There are a lot of tools out there, and it depends on what you're doing. For planning and managing at the project or program level, Rally is a good tool. 

However, at the development level, down to individual user stories and features, it can be a bit Wild West-ish in a way.

I haven't encountered it myself by breaking things down too far. But it takes diligence to do things right at that level, just like with Jira. For program-level stuff, though, Rally does a good job. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Those considering adopting the solution should evaluate it based on their specific use cases. As for our organization, the solution has met our expectations and provided us with the necessary flexibility. So, I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

I have always been a fan of Rally Software, having used it since 2005. However, recent changes have made it more complex than necessary, and I do not understand why they made those changes. While they are modeling themselves after the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which many people use for scaling multiple teams, I believe they should stay more agnostic. Overall, I would rate their performance an 8 out of 10. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have given them a perfect 10.

I rate Rally Software an eight out of ten.

I used the latest version of Rally Software the last time I used it.

My company used the solution on the cloud.

More or less one hundred people used Rally Software in the company. The users belong to the software, mechanical, and electronic departments.

I'm recommending Rally Software to others, particularly for the Scrum process, but I won't recommend it for a DevOps project because it's not a good tool for that. A DevOps project requires continuous integration and delivery for virtual machines and pipelines, which is functionality I don't see in Rally Software. On Microsoft Azure DevOps, you can do it through the configuration manager, software manager, and continuous delivery manager, but that is not possible in Rally Software. Microsoft Azure DevOps has three extensive functionalities, while Rally Software has one considerable functionality only.

In general, if I needed to use Rally Software only for the Scrum process, my rating would be nine out of ten.

The company was a Rally Software customer.

Get training first on agile methodology. Then, consider engaging professional services to help you launch your first release, if you are completely new to agile. There is a very high benefit to bringing in experienced experts as they will greatly increase your chance of success.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria are the scalability and the availability of the data to us, to be able look at in the reporting aspects.

You need to have a good strategy in terms of rolling the product out, if its something that you're getting into the first time. Make sure you have a strategy surrounding how the team should use the product, what it should be used for. Some of the benefits, some of the sign posts for success, need to be set up along the way, as well.

What's most important to us when selecting a vendor are 

• ease of use
• how intuitive it is
• customer support
• metrics, for us, that is really important.

I give it a solid eight out of 10 because of the way that things are laid out. It's more user friendly, it's intuitive. As I said, it's easy to use. I think they've done a good job with the metrics in general.

I would tell colleagues who are looking at this type of solution to do their homework and see which one works best for their company, for their teams, and for their organization. We went with Agile Central because of a lot of the things it provides, in terms of the features. I know every company is different, every team is different, and things that might serve their needs may be different than what is useful for us. My best advice would be to do their homework and explore.

You will only regret it if you have chosen the Rolls Royce when you could have got by with a Nissan Micra.

I would give it about an eight and a half. The reason why it would not be higher is because some of the things we are looking for we had to get other tools to plug into. Whereas, some of the other solutions we have seen out there, it is all-in-one tool set. 

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is that the product be user friendly. It also has to be able to produce. My bottom line is the outcome, so I want to see that it can help deliver correctly, on time, within the budget. Also resource planning, resource management, those are the kinds of things I'll put into consideration if I'm looking for a tool to use.

I think CA has been consistent in trying to improve Agile Central, but they also still have room for improvement, so I give them seven out of 10.

I would tell colleagues to try Agile Central because of the features I noted above. And then, I don't know about VersionOne, but the support for Agile Central is also great.

Just be open and take advantage of the videos to see if they understand what the product is and to reach out to the vendor and ask them questions. They seem very willing to help without necessarily charging. If they feel that you're a potential customer, they're happy to talk to you and give you some guidance. If you need a lot of help, then of course, then they have programs to actually send experts.

I have had some experience with one of the other tools out there and personally, I like this one better, so I'm a little bit biased around that aspect. If somebody were to ask me, "I'm looking between this and that ...", if I know the tool, I would have my biases towards CA Agile Central, for sure. I think it's a pretty good tool.

Take a course or two before you start using it, so that you understand the process. Especially if it is different from your current business practices. The courses have been well run and informative. But, take care in choosing the class; some are for more experienced users.

When we go out and look for a vendor, we're looking for a partnership. So we're not looking for a vendor, we're looking for a partner.

On a scale of on to 10, I would give it a solid 9.9.

Have a good plan, an overall plan, of the goals that you're trying to achieve. For those organizations that are going into CA Agile Central or going into agile or if you're currently doing agile, then do the following.

1. Go through a process of learning the system or having a handful of people learn the system so that they know it well.
2. Get the system customized because that's one of the strong aspects of CA Agile Central. We have a couple of CA experts within our organization and they connect directly with the folks at CA and make changes from time to time within the system.
3. Get all of your modifications and everything done up front and then start inputting the details and all of your teams and individuals and work efforts.
4. Just start using it!

To me, it was very simple. A very simple type of tool to use.

Use relational database concepts to relate items together instead of continuing to use old location-based organization concepts.

I would suggest to do a comparison chart for your organisation's needs and look at least 5 years ahead for the functionality and budget you are looking for in a tool. Not only the tool cost is relevant but also the resources to maintain it. For a very small organisation, I could certainly recommend a SaaS solution but for an organisation with more than 500 concurrent users, a standalone solution would be more apt, in my opinion.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• the support that we can get
• the ease of upgrades
• just having software that works. 

Even though it's not part of our core business, a lot of the supporting tools need to work for us.

Having the right tools is important, but more important than that is actually the culture, the people, and the processes. Take a look at your culture, your people, your processes. Make sure that those are what you need them to be and then select a tool that is going to work well with those objectives in mind.

There are many tools in the market out there. I have worked both with JIRA and Microsoft TFS, so it can be seen clearly that the CA Agile Central tool is entirely developed. There is a timebox and a sprint-based UI, as well, in it; it is very easy.

When I used TFS, it was very clumsy and you can't see yourself, returning to the very first point. But, here you have everything; it is very flexible, very simple and decent. You can start anywhere and can return to the very same point, again at the end.

I would suggest for most of the product development companies, if they want to have tracking of their user stories, then use a very simple tool like the CA Agile Central solution. It gives you a number a functionalities, along with a very decent UI. The UI is not very fancy, but it is going to give you a very nice picture of the status, as to what is going on with the features and user stories. So, my recommendation would be to go with the CA Agile solution. It is a very good tool.

I was a user and customer. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I've very happy with the solution. 

I would advise others to make sure that they have full training in terms of the connection between features, user stories, and epics. They should also fully understand how to configure it in terms of providing visibility across teams that have to work with each other.

I would rate Rally Software a six out of ten.

It has performed well so far. It has improved over the past couple of years.

For any product, do a full software evaluation and make sure you actually test them side-by-side with like-for-like test cases. Then you know exactly what you are getting yourself into. Otherwise, you build out and realize it might not be the right product for you. So, a full software analysis is important.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Initial support is always important. It is always great when you can have a few free hours to have somebody to come in and help you understand the idiosyncrasies of any software, figuring out exactly what the best way is for it to be set up. Otherwise, you are just trying by trial by error. So, that is important. Also, stability is important.

I would definitely say it's a very good solution to have for a company, yes.

Be very clear in agile and then “map” your knowledge into the product setup.

Given the industry and what is happening in the industry with more organizations attempting to become product-centric, Rally Software is definitely attempting to accommodate a lot of changes.

They should adopt the OKR.  In my company, for my client, we are attempting to implement OKR.

I would rate Rally Software a seven out of ten.

Have a clear vision of where you want to go, and make sure the elements of the tool accommodate that vision.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Cost
• How well we can adapt the practices of the vendor to have some pretty clear direction on where we want to be, not necessarily how to get there. It has to be a partnership. 

It is important to truly understand it! In order to use it the best way that you can, you really have to understand your process, terminology and the way that CA Agile Central is meant to be used. We had a lot of issues with the terminology; for example, at what level should we be, does this count as a user story, does this count as a feature, etc. So, it is crucial to really do all that work in the beginning and to map out everything meticulously, so as to make sure that the definitions are clear. After that, setting up of the process becomes much easier; but, if there's a lot of back-and-forth in terms of the definition, the setup and adoption will be much more difficult.

I was talking to someone at a recent CA conference. They don't use Agile Central yet and she asked me, "What should we do?" I told them that they should take advantage of CA’s transformation consulting group, to come in and provide that entire solution from start to finish, so they don't get stuck like we did and not having their value streams identified, not having the tool set up and the best way to make them effective.

It's a partial solution. It's a big problem for us right now.

I would advise potential users to get in touch with CA and have a representative sit down and show them the tool and how they can use it.

I think you have to think through how you're going to organize, especially if you have a large company. We've struggled with the structure of our teams and the way they're set up. So that's something you need to consider. And I don't know if they've done a great job of it. They actually call teams “projects”, which is a bit of a naming issue.

You definitely need to have some foresight when you set it up in terms of how that's going to work. You also need to think about how you're going to do workspaces, because there's no functionality there to change it once it's set up. You've got to get that right from the get-go or you're going to have a lot of trouble going forward.

I fully support CA Agile Central as a product. I would guess that I also support their scaled agile framework Implementation of it, if you go in with your eyes open and have honest discussions with the CA Agile Central implementers.

We do technical support and even more than that. We do what I call operational monitoring. We have an operations team on one of our products; on the other product, we don't. We're the operations team.

We actually just instituted a new process that we're implementing. We go out and check each of our environments every day. We are always deploying to QA, and always have something in our user acceptance testing area and in our production area. We look at all three of those environments. Any problems we see, we immediately investigate.

I think that's how we've been able to prevent some of the problems we were having. At least the development team is doing that. The operations team has their own methodology.

My advice to others is when you use Rally Software every day, they must be more hands-on. The employees have to have a level of maturity for gaining knowledge of the software. They need to know what it can do, what it can't do, knowing the ins and outs of the software are important.

I rate Rally Software an eight out of ten.

We are currently using the latest version of the solution right now.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We've been largely very pleased with its capabilities.

It is a well thought-out solution. It's a great centerpiece for Agile methodology. It works.

This is a very helpful solution, especially for those who are planning to switch over to the agile environment. Although I have not evaluated any other tools, I do have experience with other tools as well, but I have never compared both of them.

This is a great solution, especially in terms of the graphs and how the trend is going on. That is the one of the main features, which is helping me a lot. During a two-week sprint, if I look into it, I can exactly know where the trend is going or whether all the work is getting completed or not. Thus, it provides a good forecast as to how much of your work is getting done or is still pending. This is a good positive aspect to suggest to others.

My advice would be to use it. As with any tool it has advantages and disadvantages.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is support. I know as a team lead for a developer team, I've personally worked with other third-party softwares that we integrate with. They've assigned people specifically to our account, which I'm sure happens at a lot of Fortune 200 companies working very big accounts. So the personalization is nice. We can have a weekly meeting with the same person, the same point of contact. If anything goes down, if we need assistance with anything, that person is available. Don't take the people out of IT. We work with computers so much it's easy to get out of touch, so keeping a personal touch is probably the best thing.

I would rate it a "high eight" out of 10. It's a very capable software. Like I said, I just would like to see it presented a little bit more visually. It's definitely got some power but everything's got room for improvement. 

Try to put yourself in the mind a developer and try and use it and see how you think it would flow. Really, it's a whole team collaboration. I'm not in the project support aspect, but I can empathize with them and think how they'd want to see things. Just try using it. See how you can move a project through it.

When looking to select a new vendor, our criteria are

• price 
• feature set.

I give it a nine out of 10, just because of the slight downtimes, which make it hard to go in and update things.

Definitely look into it, because of all of the different tools for user stories and test case management. It's been one of the best I've experienced.

Go for it. It’s a nice tool to use.

Go for it but make sure you learn the tool and understand it. Hopefully, you have a product expert.

I would like the milestone features to be more seamless and user-friendly.

When selecting a vendor, the ability to integrate with other internal tools is first. I also look at the stability of the brand and extensibility in being able to extend out. Of course, meeting our minimum needs is a given, such as being able to track and report on data. I want to know how robust those items are. I think most products provide those types of functions, it's just how robust they are and how high a grade they have in terms of being able to deliver that functionality. That is what differentiates vendors.

My advice to others is to start right away. Learn as much as you can. The tool itself is not going to be your impediment or your longest pole in the tent. It’s going to take a long time to figure out what your internal culture and processes are, and the tool is only there to help you reflect what you are producing. So start early.

This solution will be of benefit to somebody who has knowledge of and understands web services, as it is built on web services - Representational State Transfer (REST). 

In our organization, we have about 400-plus users of Agile Central. It is used by the development managers, QA managers, architects, delivery managers, and scrum masters. These are all stakeholders in it.

Across our organization, everyone, including the development team, is following the Agile methodology. We are yet to get into DevOps. Agile Central is the tool which even other departments, like testing, are using.

Overall, I would rate Agile Central as an eight out of ten because of its performance. It doesn't get a ten because of the dependency issue which they need to resolve. And, on the whole, the tool needs to have more of a holistic approach for everything, such as CI/CD and a test management tool. As of now, it is still confined to being only a test management tool.

The nirvana for all organizations is to implement end-to-end enterprise business agility. It’s a lot easier to do that when you have a tool that allows you to capture all the data you need and systemically roll that up for your enterprise portfolio reporting. CA Agile Central is a tool that enables you to do that. BUT, in order for data to be entered consistently, you really do need an enterprise coach. If you are not implementing agile at scale, I would recommend a cheaper tool that is also mobile-friendly. CA Agile Central is a tool that solves the agile-at-scale challenge, and is still user friendly enough to handle non-IT work loads.

I think that there is a trial period for this tool, so I would say to try it. However, some training is needed first.

The tool is amazing. If you want organized, overall delivery at the enterprise level, this tool allows you to do it for sure.

When making a decision to switch products, I consult others on tool choice based on the number of departments they have. I went in as the Agile coach to Cisco and recommended that they move to this solution. One team I was working with used JIRA. It's an option that Cisco allows some of their departments to use. I got them out of JIRA into Rally, mainly because JIRA is older technology, and it's too lightweight for a major corporation such as Cisco.

This tool allows you to talk to the rest of Cisco. If you've got one group running one solution and you've got another group running another solution, they can't speak to each other. They can't share data. They can't assign issues to each other. By moving one off one platform and moving them onto Rally, or to Agile Central, we can now holistically start to work across organizations, and see each other's problems.

The only other big issue is their workspaces need to talk to each other. That's another area for improvement that would be good. There are a few areas they had to work on, but cross-workspace communication is the main one. If they could solve that problem, that would be amazing. I would be so happy. Even in my own group for which I'm providing consulting services, we have multiple workspaces and we can't talk to each other. That can get a little crazy. We have to create this third solution that we all feed into. Obviously, nobody pays attention to it, because everybody is so focused on their own lane.

In terms of selecting a vendor, I look for the responsiveness to quality concerns. Whenever you've got an issue, the timeliness that they'll come back to you to resolve those technical issues is important. I also look at whether or not they have consulting services themselves for customization work The other part of it is just overall “solutioning”. I want to know if they have a complete suite of products, or if it is just a standalone, a one-off. If it is, then I have to go bring in three or four other additional products to augment the single product. Then you've got multiple bids and you're talking across multiple vendors, and that can be a headache. I just want to do one-stop shopping.

That's what CA provides holistically across the entire platform. They're going to give me everything that I need. Another factor is with one vendor, you work on better pricing structures and a better deal. Whether it's in service, or getting a discount on other products, you can weave all that in as an opportunity going to one vendor.

My advice to other is take a test drive. They have a sampling system that you can demo. They'll give you a space to put your product in and try to go through the whole workflow process. Make sure you go through the whole workflow process. Really see and understand exactly the functionality that the solution has to offer. A lot of people stop at the very top level, the one-inch level. Go underneath the wave and dig down into the solution. There's a lot of great opportunity there.

One of the neatest opportunities, because of its HTML capability with its apps, is the ability to embed a lot of my Smartsheets right into the solution. I can take team rosters and embed them. I can track monthly performance reports and a number of different functionalities that are available to me via the Smartsheet. I can update my Smartsheet, and it'll automatically be reflected in Rally. That is huge in the CA Central product. That's significant for me.

I would definitely tell them to make sure that they plan out what it is that they're trying to accomplish with the tool. Making sure that they get a good structure set up, and if they are trying to manage multiple teams, try to establish early on what those teams will look like in terms of size and what they will be doing.

One of the pain points that we see in having so many teams, is that every team has its own slightly different thing that they're doing in it. This is great from a tool perspective that it is supported, but from a metrics and reporting point of view, that makes things difficult because not all teams are doing the same thing.

Please go ahead and try it out. It is a good product.

Have a score card for features that HPE ALM has. I do see some project teams uncertain when adopting Agile Central tools, as they don’t have the score card features and thus it is very hard for them to change.

You need to clearly know what you want or how you want to implement and use the product. Once you have clarity then you can figure out how you want to setup the solution and go from there.

For us, the user interface was the most important criteria while choosing a vendor. We found it to be more intuitive than the others. We also felt that it can probably scale up to the needs of what we have within the organization, in terms of integrating with the rest of the ecosystem.

I would say Rally is the way to go.

You have to adopt agile and be true to agile. This is an agile product, too. If you don't want to plan in sprint and build teams around the agile process, then it's probably not the tool for you.

Make sure it meets your needs before rolling it out. Don’t buy it just because it is recommended as the “safe” tool.

Choose a different product for your test case needs, and explore other options of managing of your agile processes, such as TFS.

When our company is looking for a new vendor we float an RFP; there is a set of criteria, we get together, list down all the requirements that we have. Any tool that we look for we look for, we typically look at four different vendors, four different tools, and try and compare them.

I would recommend CA Agile, certainly, but it all depends on what processes you have and whether it's a fit for them. 

CA Agile Central has worked very well in our ever-growing, agile-centric organization. If you’re looking to implement an agile development solution that scales extremely well and is backed by solid performance, stability, and an outstanding support team, this is the solution for you!

We recently went through a rigorous analysis across ALM tools in an effort to justify the continued use of the Agile Central, in comparison to the alternative solutions. CA Agile Central was chosen hands down, as our one and only ALM development tool across our enterprise!

I would consider it highly. Be sure what you want to accomplish; it’s not reporting-friendly. It is good with team burndown and sizing.

Although, it’s agile-based, it’s not like HPE ALM that informs you via emails when something changes, i.e., even if you enable notifications, it’s fluky, as you get more emails than needed. CA Agile Central has a dashboard per user feature, as to when logged in that must be viewed.

The key thing is process! You must know how it works and how you want to use it, before you implement it. To be honest, there is only one way to use it that I have identified above.

Agile Central allows us to more effectively plan our sprints. As a sprint progresses, we learn more about what works and what doesn’t. We can then apply that learning directly into the next sprint. When we have perfected our system, we will be able to create things like burn down charts so we can colorize what happened and analyze more clearly our process with little manual analysis necessary.

One of our major criteria for a vendor is whether the product will help us be more productive. We want to know their track record. The market is marching towards CDCA. If we have parts of features already coded, how that can be transformed to this new paradigm is a key area.

Make sure you understand your processes and just know that it's not the tool. It's more about the process and how you work with it right. I know we did our last upgrade with Clarity and we didn't have our processes all the way defined. We started implementing things in the tool only to find they broke later, so we didn't have that process defined. Make sure you understand what you need before you start.

I would give it probably in the seven to eight range. In order to improve beyond that, I think there would need to be some simplification. The team-level side can be challenging and complicated. However, its ability to scale to portfolio and executive-level solutions really drives it up to that seven to eight score. It is something that I don't think there is a lot of other projects out there that allow you to take that from a team to an executive-level view.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: First and foremost, we are buying a product, but we are buying also the people and support. Probably the best thing we have had with Agile Central is not only the tool, but the people that support that tool, and the relationships we have been able to build there in order for us to further our Agile journey.

They still feel like a small tech company. The support we have gotten and the way they have managed or accepted some of our enhancement requests. They still treat it like a small company, like Rally was before they purchased Agile Central. They still have that feel, knowing how big they are and seeing how they can act small. It is really nice.

Make sure your agile processes are really well-defined before you go out into the market and look for a tool. Tools do things differently, they call things a feature in one and a subfeature in another. Make sure your processes are defined, and once you have that, look for your tool after that. Do not look for your tool first.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We have price, which I would not say is our most important. We are looking for more of a fit and finish to our process, though price is really important to us. One of the things that we look at is: We want to create a really good process, then find a tool that fits that process. I think a lot of customers do it the other way. So, if our process is mature and we like it, the tool really needs to fit that.

I would recommend using it without any doubt. I think it fits perfectly with the agile processes.

My advice is that they need to understand their environment and what they need. Then look for that in the tools that are provided. CA Agile Central was very flexible. You can configure it without customizing it. That was one of the things we really liked.

Make sure that everybody in the company and team know the importance of the change.

There hasn't been anything surprising within Agile Central. As CA has taken in Clarity, which is now CA PPM, what I'm learning here at the CA World conference is the full breadth of everything we can do better under the CA umbrella. I don't know if there's anything particularly surprising about Agile Central. There's JIRA. They're all fairly similar. So there's nothing that wowed me there.

When it comes to the most important criteria in selecting vendors, budget always plays into, but I think it's also the breadth of the solution. I think that's one of the reasons we've stuck with CA, because now we're using several of their tools.

I rate Agile Central six to seven out of 10. For it's core functionality, it works. I think when you get into the details, there are some improvements that could be made as far as being able to better track across. There is dependency functionality now that you can use, but I think there are always improvements that can be made. But for it's core functionality, it works.

In terms of advice to a colleague who is researching a similar solution, I think most people who are developing in an Agile way are familiar with it now. I might give some tips on dashboards that I've set up. If you're familiar with Agile you're familiar with Agile Central, really. The tips and tricks that I've given my colleagues are more around how to build out dashboards to be able to see, in that first glance when you walk in, your view for the day. So it would be around the dashboards. 

When our company is looking for new products, and new vendors, the criteria is more of a consensus, or global acceptance across the board, and executive support. I'm sure price tag comes into play.

I give it an eight out of 10. I tend not to give anything a 9 or a 10, because I always think there is probably room for improvement on it, not that I can't think of anything right now. It's not perfect, but it's definitely very good.

I would tell colleagues looking for a similar solution that Agile Central is very easy to use, and it's easy to build dashboards. It's very intuitive. I'd recommend it.

I would recommend it. It is a very good product, very helpful in managing, and pretty good at checking things. The way we manage our projects and the way we work with it is pretty good.

The most important thing is to have very clear requirements as an organisation. That includes having all the internal processes, governance and ways of working well understood so that the selected tool can be assessed against those requirements with confidence.

My advice would be to make sure that you're implementing it in conjunction with agile methodology. If you implement this tool with waterfall, you will see that it's very oriented towards agile, and it's set up and structured to support agile and not set up and structured to support waterfall methodology.

I think that it isn't that flexible for helping with teams to migrate to agile; it's not very flexible with customizing for my team. There are a lot of pieces of data that my team needs, and we're having to use non-ideal fields for those. I know that that's the way that it's installed in our application, but a lot of the customization that's available in CA Agile Central isn't available to me to do. So, I would say that it would need to trickle down to the group admins, the ability to be a little bit customized, to be able to customize it to the team.

Good estimates give the burndown chart value. If your burndown looks bad, first look at your estimates for team capacity and user story/task effort estimates, and then look at the members of your team.

Our top reason for selecting an agile platform was needing to ship as fast as possible. Waterfall is good for new products coming out, but we have a lot of long-standing applications that have been out on the market for awhile. Getting releases together and shipping them as fast as possible is what we needed. It was kind of a no-brainer for us.

I would say our agile maturity is intermediate. We're still learning. There's so much you can do. Like I said, we are even coming out with new products, so we have to use waterfall sometimes; but we're still learning about it. We're trying to integrate as much as possible and tailor it to our company.

When we evaluate vendors, are most important criteria are the customer support, scalability, and availability. We've had problems in the past with some other vendors whose products’ availability was not what we needed. They would go down quite a bit, more times than you would think, honestly. That's a big deal for us, especially whenever we put so much into it. If a system goes down, the entire development department basically stops working. That's a big thing for us, especially as we keep putting more and more into CA Agile Central.

If a colleague of mine was evaluating this solution, I would advise them to keep it small. Simple is better.

Sign up for the demo and play around with it, as painful as it is to try to maintain both tools at the same time. If you have a tool and you want to try a different tool, you almost have to actually use it. You can play around with it, you can look at the demos, and you can look at the documentation, but until you actually use it, you're not going to see where maybe the pain points are.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are:

• It's got to work.
• It's got to be stable. 
• Cost, to be honest, is a huge factor. It's top three. It needs to be reasonable and affordable. I need to be able to make a business case and sell it to leadership, give them a reason why it's going to work better than what is currently in place. 
• We need reliable support.

I rate it a seven out of 10. I don't rate it higher because of the things I said I needed more autonomy in being able to change. And while I have really good results and feedback from CA Support, I wish that Accounts were as responsive to my needs as the Support side is. And I get that we're probably a small fish in their pond of Accounts, but we still need help getting our work done.

If I were to advise a colleague looking into similar solutions I would say it's a good tool. I'd want to talk to them more about what it is they're trying to accomplish to find out whether this is the best fit or if they want to use something a little different. Agile Central will cover a lot of needs for you, but maybe it's too much for what you need. So I would want to dig down deeper into their requirements to make sure it's the best fit.

It takes time to configure and clear the dashboard to make it useful.

Give it some time. It is very difficult to change this kind of tool, especially when you are in the middle of a project. However, I would advise people implementing it to take their time to check all the different functionalities and think about how to use it effectively.

It has everything that I need in my daily job routine.

Good estimates give the burndown chart its value. If your burndown looks bad, first look at your estimates for team capacity and user story/task effort estimates. Then look at the members of your team.

In a vendor, we look for good support by people that have a lot of product knowledge. We don’t want to have to wait a long time before new features and customer feedback are integrated into the next release.

Don't be afraid to change things. It's something that I try to follow, so that's something I would give that advise to others as well. People will not like new views and changes initially, but once they get used to it, they will like it. It's similar to what Facebook does. They make very subtle changes and they force it on you and initially, you don’t like the changes. But, then once you use it for a few days you find that it works out.

Most important to me when choosing a vendor is good technical support and customer service. This is very helpful when learning a new tool. If I have questions, I want someone to be available at the other end, to be ready to answer my questions. I want them to show me how this tool is going to work for my specific use case. That's the biggest thing I look for in a vendor.

I would say a thumbs up to the solution. It's pretty good and you should leverage it and try to use it. CA Agile Central gives you flexibility performing custom quoting on top of the solution. This makes it interesting and you can achieve many things with this tool.

Work with your CA Agile Central account manager to determine the best way to implement and configure Agile Central based on your needs. Put together a basic usage policy, training document, and training presentation for users. Limit the number of administrators to a small handful of people. Integrate Agile Central with your other SDLC tools.

You have to adopt agile and be true to it. This is an agile solution too. If you don't want to plan in sprint and build teams around the agile process, then it's probably not the tool for you.

Make sure you have adopted an agile methodology on a few small projects first and then work with IT and business colleagues to accept that methodology. We did that before we looked for a tool. That makes the purchase, acceptance, and customization of this tool much easier.

When considering a new solution, I always consider:

• UI
• Price

If you are an agile or even hybrid agile shop, this is an excellent tool. If you are a more traditional PM or waterfall model, it may not be your best option. It’s really built to support agile methodologies.

In order to improve the organization of your work, make sure you put real info/data into the product.

I think it's a great tracking tool. There are similar tools out there, but for us it's convenient, it's intuitive.

For me, the most important criterion when selecting a vendor is finding a partner, versus just a vendor who's going to deliver a piece of software and wait for the money to come in.

Don't think just about the tool, but think about the entire lifecycle of the tool, or the lifecycle of your application development. That's very helpful.

I would recommend that you use this product for your productivity.

Take the time to go through the Agile Central tool training videos. They are very useful and well worth your time.

Do not try to implement this product if you are not using agile at scale. There are simpler, more elegant and intuitive tools.

If you tell me you are using VersionOne, you would get more for your money with similar costs from CA Agile Management. So more value, that’s number one because being with a bigger company means you get more value with the community. If you are not using any tool, then you should start using a tool, and this is a good start.

There is a need for some training, but overall, it is easy to use this solution.

Have a strong plan and clear requirements in advance for what you want to get out of the tool. You need to have strong leadership on the design: how you're going to use it, how you're going to set it up, what you expect out of it, what you might be integrated with, what you're angle is with the tool. If you just keep buying tools, you're not going to use them in the end; and it's just going to be a waste of money and a headache for people down the line using it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor depends on which group gets to select the vendor, unfortunately. Price is always something, especially if finance is making the decision. When it comes to IT, I like flexibility and use of the system. There has to be more gain than effort. If it's too hard to implement for too little gain, then it's not worth your time. You're really looking for balance across the board. The cost has be there. There has to be value to it; so return on investment, the ROI, ends up being the big deciding factor in the end for any software company.

There is an ongoing change that is happening. CA has implemented with Rally, so they are still in the early emerging process. I think the evolution and integration of the two with product solutions will come after it.

A solution is not more than a solution. It is a tool. It does not solve your problem. It is fixed by the tool. It is important to think about the problem that you are trying to solve to work with the consultants to come up with the right solution. The tool by itself could not solve your product issues.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: partnership. That is the most important thing. To be there when I need someone to be connected with the evolution of my processes when I have difficulty, both technical or on the business side. That kind of partnership is what I value the most.

CA should keep doing what they're doing to make it better.

They should definitely use it.

Compare other products before making a decision on features and pricing along with customer support reviews.

I think that you should do some research but ultimately go for someone that addresses what you need and who is able to provide great support.

Start small.

If you are looking for a stable ALM that supports the agile process, this is the solution to go with.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: functionality and stability. So, for it to be a stable technology with a solid road map.

Make it user-friendly. 

Probably, you can add some UI templates such as a combination of filters/functions, etc.

Perfect product for implementing the agile platform.