Rally Software Benefits

SD
Sr Engineering Manager - Design Engineering at Baker Hughes

Rally Software provides the capability to accurately estimate the time required for building large software projects, which can be challenging to predict. In our company's experience, we have developed software projects that took months to complete, and it was difficult to determine when they would be finished. Rally Software enables us to schedule tasks better, allocate resources, and meet project deadlines.

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it_user631632 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Digital Engagement Delivery at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

In setting up agile delivery operations, CA Agile Central’s training and platform have been instrumental to our progress and success. CA Agile Central was a key ingredient to that delivery transformation. Also, CA has updated the tool to support Scaled Agile Frameworks, which is a key competitive differentiator for them.

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KS
Director Of Tool Chain Automation at American Express

The benefit of the solution is enhanced visibility, that is probably the key one. And it provides data points to enable continuous improvement.

The ability, for example, to use the deep export report, and pivot tables and that kind of thing in Excel, has helped us out a lot.

It drives the conversation behind some of the pain points the teams have, based on the data that we're able to pull out of the system. As a result of that, we're able to make better decisions, to become better as a whole.

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Buyer's Guide
Rally Software
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Rally Software. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user778977 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It really helps us scale in terms of our organizations, and be more predictable. That's one of the biggest advantages that the Agile Central tool has provided us. As I said, gathering metrics and being more predictable, that really helps us in the long run.

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it_user628020 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dealing Technology at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has enabled the transition from a project-based portfolio to a product-based portfolio.

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BN
Agile Coach at T-Mobile
  • It really helped to connect the dots between what the overall vision was down to T-Mobile. 
  • Having that view into features and roadmap from product to delivery teams, and where they are going, then execute on. 
  • Being able to have the information, helping to facilitate those conversations, and just overall delivery. It is a really powerful tool for that. 
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it_user663606 - PeerSpot reviewer
Quality Assurance Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I get to see what we have, what test cases we need to deliver, per release.

It gives us the visibility into what we're doing and how we're doing on a day to day basis, to see if we need to refocus or to try to change things before it gets down into the negative. The daily iterative working part of it is what I like. And I get to see the visuals of what's going on.

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it_user635454 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Technical Analyst at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees

It helps us organize our projects so that we can get down to really detailed work items; really granular, busting up a task, a feature, and parsing it out so that we really understand what's needed. We can put it into small, bite-sized pieces that can be addressed quickly. If somehow there's a misunderstanding or miscommunication, it can be adjusted and corrected fast and easy.

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it_user637815 - PeerSpot reviewer
Quality Assurance Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I think what it's helped with in general is that we've learned a lot about how to break things down a little more in detail. Going from primarily a waterfall organization into an agile organization, the tool has been very helpful to help people make that transition.

It's a relatively slow process, unfortunately, as it's a large organization we're dealing with, and everybody interprets things a little bit differently. We've had some people that have really spent a lot of time with the CA resources, who really understand the product and help the users use the tool effectively.

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it_user636102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Tech Ops Support System Analyst at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

In the past, we used the JIRA system. It was very difficult to track progress. With the agile method, we can break things down to manageable pieces. Our deliverables to production have increased as a result, and I can clearly see if we are moving at the speed and in the direction to best serves the business.

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it_user272523 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

When we went into Scaled Agile Framework, we could not have done it without the use of Agile Central. So for us, it allows us to scale our Scrum teams, and it also enables us when we do our remote big room plannings.

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it_user647424 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Business Systems Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I work with our business units and they hand over a project to me. Then, I break it down and dissect it at the project level and break out all the features. Then, for each one of the features, I write all the user stories. Then, I coordinate with my software development team to get the work done for all of the user stories.

We take it through the entire process from the conceptual stage to the business of getting the work done and showing the business that we got it done.

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it_user629937 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Owner - Business Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is used as a source of truth on workstream, workstream progress and issue management.

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it_user627030 - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivery Pipeline Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Parts of our business use Agile Central to deliver in an agile and features-based method. It is a much more user-friendly product compared to other products in market.

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it_user597612 - PeerSpot reviewer
Agile (Jira/Confluence) Tools Specialist at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It needs to become more mature for large organisations with better integration required to DevOps. 

It has the capacity to let you integrate if you have in-house development capability but not out of the box. 

Solutions are available to integrate it with development tools or Atlassian tools but they are expensive.

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SM
Director Of Enterprise Architecture at Best Western

It probably would be mostly the visualization of what's in flight, and being able to move the cards across the board, and plan our releases based on completed work, which really is the goal of Kanban.

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it_user355629 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Corporate Systems and Emerging Business at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The tools are not overly complex for Agile. It appears that CA has recognized that. They're not just building the connector for Rally, but they are also allowing other groups to build connectors from JIRA into CA PPM and from other tools to CA PPM.

If you are looking at open source products, why isn't somebody building an open source product so that it could actually do this interface? I build open source interfaces that allow me to get to use different products.

In terms of the APIs, you have consulting companies that are building other products that you buy and you pay for maintenance

In the open source community, they are attempting to tie the old to the new, or they are just looking at the new. In the open source community, there's a lot of need for tying the old to the new. (The old refers to CA PPM.)That's the old way to do project management, which involves governing and controlling.

The new way is Agile. While you still have to do some governance and control, Agile allows you to get away with a lot of things that CA PPM doesn't allow you to get away with.

There is a need to connect these two elements. What I'm seeing in the open source community is more of a focus on the new products.

There is a lot old stuff out here that has to be connected to the new. You can't just ignore it.

The Agile release management is ready to go. When I take this function and try to run it as a discreet element, the other function of the system is rendered as a separate sprint.

All the other vendors wrap around this core. They interface with SharePoint and Clarity. They will also interface JIRA to Clarity. It is a methodology. It is basically taking the Agile methodology, doing some things, and not redefining the whole process. It is, rather, adding some additional components to it, so you can understand what you can do with it, and what cannot be done with it.

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it_user638709 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Owner at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The velocity of work that we were doing prior to using CA Agile Central, was not quantitative, i.e., we were not able to quantify how many user story points we had delivered or how much work, we were doing.

By using the CA Agile Central tool organization-wide, it gives us a clear picture of how many user stories we can pick and the capacity of the entire team. It is a very good tool; we can see the capacity and the entire velocity of the team. So, this is how it has improved our deliverables. Earlier, we used to deliver in around an 8-week sprint. Now, since our company is using it for about two to three years, the team has matured on the process. They have really improved deliverables and reduced it to a 5-week sprint, that we are giving to the clients.

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it_user635460 - PeerSpot reviewer
Process Transformation Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

This tool is basically used for our IT project management in our organization.

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it_user635481 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Using CA Agile Central, my organization was able to develop, test, and deploy software much quicker than we used to under the waterfall methodology.

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AL
Implementation Consultant at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

It is kind of set up for Scrum or Agile, but we sort of use it more in a kind of hybrid way. It does help build accountability because, during stand-up, you have to see what everybody is doing, why certain things are in red, and why someone is not where he or she is supposed to be.

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it_user778653 - PeerSpot reviewer
PMO Manager at Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc.
  • Ease of use
  • Visibility

As a PMO Manager, I need to be able to look and see what the project status at any time without having to go ask somebody or look for a status report. So, I could go there and see exactly what percentage is complete, what the blockers might be, and just see who is assigned to what, so I can look at resourcing.

It has made our company more organized and it is helping us be more true to the agile principle. When I came to the company, we did not have any agile practices in place. So, it has helped us, because it gives us a framework to put the agile practices in place. 

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it_user631626 - PeerSpot reviewer
Reservations Supervisor at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has helped a great deal in the fact that we are able to take small chunks of data and get them actually moved forward end to end. Previously, we had to wait several months before something would actually be available for the end user. This has helped us to break that and to move forward quickly.

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it_user627045 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It is supposed to shorten the project’s lifecycle. I do not have proof of this.

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it_user778848 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at DISH Network Corporation

We have gotten away from so much paper, which is more dynamic. It allows us to work in a more dynamic fashion and track more of the development lifecycle. 

Essentially, we are replacing TeamTrack. TeamTrack was more of a waterfall type of process and documentation for us. In fact, I have tried to go back and look for some of those old projects and it is not possible to find them. Although with this product, searching for historical information or the evolution of the requirement, detecting conflict between projects has helped a lot.

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it_user635421 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst, Business Process Design at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Previously, we had an in-house solution that was very difficult to update and customize. Thus, when we had acquired new businesses that we were working with, we weren't able to add the right type of information that we needed or get the right type of support and customers. We weren't recording half of all our new work that was coming in through my team because we couldn't do it. So, when we started using CA Agile Central, those changes could be made in a day or two and we had better data integrity, than my team had ever had before.

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it_user572916 - PeerSpot reviewer
Group Product Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The benefits of the solution are the collaboration and transparency. We encourage everyone across the organization to have an ID and to log in to the tool – daily or weekly, whatever their needs are – to see the data. They log in to the tool to see the real-time data. We have really pushed back on teams that would still want to do external reporting, where the data is old and stagnant. I would say that real-time transparency is one of the most valuable aspects for us.

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it_user558174 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Primarily, it has given us a more structured approach than doing some kind of scrum using white boards and other manual methods. It's a very helpful tool. The push for Agile Central came when we asked the company to go agile and do scrum. This required us to go ahead and purchase a tool to unify us across the company.

My personal agile maturity is about medium. Company-wide, some facets are medium to high and others are just starting. Our scrum masters also use it for coaching. Some of the best practices we use are keeping the tool updates timely and making sure stories are well defined and broken down in the right unit of work.

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it_user558279 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Program Management at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Agile Central helps in terms of Agile management, especially with our scrum teams. It's designed to be used from an Agile standpoint, so I think the teams that have struggled with it are the ones that aren't really set up for Agile. Agile Central is really founded as an Agile tool, so if you're not doing Agile, the tool doesn't work all that well for you.

Our company is large and we've got a very wide gamut of Agile maturity. We have some teams that are very expert in Agile and we have others that are still Waterfall. It's a 100+ plus year old company, so it runs the full gamut. Personally, I have been using Agile for a couple of years, so I'd say I'm pretty familiar with it at this point.

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it_user558066 - PeerSpot reviewer
Safe Agilist Scrum Master at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • By using this extracted data, it provides a real picture, instead of a perceived picture, of the amount of work the team is doing, the time it's taking to get new changes out, ready to put into a user acceptance test area, and production, which is really where our problems are. It's not solving those problems right now; but it is providing data that I use to present data on the deployment delays. For example, we can see that we’re finished at point A, but we're not actually deploying it to a production environment until point B, which is sometimes only three months later. So there is a delay in getting the features that customers want to production. This is because we lack a DevOps culture. CA Agile Central is giving me real data to show that for many features. 
  • Our company implemented the scaled agile framework. I believe they've created a heavyweight bureaucratic implementation, and I think they have some work to do there. It’s putting wear and tear on our team. We just did a total pivot. With scaled agile, we work in three-month program increments. I'm actually used to planning out that long, but we had a business situation that came up in which our whole department did an immediate pivot; so we are pretty agile. I just think that we have some work to do on the wear and tear on the team.
  • I think I have a great handle on agile methodology, but I haven't done any portfolio management using agile tools. 
  • Our team’s agile knowledge is intermediate, but they're learning; and they're learning on their own now. They actually understand their limitations. When I started, they had been doing the whole methodology for a couple of years, but they didn't realize where they had opportunity to grow, which is one of the reasons why I was brought in. Before, they just needed to be directed.
  • For people outside my team, we created a scrum master guild, and we use that all the time. One of our best practices is that we created agreements across all of our teams regarding how those specific teams work. Those agreements are not the same on every team, which I think is exactly the right way to go. It is definitely a positive change for the organization now that each team can provide information transparently to executive management. Everybody seems to think that’s a good thing.
  • We also do a retrospective across our teams, which I think is very open. That's pretty refreshing to see.
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it_user558372 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Curriculum Development at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • We're using it to manage the training content development we're doing, so it's kind of a one-off case. It's not your typical agile project, but so far it's working well, and we're able to incorporate most of the agile methodology into our processes. We get all of the transparency that comes with the tool; so we have a clear view of what's happening with all of our projects, what state they're in, and where all the pieces are. Blockers stand out, so they're getting more attention. It's become our single location for project information. Although there's been a bit of a learning curve for the team (more around the processes we're using than with complexity in the product), I've had several team members tell me that it's a good product that they enjoy working with.




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it_user638703 - PeerSpot reviewer
QA Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I am from the QA team and am using this especially for test automation. We have so many test scripts and this would take some time. Earlier, we used to have a different tracking system, but the difference is that, if there are any new changes, then it was very hard for us to get them into the system. However, with the CA Agile tool, we were able to have two-week scrums and two-week sprints. After each sprint, we were able to pull any new tricks that came up and we could easily prioritize, prior to the two-week period, instead of having to wait for a long time. We were able to easily create and track the user stories. We were able to understand the graph as to how the trend is going, so all this was really helpful.

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it_user345534 - PeerSpot reviewer
Agile Coach at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

It's the first software that allows everyone to use the same software that is actually user friendly.

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it_user778923 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst Developer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It really does help everything just flow through the cycle better; everybody just worrying about their small piece of the pie. And then the project managers can have a bigger overview of it. I like how it moves things. It moves development through the whole lifecycle. 

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it_user779166 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Developer Analyst at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

It allows our team, and all the external teams that are waiting on us for dependencies, to see where progress is on the stuff that we're about to develop and deploy.

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it_user631638 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical System Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

This is the only tool our team is using for tracking and monitoring agile projects (features, stories, tasks and use cases). It’s stable, easy to navigate and fast. It’s not overwhelming with details and fields, but provides necessary placeholders to keep all the information needed for the project and have a picture where we are and what is coming.

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it_user558177 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The charts that this tool has make it transparent. Also, the information is there for everybody to share and it supports Agile methodology. This tool makes it easier. These are the features that are valuable to us. Our team’s Agile maturity level is close to expertise.

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it_user558441 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lean Agile Coach with SPC4 at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has improved the organization's functions by eliminating time wasted waiting for someone to have a prioritized list on their laptop or on some SharePoint site that to which we then have to get access. All of this is simplified and we're not wasting time looking for information. Everything is right in one place, correlated, and related in the right way, and at the right level that allows for planning, execution, and tracking afterwards.

We have pockets of really good Agile maturity in the company and some pockets where more maturity is still necessary. I think the bank as a whole is still maturing in terms of agility, and it's ability to adapt to change. I would describe it as just pockets at this point, but growing very, very quickly.

We use Agile for coaching as well. We try to coach to a few things. One of them is, of course, business value; to say, "hey, focus on delivering high business value first". So again, we are able to take advantage of the prioritized lists at all levels within the tool.

This applies to transparency also; making data visible at all levels and to anybody who is a stakeholder or part of the team. The information is right there, and everybody has the same exact view given the access that they are granted.

We work on predictability also. You're able to see the level of velocity that each team and each release has very quickly. You don't have to go and search for data. When talking about improvement, it's more of a process that we coach. But, enabling those types of conversations around continuous improvement based on accessible, real data from the system is invaluable.

We're focused on multiple areas. We are trying to get teams to think about the system as a whole and not just their small areas. We're trying to get end-to-end visibility of how efficient we are at doing our work. That's where we coach.

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PM
Test Automation Architect at CenturyLink

We were using Quality Center, Application Lifecycle Management, from Micro Focus. That is hosted on an Oracle Database, whereas Agile Central is completely built on web services. If I have to create some metrics, I can do it via simple web services. Web services can be used to pull the metrics and this is much faster. I don't have to write SQL queries to do so. It definitely saves time, perhaps something like 30 percent.

Also, if I had to track multiple teams in Quality Center, I needed to go through different containers. With this solution, I can just add all of them and see them together.

Also, the data is more granular when it comes to tasks, iterations, sprints, and releases.

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it_user637821 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Developer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It helps us to track work in progress for each project and for each user story. We can also learn project details from a high level.

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it_user629046 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project Portfolio Manager at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

It provides teams the ability to define, prioritize, and monitor the progress of both their operational and project work. The big win is the fact that we are using the same tool outside of IT. It’s a huge win when your internal customers are also using the same platform for defining, tracking, monitoring progress on their objectives. The non-IT departments that have teams using the tool are marketing, operations, training, and human resources.

Provides portfolio, department, and program managers the ability to define, prioritize, and monitor progress on larger initiatives being delivered by multiple teams.

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it_user591864 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Systems Analysis Consultant at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

When there are disparate locations in cross-area teams, it is difficult to locate all of the documentation that one needs.

Having the CA Agile Central tool allows for there to be one place that contains all the information on teams and sprint by having features to add and update notes, attachments, and data element values to user stories and tasks.

This encourages team members to make updates as a way for others to learn the challenges and developments that are occurring during sprints and to communicate statuses on where we are now regarding tasks that are in-progress or completed.

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it_user558051 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise / Team Agile Coach at RBC

Agile Central is an enterprise tool, so it allows our teams to work together. Individual teams don’t work in a silo. Agile Central allows us to drive all the metrics at an enterprise level. We can then discover what needs to improve at the enterprise level, instead of looking at it on the team level. We are using it for our Agile project delivery.

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it_user558054 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Agilest at SolutionsATI Consulting

It's optimized how our organization runs. We can look across multiple teams, using Scaled Agile Framework Methodology (SAFE), so that we can look at various release trains, and how that then flows up to the overall program budget. Each train has its own unique budget line. I can look holistically across all the trains and have it flow up to the program office’s budget. I can track personnel within the software. We can do all of the quality functionality and spread that across multiple tracks. In this way, one track is not going to be heavily burdened by taking on the quality function.

The big value add is not only the ability to do Agile, but scaled Agile as well, utilizing the budget functionalities. It’s really top notch in that regard, with the ability to work with the personnel function of the software. It gives us another holistic view of the overall functionality and operations that we have providing a value add to our customer, Cisco.

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it_user558003 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Developer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The biggest benefit that we've found has to do with the ease of use. We can get into the data and actually report out of it. Historically, we'd gather requirements in Word documents and things like that, so moving to a tool where you've got easy access to get to the data was a big win for us. The reporting in the tool is pretty good at the team level. It struggles a little more in a big organization. We are trying to look at things across all of the teams, trying to do reporting across the whole tool, so it's a little less good there, but overall it’s pretty nice.

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it_user639684 - PeerSpot reviewer
Front End Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

The agile methodology has made it easy for all disciplines of software development such as the developer, QA, software architect (SA), and the product owner. Thus, anybody can open up CA Agile Central and find out what they need. That has improved our productivity. It is easy to use this tool.

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it_user627060 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Analyst at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

The project team can easily keep track of progress and the burndown chart that, if auto-populated by the tools itself, is a good indicator for the team to keep track of their velocity.

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it_user558417 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of improving the organization functions, it gives us a lot of visibility as to what features are getting released and when. It also helps us to track across the organization in a much better fashion. In my opinion, visibility is the biggest benefit that we have received from implementing CA Agile Central.

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it_user352929 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer II with 1,001-5,000 employees

When we started to go to the agile model from the waterfall one, it was a big challenge for us. We had couple of folks move from Paypal to us, and they gave us a success story in a meeting. When they were looking at tools, they came across Rally, and it was introduced to us by the CA team. We had a couple of training sessions on Rally.

The immediate impact of that was when we started using Rally, we didn't even know that we could do agile. But because of Rally, we were able to track all the users' codices, track all the features, track the capacity so that we could plan, and find out as a team what the capacity is as a team to deliver in a two-week sprint.

As an application developer, I can speak only based on what the developer and app teams can do, and this has helped a lot. We were trying to go strictly agile, and I think Rally is helping us big time.

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it_user592689 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineering Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

It is designed 100% for agile, so if you run an agile/scrum organization, it will work for you. With the portfolio management feature we were able to understand our capacity for the first time and visually understand all the various initiatives in-flight. We could provide very clear dashboards to senior execs to be able to choose which projects we did and if they were on schedule.

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it_user591855 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior QA Analyst at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I use this at a customer’s site. I cannot say for certain it is better than nothing, but I do not know what they were using prior.

Generally speaking, I can usually think of a product that functions better than CA Agile Central for the features that are utilized the most.

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it_user779217 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Manager Build Automation at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It helps me plan the work. Also helps me plan an estimate of how soon or how far out we'll be able to deliver something. Those are big things.

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it_user637812 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Business Mgmt. at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Team collaboration is made easy and effective to meet business initiatives, while tracking progress across all the solution groups, regardless of their geographical location.

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it_user629055 - PeerSpot reviewer
QA Analyst, Business Unit at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the jobs that I adopted was to design procedures using CA Agile Central. In the beginning, without a procedure (not sure if the online help has much “method” suggestions, which it should), it does allow the agile process to be followed easily from features > user stories > team capacity > sprint sizing > test management and defect management. If properly used, it can be an amazing tool relaying to scrum masters, project managers and for all management levels to show exactly how a sprint is going. I will say the CA Agile Central Excel plugin is great for real-time extraction of data, i.e., if you know how to use it correctly, and out-of-the-box you will not know the hidden tricks that I have learned. But, CA Agile Central Support is actually very good.

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it_user558495 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Applications and Development at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has helped us to become Agile. It has helped us to really get our products in front of the customer faster. It's changing the culture of how we build software.

When you look at the old waterfall methods, we weren't adapting to change fast enough. We weren't able to rapidly deploy what we were building. By the time we would build something, there would be changes that came down the line. We didn't react to it fast enough. This allows us to react faster, and to build better products. We're learning more and more every day, and using their coaching.

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it_user558585 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Syntel

I have a team of about ten people. Like me, all our team leaders have difficulty managing their workload. They are spending at least half an hour a day to share their updates with team leadership and this costs us down the line. With Agile Central, everybody knows what their tasks are and the current status. This allows team members and leadership to focus on the current work deliverable rather than managing their work.

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it_user353874 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Portfolio Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think it got everyone aligned. I would say that's probably the most helpful thing, whereas before that I think that teams were just managing backlogs of spreadsheets or whatever they had or whatever they were doing beforehand. I'm not quite sure. I came in right after we started implementing it so I didn't really see what was there beforehand. I do know that just from when I first started to today, everyone is more aligned and has a better understanding of all of the work that is happening, not just pieces of it. It has an API that connects it with CA PPM.

I know you connect CA PPM to other agile tools as well, not just routers. I know a lot of people are hoping for that and a portfolio RPM are kind of pieces of it, but I don't think it's quite there yet. I would like to see it be a little more integrated going forward.

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it_user797955 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Delivery at Physicians Mutual Insurance

It has improved our ability to focus on less work, but do that work better and at a higher quality, than we were able to before. 

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it_user778893 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Manager at a insurance company with 201-500 employees

We are very new on agile and Mode 2 devolvement. It has really allowed us to experiment with approaches that we would have been a bit afraid to experience before. So, it has allowed us to try new things and to take risks. 

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it_user603810 - PeerSpot reviewer
Test Automation Engineer / Qc Analyst Ssr Advanced at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We have centralized all our agile process on it, so it's been our agile central during the project.

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it_user558213 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Project Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has brought a lot of light to the differences in the way our teams process the work through. They may be doing the same set of work, but Team A is doing it completely differently from team B. We've identified some of those differences; and we're now starting to align the process.

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it_user558090 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architecture Managment at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It optimizes the time to market of the requirements.

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it_user778581 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Delivery at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

It's a good platform to keep track of all the user stories across all projects. So rather than having one off Excel spreadsheets with all of the requirements, it is a good place to have all of that. 

I think where we as an organization can get better - and this may be something that is out there in the functionality now, and we're just not using it - is better mapping across projects and having that cross-project dependency mapping.

It's good, you don't have everybody in separate emails and Excel spreadsheets with all their various stuff and requirements, but we're still filing within the projects and not keeping track of everything across.

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it_user779259 - PeerSpot reviewer
SCRUM Master at Transunion

It helps us not to have to use any sticky notes. We project up every day, on a daily standup using the iteration planning part of it, and using the post-it portion of it in the Kanban, to communicate daily with the team on how things are going. 

It helps me to have a dashboard where I can see what things are not being worked on, what things are blocked, for instance. It helps me evaluate teams' historical performance using velocity charts. 

Capacity planning and release planning for the next PI help me figure out what the potential velocity is for each of the teams. It rolls it up, so that across teams we can figure out how many features we think we can get in for the next PI. 

And we've actually used it for virtual PI planning as well. We have teams in different locations, and we actually virtually do PI planning, big-room planning, using the tools so it's been really helpful there.

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it_user637830 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

It helps us to track and manage the way we work. We follow the Agile method and it really helps us to manage things and divide up tasks. It is quite a good tool.

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it_user631623 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Analyst at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

It allows us to better scrum and Kanban. It allows us the opportunity to not need a board and physically co-locate it. We can do it online.

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it_user598992 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Some of the improvements to my organization are as follows:

  • Helps my team organize our planning and testing activities.
  • Removes the need to have separate products for tracking the various ancillary records for our user stories.
  • Helped us to organize team effort and keep the team on track by providing a burndown chart and team status breakdown at the task level.
  • The ability to create child stories and track discussions throughout the lifetime of a user story and its children removes the need to maintain additional external documentation.
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it_user558609 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Release Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Honestly, it keeps us more organized. We have a lot of products and we ship them pretty fast. CA Agile Central is great for us because we can categorize all these different things. It really gives our top-level leadership visibility into what we're doing so that they don't pound down our door every two seconds. They can actually go into CA Agile Central and figure things out for themselves. They can make better decisions without really needing us.

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it_user354006 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It supports the SAFe toolkit so that you can create artifacts and define a whole bunch of teams. So you have a project pull-down, you have all the teams, and then program layer, and then the portfolio layers, so you've got the features live at the program. There's a top layer and a middle layer and then the bottom layer. It supports it very well.

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AW
Team Leader at CU Direct

Reporting capabilities were better with CA Agile than VersionOne. Both were otherwise quite good. The primary reasons we switched were that our parent company used CA Agile, and that the solution has the built-in ability to track bugs. We still used Bugzilla though.

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it_user779193 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager

There's familiarity. The teams have been using it for a while. Leadership is comfortable with it. That's huge. And from a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs.

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it_user778650 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

My launch. How soon or how fast can I go to production, is what this helps me design.

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it_user642177 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

This product provides easy storage and accessibility to share documents and objects.

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it_user629931 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate consultant at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

This product had helped my organization so much because it helped us keep everything tracked.

We are now able to predict each team member's capacity in a single click.

We use the report to see if we are going to reach our deadlines and we are able to easily make decisions thanks to the available reports.

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it_user499434 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software QA Automation Analyst at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

This product has helped to organize team effort and keep the team on track by providing a burndown chart and team status breakdown at the task level. Additionally, the ability to create child stories and track discussions throughout the lifetime of a user story, and its children, removes the need to maintain additional external documentation.

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it_user553188 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a engineering company with 10,001+ employees

From my personal viewpoint, it helps make sure everything is on track.

I'd say our agile maturity is mid-level.

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it_user558555 - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Program Manager at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

It brought transparency and clarity to our work. We can see from one place everything the engineering team is working on, in a very simple way using a very simple interface.

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it_user558642 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were using the Waterfall methodology, but we moved Agile about four years ago. Agile Central makes the transition easier and we don't have to think twice about how to implement this or keep track of features and user stories. We know we can go to a web page to track features and break them down into user stories. Agile Central has helped make our transition more efficient.

Where I work, there are some teams that don't practice Agile. My team started practicing about four years ago. We customized our processes, changed it around and made modifications to it. We are at a stage where we like our process. We are not afraid to make changes so I wouldn't say we follow 100% strict Agile. We started with what we considered an Agile practice and then made changes to it.

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it_user558471 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Associate QA L2 at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is a single platform that your Agile team can talk about. If you talk about a user story management, then you can talk about it as well. If you want to do test case management, you have all the QA team and developers who can work on it. It's a single tool that works with all team members in a scrum team. Before any communication, you don't want to go on another systems, but rather use a single system; a one-stop solution that solves it for you.

We wanted to have a hub, a faster time to market, high quality, and we wanted to move from Waterfall to Agile. I’m an intermediate user. We use this tool for coaching. In terms of best practices, we have certain guidelines that you need to follow. For instance, with Agile maturity, you should have your acceptance criteria selected when you have user stories and the test case results present. You can then attach your proof of testing. This tool supports these best practices.

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it_user603816 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Agile Coach at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

We now have a more holistic view of how development teams are executing against the enterprise’s strategic roadmap. This improves our ability to prioritize work and to manage our risks and dependencies.

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it_user597618 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Member Of Technical Staff at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

It is 100% designed for agile. So if you run an agile/scrum organization, it will work for you.

With the portfolio management feature, we were able to understand our capacity for the first time and visually understand all the various initiatives in-flight.

We could provide very clear dashboards to our senior executives in order to be able to choose which projects we did and to check if they were on schedule.

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it_user592353 - PeerSpot reviewer
Strategic Analyst at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

The product helped engage the business product owners by increasing both their view into the development cycle and their responsibility to assist in setting up work priorities.

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FF
Scrum Master for a Big International Bank in Belgium at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

CA Agile is a product that really needs more than 100 teams working on it. It works best in big organizations. It definitely streamlines workflow for many users in tandem.

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it_user631641 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Project Management at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

CA Agile Central helps us plan, organize, schedule and prioritize hundreds of feature requests into our release calendar. There is simply no way we would be able to release as many new products, enhancements or defect fixes without it!

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it_user591861 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees

The solution now offers visibility on each activity and its status.

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it_user352881 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Project Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

It helps us track our development life cycle for our development teams. They can keep track of the progress of their user stories and features, from the intake process all the way through deployment and into production. This can be done in tandem with test results, and we have a substantial team with various applications.

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it_user779133 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Application Developer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It's the ability to bring visibility to the work. Previously we had another tool. Actually, it's a tool that I built, but it was limited in its ability to provide that start-to-finish visibility. And the traceability, from inception of the project to final test and deployment. Agile Central provides us that, not directly, but with its integrations to other tools in our tool chain, so that's a great help.

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it_user635475 - PeerSpot reviewer
DCDP in Indian dept at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

This solution saves us lots of time and it is central for everyone. Everyone can see the revisions whenever anyone has made any sort of change.

For example, if there are changes in the user story, we can track it. That's very useful for us, because in regards to the test cases, we have all the results available for us.

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it_user636111 - PeerSpot reviewer
Validation Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

It made it much easier to adopt agile methods of execution. The learning curve on using agile is now much more approachable.

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it_user613554 - PeerSpot reviewer
SAFe Release Train Engineer (Program Manager) at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This product is a great fit for organizations using the Scaled Agile Framework. It follows and facilitates best practices for agile and scrum. In many instances, the built-in constraints of this tool have opened discussions about agile best practices, and the comprehensive documentation in the online help knowledge base has provided solid guidance for agile transformation where needed.

One example of this would be the question of what to do with unfinished work at the end of a sprint. Because the right action is counter-intuitive, this is an area of much controversy and contention across the industry; however, there is an established best practice, which the help section explains and which the tool facilitates. See Manage Unfinished Work: https://help.rallydev.com/mana...

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it_user638706 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Validation Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I can review my pending tasks daily. In this manner, I can organize my day-to-day work.

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it_user627027 - PeerSpot reviewer
Scrum Master at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Capacity and resource planning help us understand how much work an individual can accommodate per sprint and if any one person is over-allocated.

Release planning is made simpler by the Agile Central interface.

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it_user779079 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer Manager at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. You have to adopt yourself to the kind of workflow that it comes with. It helps you shape the way you flow.

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it_user636108 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Analyst at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

It keeps everyone involved accountable to make sure the project moves along in a good pace. Since it is also viewable to all involved, it allows everyone to see where the project is at any moment.

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Martin Quiroga - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultancy Manager at Aptasolutions
  • Plans and prioritizes to quickly deliver value. 
  • CA Agile Central provides visibility into how teams are meeting business objectives.
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it_user628026 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We can track of our tasks and project estimations.

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it_user635472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Scrum Master, Coach at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

New features with Team Capacity Plan have helped our organization.

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it_user597591 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager And Disaster Recovery Coordinator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

It greatly helped our adoption of agile project management techniques. More projects are completed on time.

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it_user356046 - PeerSpot reviewer
Commercial Manager at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

The principal is because they listen and that helps a lot and the business, this is very important to us.

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it_user558303 - PeerSpot reviewer
Agile Coach at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have a lot of product owners (POs) and teams that work on the common backlogs, so we need the transparency in these backlogs. We get the transparency between the teams and the departments.

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it_user778926 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at ZAPTEST

It has streamlined the entire process of development from getting the requirement for the application, supporting all the testing processes, and reporting all the defects back to development.

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it_user637806 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engeneer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

We have many teams that work on different modules and every team can follow what the other team is doing at the moment, so as to take a decision about taking the user story into the sprint or wait, till the dependent team finishes its work. So, it suits distributed and big projects.

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it_user607434 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst-Property & Casualty Insurance at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Highly helpful for defect tracking and maintaining story cards.

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Buyer's Guide
Rally Software
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Rally Software. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.