We performed a comparison between OpenText ALM Octane and Rally Software 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."The most important feature is the integration among all the different features in just one tool: Agile management system, requirements management system, test management, defects management, automatic test execution. Really, if you're looking at other tools, you will never find all that integrated into just one tool with all the traceability, with all the elements in just one place."
"The key feature is the usability. It is fast to learn and easy to use. It's very intuitive to work with. Most of the important functions are available via a few clicks, compared to other tools where I have to open a sub-menu and then a sub-menu and another sub-menu, and then press a button."
"Current version of the solution is fairly stable."
"It's more streamlined because we have it all under one umbrella. And once the business requirements and rules have been created, we can do test cases and apply them to the business rules."
"Octane creates a gentle approach to Agile-based projects."
"The integration points are very good. Octane gives us a window not only into our manual testing, but also our automation testing and our performance testing. We can see all results from all three streams of testing in one place."
"The defect management gives us full-fledged capabilities for handling defects, including capturing the details of the defects and even screenshotting the defect cases. The defect management is comprehensive."
"On the user side, what I like a lot is the reporting capabilities. There's no tool, to my knowledge, that gets anywhere close to Octane at the moment when it comes to the reporting capabilities. I can do everything with the reporting. There's nothing missing. I have all the options. I can create graphs, including graphs of several types and looks."
"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."
"It has allowed the quality assurance team to keep all information in sync with the application requirements and user stories for our general development."
"Helps me plan an estimate of how soon or how far out we'll be able to deliver something."
"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."
"The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. It helps you shape the way you flow."
"My teams uses it for their daily agile management. They describe their user stories and track the progress of their projects."
"Gives me a dashboard where I can see what things are not being worked on, what things are blocked."
"It would help us if ALM Octane got FedRAMP-certified, so our government departments could use the cloud solution. That way our external consultants could access it. We've created a URL to get to it, but if it were FedRAMP-certified and service and had support in the continental United States, that would be better."
"We have some requests to beef up the manual testing abilities and the ability to report on testing progress. All the basics are there, but there's an issue of maintainability. For example... once you plan a test and it creates a run, more particularly a suite run, you can't edit the suite run afterward... That that is not realistic with how people work. Mistakes are made and people are humans and we change our minds about things. So the tool needs to allow for a bit more flexibility in that testing area, as well as some better widgets to report on progress."
"They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add."
"The elements in filtering need to be improved, meaning the number of filters I can use in widgets or in the grid views in parallel. There's a limitation which bothers a lot of our users. Filtering in text, or having a complex filter is limited. In a given field, for example, I can use a filter only once. I cannot say, 'Include the values 1, 2, and 3, and exclude value 17.' This is not possible but we have requested it often."
"The solution should improve by adding scrum board-like functionality."
"There are some challenges when we want to integrate the tool with other products, and it takes time for a team to figure out how to do it."
"I like their smart analytics; perhaps they should continue to expand and improve there because it's a fantastic start."
"Though Micro Focus ALM Octane doesn't have much of a bug, it lacks integration with some solutions. For example, my company has fairly new software, but it can't be integrated with Micro Focus ALM Octane, so integration with other software, particularly with less popular software, could be improved. Micro Focus ALM Octane also requires a lot of resources during its setup, and I find this another area for improvement. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the ability to customize the interface, especially when doing a manual test."
"The Reporting feature can improve, especially around executive summaries and dependency mapping."
"We did submit an enhancement request. I think a lot of teams that do very large scale products have the same issue. They just do not realize it would help them."
"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."
"There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but it needs something for the Kanban side."
"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."
"The navigation within the tool sometimes is a little tricky for me. I'm sure with more use, more practice, I'll become accustomed to it, but some of the things just aren't intuitive."
"I'd like to be able to color code timeboxes, so I have an easy visual way to track the success of sprints."
"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."
OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 5th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews while Rally Software is ranked 8th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 116 reviews. OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2, while Rally Software is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of OpenText ALM Octane writes "Reporting engine, widgets, and dashboards are a huge plus, and powerful REST interface means we can interact with other tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rally Software writes "A solution that enables users to accurately estimate the time required for building large software projects". OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps, GitLab and Codebeamer, whereas Rally Software is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, TFS, Jira Align and Polarion ALM. See our OpenText ALM Octane vs. Rally Software report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors and best Enterprise Agile Planning Tools vendors.
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