Rally Office Hours:
December 11, 2025

Summary

Product Announcements

• Deprecation Notice: The static query box on the Portfolio Kanban page will be deprecated as of January 15th. This is because the filters and saved views on the front of the application offer more flexibility.
• Ancestors Field Enhancement:
  • A new "Ancestors" field has been added to all list pages, including Work Views and Portfolio Items.
  • This field shows the hierarchy of portfolio items above the current item, allowing you to trace a story or defect all the way up the hierarchy.
  • It provides visibility to help teams understand how work items align to strategic or high-level goals.
  • The ancestors field is available for filtering on list pages.
• Non-Conflicting Save Changes:
  • Rally now accepts non-conflicting changes made by different users on the same item, which allows for quicker changes.
  • If changes are conflicting, the user will be alerted.

Q&A Session

• An attendee asked for help with a custom view, based on an XML code file from GitHub, that views all ancestors to a user story in a grid. The attendee is experiencing intermittent stalling when trying to export data after filtering by iteration.
• It was suggested that the issue might be due to the app being an older, legacy app that makes multiple calls for ancestor information.
• A suggestion was made to use the browser's developer tools and network tab to see which calls are taking the longest.
• It was noted that the new Ancestors field and filter may partially solve the problem.
• A dashboard view was demonstrated that could help an attendee in sprint planning by flagging stories not aligned with themes and showing all themes represented in an iteration.
• Resources for learning query writing were suggested, including the query bot and the web services API documentation, which shows internal field names and allows for query testing. A tip to use a large language model like ChatGPT to write a query was also suggested.
• An attendee asked about a user who was losing customizations on the Team Board after switching between different teams. The suggested solution is to save the view.
• It was noted that if the configurations of the team board are meaningfully different between projects (e.g., different flow states or filters), a preference might be overwritten.

Event News

• Replay of the road map announcement from November 18th is available.
• Replay of a session on bridging the gap between strategy and execution is available on Bright Talk.
• ValueOps Insights Design Partnership: Broadcom is seeking customers to interact with them as they build out the ValueOps Insights product, which allows for showcasing health metrics (such as NPS scores and feature progression) on a dashboard using data from various parts of an organization to predict success. Interested parties can reach out to Shim or Rusty.
• AI Design Partnership: Customers are also invited to partner on expanding the use of AI throughout all products.
• Software Academy: The academy offers a wealth of information, including courses and videos, and can be used to create training programs.
• In-Person PI Planning: Customers are hosted in Broomfield, Colorado, quarterly to participate in PI planning, see what is being built on the roadmap, and observe how Rally is used to do agile at scale. The next sessions are the first week of February, May, August, and November.
• Additional links are available for the community, re-registering for 2026 office hours, and subscribing to the monthly Rally newsletter.

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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