What do the options to copy timeboxes from parent project mean?

Products

• CA Agile Central On Premise (Rally)
• CA Agile Central SaaS (Rally)

Issue/Introduction

When creating a child project, you have the option to copy current and future timeboxes (including releases, iterations and milestones). This article explains this option is more details.

Environment

Release:
Component: ACSAAS

Resolution

The option to copy selected timeboxes from the parent project is allowed only at the time a child project is created. This option does not carry forward upon later moves of this child project to different hierarchies. This option works once and is applicable only at the initial creation the child project.

Let us elaborate:

We set up the system so that we have two parent projects: Project A and Project B:

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Both projects have a few times boxes defined. Project A has 2 releases and 3 iterations:

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Project B has 1 release and 2 iterations:

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Now, we would like to create a child project under Project A:

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Upon this creation, notice we select the highlighted option that reads: "Copy current and future releases and iterations from the parent project":

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We are resulted in Child A , under Parent A, as expected:

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We examine the releases and iterations of Child A, and we see they were copied from Parent A, as requested:

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At a later point we would like to move Child A out of Parent A and into Parent B. Notice that at this point the option to "Copy current releases and iterations from the parent project" is not available. This is because Child A is not a new project, it is being edited but not created:

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We result in Child A being under Parent B:

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At this point when we examine the time boxes of Child A, we still see what it had before, i.e the time boxes that were originally copied to initialize Child A out of Parent A. Nothing was copied from Parent B:

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<Please see attached file for image>

This is also a good result.

Conclusion
What this demonstration highlights is that the option to copy time boxes is available for children projects only at time of creation. Once created there isn't a 'dynamic preservation' of that option. This option is not part of the project, it was available once. Moving the children projects further between project hierarchies will not longer provide the option to copy time boxes.

The idea behind this option is to spawn a project and initialize it with similar behavior to its parent. However, from there on this child project is independent, can be modified independently and maintain no 'linkage' to the parent and certainly not if moving further to other parents. 

One more example is: If Child A was created by such copy , still lives under Parent A, and at that time we create additional time boxes to Parent A or modify existing time boxes (including the ones that were copied to Child A) - there will be no impact on Child A.

This option is for creation time only.