Just Launched! — Enhanced Two-Way Aha! + Rally Integration

Update: We recently launched our most powerful Rally integration ever. Learn more about it here.

I feel fortunate to have been a part of four great SaaS product teams over the years. My experience has given me the opportunity to work on vastly different products that solved real problems. One thing each product and engineering team had in common — in order to ship great products and features, they were in sync.

Product management defined the why, when, and what, while engineering was responsible for how features got developed. But even with that commonality, each product and engineering team organized the features and worked in different ways.

Sound familiar? The above is not unique to me. I have also seen this in many other product teams which I have spoken with while working at Aha! Some product managers group features into releases, then send entire releases to engineering to be built. Other teams prefer to have their engineers organize the work by breaking features down into smaller stories and allocating them to sprints or versions.

Our latest enhancement to the Rally (also known as CA Agile Central) integration now makes it possible to send Aha! features to Rally without also sending releases. This is so your engineering teams can group features together in a way that makes the most sense for how they do their work.

This integration already made it possible to send your features and requirements from Aha! to Rally and to get status updates back from the engineering team as work progressed. Now, we are providing you with the flexibility to make the integration match your workflow.

Here is how you can leverage the latest enhancement to this powerful integration:

Plan upcoming features Drag and drop feature cards from the backlog into a release, or to reorder them based on their Aha! scores to help with prioritization decisions. You can define features and describe exactly what your customers want in Aha!, so when features and requirements are sent to engineering in Rally, those teams have the information they need for implementation.

Drag and drop cards on the feature board to change their rank or release.

Control which features are sent to Rally It was already possible to send features and requirements from Aha! to Rally. Simply select Send to Rally from the Actions menu in Aha! You can send features individually or in bulk. Requirements are sent to Rally with the feature and include the name, description, attachments, and tags.

Engineering teams using Rally will see the feature appear as a user story.

Allow engineers to organize their work into versions By default, releases sent from Aha! will create releases in Rally. However, in the integration settings, you now have the option to send features without releases. This allows engineering teams to organize features into upcoming sprints and backlogs based on their workflow.

Features sent without releases are added to the backlog in Rally where they are ready to be organized by engineering.

Send feature status back to Aha! We know a product manager’s work does not end when a feature is sent to engineering. The product team still needs to track work and understand progress. Whether you send features with releases or not, status updates from Rally are automatically sent back to Aha! so you are always up to date.

Status updates flow from Rally to Aha! only. This ensures that product management will not inadvertently change a feature status while engineers are working on it.

Easy configuration When setting up the Rally integration, there is a new Don’t send releases option in Settings. Selecting Don’t send releases will prevent the integration from creating releases in Rally and from populating the release field for user stories.

Navigate to Settings Product Integrations to configure release options.

Turning ideas into reality takes more than just effort. It takes teamwork across the organization — especially between product management and engineering.

At Aha!, we interact with more than a thousand product teams per week. And we know that each one is passionate about building great products. We want to help you continue doing that by giving you the flexibility to make Aha! match your workflow. Thanks for allowing us to do that.

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy The Rally integration is available to all Aha! customers. If you are not already an Aha! customer, you may want to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Aha! now to see why over 100,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, and prioritize releases and features.

Aha! is a trademark of Aha! Labs Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.