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."Ease of use - I don't even know when a new release is coming and I don't need to because it's so easy to use what's new."
"It documents stories in a way where we do not have to be heavy on front-end requirements, front-end documentation, and front-end workflows."
"What I like the most about Agile Central is that it is the only system I need to have full control and visibility of our entire body of work plus the activities and processes required to deliver it."
"CA Agile Central provides visibility into how teams are meeting business objectives."
"Rally Software provides the capability to accurately estimate the time required for building large software projects, which can be challenging to predict...Rally Software enables us to schedule tasks better, allocate resources, and meet project deadlines."
"The most valuable feature is actually creating a field within there for architectural review. So when teams are struggling or have questions on the architecture or strategy that they take, they can actually flag that particular story, release, or project. Those can then be reviewed by the architecture team and the teams actually get additional information on how to course-correct, build on the architecture that we're trying to build throughout the organization, and get over road blocks much quicker."
"Its ability to scale."
"It helps me evaluate teams' historical performance using velocity charts."
"The most valuable features of TFS are bug reporting and its high performance."
"It has great functionality: work items, backlogs, source code, build releases, and it's easy to use."
"For what I need TFS for, I have never run into any limitation."
"Team Foundation Server (TFS) is easy to use, and we have a complete trail and traceability. We also like the access control part."
"The biggest value-add is the solution integrates well with most Microsoft products."
"The interface is easy to navigate."
"As far as queries are concerned, creating, grading, or customizing the queries as a primary requirement is very easy to do."
"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."
"The Reporting feature can improve, especially around executive summaries and dependency mapping."
"There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but it needs something for the Kanban side."
"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)."
"More importantly, we are seeing internal challenges from Atlassian because of their highly integrated suite that enables further automation and centralization of activities that are also highly necessary – messaging notifications cued off builds, collaboration on Solution Architecture Documentation, etc."
"More customization capabilities would be helpful. Providing a little bit more structure around how the system should be set up in terms of the hierarchy structure might be helpful as well."
"We want Rally to generate OKRs, to allow teams to record the OKRs, and then the OKRs can be mapped to the epics and there is organizational alignment."
"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."
"The execution of test cases could stand improvement."
"Since it is Microsoft, it is technology agnostic, thus it does not really fit into various different technologies in the organization."
"Access and permissions are confusing when attempting to include basic manual testing functionalities."
"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."
"The interface can be improved and made more user-friendly."
"We encounter issues with backups."
"I'm looking for specific options that aren't currently available, such as active status, new status, or what's currently in progress."
"Not all of the functionality, which is exposed by the command line interface (tf.exe) is available in the Visual Studio GUI."
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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