Moving to Rally

Recently my company, in an effort to increase visibility of work and help organize things, has transitioned from Jira to Rally.  Not unsurprisingly we're dealing with learning how to use the new system and the differences between them.  My team likes the flexibility of being remote - at times we've had half the team working remotely - so we don't have a physical board and are keeping things all in the tool.

Here are some of the issues we're having that we have yet to find a work around:

1. Handle unfinished work from an iteration
   
   Rally gives some advice around this, but nothing that just works.  Some options and their downsides:
   
   
   1. Move the story to the new iteration.  You lose sight that it was in a previous iteration so the planned points goes down.
   2. Split the story - which by default creates a second story with the same number of points in the upcoming iteration.  Unfortunately, if you're doing any reporting like the release burnup, then this gets a double shot of points from this one story.  The suggestion in this case is to zero out the points for the left over work, which of course changes the points planned in the last sprint. 
   
   Nothing provides a solution that maintains both the closed iterations planned and actual points as well as the release burnup.
   
2. Starting and stopping an iteration
   
   It doesn't appear to allow any flexibility in the time an iteration is to close - so midnight on the day indicated is when it happens.  Historically, my team has closed the sprint after daily standup (which we do at 10:15) on the day we're planning our iterations.  Which immediately afterward we do our planning for the next iteration.  Since it's all automatic, we'd have to close things up the night before so that any reports look reasonable and aren't missing our last morning of work.  This just seems too rigid and I'm not sure what the benefit is versus our being able to indicate we're done with the iteration.
   
3. Identify what stories/features are being released
   
   Rally has introduced milestones that seemed to be a perfect fit for this.  These can be applied to portfolio items and stories.  However, I have yet to find a way to view everything it has been applied to in one view.  So while I add the milestone to everything I can't a view that will show everything that's going out in the release.
   
   Some of this I'd take as a challenge to avoid working on things that aren't going to get released, but I've learned that reality gets in the way.  So it's not impossible to figure out what's getting released I just prefer indicating it as soon as I know and having a single place where people can look at it.

Some things we've found work arounds for that we're not really satisfied about:

1. Unable to view defects on Task Board view
   
   I've honestly found Defects to be next to useless.  Maybe they work better with the test plans, but they behave differently than tasks and stories.  In the end they are work that needs to get done, but they don't work well with the rest of the system.  So this is just the biggest annoyance with them.  The Task Board view is how we do our day to day work, but defects created under a story don't show up along with the tasks on the story.
   
   Our work around for this is to stop creating defects.  This means we can't report out on things we consider defects in our own work as easily, but we'll see about figuring that out when we get a chance.
   
2. A couple of good views to work with
   
   It seems like every view is not quite all there.  You can do 90% of what you expect, but not everything.  For instance, the Task Board is great for updating tasks and progressing them.  However, viewing the parent story and adding new tasks is awkward.  The Iteration Planning view is good for putting stories into iterations and adding tasks.  However, viewing the story is awkward since it takes over the view and when you come back your location on the page is lost.
   
   Our work around for this is to open stories in a new tab.  Jira certainly isn't perfect, but I really appreciated it's plan and work views that seemed to really focus on the purposed for those views - also it's opening selected items in a sidebar view.

It's not without cause that many coaches advise finding you're own flow to things and keeping tools out of the mix as long as you can.  Because of our desire to work remotely and not wanting duplicate entry of stuff (as in update what we're using and keeping the central tool matched) we're continuing to work inside the tool.  I'm concerned with wanting to keep reporting in Rally with some of these concerns.