Integration from Clarity to Rally creates new project in Clarity for project inactive

Products

• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

The Integration is setup so Clarity Projects go to Rally MVPs (Integration level create direction: Both)
The projects in Clarity are closed and the Portfolio Items in Rally are in Released state.
However, when the Integration job runs the project keeps getting created as new in Clarity for these items.
How do I fix the project duplication in Clarity?

Environment

Clarity/Rally Integration

Cause

Using feature sync all children, in Rally at the Integration Mapping level it will try to get everything synced underneath that Rally Initiative and sync over to Clarity (this setting makes data entry easier in Rally so that you don't have to configure every single MVP).

On Rally side there are two controlling things...
1) Remove Integration Mapping on the Portfolio Item
2) Remove it from parent PI with Integration Mapping set (if you are having the sync children from parent)

Resolution

By design, when bi-directional integration is configured to use the "Both" option in the supported direction column, the values in Clarity and Rally will be synchronized with data changes in either of the systems. Therefore, you will need to remove/unset the Integration Mapping on the Child and the Parent in Rally or else it will duplicate project (MVP) in Clarity when the syncronization job runs.

As workaround, you can solve the duplicates with the OOB Integration using either a Clarity to Rally, or a Rally to Clarity direction, depending on your requirement.

In the future, we need to explore having more flexible business flow in the Integration so that once something is connected there's record of it and which object is connected on each side, to maintain the relationship better and hopefully avoid this scenario of creating duplicate projects.