).
• The AI-created stories have an "AI" prefix and the "AI assisted" attribute is automatically enabled for analytics (10:57).
• Small updates to custom views include the ability to copy a custom view from the page itself using a new icon (12:34).
• Permissions have been updated so that everyone, not just project admins, can copy a page, which creates a new private version (12:55).
• Additional denominator options have been added for the progress widget, which now includes a static number and a view filter attribute, in addition to a query (13:12).
• A query box was added to the planning boards (13:34).

Q&A

• Pie Chart Widget Legend: A user asked about a pie chart widget showing all possible values in the legend for a custom field, even if only a few values are present in the data set (17:41).
  • A Rally team member suggested that having a setting like the one on the bar chart that says "show empty categories" would address the issue (25:31).

• Releases Out of Order in Bar Chart Widget: A user reported that releases on the horizontal axis of a bar chart widget were out of order in some projects (21:03).
  • The user is using "sort by aggregation" (21:59).
  • A Rally team member stated that if the dates for the releases are not sequential when sorting by aggregation type, it should be reported as a defect (22:08).
  • A Rally team member shared their email to coordinate reporting the defect (23:08).

• Geographic Mapping Widget: A user asked if anything in the Rally ecosystem supports putting things on a map for reporting relative to geographic area (26:56).
  • A Rally team member replied that out of the box, no, but it would be a "wonderful experiment" to try and build a custom widget using external libraries (27:08).
  • The data would likely come from custom fields like coordinates, zip codes, or city/state (27:14).

• PI Objectives: A user asked if there are plans to allow the creation of PI Objectives and associate features to them, similar to the SAFe framework, as objectives are currently only associated with OKRs (29:58).
  • A Rally team member stated that there are no plans to change how objectives work to specifically support PI Objectives (30:34).
  • The common approaches seen are either recording them in the release time box object for visibility or using a milestone scoped to the team to associate with work and track it (31:01).
  • Another user suggested using the Risk object as a container for PI objectives, adding custom fields for planned value and actual value, and tracking features attached to it (33:49).
  • The challenge remains in automatically correlating features to PI objectives to reflect changes like a feature moving out of a release (36:18).
  • A Rally team member offered to work with the user in depth to flesh out a custom view against a milestone in their environment (40:02).

• Getting Project Context in a Widget: A user was having difficulty getting a custom widget to reference outside of the app and use the project hierarchy/selector (45:51).
  • A Rally team member explained that it is doable programmatically; the Rally context object is available in the HTML for custom widgets and can be injected into the JavaScript by including a certain comment in the code (44:41).
  • This object allows access to the current context, including navigation scope, project scope, view filter, and schema (45:07).

Event News

• The webinar "Will AI Replace the PMO?" is now on-demand (51:27).
• The webinar "Chaos to Control" is available on-demand (51:58).
• The "What's New Rally, Our Roadmap" presentation is held every quarter and is the most up-to-date version, showing the vision and plans for the current and next quarter (52:12).
• The event "State of Strategic Plan Portfolio Management" was yesterday and is now available on-demand (52:37).
• The PI Planning event is scheduled for the 4th to the 7th in Broomfield (53:00).
• Attendees can nominate themselves or their colleagues to experience how the Rally team conducts PI planning and participate in a workshop (53:08).
• The next PI Planning event will be in May, and the one after that will be in August (53:44).
• Useful QR codes are available for the community, office hours, and subscribing to the newsletter (53:57).

Note: This summary was generated with the assistance of an artificial intelligence language model. While we strive for accuracy and quality, please note that the summary may not be entirely error-free. We recommend independently verifying the content and consulting with a product expert for specific advice or information. We do not assume any responsibility or liability for the use or interpretation of this content.

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