Rally's Drag-to-Estimate Widget Lands Just in Time for PI Planning

Rally shipped a native Estimation Board Widget for Custom Views, documented in the Q2 2026 release notes. You drag artifacts into columns that represent relative sizes, and Rally writes the plan estimate values for you.

It's a small widget that fixes a surprisingly persistent annoyance.

What It Does

Configure a set of size columns, drop your unestimated artifacts onto the board, drag them into the column that feels right.

Columns map to whatever estimate scale your team uses (Fibonacci, t-shirts, story points, the one weird scale your release train chief insists on)
Drag-and-drop assigns the plan estimate value
Filter by query so you can scope a board to a specific PI, team, or backlog slice
Works for any artifact type that has a plan estimate field

That's it. No more right-clicking each story to open a detail view, typing a number, hitting save, repeat for forty more.

Why This Matters

Relative estimation is a planning ceremony, not a data entry task. Most teams already do it on a whiteboard or a Miro board, then someone takes notes and types the numbers into Rally afterward. That two-step workflow has been broken for years and nobody fixed it because nobody wanted to write a custom App SDK app for a problem that wasn't quite annoying enough.

Now you can run the ceremony in Rally directly. The estimates land where they need to land, and you skip the "now I'm typing it all in" step that everyone hates.

For PI Planning especially, this turns into a meaningful time saver. A 50-team ART that runs estimation across multiple backlogs is suddenly looking at hours back, not the kind of hours that show up in a metrics dashboard, but the kind that mean the planning event ends on time.

Where to Find It

It's in the widget catalog when you edit a Custom View. Look for "Estimation Board" in the picker. No subscription admin enablement required.

One Caveat

This is a workflow widget, not a migration target. If your team built a custom estimation interface on the App SDK, the new widget might cover it, or your custom one might do something specific that this doesn't (weighted voting, planning poker integration, custom column behaviors). Worth a side-by-side check before you delete the old one.

Need Help?

If your PI Planning currently involves a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, and a long Friday afternoon of typing, we can help you wire up Custom Views around your planning flow. Let's talk.