Rally Software Reviews

The part that I like the most is that we can filter the defects and user stories. We use the reporting features at our own convenience. We use different types of filters and they help us a lot in finding anything we want.

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.

One feature that can be improved is the extraction and importing of reports. It should be easier and should be available everywhere.

For example, we have applied all kinds of filters. If we want to extract that report only, then we should be able to extract that part.

Also, we have placed a certain number of test cases in the folder and we should also be able to extract that report from there as well.

I have used this solution for around two years.

There were no stability issues. It is very rare that we are not able to access the CA Agile solution.

In around two years, we have only faced this issue one or two times. Otherwise, it is up and working fine.

There were no scalability issues.

In regards to the technical support, they can improve and make the procedure easier. In order to import/export any reports or test cases, we have to create certain queries. They should be more user-friendly.

The setup was easy.

We have compared it with JIRA, the other agile-friendly tool. However, we find this solution better.

I would recommend that you use this product for your productivity.

Iteration status tracking: The ability to instantly see what my team status is and to quickly find out about roadblocks to existing tasks is very valuable.

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

General performance could be improved. The tool is not the fastest or most responsive. Creating stories, saving story changes, updating status; regular transactions are not instantaneous and make the tool feel sluggish. More complex tasks, such as automated reports and aggregate information queries can easily take a few minutes. Improvement could be through backend software optimization.

We have not had any stability issues.

For larger projects, the tool gets significantly slower.

I have never used technical support.

We previously used manual methods. Switching to this IT-based solution was a welcome change.

It was a simple setup! Thanks.

I was not involved in the licensing for the company.

I was not involved in choosing this specific product. It was provided by our company’s IT department.

Take the time to go through the Agile Central tool training videos. They are very useful and well worth your time.

We find the most value in the Release Tracking view. We use this view during draft plan review for our scrum teams. This view allows us to see which features each team is working on during a PI. We can easily see where stories for a feature are scheduled within or across sprints, and we can compare that to priority and any logical sequencing requirements. We can also see any interdependencies between teams. This view is also very useful during a PI to track progress using the burnup chart with its forecast based on empirical trend lines. We view these forecasts per team and also in aggregate for an entire release train.

The other features that we find valuable include the task board, which is useful sorted by team member for daily scrum; the iteration status for sprint planning; the team and iteration planning pages, which are useful for PI planning and draft plan review; and various Kanban views at the portfolio, program, and team levels.

The “follow” and “discussion” features are also very valuable for qualitative tracking of work items.

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...

The discussion feature should be front and center when opening any work item type. The description and acceptance criteria can become irrelevant as soon as work begins. Those areas are better suited to being buried back in a tab rather than the discussion area. The adaptive changes should be the primary focus once work is underway. Updates, questions, decisions, and suggestions should all be the first thing seen when opening a work item. This is implemented well in tools like Asana.

It should be possible to assign an epic or feature as the parent of a defect. Many organizations struggle to use defects because they do not roll up in the hierarchy to specific features and epics.

Kanban boards should allow local exit criteria. Currently, the policies are set and viewed globally.

I have used Agile Central for two years.

Stability has been an issue at times. We have seen an unacceptable amount of system downtime. This has improved over the last year.

The product team has been somewhat unresponsive to popular community requests for feature enhancements. Technical support has been responsive, and customer service has been acceptable.

We have previously used Team Foundation Server and we have evaluated JIRA. This product was chosen because it was a good fit for Scaled Agile Framework.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward compared to other products.

This was implemented through a vendor team. Because this tool is so flexible and can be used in so many ways, we do not recommend attempting the implementation without outside consultation. It is easy to have the configuration fall victim to local anti-patterns.

Efficiency and effectiveness in our processes have improved by 10 percent with this tool. At scale, and across multiple release trains, this gives us a 15X return on our investment.

Do not try to implement this product if you are not using agile at scale. There are simpler, more elegant and intuitive tools.

It provides overall functionality in project management and release tracking all in one tool. Those are our main things. Additionally, it provides integration with JIRA and ALM. The Rally guys came in and said they would integrate, and that’s a great feature. We don’t have to use our infrastructure, so maintenance of the system is avoided.

The UI had some issues, but I attended sessions at CA World 2015 and they updated this. But they still need to improve performance.

It is stable, but at times the performance is slow. It doesn’t crash, but it's slow.

Also, because it’s on the CA network, we have API connectivity to Rally. However, our server proxy cannot talk to the Rally systems. Rally has a fix for that, which is working for now, but we need a long term solution.

We have 800-1200 users. I haven’t seen any issues so far. Rally was installed three months ago and the transition is going well.

The response times are good and the support is very good. I deal with a few guys, so when I email them I get a quick response.

Our VP was given a presentation on project management, defect management, and release tracking all in one tool, which excited him. Then we were given a demonstration, and the fact that our existing tool didn’t do those things made Agile Management an easy choice.

Set up of the software is easy but the integration is complex. If you are only using it as a tool, it is good, but the integration is not so straightforward.

If you tell me you are using VersionOne, you would get more for your money with similar costs from CA Agile Management. So more value, that’s number one because being with a bigger company means you get more value with the community. If you are not using any tool, then you should start using a tool, and this is a good start.

The dashboard and planning board are the most valuable features. These help me track the progress of my user stories.

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

In terms of the loading speed, sometimes I have noticed that the website takes a long time to go over to the Planning Board for the user stories. However, this could be a network issue.

When creating a task, sometimes the Description field is left empty, either because the user is missing or it is a mistake. However, there is nothing in the tool that makes us aware about this missing field. The tool should post some kind of warning message indicating that the Description field is empty.

I have been using this product for approximately 30 weeks.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

It is the first agile tool that I have used.

The initial setup was easy to carry out.

The pricing policy is transparent for me.

There is a need for some training, but overall, it is easy to use this solution.

• Real-time status tracking
• Capacity planning
• Ease of configuration of reports and dashboards
• Iteration and release planning
• Ability to personalize views
• Ability to see vital information in one screen as opposed to having to navigate to multiple pages

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.

Honestly, I can’t think of any areas that need improvement.

I have been using Agile Central for four and a half years.

Once or twice in a couple years we experienced outages, but not frequently.

I have used Agile Central in small organizations, as well as large organizations working in a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) environment.

I have never had to use technical support.

I have not previously used another solution, but I have to use JIRA now and I would rate JIRA a 3/10 compared to Agile Central at a 10/10.

I was not an admin of the tool, so I’m not sure how complex the application setup was.

I don’t know about the pricing.

I was not in charge of making the decision to purchase the product.

We needed something that we could collaborate with and was easy to use, and easy to access for business analysts.

We are trying to be agile, but we still use waterfall for a lot of things. We are not working agile as much as we should. We don’t adapt as quickly as we should. The tools are all there; but we are not implementing it correctly and not enforcing the rules enough.

The most valuable features of CA Agile Central for us are:

• It provides organization.
• It's a good collaboration spacing unit.
• It does a really good job of tracking overall statuses.
• There's a ton of flexibility. I can use it for anything I can think of within the development lifecycle. So that's really nice.
• It is user friendly.
• It really helps us with tracking progress, so we can see where we’re heading.

It's tough to think of areas for improvement. I mean, I think it's all there. Making some of the features more obvious would probably make them more useful. Right now, there's a lot of power and flexibility; but it's not always obvious. There should be something in the way of best practices and suggestions, and to know what makes logical sense. You really need to have a good plan for it. I've seen how it can be mishandled and not implemented strongly to where it becomes more of a hindrance than a value.

For the most part, the stability is quite good. We haven't had a lot of issues. There are little tweaks and quirks, here and there. I think a lot of that is because the tool is so flexible and powerful; and it can do a lot of different things if you want it to. You can kind of corner yourself, where you’re doing something not really modular. It is not really a stability problem, but in some ways, you could have too much content to the point that it drowns out the rationale for using the system.

The scalability is incredible. It's not always straightforward and easy. It’s varied, but there is a lot of overhead in getting there. There is a lot of thought process that you need to put into it. People were already pressed for the work they already have. Asking them to set up entire systems to integrate and be flexible is quite a change.

I can’t think of any big enough issues, so we haven’t used a lot of technical support. I did contact them with a small issue that went away and then came back. I didn't really have a lot of direction on that. It was a flow issue.

Have a strong plan and clear requirements in advance for what you want to get out of the tool. You need to have strong leadership on the design: how you're going to use it, how you're going to set it up, what you expect out of it, what you might be integrated with, what you're angle is with the tool. If you just keep buying tools, you're not going to use them in the end; and it's just going to be a waste of money and a headache for people down the line using it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor depends on which group gets to select the vendor, unfortunately. Price is always something, especially if finance is making the decision. When it comes to IT, I like flexibility and use of the system. There has to be more gain than effort. If it's too hard to implement for too little gain, then it's not worth your time. You're really looking for balance across the board. The cost has be there. There has to be value to it; so return on investment, the ROI, ends up being the big deciding factor in the end for any software company.

I use Agile Center mostly to do two things: 

1. To manage my requirements and I have hundreds of thousands of requirements. 
2. My teams uses it for their daily agile management. They describe their user stories and track the progress of their projects.

We are a former customer before it was acquired by CA. In that time, we were using just a fraction of what was there. This year, we started having more implementation and moving into the newest version. This has allowed us to use some of the high-end features like the label hierarchy, and it is good so far.

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.

Right now, it is the idea of having everything in place for both information and my project in a single network. Everybody who has different kind of users take advantage of the go through from the development guys to the project managers to management staff. Everybody has such great perspective of what is going on. It is very helpful.

There was some evolution, and as we have this old on-premise, it does takes longer. However, this complex requirement management, having different perspectives and different ways to organize the hierarchy of things, that is something that we value. It looks like the tool is at the beginning of having this new kind of approach, and we expecting different things from it.

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.

The stability is pretty good. I do not have any complaints about the abilities of on-premise version.

I do not have a bunch of users. I have not tried scaling it.

I use more the sales consultants than the technical support. The consultants are very knowledgeable. They should be more frequently available. I would like to have more of their presence, but their technical expertise and their willingness to help me is pretty good.

We were not using a previous solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

No, I am not thinking about changing. I need to have a lot of pain to start making changes.

There is an ongoing change that is happening. CA has implemented with Rally, so they are still in the early emerging process. I think the evolution and integration of the two with product solutions will come after it.

A solution is not more than a solution. It is a tool. It does not solve your problem. It is fixed by the tool. It is important to think about the problem that you are trying to solve to work with the consultants to come up with the right solution. The tool by itself could not solve your product issues.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: partnership. That is the most important thing. To be there when I need someone to be connected with the evolution of my processes when I have difficulty, both technical or on the business side. That kind of partnership is what I value the most.