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."Agile Central allows us to log one hundred percent of the work we do and it allows for no hidden work, so teams can't go under the radar with what they're working on."
"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."
"Helps me plan an estimate of how soon or how far out we'll be able to deliver something."
"Its ability to scale."
"We use the roadmap features, and we're getting better at using dates to use the roadmap so that we can see if we're on target for work."
"It allows us to work in a more dynamic fashion and track more of the development lifecycle."
"Having that view into features and roadmap from product to delivery teams, and where they are going, then execute on."
"With this product, searching for historical information or the evolution of the requirement, detecting conflict between projects has helped a lot."
"It's user friendly. We haven't had any issues so far. It's flexible. If we need something, we can always contact the owner in our headquarters to make a configuration."
"It's an integrated system that includes all the information that we need to deliver our products smoothly and to track the progress of each piece of code."
"Complete integration with VS IDE and Office tools: This give us a possibility of high-level automation, thus minimizing human error."
"Stability is okay."
"The most valuable features are the dashboard and task-selection capability."
"The tool's installation is straightforward."
"Since it is a robust solution, I face no performance issues. Also, considering how well the implementation process of the solution was carried out, we never faced any issues while using the solution."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It could improve by being self-organizing: user stories, different hierarchies, and different perspectives. Not just as a single hierarchical structure, but something that can be multidimensional."
"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."
"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."
"I think the interface could be a little bit more visual and less wordy. Right now, it seems like it's just a lot of text on the page. In other ticketing systems where it's more visual, you can see more of a flow. But in this one it's more just a list of tasks. I would like to see that a little bit better, especially considering it has so many great organizational features, like child tasks, different artifacts. It would be great to see it presented more appropriately."
"CA Agile Central does not have a workflow tool included."
"The user interface could improve and test management was not useful in 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."
"Currently, we are looking for a solution with which we can incorporate third-party development sites or third-party project teams into the system. Because it is on-premise, it is a bit problematic because we need to have a VPN or something else in the system. A cloud-based solution would be better for us, and that's what we are looking for. Our biggest problem is the external connection, which, of course, is limited by our own IT. It would be good to have some kind of publishing service for this external connection. It might be there, and it might be that our IT is making it impossible for us. Its template editor could be easier to use. Currently, customizing the project templates according to your needs requires some work."
"One of the areas that could be improved is to have an effective full lifecycle management."
"I'd like to see some kind of visualization tool for TFS that would make life much easier."
"The tool needs improvement in stability."
"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."
Rally Software is ranked 8th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 7 reviews while TFS is ranked 3rd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 27 reviews. Rally Software is rated 8.2, while TFS is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Rally Software writes "Good discussion and note-taking capabilities but hard to track the changes". 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 OpenText ALM Octane, 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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