Rally Software Room for Improvement

LH
Dev Ops Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is hard to track the changes. For example, we're in sprint 25, and then we have 26, 27, 28, and 29. Throughout that whole time, we're developing pipelines in Azure, moving to GitHub, creating pipelines, and working with teams. But sometimes, we need to revisit specific decisions made in previous sprints, like pipeline details. Maybe it's in our Azure Wiki, GitHub, or Teams, but it's not always consistent. I wish I could search for all tasks or stories related to that particular effort without needing to know everyone's individual stories or features.

So, I would like to see a tag system with prefixes like KBI for knowledge-based information or JC for Java Core to search and find relevant items easily.

It would be so much easier to search for everything related to KBI or the actual feature itself. I could even search within my group using a shared scrum team name, like "Snoopy's Developers," and then find everything related to JC or Java code. 

Another pain point for us is managing our limited number of licenses with contractors coming and going. It's a constant struggle to figure out who's still active. We have to run reports to find people who haven't used Rally for x months, like logged in or whatever. 

As an admin, wouldn't it be great if we could have an automated report emailed to someone, say another admin, highlighting users who haven't logged in for, like 12 months? That way, we could easily go in and deactivate or revoke the licenses. If someone hasn't logged in for eight months, why not have Rally automatically disable them?

So, easier license tracking would definitely be beneficial.

Those are my two main wish-list items. With the Description field, it can work for them; it's free. But they have to be diligent enough to remember to tag things there. 

And even then, it's not always clear during stand-ups unless you specifically look at it. Someone is working on "admin" or "accessories" or whatever that "digital transformation" tag is. That kind of thing helps track progress at a glance.

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SD
Sr Engineering Manager - Design Engineering at Baker Hughes

I don't have any specific suggestions for improvement regarding the solution because we are currently satisfied with all aspects. Our usage requirements are relatively straightforward, and we haven't encountered any significant challenges or complexities. Therefore, I don't have any valuable suggestions to provide at this time.

I hear from some people that it could be customized, but they don't have details on how. Customization is possibly a desirable feature, and I don't know if it is available in the system. Customization features may not be exposed or unavailable, so people may be looking for them. So, customization is an area people have told me is more desirable.

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Shawn Carlson - PeerSpot reviewer
Agile Delivery Transformation at Transparent Change

Rally Software is highly complex, and it takes some effort to get everything tied together. But once you do, it's a satisfying experience, and the result looks beautiful. Azure, ServiceNow, and Jira do not have all the features that Rally Software provides in one place, making it an exceptional tool for project management.

It was either Optum or Rally Software that had a significant number of connections and workflows that were challenging to comprehend. As a result, the visualization was lacking, which was frustrating. One feature of Jira that I admire is the ability to view the workflows for user stories, for instance, by going into the user story settings for my team. You can see where the story is heading and what the workflows are. Unfortunately, Rally Software does not offer this visual representation, although it does have all the connections. However, to utilize it correctly, you must be aware of how to set it up correctly, and Rally Software could do a better job of splitting up workflows.

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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.
Luca La Via - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineering Manager at Biesse

The big problem with Rally Software is migration. If I were to migrate from Microsoft Azure DevOps to Rally Software, it would require more effort because in Microsoft Azure DevOps, every time you create a project, you have Git for each project you create. My current company has the pipeline and virtual machine for compiling code in the project, so if I migrate that, it would mean that I have to put in extra effort to evaluate the pipeline in Rally Software, so that's a big problem for me.

In Rally Software, the connection with GitLab and GitHub needs improvement because every time I evaluate Rally Software, there's an issue. When I have a lot of team members and push the code in Git, I track the requirement and the code. Rally Software needs to improve in that area because I'm a person who understands the requirement. However, I still have to evaluate the code, virtual machine, and pipeline despite my knowledge. I don't have this problem with Microsoft Azure DevOps, only with Rally Software, so this is an area for improvement.

In future releases of Rally Software, I want it to have GitHub and GitLab connectors. If it has existing connectors, then the connectors should be better.

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

I miss the “Rally” brand – I do not find the CA Agile Central branding as compelling, but I get the reasons driving the re-brand.

More importantly, we are seeing internal challenges from Atlassian because of their highly integrated suite that enables further automation and centralization of activities that are also highly necessary – messaging notifications cued off builds, collaboration on Solution Architecture Documentation, etc.

It would be good for CA to develop a strategy to address the competitive threat coming in from Atlassian.

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KS
Director Of Tool Chain Automation at American Express

More customization capabilities would be helpful. Providing a little bit more structure around how the system should be set up in terms of the hierarchy structure might be helpful as well.

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it_user778977 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have a couple of pain points, but I can't remember off the top of my head what those are. Every once in a while we'll submit feedback through their online tool. 

In terms of improvement, perhaps some more metrics. If they could add some additional, that would be cool.

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

It could do with a wider range of colours for cards and the Kanban features need some improvement (which I know is on the way this year). The colour swatch for cards in Kanban board views is quite limited; I think there are 9 possibilities. Using these to visually differentiate cards on a busy board becomes less valuable when multiple themes are sharing a card color.

Kanban features should be built around flow, which implies they should not be constrained by time boxes. This is of particular relevance when considering many of the views that, by design, require one to select a time box. This is also true of reporting. There are some things to consider, though, as when viewing a personal or team board, one doesn’t want to see the entire backlog, so it would be useful if that could be limited to a user-defined number of stories.

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VK
Agile and DevOps Coach at Infosys

Rally has the ability to improve the features. We would like to see progress made against the features, probably in the form of a dashboard, where when teams complete stories, the features upload, and the stories are completed, and the feature about them gets updated with the progress. This is available in Jira but not in Rally.

That's something I would like to see because the management wants to see how far we have come with the epics and the features. They want a dashboard that would allow Rally to provide a picture to the leadership of the progress made on the epics and features.

There should also be an automation feature. When the last story in the feature is finished, the feature's status should be automatically updated.

The user interface can be improved. I still don't think the UI is as impressive as Azure DevOps or Jira.

The performance can still be improved.

Rally Software should develop an OKR framework that will allow OKRs to be recorded in Rally. That would be a win-win situation because there would be changes for Rally Software because there are other tools that are attempting to provide, the OKR option, and the tool to this Rally integration is difficult. Rally will be more successful if they can enable the OKR capturing or recording process.

We want Rally to generate OKRs, to allow teams to record the OKRs, and then the OKRs can be mapped to the epics and there is organizational alignment. The organization can execute those objectives using the team's backlog.

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BN
Agile Coach at T-Mobile

What I have learned is that a lot of features that I am looking for, in many cases, are part of a different tool set that CA offers. Really it is more learning about which features and tool, those features would be in. A lot of the features that we would be looking to add, I am learning may not be within Agile Central, but part of another CA tool set. It is about learning which tool that would be and how to integrate it. 

It would be nice if CA had those tools as part of a package rather than having to try and find multiple tools to integrate together. Some of the additional features that we are looking at would be better roadmapping capabilities and increased robustness around permissions. More of a view into the overall lifecycle of the portfolio items, so post acceptance of a story through the pipeline. Those are some of the key things that I would like to see. 

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it_user663606 - PeerSpot reviewer
Quality Assurance Manager at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One thing that my team struggles with is when they have so many user stories. You have the parent's story, and then you have a child of a child of a child and it goes "down into the drain." Sometimes it's hard for them to quickly search for a user story. I know there is a part where you can just type the user story number, but that's if you know it. 

I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help.

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

To me, the biggest thing I see that needs improvement is the navigation. When somebody's using more than one workspace, it's not obvious how to go from one workspace to another. It's simple enough once you know, but is you're looking at the screen, you don't notice it.

I actually have to write documentation, and I sent it out often to tell people how to navigate from one workspace to another when they're on more than one workspace; in a sense, more than one project, though a workspace is a bigger bite of a project. If you're really just on a different project, and they're all on the same workspace, it’s not a big deal. But when they have to switch from workspace to workspace, it's not obvious. So, that's where I see they could improve in their navigation. Make it more intuitive.

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

I think one of the things that we stumble upon is how to organize the teams. We have one overall workspace, but outside of that workspace we have many, many teams underneath it. I think you can organize them in two different directions. You can organize them by leadership or organizations, or you can organize them by, for lack a better term, product. And those two don't sync together, because you have many organizations contributing to a product that don't roll up to the same leadership level.

So from a reporting aspect, for different things, we struggle trying to get that balance; to get the reporting for the leadership side, and then get reporting for the product side. That is one aspect. It's not necessarily a hierarchical issue, it's a flexibility issue, if you ask me. If you put it in one direction, you can't get it to the other. So you need to be able to balance it both ways. That would be something I think that could be worked on.

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

It’s hard to say if it is a product improvement or business use improvement that is needed. But, managing the backlog has proven to be an issue. There are stories written for the same purpose, but in different words. If there was some way to question the writing when the subject is very similar; as to the need for the new story.

I don’t really think this is a product issue. The tools are there, but the business seems to not be utilizing them. The duplicate story issue is a business issue. I don’t see how the application can prevent this; especially since when developing, the same words can be used in multiple stories with minor differences in the tasks desired.

I know initially I thought Agile could put some sort of alert if the wording was similar; but that is a task too large and out of the scope of design.

As a business user, I just need to insure myself and my PM are taking better care in reviewing our backlog

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

Let's look at the portfolio level. Let's take a look at what capabilities are needed to scale our teams and really add them to the tool.

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

I'd say that there are a few things to improve.

On the main screen, I think it's called the Team Planning screen, it should be able to run a backlog. For example, if I have 300 stories in my backlog, it would be nice to be able to filter those out by project because that's the main place that I look at them and my team looks at them, and you get 300 stories out there for numerous projects for our team, because we work on 85 different applications. There are five or six primary ones, but the rest are back-end components.

We've got some technical stories for back-end stuff and we've got some continuous improvement items for our assisting applications. Within that backlog, to be able to have some type of filtering mechanism so that if I want to see all of the stories for a certain project, I can pull them out and view them, would be useful.

Right now, I have to scroll down through 300 stories and try to group them all together and find them and then, by the time I go and group them together, somebody's going to ask me to group them another way. Then somebody's going to say, "All right, well, can we prioritize them in that backlog?" Well we can, but then I've got to change all my groupings.

All this takes time. Basically, what I end up doing is just pulling those out, either copying, pasting or exporting them into a spreadsheet and then I'm back to managing them on a spreadsheet rather than in the tool and it's just time consuming.

There are certain things that I think I would like to add that would make my job or my function easier. One example is that they have different levels of access within the system and I do not have the highest access, so there are certain things that I can't do. There are other people within our organization that can modify the system or make certain changes, but I can't.

Also, for each one of the user stories, you can throw different tags on them so you can do searches or filters by those tags. Everybody can add a tag, and you can create new ones, but I'd like the ability to go in and modify and clean up those tags.
I've asked to get that access and they said I don't have the right level of security so then, it's a matter of working with somebody back and forth to try to get everything cleaned up.

For example, we have an internal system that we do a lot of work on. It's called Service Desktop. Well, there are about 10 different tags out there for Service Desktop; one of them is "Service Desktop", another one is "SD", another is "SERV D", etc.

Because we have multiple people working on this and they've created their own tags for their own stories on different things but they all mean the same thing, so, to me, it makes sense to have only one so that everybody is on the same page with that same one.

I would like to get it all cleaned up, so that when I do some sorting or filtering or running different reports and I'm basing it on a tag, I want to make sure that I've got everything and I don't even know all the different tags that are out there for Service Desktop.

If I had those abilities to make these changes or create some of the modifications or to build some of the panes and windows that I would like to see, I guess I would probably give the solution a higher rating.

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it_user629937 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Owner - Business Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Bulk priority change of portfolio items
  • Portfolio feature
  • Dependency reports

In our project, when a feature is completed, we mark it as completed but then don’t want to have it show at the top of the priority list and don’t want to constantly add filters to filter out completed items. So we put the completed items at the bottom of the backlog by changing the priority. There’s no way to do this except one at a time. With thousands of features, this is cumbersome.

There is no good way to get an overall view of feature dependencies except to go to one feature at a time and look at its specific dependencies. The team could have made great use of a report/dashboard of some kind (I failed at coding my own) that gave a larger view of feature inter-dependencies.

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

Pricing could be improved. Compared to JIRA, it is not cost effective for a large user base (1000 user plus). User licenses should be a group level within the company, rather than company level.

Jira is more cost effective once set up – no cost per user seat.

RALLY costs around $60/month/user seat

If you then multiply this cost by the number of users (let's say 2000 – 5000 users), it's a very large amount of money, not effective from a price point of view.

If we could get an Enterprise license at a reasonable price then, management's view of the product may change.

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

I believe Excel imports and the ability to modify workflows are two important improvements which will enhance its competitiveness in the market. 

I believe the feature to use Excel to import issues, tasks, test cases or any other relevant data will be a useful functionality which is missing and many teams are willing to have such a feature. Also, the ability to modify workflows to support custom requirements will increase acceptability of the tool. Currently it has a slightly rigid response to users wanting to tailor the project for their need.

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SM
Director Of Enterprise Architecture at Best Western

I would like to see more Kanban support. As it stands, it doesn't seem to have the features or the layouts that the teams really need to be able to execute their tasks. It almost tries to force you into more of a Scrum style.

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

It would really be interesting to see an open source community that actually focused on how we build the connectors from the old to the new, and then make that transition possible.  Once you build those connectors, you transition the old into open source, so the old goes away.

I was just looking at a small company and their release management. It felt like it was very close to this, but it's the opposite end of the spectrum. They tie in to CA PPM and they do the development and the project management. 

They are doing Agile this way, but they have these other components that they have to put in front of it and behind it, to make it tie into release and change management.

Agile comes at this development piece of work. It's now production ready and I put it on the shelf. Most systems don't allow that. I put it on the shelf. Somebody else develops another piece of work. My piece of work has to come back off the shelf. 

They interact with one another, so I can't just say this one is ready for production, and then that one is ready for production. I have to go into a system test mode, and not just the function test mode. Agile generally doesn't look at it that way. Agile is really built to run on building services.

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

The product is really good and there is very little space, as to what needs to improve.

The only thing that I can think of is to improve the section of the acceptance criteria, that is located far below the user story description. Sometimes, what happens is that people who are looking at the user story are not looking at the acceptance criteria, because they need to scroll down to look at it. It would be better to display it on the top, where you can see the user story, without having to scroll down; perhaps, by having another screen where you can see the acceptance criteria field.

For example, from what I have seen often is that, instead of our developers going to the acceptance criteria field after the user story, instead they come to me and ask me where it is. That means, they haven't gone through the entire user story until the bottom of the page. The practice that I have asked them to follow is to read the notes right at the bottom of the user story, so as to access the acceptance criteria field. So, if one is looking at the laptop screen, then there should be a button aligned somewhere on the topmost part, that will immediately prompt as to where the acceptance criteria field is located, i.e., somewhere within the description box itself. So, no one will have to scroll up or down to look for it. This is the only thing that I found that needs improvement; rest of the stuff is great.

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

In regards to the customization part, sometimes it is not understandable. Things are not so clear, such as how to customize it for our needs. We need to have a lot more user-friendly options.

Most of the things are associated with the user-friendly options. Currently, the reporting and matrix connections are a little bit sketchy.

There should also be a lot of customization opportunities, especially being able to add additional filters for the project management. If those things improved, it would make this tool more beneficial for us.

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

The ability to customize reports needs improving by providing users with features for selecting what they want to see on the reports, how they want to lay out the reports, and create a schedule for a report to be generated automatically and sent by email.

When I create a custom report (see below screen), I want to be able to have my report run automatically once a day and email the scrum master.

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HeloisaClaro - PeerSpot reviewer
Process and Agility Consultant at V.tal

We'd like to be able to export information about the users, like rules. It's not easy to identify the teams, users, and rules. We'd like better dashboards to make visibility better. They are a bit complex right now. 

It is not integrated with the PPM. It's very difficult to make an integration with both.

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

What I don't like about it is that it is really hard to find old work to reference information and use the reporting section of the application in terms of trying to analyze trends. If I am trying to find out which interfaces took this long and I want to compare and measure improvement from one quarter to another quarter, the reporting mechanism within Rally is very troublesome. They have an Excel plugin that you're supposed to use, but you literally have to pull the raw data out before you can do the analysis. You can't do it within Rally, and if you can, it is a secret, and I don't know how to do it. It should have better, easier, and user-friendly reporting without having to use the Excel add-in.

It is very clunky. There is a lot of data in there, but it is not organized in such a way that makes it intuitive. You really have to kind of look for where do you put your documentation or dates. Some customization is available, but it is not plug-and-play like Jira. When I switched from TFS to Jira, I just went and started using Jira, whereas with Rally, you kind of have to really get in and figure out what you need to do before you set stuff up, or you're going to get yourself stuck. You can just start using Jira and be successful.

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it_user778653 - PeerSpot reviewer
PMO Manager at Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc.

The integrations with the PPM tool and making sure those two work well together. 

Improved engagement with TFS, because we still used TFS for code management. There is an API between the two. I think that the APR could be easier to set up and the API could be a little more fluid in terms of when the code is checked in. It really relates to how a project is updated based on that.

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

I think I'd like to be able to color-code the words more easily, not just the side. You can change the color on the side, but to actually change the font color would be useful.

Currently, I use an HTML color font to change the title of a user's story or something. If, instead of having to put in the HTML version of it, to make it change the color of the font, and I could easily change the color of the fonts, it would be a lot better.

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

The text editor is for sure an area with room for improvement. Under IE 11, the Backspace key is not functioning as expected; it deletes and also inserts empty rows. If you continue, you end up with a lot of empty rows that you do not want. The DEL key, as well. Formatting is difficult.

A CR (carriage return) always creates a new paragraph. But sometimes you just want to stress something in relation to previous statement, but you do not want it in a new paragraph.

Pasting text from Word can create a lot of formatting issues, mostly in cases when the font is not recognized. Also, features such as graphics and tables are supported but only if coming from Word. So, if you want to eliminate a column or a row, you need to go back into Word, make the update, and then past back in the editor. In fact, if you want to come back to a text and edit it, it is very difficult to maintain the initial format.

These issues slowed down my work.

My comments are meant to help improve the product, not criticize it.

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it_user778848 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at DISH Network Corporation

We are not on the most current version, so it may have been addressed, I have not really seen the new product yet. 

I would like to see more in the way of capitalization. I spend a lot of time on capitalization. Working out capitalization, it is largely manual work, where it does not have to be. The tool, I think can support it. When it is a story, capitalization in the current version of the solution we are using, occurs at the task level. I would like to see it roll up a little better to the story level, then up to the feature.

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

It takes a very long time to load and, if you make some small changes, then the whole page has to reload. I know that's a major frustration for a lot of people using the tool.

I know that they're constantly updating and providing new features. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I set it up for two different teams. By using it in it's most standard and straightforward route, it is definitely a ten out of ten. However, working at the portfolio feature level, which is what my main team did, there were some functionalities that were missing and over the last two years, I've seen more and more of it come along the way. I would have liked to have the same development support at the portfolio feature level as well, that I was seeing at the user story level.

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

One of our main challenges right now is that we have not deployed our value streams yet. We still have an organizational hierarchy within the tool. We have the need to be able to report from different levels of the hierarchy. We really need to be able to have a virtual project hierarchy within the tool. I'm looking forward to seeing it. I know that the company's working on a slightly different approach to solve that issue, and we're working with them on those user needs and we'll be working with them on the beta as well.

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

I would like to see greater ability to manage common teams that are working across projects and how that common team has tasks to do in both projects or in multiple other projects. I want to see more common services.

The project might require common services, but if I'm a common services team and I have tasks in all of these other projects, it’s better to manage the common services team itself and their tasks; because they have tasks in multiple other Agile Central projects.

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

We've been asking for a couple of things. A big one for us has been on the administrative side. Again, I'm coming from a very large company so these are the things that are, at that scale, very important to us, such as access. How do we get access to people? How do you move a large number of people?

The other big one that we've been requesting for years is the ability to move people between workspaces. For us, that's really important. Every time we've had to do this, we have to get technical support involved and it's just a big pain in the butt. Within Agile Central, each workspace is very independent and one workspace can't talk to another workspace.

We have multiple workspaces set up and when a team wants move from one to the other it's very difficult to do. For instance, with a big organization you're always going to have organizational changes. So you may have set the things up perfectly when you first set it up, but things change. Now when they go and change, since we can't move workspaces easily, the new teams that are together can't collaborate because they're in different workspaces. There's no easy, functional way of doing it.

I also think the UI could use some improvement. I believe they're working on it. Also, it's not the most developer-friendly tool. So while management tends to like it, I don't know if developers are huge fans of it, at least in my business, from what I've seen.

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it_user558066 - PeerSpot reviewer
Safe Agilist Scrum Master at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • I would like them to give me back the fields I used to have. We lost the release field because they mentored our scaled agile framework trainer to actually use the release field as what I would call a program increment.
  • We're releasing every two weeks, so it's pretty hard. They also should put a product field in there. We have work areas. Our work area is our team, it's not our product. So my team actually supports four different products. I'm doing name mangling that I then have to write code around to understand how to get metrics out. That is challenging.
  • The other thing is that I think I can pull out data from the release, but we're not using all of the CA Agile Central projects. For example, we're not using the testing part of it. We do use the defects. I don't know how I'm going to integrate the testing tool that was selected by the test organization. I don't know how I'm going to integrate all of that. They might have plug-ins for that. I don't know.
  • The only thing I can think about is finishing the lifecycle. There are tools in there, and I don't know how I can close the loop.
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RK
Senior Manager - Business Intelligence at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability may need to be improved. We'll see within the next three to six months, as we test it.

The product needs to have more integration capabilities.

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it_user558372 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Curriculum Development at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

I'd like to be able to color code timeboxes, so I have an easy visual way to track the success of sprints. Workflow is not a strength, we've cobbled together our own workflows around changes in State and Ownership.

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

During the last four years, there were four projects in there, that I was handling. However, one of the issues that I am facing is how to remove the old projects, as one of the projects is over. Although, CA Agile is still showing me all of those four projects and I don't want that information now. So, there should be a way to remove that project.

I am not sure whether CA has their own bug tracking tools. However, if there are some tools like that, then it will be very much helpful, i.e., to have one integrated system, where the configuration management as well as this bug tracking tool are integrated. Bug tracking we have with NetApp's internal tools, but I don't think we are able to do the integration between CA Agile Central and what we have.

So, it would be good to have one single complete solution for complete development, such as for tracking agile work, the bug tracking tool, and Perforce management, the version control system. Thus, an integrated system would be very much useful, I think.

I am not sure if CA has the integration tool part, currently or not; however, I am unaware of that. Hence for me, the integration between other tools will be a very useful add-on feature. In the market, there are other tools that are available as a complete solution, providing tracking tools, bug tracking features and necessary support as a package. If CA Agile Central could also provide that kind of integration such as the bug tracking, a version control control system as a single solution, then it will be very much helpful.

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

An improvement would be if at the leadership level, they want to view certain teams, it’s easy to break down. For example, if a portfolio is 60 teams, as a director, I can filter and easily see only my teams and the stats I want.

Also, the defect-management cycle needs work. It's already there, but the functionality isn't all the way through.

It could offer more functionality and spread those functionalities to individual users in a way they can understand. That would make it more intuitive, but I understand that doing so is a challenge.

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

I think the interface could be a little bit more visual and less wordy. Right now, it seems like it's just a lot of text on the page. In other ticketing systems where it's more visual, you can see more of a flow. But in this one it's more just a list of tasks. I would like to see that a little bit better, especially considering it has so many great organizational features, like child tasks, different artifacts. It would be great to see it presented more appropriately.

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

I can't really think of any additional features that it needs. It pretty much has everything that we use it for.

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

I would say use cases is an area with room for improvement. I found it a bit cumbersome and not so easy to grasp a global picture. Some teams prefer to track use cases through the HPE QC tool, keeping the rest in CA Agile Central.

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

I would like to see it more well connected with the PPM tool. We have Planview. It does connect to it but I would like it to connect more robustly. They just introduced a new milestone feature of the product. I would like it to be more user-friendly.

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

We have submitted lots of ideas to the Ideas portal, such as milestones. We would like to make sure that that's a first class citizen, if you will. Make it a little bit more robust regarding our API plans. Reporting I think is a big one too, especially at the bank.

We base a lot of decisions on real data. So if we're not able to get that real data in a very simple way and be able to slice and dice it, then we aren't as effective as we could be at making those decisions quickly. I'd like to see a reporting interface that is easy to use, based on report templates that we can take advantage of.

Lastly, the Insights module within the tool was great when it came out, yet very few people harness it's power today. I think it could be more integrated into their reporting interface, if it's possible. It would really drive true insight right into the data that we are creating around our work.

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PM
Test Automation Architect at CenturyLink

One problem I see is that if there is a dependent user story - for example, if my team is working on one thing and there is a dependent user story from another team - we can have a dependency created but we don't know if there is a change of status from the other team. That is something which is very important for Agile Central to look into so that if the other team makes any changes we will be notified as well.

As of now, we get an email alert but that's not sufficient. We can overlook it. What I'm suggesting is that they have something which populates on the team level so Team One and Team Two can communicate on dependent user stories. That would be really helpful.

In addition, reports are confined to teams. For example, I have five to six teams under me, if I have to pull a report, it will be mapped to a single team. I have to pull five teams' reports and then consolidate them to see what the metrics are. I don't have an option to actually add multiple teams to one report.

Finally, it's not capable of some things such as CI/CD. Agile Central is still not there. For CI/CD you need a separate tool and a separate repository called a GitLab. Then you need to run that through a continuous integration called Jenkins. I want to see a holistic approach when you're going with DevOps. There should be just one enterprise tool which is capable of all these things. As of now, Agile Central is just a test management tool.

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

The search feature may need some improvements. Sometimes it is hard to pull a specific user story just by adding the user story number. It is not straightforward to search for a specific user story using its ID number.

My suggestion would be to add a search button. In this way, the user could search for a specific user story based on a given user story ID number, or on the user story description.

I don’t think that I’ve seen this option. Even if it is there already, it is not intuitive to the end user.

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

Make it easier to export information outside the tool for additional data visualizations and metrics. The tool does have a REST API, but that requires us to use a developer. The tool does have CSV exports for everything, but that’s a manual step.

Make it easier to share CA Agile Central information to non-CA Agile Central users. Not everyone in our organization is a licensed CA Agile Central user. Those users who are not licensed and provide work to the users on our platform, have a hard time tracking their work requests.

Provide the ability for team members to customize their custom fields/custom workflows without needing a tool administrator to set it up for them.

Mobile friendliness: It would be nice if we had the ability to view and change the state on assigned tasks from a phone.

CA Agile Central integration is great! Currently, everyone who has an CA Agile Central license has a Flowdock license. Unfortunately, it costs a lot of money to add non-CA Agile Central users to Flowdock. And a messaging platform is useless if you can’t message all your stakeholders within the organization.

There is no ability to easily create a work intake portal where a stakeholder can enter new work, have it routed to the appropriate team, and be able to track the work status. You can buy an integration engine that syncs your ticketing system with CA Agile Central, but again, that’s more money.

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

I think that the product use of the user-story-split feature that creates child user stories can be abused by users for being so easy to do. It will require one to drill down to the grandchild, or great-grandchild, etc., to see the progression or what happened before now.

Also, it will look messy when seeing a list of nested user stories. Using this feature, a waterfall view is being promoted. Instead, having predecessors and successors as part of the split will allow us to track this “legacy” user story better, which should have been created as smaller user stories to begin with.

In a sense, completion of a user story in a sprint would have been reinforced by not seeing parent and children. Predecessor user stories would not contain unfinished tasks.

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it_user558051 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise / Team Agile Coach at RBC

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Kanban needs to mature a little more. The product itself is focused more on the scrum, but they need to go forward. Also, they did a pretty good job on the scaling side, but they could improve.

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it_user558054 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Agilest at SolutionsATI Consulting

The main area to improve is performance. If they can get that performance improved, they'd be golden. They really need more in the DevOps modeling, and the use of Kanban. Their Kanban area is fairly weak. That's probably the one area of the tool that, outside of performance, really needs improvement. If they could add more robust Kanban functionality, then they would have the best of both worlds. You would have a DevOps capability, Scrum capability, and Test Driven Development (TDD) within the tool.

That would also help from the quality perspective. When you're dealing with your DevOps team, especially when you're trying to do releases on a monthly basis, they need to be tied into deadlines and be able to track through a Kanban mode. They need to know about the workflows, the work in progress, and how it moves through the workflow. That would probably be one of the main areas I would tell them to put some energy into the Kanban side of the tool. If they did that, then they would have pretty much the complete solution. They are losing a lot of business to Trello.

There are performance issues that nag the product. I would like them to build out a more robust Kanban workflow methodology system. Then, I would open up the APIs more. I would allow for third-party solutions to be able to plug in easier. There's a little bit of work that they'd need to do.

There's a couple areas where that they can make significant improvements, and I'm sure they're working on it.

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

In the next version I'd like to see more of a focus on reporting at that overall level. I want to find a way to do analytics on what's going on within the tool, how many people are using it, and not so much detailed reporting on individual teams. I want to see how the organization is doing as a whole as they use the tool.

As an example, one of the metrics that we'd like to be able to see has to do with this idea of teams that are meeting their commitments when it comes to deliverables. So when they come in to start a sprint, we'd like to be able to say "By the time the schedule ended, you hit this many of your stories, or features." And we'd like to do that, not necessarily for a specific team, but on the whole tool overall. We want to be able to compare between teams, and say "What is this team doing that's better, what is this team doing that's not." I think they could really do some work on the overall analytics. There are parts of the UI that could use a little bit of work, as they are older. It would have to do with changing the analytics and a little bit of the performance.

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

When you open up a user story, consider opening it up as a modal/dialog box on the top of the page, rather than splitting up the screen. In my opinion, if it opens up by splitting up the screen, then it becomes hard to read.

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

For the reporting side, it could have more options besides generating the chart. It would be good if it also allowed infographics.

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

We would probably like to see a more robust dependency management system.

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

When we started using Rally, we used the user interface pretty often. It was very informative and everyone was comfortable with it. But there were challenges with product backlog and how to track the capacity planning. Everyday you needed to update the status. There were a couple of questions about, what is the capacity of every developer or a QA engineer for this sprint.

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

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

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it_user602427 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Global Tools at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is not compliant with the FDA regulations on electronic signatures (21 CFR part 11), which is required for regulated industries.

We produce medical devices, which means we have to comply with the FDA regulations if we wish to sell in the U.S. One of these relates to being able to have electronic signatures within the tool, when we close or reject future defects.

CA Agile Central does not have this functionality and when we asked them, they said they had no plans to implement this. As a result, we cannot use this tool for defect management. In fact, the tool has such few security features that you cannot stop anyone with an account from editing, deleting, or otherwise interfering with the records storied within it. As a result, we cannot use the information stored within it as part of our quality system.

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

I have yet to see a section of CA Agile Central that could not benefit from improvement. As I tell people, it ALMOST behaves how you would expect. There are so many twitchy bits that require workaround for the business process to function. It’s ridiculous and feels almost like it gets in the way more than it helps.

For example, these problems come up when re-executing test cases. I have found no way to easily set up another testing cycle that reports the results independently and I’ve LOOKED. There is no way to assign a test case to multiple stories or a defect to multiple test cases. Associating a defect with a defect suite is easy. Removing it is hard; exceedingly so. Creating test cases in a test folder on the test plan page is easy. Moving those test cases around is exceedingly difficult. I could go on and on and on about how this product has let me down.

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

It could use some templates and patterns that we can follow. There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but something for the Kanban side, I'd really appreciate that.

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it_user637812 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Business Mgmt. at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • The Reporting feature can improve, especially around executive summaries and dependency mapping.
  • One report that would be especially useful is a Release Dependency report that displays the relationship of dependencies, across release trains. Currently, Agile Central will show you respective dependencies, but only if they exist within the same release train.
  • CA Agile is hosted on a multi-tenant server, which prevents duplicate user names to coincide. This has become bit of an issue, in terms of provisioning users that had demo accounts in the past. In our experience, when provisioning a user who held a demo account with their company's email address, we had to reach out to the user to have them rename their old demo account. This opens the door for us to then proceed with the account creation.
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it_user629055 - PeerSpot reviewer
QA Analyst, Business Unit at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

On the test case level, I feel there are a couple fields missing, i.e., I cannot easily create a day-over-day report. I cannot find out what is planned for the QA team, as I cannot track what is “ready”, or as to the day when it’s planned to execute.

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

An Agile Central mobile app is long overdue. At the end of this conference, I want to look at my burn down charts. I want to look at how my teams are doing, and trying to look at the full website on a phone. It's a terrible user experience. We need a mobile application for Agile Central.

It’s a great tool other than that. It's been fantastic. Developers love it. My managers love it. It's been great.

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it_user558585 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Syntel

There are a couple of accelerators in the market that allow teams to manage meetings and notes, particularly stand-up call notes. Integrating these with Agile Central will be more powerful than manually explicitly adding it and generating reports. The capability to manage stand-up call minutes will inspire this to happen.

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

The portfolio side of it needs improving, especially integration into CA PPM. It would be nice to hopefully see some of those have a little bit more connections.

I know we do a lot of high level planning and it seems like there are a lot of duplicate features back and forth, and it's kind of like, pick one or the other at this point. It would be nice if they talked a little bit more. For example, we'd really like a better integration with Rally.

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it_user797955 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Delivery at Physicians Mutual Insurance

We have been talking about improvements in the quality section of Agile Central. The quality section does allow you to do test cases and test sets, and all these things, but it does not integrate very well with the portfolio and feature side, which causes some challenges. 

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

When you copy a story, I would like the attachment to copy with it. This is a big one for us. We do requirements in one sprint, then do development in the next, which still is a little bit of waterfall. So when we copy those requirement stories and they become development stories, the attachment does not come with it. So, it is a lot of manual effort to do that. It would save us a lot of time. 

We did submit an enhancement request. I think a lot of teams that do very large scale products have the same issue. They just do not realize it would help them. 

Also, there are a few things in the way things trickle up from category to theme to feature that I do not really like. I wish there would be some enhancements there.

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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

Based on my experience and the level of use, I think this tool fits everything we need.

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

Our biggest struggle right now is that we're a SaaS customer, and that we don't have access to the database behind the scenes. So we're being asked by our Scrum masters and teams to provide data and reporting that we're not able to get to using the tool.

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

There should be different ways to decide on the requirements, not only by using a flow chart. There should be more than one way; maybe with use cases or another more graphical way to represent the business requirements.

I wish there was a way to maintain the documentation, the knowledge management of the development team; and to keep a live version.

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

I don't know that I can answer this, because I'm not using it day to day. I'm using CA PPM now, and I know we're looking to integrate Agile Central into CA PPM, which I believe is an option. 

When I used it before I would say the stronger CA can get on dependency mapping the better. That's the biggest hiccup. As you're setting up your features, they should make it easier to flag the dependencies, either across features or across projects. Then you're more set up for success.

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it_user779259 - PeerSpot reviewer
SCRUM Master at Transunion

I can't think of any off the top of my head.

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

I am pretty much happy with the use of the solution. I want to recommend it to other people. The way we work, get the reports, and check on things is very clean. I can customize things from my dashboard. I would like to see better scalability.

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it_user639675 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Lead at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

There are few customisation options. For instance, the workflow for story cards cannot be changed out of the box from the standard (Defined, In-Progress, Completed and Accepted). However, this will not be a big problem for most organisations that follow a standard scrum framework.

The issue is mostly relevant to team using Kanban boards with customised workflows. A very common flow for instance is: To Do - > Analysis -> Development -> Testing -> Completed. So teams wanting to bring that kind of workflow to Rally will not be able to our of the box. And Rally will rightly discourage that kind of workflow.

And I’ve seen teams doing Scrum that have added additional columns to their workflows such is “Waiting” or “Blocked” and other not having the “Accepted” column.

Rally of course offers other options to manage blocked stories/tasks so perhaps the “improvement” tag might not be entirely fair. They do offer the functionality so what I was referring to was the ability to customise that functionality to more personal preferences.

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

Building custom reports is difficult and cumbersome. Trying to find the correct field name to test is only part of the problem. The field name and qualification changes depending on what level I am trying to report.

When reporting at the task level, the story needs the story qualification whereas when reporting at the story level, the qualification is not needed. When reporting at the task level, I cannot qualify based on Feature Group. This limits my ability to programmatically limit my results. The syntax of the reporting is also cumbersome. The help is only limited help and is not written for non-programmers.

Solution: Provide a query help that actually lists all of the fields at each level. Even when selecting “To see a list of all fields available for each type of work item, check your Web Services API documentation

It is easy to put information into Rally but it is all overhead without an easier way to get the data back out. I have team members who continue to double entry the Rally data into a spreadsheet just so they can more easily produce the reports that are helpful to them.

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

The following are areas for improvement:

  • 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.
  • The tool can be slow to respond when estimates or statuses 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 helps to demystify the application a bit. However, even that page can be cumbersome to navigate.
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it_user558609 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Release Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

I use it a lot. I don’t really have any complaints. There are a lot of alternatives out there. They are also useful, but I have no complaints with CA Agile Central or with CA in general. I don't find myself saying, “I wish it did this,” or ”It's really killing me here”. It has been a good experience.

As a release manager, what they’re coming out with now in terms of release automation is going to be very valuable to me. I think that with CI (continuous integration), as much as it is expanding and taking over most software shops anyway, I think that's the way to go. I think they're doing it right. As a release manager, I'm happy. CA is coming out with a lot of CI-type things, which is good.

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

Being a Kanban team inside of SAFe, some of the fields that you have to fill out are a little awkward, because then you can't use the views the way you want to. You have to assign it to all the SAFe people, and that might not be a Rally thing, only a SAFe thing.

I think you can kind of tell that they started from scrum so the Kanban support kind of feels like an afterthought. I'd like to see more maturity around Kanban metrics. So, here's your cycle time, here's your lead time. But I'd like to know why was my lead time that. I want to drill in. I want more ability to drill into the data with analytics.

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AW
Team Leader at CU Direct

Not as user friendly as VersionOne. At first I liked VersionOne better and was very disappointed in the switch. However, after a month or so I was quite happy with CA Agile.  

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it_user779193 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager

I would like for workspace admins to be able to hide projects in the Project Picker and not lose any historical data; make them invisible to certain users, visible to certain users, depending on permission sets. That would be lovely. 

I'd like the ability to customize reports without having to incur Professional Services, or having to write my own code GitHub and then implement that as a custom report. That's untenable. It's not sustainable.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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it_user603816 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Agile Coach at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
  • 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
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it_user597618 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Member Of Technical Staff at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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

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.

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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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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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

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.

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it_user351489 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Software Architect at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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

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.

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

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

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it_user558369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Annalyst Two at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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

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.

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

I think the areas for improvement are mostly related to the user. There are things we often forget to update or change.

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it_user636105 - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Previously, to upload test cases we usually used the Agile Central add-in for MS Excel. But as per recent changes, they have made Single Sign On to access Agile Central due to which, the add-ins seems not to be working.

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Martin Quiroga - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultancy Manager at Aptasolutions

CA Agile Central does not have a workflow tool included. If possible, it may be necessary for some companies that this type of feature be included.

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it_user628026 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It’s a good tool to use. Charts and dashboards should be more interactive.

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it_user635472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Scrum Master, Coach at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
  • Performance is very bad especially late evening and on Fridays.
  • Enterprise backups could be improved.
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it_user597591 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager And Disaster Recovery Coordinator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Portfolio management and reporting may be the weakest areas.

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it_user558012 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sea System En at Hauwei

I don’t know this product well enough yet to offer suggestions for new features. I recently went to a conference to learn about CA Agent Manager as well.

See below regarding stability.

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

So far it seems to be doing everything we need it to. We don’t require any improvements at this stage.

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

We have teams that are not collocated, so the team tool for managing and showing tasks and work has to support this.

We use a tool that automatically updates all active users screens as
one user updates a task or other work.

This is helping with issues we have seen in Agile Central when more than
one person is working on the same issue, to do a missing update of what needs to be done or started.

I would like to see live updates. Live updates would help us because we have off-shore teams. We're actually using another tool right now because Agile Central does not support it. We're using two tools.

I would like to see some management views on the workflow. The workflow is not lightweight. It's pretty big.

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it_user778926 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at ZAPTEST

We would like maybe to have more integration with test automation. As it is right now, it does not support automation of the quality assurance process. It just supports manual testing. 

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

Probably, the user story history details could include the candidate. Now, it is ugly looking and is not informative. I would prefer to use it to restore details.

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

At times, when we update the status for cards or defects, it shows a message that says something like, "Someone updated the status before, which one to consider: yours or theirs?"

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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.
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