Rally Software Reviews

• Requirements management
• Development team planning
• Tracking progress against plans
• Linking strategy to execution

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.

• Defect and test case management
• Executive-level reporting capabilities
• Project management functionality (financials, EVM, resource planning, etc.)
• Lacks the ability for non-coders to create custom app/widget charts

I have been using Agile Central for eight years.

We haven’t had any stability issues. We’ve experienced reliable uptime and few defects.

I’m currently working for a large Fortune 500 company and we haven’t any issues with scalability.

Technical support is excellent; however, some of our users find it a little confusing as to how to submit a case/help ticket.

We previously used a home-grown solution and wanted to switch to a more scalable solution.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward but there are certain best practices as to how to configure Agile Central. Typically, the CA Agile Central account manager will provide guidance as to how to best configure Agile Central and will be available to answer ongoing questions as they arise.

You can negotiate prices, technical services, and professional services if you need a large amount of seat licenses.

We looked at VersionOne, Pivotal Tracker, and Trello.

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.

Portfolio management is a valuable feature.

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.

Its greatest feature is also its limitation. Nothing is locked down or mandatory with no complicated permissions; so it's very easy to get it up and running quickly. They could have more controls around user types and as to what permissions they have.

I have used this solution for 18 months.

We did not encounter any stability/scalability/deployment issues; it's cloud-based.

It only went down a few times which is very inconvenient when you run your entire team on it. But I assume this is the same for any system whether cloud-based or self-hosted.

I would give the technical support a 6/10 rating. There weren't too many problems, so I didn't have to use them much.

However, if the issue was specific to your data, then they couldn't really help easily. They had to get permission to duplicate your database and then work on that, which in a large organization required quite a few approvals.

I have used JIRA in the past. This is not originally agile-based and requires more setting up to get it right for you.

The setup was simple as it only does agile.

We implemented this product in-house. The adoption wasn't the hard part. It was the overall agile transformation that required the effort which was a culture/process thing.

I am not certain but we couldn't work without it.

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.

The Kanban board is probably the most useful feature. It is very customizable and is great for somebody who doesn’t need to run the project with a scrum approach. The second most important feature is the overall ability to customize almost all of the solution’s features and work products such as user stories, defects, and features.

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.

The weakest part of this solution is its primitive report generator.

The report generator is very simplistic with a limited capability to filter, sort and group, and the designer is not WYSIWYG. The product would benefit from a more capable browser and a more compatible report builder.

It needs a UI that has a Crystal Reports-like design and WYSIWYG capability. Right now, it is an early 80s throwback.

We have not had many stability issues. It is a stable product, but in the past, CA has fixed some server-side issues or implemented an “improvement” without any patch notes. That is usually just frustrating but one time, an “enhancement” broke our link to TFS. It took us two days to re-enter all the users.

We have no scalability issues. We have 185 users. However, because we are a cloud product, we are at the mercy of the internet routers and traffic.

Technical support is good once you get their attention. What is critical to you might not be critical to them. As an example, we had a broken TFS connector. It took about six hours for them to understand the problem, and that they were the ones who broke it. Once that happened, they were very helpful.

We used Microsoft Project. At that time, it was very weak with agile projects. Prior to purchasing this solution, we created a vendor grading scorecard with the features that were important to my company. We started evaluating six products. We then eliminated three, re-compared them, and settled on this solution.

Since we bought the cloud option, there was no specific setup. There was, however, lots of customization that we have done since 2012. It is straightforward once you are familiar with the product.

We also purchased five days of CA Agile Central on-site training. It broke down like this: one day for developers, two days for project managers/scrum managers, a half day for product owners, and a half day for administrators.

CA seems willing to give deep discounts when you have 100+ licenses.

We evaluated five other options. They have changed so much since we evaluated them in 2012, so it wouldn’t be fair to name them.

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.

I was previously using it as a scrum monitor for the team. It helps with billing and the IT team used it, as well. I am very satisfied with this product. 

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.

The program management is one of the most valuable features in the bank I work for. I was able to create epics for our budgeting concerns and it helped me link everything together. 

I think there is a missing link with the development activity. Some developers are pushing in new versions of the code, but you cannot make the link from the user story to a specific application version.

It is stable.

We are a big company. We have about 170 teams, and we find it scalable. It has been used for more than 1500 people at our company.

I have experience with JIRA. I find Agile has an easier UI. Furthermore, JIRA was more of an IT tool, and Agile has both IT and business capabilities.

It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company. 

When considering a new solution, I always consider:

• UI
• Price

The product is very intuitive to use, which drastically reduces training and onboarding time with new employees. It is highly customizable, which is both good and bad.

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!

Customization can be a bit complicated but it is a highly customizable tool, which has its own significant benefits. It just takes a bit of practice working through the tool and its many options.

You need to use caution when adding custom fields as you can only disable them once created; you cannot delete a custom field.

Overall, standard/canned reporting options are probably the weakest part of the platform but exporting a data dump for reporting outside of the tool is very easy.

Rally/CA Agile Central has been in use at our organization for eight years.

We are a hybrid SDLC/agile shop and use the tool heavily to support our release planning and execution plans. We did adapt our SDLC process to use the terminology in the tool (Features, User Stories, Tasks and the Portfolio Hierarchy). We have people build features under a portfolio hierarchy which creates our master backlog. We assign built features across various releases to build our deployment schedule.

We use CA Agile Central with the following enabled modules:

• Integration Hub
• CA Agile Central Portfolio Manager
• CA Agile Central HP Quality Center Integration
• CA Agile Central IBM ClearQuest Integration
• CA Agile Central Idea Manager
• CA Agile Central Quality Manager
• CA Agile Central Support Manager
• CA Agile Central Time Tracker
• SSO
• IP Restriction
• Extension Whitelist

As with any cloud-hosted, SaaS model, we occasionally run into unscheduled downtime but they are usually able to switch data centers quickly where there are issues. They also maintain a system status page to monitor maintenance and repair time/updates.

The tool scales effortlessly. The only drawback is if we wanted to create a new workspace because migrating existing data between workspaces is difficult, especially if heavily customized.

The technical support is outstanding! We have a rep who contacts us quarterly to review what’s new and what’s in their development pipeline. Online and the web knowledge base answers most questions. Support is quick and easy to access and they turn-around tickets quickly, most times on the first call. They also helped us with building custom reports, pages and add-on apps.

I don’t know of any previous solutions, as this tool was here well before me.

I built out the most recent workspace and it was pretty easy after a week or so of trial and error, but that was mostly getting our portfolio hierarchy structure right.

Pricing is competitive for what you get even at the most basic level. It reflects a typical SaaS model of pricing/licensing.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

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.

The valuable features are:

• Tracking progress and other parameters.
• Allowing a better overall picture of activities.
• Facilitating the interaction between team members and teams.

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

I would like to see team masters have an easier way of managing the tasks/stories for their team members when creating default tasks in advance.

We have been using this solution for a year and a half.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

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

It has most benefited me because as a release manager, it helps me know and mitigate the risk going into production so I can reach out to the different teams. I can, at anytime, pull up a report to show me where the status of a candidate for release is and I can reach out to those teams. Based on the report, we can then decide whether we need to allocate more resources to ensure we're able to release on a certain date.

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.

The reporting functionalities need improvement. Also, there's too much lag, but they're fixing that.

We're at 13,000-plus companies. We have lots of applications, lots of different teams with upstream and downstream dependencies. Different teams have different maturity levels in terms of how they are using Rally. Some are just getting on board, and some have been using it for a long time. So we're trying to consolidate that.

The technical support with Rally is going pretty well.

I can't even give you off the top of my head how many licenses we have with them, but it's user-based licensing and we have quite a few of them.

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

Planning for the scrum team.

It has performed excellently.

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.

The visibility it brings to the plan, the ability to capture tasks, and trace them all the way through the life cycle. Providing that visibility helps both me and the team, or teams, to be able to understand where we are in the development process.

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.

The tool is much more stable that I am. It's very stable. We've had no problems.

Scalability hasn't been an issue. I wish it were, but so far the adoption has been good. We have a ways to go before I would imagine that there would be any scalability issue.

I have not used tech support. We have an application administrator and he handles all that.

Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup, I do know that there was some complexity to it. But not terribly complex. It was not hard to do, because it is a SaaS solution. It was basically: Give us the URL and point us to the training, and that was it.

No, Agile Central, had been on our radar for quite a while.

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.