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."It allows us to work in a more dynamic fashion and track more of the development lifecycle."
"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."
"Reporting is much easier and faster than Micro Focus ALM, with CA AC built on web services... Also, the data is more granular when it comes to tasks, iterations, sprints, and releases."
"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 reporting, and being able to roll that up across the verticals, was an important selling point for us."
"We can work better and at a higher quality, than we were able to before."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features of TFS are bug reporting and its high performance."
"What I like the most is that you can set permissions on just one folder."
"I have found almost all of the features valuable because it integrates well with your Microsoft products. If a client is using the entire Microsoft platform, then TFS would be definitely preferable. It integrates with the digital studio development environment as well."
"As far as queries are concerned, creating, grading, or customizing the queries as a primary requirement is very easy to do."
"The most valuable features are test case writing and bug tracking."
"The most valuable features are related to source code management. Using TFS for source code management and being able to branch and have multiple developers work on the same projects is valuable. We can also branch and merge code back together."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is the central repository, and you can see what changes other developers did from which branch."
"The initial setup is fairly easy."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We would like more meaningful, customizable dashboards."
"I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help."
"I would like to see more Kanban support. As it stands, it doesn't seem to have the features or the layouts that the teams really need to be able to execute their tasks. It almost tries to force you into more of a Scrum style."
"CA Agile Central does not have a workflow tool included."
"The dashboard needs more enhancements."
"Microsoft should discontinue the use of SharePoint as I don’t really see any value add to TFS, document management features can be included in TFS web portal itself, if required!"
"The dashboard and the customization of dashboards is an area they have to work on."
"Not all of the functionality, which is exposed by the command line interface (tf.exe) is available in the Visual Studio GUI."
"TFS on-premise does not support integration with SharePoint Online."
"Since the TFS was an on-prem solution, the private network accessibility was restricted."
"I'm looking for specific options that aren't currently available, such as active status, new status, or what's currently in progress."
"In the next release, I would like them to include integration for various projects, similar to what JIRA has, and they could create this feature on the dashboard."
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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