Rally Software Reviews

The linkages between artifacts, going from epic to feature, from feature to user story is very native and works very well. The in-built support for scrum, so having good parts on the side and the tasks go across works. We can't do that with Trello. We can do that with LeanKit.

I think as for scrum adherence, it's very mature because I think it started as a scrum tool, and you can kind of tell that. The support for scale works very nicely.

It supports the SAFe toolkit so that you can create artifacts and define a whole bunch of teams. So you have a project pull-down, you have all the teams, and then program layer, and then the portfolio layers, so you've got the features live at the program. There's a top layer and a middle layer and then the bottom layer. It supports it very well.

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.

Deployment hasn't been an issue.

I haven't noticed any crashing or poor performance. It's pretty solid.

It's scaled fine for us.

I've not used it, so I don't have an informed opinion.

We've used Physical, we've used Trello, we've used Gyro, we've used LeanKit, and we landed on Rally.

I think I was very involved in LeanKit and less so involved on the Rally side.

Sign up for the demo and play around with it, as painful as it is to try to maintain both tools at the same time. If you have a tool and you want to try a different tool, you almost have to actually use it. You can play around with it, you can look at the demos, and you can look at the documentation, but until you actually use it, you're not going to see where maybe the pain points are.

We run our team and enterprise with Agile Tool. At the team level we determined and managed capacity, created tasks, and assigned hours to the tasks.

Reporting capabilities were better with CA Agile than VersionOne. Both were otherwise quite good. The primary reasons we switched were that our parent company used CA Agile, and that the solution has the built-in ability to track bugs. We still used Bugzilla though.

Easy drill down and drill up, creating a very user-friendly menu. The reporting on stories with features and without parent features was quite helpful to keep the enterprise clean.

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.  

We use it to track all of our work. We also manage our portfolio in it.

It works. It's a bit cumbersome to manage the Project Picker. As we sunset teams or projects close out - but we still have test cases tied to those teams or projects that are being used in other spaces - we have this monstrous list in the Project Picker that becomes really difficult to manage and find, and we can't clean that up ourselves. It would be nice if it was easier to do that and not lose your history.

There's familiarity. The teams have been using it for a while. Leadership is comfortable with it. That's huge. And from a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs.

Visibility of the data. If teams are tracking correctly and entering their information correctly, it's really easy to see where you're at, within your release, and whether you're on track or not. For our business model, we can't get everything out of the box, but we're a unique business so I understand that, but we know how to massage the reports to get what we need out of it. And so far it's done the best job for us.

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.

I think it's relatively stable. I've had very few instances where I've had an issue. I think CA is really good about communicating outages. Any troubles we've incurred generally haven't been on CA's side, it has been teams or functional managers not assessing impacts to anything they have in process that could be related to the outage that was communicated.

Scalability works well for us.

I've had pretty good responses with them. If I need help or we run into something that we believe may be a defect, I just open a ticket on the support site and I usually get resolution really quickly. 

There was one issue that we had where I was going to be out of town, and I'm the point of contact for our company, so I had to leave a person in the gap to get it to "done." And within a business day it was resolved. I was really happy with that because I was a little concerned.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are:

• It's got to work.
• It's got to be stable. 
• Cost, to be honest, is a huge factor. It's top three. It needs to be reasonable and affordable. I need to be able to make a business case and sell it to leadership, give them a reason why it's going to work better than what is currently in place. 
• We need reliable support.

I rate it a seven out of 10. I don't rate it higher because of the things I said I needed more autonomy in being able to change. And while I have really good results and feedback from CA Support, I wish that Accounts were as responsive to my needs as the Support side is. And I get that we're probably a small fish in their pond of Accounts, but we still need help getting our work done.

If I were to advise a colleague looking into similar solutions I would say it's a good tool. I'd want to talk to them more about what it is they're trying to accomplish to find out whether this is the best fit or if they want to use something a little different. Agile Central will cover a lot of needs for you, but maybe it's too much for what you need. So I would want to dig down deeper into their requirements to make sure it's the best fit.

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

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

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

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

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

The solution is stable. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were no stability issues.

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

This tool was already present before I started working here.

The setup was easy.

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

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

This product had helped my organization so much because it helped us keep everything tracked.

We are now able to predict each team member's capacity in a single click.

We use the report to see if we are going to reach our deadlines and we are able to easily make decisions thanks to the available reports.

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

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

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I have never contacted the support.

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

The setup was pretty intuitive.

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

Give it some time. It is very difficult to change this kind of tool, especially when you are in the middle of a project. However, I would advise people implementing it to take their time to check all the different functionalities and think about how to use it effectively.

It has everything that I need in my daily job routine.

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

This product has helped to organize team effort and keep the team on track by providing a burndown chart and team status breakdown at the task level. Additionally, the ability to create child stories and track discussions throughout the lifetime of a user story, and its children, removes the need to maintain additional external documentation.

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

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

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

I have used Agile Central for 4 years.

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

We have not had issues with scalability.

I have not contacted technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I am not involved in the licensing of this tool.

Good estimates give the burndown chart its value. If your burndown looks bad, first look at your estimates for team capacity and user story/task effort estimates. Then look at the members of your team.

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

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

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

I think scalability is good.

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