We performed a comparison between Rally Software and TFS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."When it comes to the valuable features of Rally Software, it excels at burn-down charts, burn-up charts, and road mapping once it's set up. I particularly appreciated the new feature for releases and road mapping, which worked exceptionally well."
"The most valuable features of Rally Software are the executive dashboards, ease of use, and many other features. They have encapsulated everything that a GI can do, such as monitoring, maintaining, and then releasing. It's continuous integration and development."
"It scales very well. It improves in technology constantly and gets up to speed with the latest and greatest."
"Helps me plan an estimate of how soon or how far out we'll be able to deliver something."
"The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. It helps you shape the way you flow."
"The metrics - collecting metrics. It's because we've used several other tools in the past, and they don't give you a full indication of how well your teams are performing, at a portfolio level, at a product level, and at the team level."
"When we went into Scaled Agile Framework, we could not have done it without the use of Agile Central. It allows us to scale our Scrum teams, and it also enables us when we do our remote big room plannings."
"The main ways that I used it when I was in it day to day was keeping up with the burn rate within the teams. Also, to track at the feature level too, as far as how we were doing with actually being able to deliver that feature."
"It's user friendly. We haven't had any issues so far. It's flexible. If we need something, we can always contact the owner in our headquarters to make a configuration."
"I like the build management features and the integration with Jenkins and many other tools."
"From the project management perspective, the tool is efficiently managing teams by giving management information, such as reports, graphs, velocity, capacity, etc."
"I like the Kanban board. It is very useful in terms of seeing who is working on what and what the current status of work is."
"We use TFS for forecast management."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is the central repository, and you can see what changes other developers did from which branch."
"The interface is easy to navigate."
"The tool's installation is straightforward."
"As it is right now, it does not support automation of the quality assurance process. It just supports manual testing."
"What I don't like about it is that it is really hard to find old work to reference information and use the reporting section of the application in terms of trying to analyze trends. If I am trying to find out which interfaces took this long and I want to compare and measure improvement from one quarter to another quarter, the reporting mechanism within Rally is very troublesome. They have an Excel plugin that you're supposed to use, but you literally have to pull the raw data out before you can do the analysis. You can't do it within Rally, and if you can, it is a secret, and I don't know how to do it. It should have better, easier, and user-friendly reporting without having to use the Excel add-in. It is very clunky. There is a lot of data in there, but it is not organized in such a way that makes it intuitive. You really have to kind of look for where do you put your documentation or dates. Some customization is available, but it is not plug-and-play like Jira. When I switched from TFS to Jira, I just went and started using Jira, whereas with Rally, you kind of have to really get in and figure out what you need to do before you set stuff up, or you're going to get yourself stuck. You can just start using Jira and be successful."
"In terms of improvement, perhaps some more metrics. If they could add some additional, that would be cool."
"A lot of the features that we would be looking to add, I am learning may not be within Agile Central, but part of another CA tool set."
"I would like for workspace admins to be able to hide projects in the Project Picker and not lose any historical data; make them invisible to certain users, visible to certain users, depending on permission sets. That would be lovely."
"Customization features may not be exposed or unavailable, so people may be looking for them. So, customization is an area people have told me is more desirable."
"The stronger CA can get on dependency mapping the better. That's the biggest hiccup. As you're setting up your features, they should make it easier to flag the dependencies, either across features or across projects. Then you're more set up for success."
"I think there needs to be some simplification. The team-level side can be challenging and complicated."
"The tool needs improvement in stability."
"It would be better if we could bring it out on the cloud."
"There are many things that I cannot do, and I have a lot of bugs."
"The usability of TFS is not that great."
"We encounter issues with backups."
"It has been really dated. When you start to work more in an agile environment, it is not really that flexible. They tried to replicate the look and feel of Jira, but it is not quite there. It was nice to use in the past, but it is not as flexible now with the changing development environments and methodologies."
"They should have design patterns in TFS for the development team, and design patterns for the QA."
"The program and portfolio planning facility can be improved."
Rally Software is ranked 8th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 116 reviews while TFS is ranked 3rd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 93 reviews. Rally Software is rated 8.2, while TFS is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Rally Software writes "A solution that enables users to accurately estimate the time required for building large software projects". On the other hand, the top reviewer of TFS writes "It is helpful for scheduled releases and enforcing rules, but it should be better at merging changes for multiple developers and retaining the historical information". Rally Software is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Jira Align, OpenText ALM / Quality Center and Digital.ai Agility, whereas TFS is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Visual Studio Test Professional, OpenText ALM / Quality Center and TestRail. See our Rally Software vs. TFS report.
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