Rally Software Reviews

We use Agile Central to record all our user stories, features, and then to track down the burndown, velocity, defects.

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

From a solution perspective ,we use the Burndown to see whether the velocity for the entire sprint is okay or not. Am I going, did I pass? Do I need to prioritize? How many impediments do I have? What does my backlog look like? Have I taken up enough in that given sprint? Will I be able to deliver all that? It helps me track that down.

Primarily, producing more meaningful dashboards is what we have given to them, saying "customizable." 

Customized reporting, so that rather than going to them, if I can produce my own UI, that would be meaningful.

The solution is stable. 

Scalability is good. Based on what we have done so far, it is scalable. No problems faced so far.

We have a solution group as well, Testing Services within our organization. If we are looking for any modification within the tool, we can go to them saying, "Okay, when the tool came in it had a particular layout of, say, 100 fields. But based on my requirements, I want to improvise that, I don't need them. Eighty fields are good, but the remaining 20 fields I want to change over to this, make it more meaningful, more for my own organization. Customization.

So when we go to the Testing Services group, they take their time to have it implemented on Agile Central and then we pull a report. For example, the Defect Dashboard. Now, the Defect Dashboard came with some basic things. My anticipation regarding the Defect Dashboard is, I need to see more details, like what was the root cause, sub-root cause. I track it down to that level. So that customization we can easily do. That makes it helpful.

As I said, we have a Testing Services group, so we just give our requirements to them. If they needed to contact CA for any sort of modifications the would have done that. We don't know.

We don't directly interact with the CA technical team. We talk to our technical team and they might internally talk to them.

What we used to do in, say, HPE Quality Center, is now getting done Agile Central.

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

Personalization of the dashboard and its design are the most valuable features of this solution.

There were no stability issues.

Sometimes it takes a few seconds to scale, such as when changing the size of Windows.

This tool was already present before I started working here.

The setup was easy.

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

There are multiple valuable features of this product and the most important for me is the section related to bugs. It helped me during this time to keep track of all the bugs that the app has, the status of each one and at the same time, we were able to keep notes for each element. In addition, the ability to add the concerned developer as a watcher, so in this way if the bug is not fixed, then they would be notified.

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.

I think the only area that needs improvement will be the front end. It is very good as is but I think it could be better as the colors are a little faded.

I have been using this solution for almost a year and a half.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I have never contacted the support.

I have used multiple tools before CA Agile Central. I switched because in CA, everything was in the same platform and it is a pretty intuitive tool. I didn’t need any tutorial, as I did for the other tools.

The setup was pretty intuitive.

I don’t have a lot of information about the pricing because I had the IT team handle that for me.

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.

The most valuable features are user story tracking and team status management, including capacity and burndown. Allows for creation and scheduling of detailed user stories including attachments, assigned tasks, discussion, child stories, and revision history. Also allows association of defects and test cases, though I have not used these features as we use HP Quality Center for that purpose.

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.

The UI can be slow to respond at times and difficult to navigate initially.

The home dashboard can be very slow to load. Individual user stories can be slow to respond when navigating from the Iteration Status page, as well as being slow to respond when estimates or status are updated.

The difficulty in navigation relates to the learning curve of the application. There is a help page with a great deal of information about the various features and processes which does help demystify the application a bit. But even that page can be cumbersome to navigate.

I have used Agile Central for 4 years.

This application is rarely unstable. Scheduled maintenance is conducted with ample warning.

We have not had issues with scalability.

I have not contacted technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I am not involved in the licensing of this tool.

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.

We're using CA Agile Central to track project development status, including the whole process, starting from the initial plan, followed by testing, development, and bug tracking.

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

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

I think scalability is good.

I think initial setup was straightforward. The documentation was very clear.

I like that you can link user stories and tasks to the features and the initiatives. This allows us to see how much were investing in people and effort. Mainly, I like the simplicity of it.

We can very easily run a report that clearly shows the amount of effort we’re investing in initiatives and features. It is very straightforward.

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.

I would like to see improvements in these areas:

• Integration with Git is not very good. It should integrate more seamlessly with the other tools that we use.
• The ability to inexpensively add custom reports.
• Ability to easily add features, such as saving views, that we need to add to these reports.
• Ability to specify required fields per project and not per workspace.
• Some competitors offer much more flexibility.

JIRA, for example, has much more flexibility in terms of defining your own states, your own workflows, and even when you're in the same work space. Whereas, with Agile Center, you have to decide whether share a workspace with other teams; then you must all comply with the same configuration. For us this is a problem, because many business units are sharing the same workspace even though they have different processes and different flows. So you can either all agree on the same one or move to your own. But in that case, you lose the transparency of everybody being in the same workspace, which is part of the value and core reason why we want to use the tool.

We have had issues with custom reports that were dependent on an internal Agile Center API, but they crashed often. These are now fixed, and other than these, it's been okay.

Technical support is very responsive we were happy with them.

The solution we had just didn't work and required too much time from the engineering team, which I was highly against.

Initial setup was pretty straight forward.

Agile Center was already used in my company by other business units, so it was supported internally. Also, we heard that technical support was good. Since are heavily invested in Bugzilla for bug tracking, integration with Bugzilla was a plus.

We are not expert at Agile. We use a different tool for each development model; Eternity WaterFall and Agile. I think that that's one of the advantages.

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.

One of my favorite features is the Iteration view. I am responsible for many tasks and I use the Iteration view to view current tasks and user stories for the current trend. I sort by owner and I determine which tasks I own and what progress I am making. So to me, personally, I think that's the most valuable feature from Agile Central.

I like the way the dashboard is set up. I can customize it, so if it is too cluttered, I can change the view that I want and it gets saved based on my login. I encourage CA to keep playing around with the views by changing it every once in a while so that users are not afraid to change.

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.

I would like CA to play around with some of the dashboards, some views and reporting features. I know they roll out new reports every once in a while. I don't know what I'm missing, so show me what I'm missing.

Agile Central does do defect tracking, but not all of our teams use it. Some teams use other tools like HPE’s BPM, and a few other tools. We would like to move to Agile Central since that's where we track features and where we do project management. We would like to do defect tracking in Agile Central as well.

Something else that CA could improve in Agile Central is the notification system. The other tools we use have pretty good notifications systems with email notifications and the ability to opt in and out of specific notifications. What Agile Central is lacking is more ways to customize notifications and the ability to opt in and out of notifications; this would help with defect tracking as well. And when status changes, I would like to receive a notification. I know it's partially supported, but it's not really straightforward to opt in and opt out.

Regarding stability, we have noticed there have been a few bugs with the website. My organization is a part of the beta program, so every time there is a beta we are one of the first ones to get it. I really like being able to optionally enable it whenever I want. We have found bugs, which is the point of a beta program.

But, in actual production, we have seen several minor bugs. For example, when you drag and drop an object, it wouldn't do the right thing. Apart from that, nothing major. It's been pretty great.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Any time we have a problem, we use the "Leave Feedback" link on the website and they're usually prompt about getting back to us. They have been pretty helpful. Although I'm not involved with it, I know some of the administrators who are and I've heard good things about technical support from them.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

I wasn't involved with choosing which tool to use, but I know other platforms were evaluated, including some open source tools like Trello. In the end they went with Agile Central.

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.

It is a very good tool is well suited for Agile methodology, and lends itself to user story management. With the introduction of test case management and defect management, it has really boomed and it is at par with some of the existing systems, apps, test management tools such as HP ALM. I really like Agile Central.

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.

You should have the ability to run various automation tools, irrespective of their organizations. Some of the teams are using HP products, or other products, such as open source producst. If your tool can run those products, that would be great. If you are able to run those tools from Agile Central, then it would make sense and be a good improvement.

It is pretty stable and it's fast also, compared to other products, like HP ALM. It's fast and performs well.

Scalability is good. I have not faced any issues so far.

We have a team which connects directly with Rally. You have a help feature where you can raise requests and they can be solved. We have support available from CA.

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.