Adding postdated tasks and sprints in Rally

Question

Our team is transitioning from waterfall model to Agile model. We are using Rally for sprint planning and user stories.

The current project that we are working on required 4-5 weeks of lab setup, installation of servers and other general administration tasks. Originally, the plan was to finish these tasks and then start official sprints in Rally.

However, now the official direction is to include these tasks which we have already done in Rally as well. So, I've got the following questions:

1. Is it possible to include sprints from past dates and add those to Rally?
2. Is the above an allowed practice in Rally?
3. What could be alternative way to document what we have accomplished so far in Rally if #1 above is not allowed?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can certainly create Sprints whose start and end dates are in the past. You can then associate Rally artifacts to those sprints. This will at least get your data into Rally.

However, what you won't be able to do is obtain reporting or burndown charts for those sprints. Per your question about post-dating object - you cannot modify CreationDate or InProgressDate or AcceptedDate for Rally artifacts, after the fact, even using the API. These values are calculated by Rally internally and cannot be modified, for purposes of trace-ability and accountability.