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."We have teams come and go all the time. We have teams in India, America, Ireland, Poland, Italy, England... we are spread out everywhere! Rally is our key tool for scrum planning and our single source of truth, and it handles it all flawlessly."
"Tech support is very responsive, helpful, and available."
"Helps me plan an estimate of how soon or how far out we'll be able to deliver something."
"The most useful part is how it breaks down tasks into parents and children, manageable tasks. It has a whole project as an initiative, and then it breaks it down further and further. And then you get to actual user stories and tasks that you can sit and develop."
"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 transparency it allows us to provide, both from the team level all the way through the executive level within the company and the work that we are doing."
"Gives me a dashboard where I can see what things are not being worked on, what things are blocked."
"The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. It helps you shape the way you flow."
"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."
"Good branching and labelling features."
"The work item feature is most valuable. It allows us to store all product requirements. We can also link the test cases to those requirements so that we know which feature has already been tested, and which one is waiting for testing. We can also couple the code reviews, unit tests, and automated tests into these requirements. It is reliable. It has all the features and good performance. It also has reporting tools or analysis tools."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is the central repository, and you can see what changes other developers did from which branch."
"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."
"The most valuable feature from my point of view is project management, which includes user stories as well as task management."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is the central repository, and you can see what changes other developers did from which branch."
"I'd like the ability to customize reports without having to incur Professional Services, or having to write my own code GitHub and then implement that as a custom report. That's untenable. It's not sustainable."
"It requires better scalability for the implementation of the whole suite. We do not use it in that fashion, and visibility is sometimes a problem."
"It is hard to track the changes. For example, we're in sprint 25, and then we have 26, 27, 28, and 29. Throughout that whole time, we're developing pipelines in Azure, moving to GitHub, creating pipelines, and working with teams. But sometimes, we need to revisit specific decisions made in previous sprints, like pipeline details. Maybe it's in our Azure Wiki, GitHub, or Teams, but it's not always consistent. I wish I could search for all tasks or stories related to that particular effort without needing to know everyone's individual stories or features."
"We would like more meaningful, customizable dashboards."
"CA Agile Central does not have a workflow tool included."
"We'd like better dashboards to make visibility better."
"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."
"There are few customisation options. For instance, the workflow for story cards cannot be changed out of the box from the standard (Defined, In-Progress, Completed and Accepted)."
"The test management interface is not very handy."
"I only use 1% of the functionality, so I am not familiar enough to know what needs to be improved."
"As an end-user, I expect the solution's performance to be faster while staying as stable as possible."
"I would like to see the reporting features expanded so that I can see details on the users connected to all of the projects."
"I understand Microsoft is phasing out TFS in favor of Git, so I would steer anyone interested in TFS to look into Git."
"We are also using Microsoft Teams. The two products function separately. There is not enough collaboration between Microsoft Teams and TFS."
"I would like to see TFS improve its web interface as there are some limitations with IDs and the integration behind it and with open-source tools like VS Code."
"Access and permissions are confusing when attempting to include basic manual testing functionalities."
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.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors.
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