We performed a comparison between OpenText ALM Octane and Rally Software based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution natively supports Agile-Waterfall hybrid software development at an enterprise scale. This is very important to us. Because even though the company wishes to go Agile, we still have projects which follow a Waterfall methodology. In order for us to accommodate both, we needed some sort of hybrid system. Because if we are using a fully Agile system, then the reporting might not be correctly extracted."
"There are a lot of predefined reports. We can attach additional reports for users, like who worked on what defect and when, as well as what is the status of the release compared to the previous release. It is really endless. All the data is really linked together. Then, if all the data is linked together, there is an option to prepare reports out of it. We are very impressed with its reporting capabilities."
"Its end-to-end traceability is one of the big advantages. Most of our agile projects work in a closed team structure. We are seeing what is the flow, where we are, and what is the project milestone. So, it provides end-to-end traceability and good visibility of project milestones."
"The defect management gives us full-fledged capabilities for handling defects, including capturing the details of the defects and even screenshotting the defect cases. The defect management is comprehensive."
"Octane creates a gentle approach to Agile-based projects."
"We are seeing some real improvements in the way we do things. We are becoming more agile in the way we do it because of that and in a way that stories are managed. Stories are given lifecycles as opposed to just being entities within a tool."
"It's brought our entire team into a single tool. We're all looking at the same real-time data. Our project management office has been able to set up dashboards for individual teams, and do comparisons by teams, of integration, and cross-team integration, burn-up, burn-down, and cumulative flow..."
"On the user side, what I like a lot is the reporting capabilities. There's no tool, to my knowledge, that gets anywhere close to Octane at the moment when it comes to the reporting capabilities. I can do everything with the reporting. There's nothing missing. I have all the options. I can create graphs, including graphs of several types and looks."
"My teams uses it for their daily agile management. They describe their user stories and track the progress of their projects."
"The most useful part is how it breaks down tasks into parents and children, manageable tasks. It has a whole project as an initiative, and then it breaks it down further and further. And then you get to actual user stories and tasks that you can sit and develop."
"The reporting, and being able to roll that up across the verticals, was an important selling point for us."
"It's a good platform to keep track of all the user stories across all projects. So rather than having one off Excel spreadsheets with all of the requirements, it is a good place to have all of that."
"Agile Central allows us to log one hundred percent of the work we do and it allows for no hidden work, so teams can't go under the radar with what they're working on."
"It is very stable. It has been on the market a long time."
"The configurable Portfolio Management and parent-child relationships."
"Ease of use - I don't even know when a new release is coming and I don't need to because it's so easy to use what's new."
"What could be improved in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its integration with Jira."
"Development of extensions or connections to GitHub actions could be better. Better integration with Azure DevOps would also help."
"It would help us if ALM Octane got FedRAMP-certified, so our government departments could use the cloud solution. That way our external consultants could access it. We've created a URL to get to it, but if it were FedRAMP-certified and service and had support in the continental United States, that would be better."
"The reporting needs to be improved and allow for customization. I want to build my own widgets, but I don't want to use the ones already in the system. I want to build mine from scratch."
"Documentation is not clear."
"We’d like to see Platform One/Iron Bank compliant containers."
"They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add."
"I have yet to experience the CI/CD part of Micro Focus ALM Octane but as demonstrated by the team who is providing the services, I see that the CI/CD could improve. When we check in the code, for the code snippet that has been checked in by a particular user, you need to open a separate file. When comparing Micro Focus ALM Octane to Jira, they have a separate window in which you can click on the ID and the code is visible in the snippet. It's a two-step process in Micro Focus ALM Octane and it's a single-step process in Jira. It's essential for the developers to think about this difference."
"I'd like to be able to color code timeboxes, so I have an easy visual way to track the success of sprints."
"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)."
"In Rally Software, the connection with GitLab and GitHub needs improvement."
"As it is right now, it does not support automation of the quality assurance process. It just supports manual testing."
"In terms of improvement, perhaps some more metrics. If they could add some additional, that would be cool."
"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."
"There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but it needs something for the Kanban side."
"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."
OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 5th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews while Rally Software is ranked 7th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 116 reviews. OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2, while Rally Software is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of OpenText ALM Octane writes "Reporting engine, widgets, and dashboards are a huge plus, and powerful REST interface means we can interact with other tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rally Software writes "Good discussion and note-taking capabilities but hard to track the changes". OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps, GitLab and Codebeamer, whereas Rally Software is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, TFS, Jira Align and Digital.ai Agility. See our OpenText ALM Octane vs. Rally Software report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors and best Enterprise Agile Planning Tools vendors.
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