Rally Software Reviews

Being able to control the requirements through the change request lifecycle is one of the most valuable features.

It optimizes the time to market of the requirements.

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.

The stability is very good. There are no crashes.

The scalability is very good. We are planning to complete the whole lifecycle of development activities.

We use technical support a lot. We have our partner, and we use support with them. Technical support is excellent.

We considered IBM Rational.

We have a lot of requirements. We have lot of business areas that continuously places demands on the IT group. We need strong tools that help us keep correctly the requirements in the lifecycle. It's important. It's not enough to do things better. You need to have a better tools. We have a lot of delays that we want to mitigate. We don't have a good time to market. Agile management helps us.

Technical support, knowledge, and productivity are the most important factors when we chose CA as a vendor.

Make sure that everybody in the company and team know the importance of the change.

One of my favorite features is the Iteration view. I am responsible for many tasks and I use the Iteration view to view current tasks and user stories for the current trend. I sort by owner and I determine which tasks I own and what progress I am making. So to me, personally, I think that's the most valuable feature from Agile Central.

I like the way the dashboard is set up. I can customize it, so if it is too cluttered, I can change the view that I want and it gets saved based on my login. I encourage CA to keep playing around with the views by changing it every once in a while so that users are not afraid to change.

We were using the Waterfall methodology, but we moved Agile about four years ago. Agile Central makes the transition easier and we don't have to think twice about how to implement this or keep track of features and user stories. We know we can go to a web page to track features and break them down into user stories. Agile Central has helped make our transition more efficient.

Where I work, there are some teams that don't practice Agile. My team started practicing about four years ago. We customized our processes, changed it around and made modifications to it. We are at a stage where we like our process. We are not afraid to make changes so I wouldn't say we follow 100% strict Agile. We started with what we considered an Agile practice and then made changes to it.

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.

Regarding stability, we have noticed there have been a few bugs with the website. My organization is a part of the beta program, so every time there is a beta we are one of the first ones to get it. I really like being able to optionally enable it whenever I want. We have found bugs, which is the point of a beta program.

But, in actual production, we have seen several minor bugs. For example, when you drag and drop an object, it wouldn't do the right thing. Apart from that, nothing major. It's been pretty great.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Any time we have a problem, we use the "Leave Feedback" link on the website and they're usually prompt about getting back to us. They have been pretty helpful. Although I'm not involved with it, I know some of the administrators who are and I've heard good things about technical support from them.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

I wasn't involved with choosing which tool to use, but I know other platforms were evaluated, including some open source tools like Trello. In the end they went with Agile Central.

Don't be afraid to change things. It's something that I try to follow, so that's something I would give that advise to others as well. People will not like new views and changes initially, but once they get used to it, they will like it. It's similar to what Facebook does. They make very subtle changes and they force it on you and initially, you don’t like the changes. But, then once you use it for a few days you find that it works out.

Most important to me when choosing a vendor is good technical support and customer service. This is very helpful when learning a new tool. If I have questions, I want someone to be available at the other end, to be ready to answer my questions. I want them to show me how this tool is going to work for my specific use case. That's the biggest thing I look for in a vendor.

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.  

My company uses it for managers, project management, and all the release management team.

It helps us to track and manage the way we work. We follow the Agile method and it really helps us to manage things and divide up tasks. It is quite a good tool.

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.

We have used this for almost four years.

I guess if it can give more integration, something like Outlook, and more automated instead of manual entries, then scalability would be OK. We have around five thousand people using the tool.

I guess I am good with the level of technical support.

I didn't use any other solutions. I came to know about this program management solution from working at my company.

In terms of the setup, there was one thing that was a little difficult. I got to change it very quickly, and the team was helpful.

I would recommend it. It is a very good product, very helpful in managing, and pretty good at checking things. The way we manage our projects and the way we work with it is pretty good.

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.

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

Capacity and resource planning help us understand how much work an individual can accommodate per sprint and if any one person is over-allocated.

Release planning is made simpler by the Agile Central interface.

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

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

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

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

I have never had to use technical support.

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

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

I don’t know about the pricing.

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

The valuable features are:

• User story tracking and team status management, including capacity and burn down
• Allows for the creation and scheduling of detailed user stories including attachments, assigned tasks, discussions, child stories, and revision history
• Allows for the association of defects and test cases. (I have not used these features as we use HPE Quality Center for that purpose.)

Some of the improvements to my organization are as follows:

• Helps my team organize our planning and testing activities.
• Removes the need to have separate products for tracking the various ancillary records for our user stories.
• Helped us to organize team effort and keep the team on track by providing a burndown chart and team status breakdown at the task level.
• 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 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.

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

There have not been any scalability issues.

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