Rally Software Reviews

I like that you can link user stories and tasks to the features and the initiatives. This allows us to see how much were investing in people and effort. Mainly, I like the simplicity of it.

We can very easily run a report that clearly shows the amount of effort we’re investing in initiatives and features. It is very straightforward.

It brought transparency and clarity to our work. We can see from one place everything the engineering team is working on, in a very simple way using a very simple interface.

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.

We have had issues with custom reports that were dependent on an internal Agile Center API, but they crashed often. These are now fixed, and other than these, it's been okay.

Technical support is very responsive we were happy with them.

The solution we had just didn't work and required too much time from the engineering team, which I was highly against.

Initial setup was pretty straight forward.

Agile Center was already used in my company by other business units, so it was supported internally. Also, we heard that technical support was good. Since are heavily invested in Bugzilla for bug tracking, integration with Bugzilla was a plus.

We are not expert at Agile. We use a different tool for each development model; Eternity WaterFall and Agile. I think that that's one of the advantages.

In a vendor, we look for good support by people that have a lot of product knowledge. We don’t want to have to wait a long time before new features and customer feedback are integrated into the next release.

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.

It is a very good tool is well suited for Agile methodology, and lends itself to user story management. With the introduction of test case management and defect management, it has really boomed and it is at par with some of the existing systems, apps, test management tools such as HP ALM. I really like Agile Central.

It is a single platform that your Agile team can talk about. If you talk about a user story management, then you can talk about it as well. If you want to do test case management, you have all the QA team and developers who can work on it. It's a single tool that works with all team members in a scrum team. Before any communication, you don't want to go on another systems, but rather use a single system; a one-stop solution that solves it for you.

We wanted to have a hub, a faster time to market, high quality, and we wanted to move from Waterfall to Agile. I’m an intermediate user. We use this tool for coaching. In terms of best practices, we have certain guidelines that you need to follow. For instance, with Agile maturity, you should have your acceptance criteria selected when you have user stories and the test case results present. You can then attach your proof of testing. This tool supports these best practices.

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.

It is pretty stable and it's fast also, compared to other products, like HP ALM. It's fast and performs well.

Scalability is good. I have not faced any issues so far.

We have a team which connects directly with Rally. You have a help feature where you can raise requests and they can be solved. We have support available from CA.

I would say a thumbs up to the solution. It's pretty good and you should leverage it and try to use it. CA Agile Central gives you flexibility performing custom quoting on top of the solution. This makes it interesting and you can achieve many things with this tool.

• Requirements management
• Development team planning
• Tracking progress against plans
• Linking strategy to execution

We now have a more holistic view of how development teams are executing against the enterprise’s strategic roadmap. This improves our ability to prioritize work and to manage our risks and dependencies.

• 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

I have been using Agile Central for eight years.

We haven’t had any stability issues. We’ve experienced reliable uptime and few defects.

I’m currently working for a large Fortune 500 company and we haven’t any issues with scalability.

Technical support is excellent; however, some of our users find it a little confusing as to how to submit a case/help ticket.

We previously used a home-grown solution and wanted to switch to a more scalable solution.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward but there are certain best practices as to how to configure Agile Central. Typically, the CA Agile Central account manager will provide guidance as to how to best configure Agile Central and will be available to answer ongoing questions as they arise.

You can negotiate prices, technical services, and professional services if you need a large amount of seat licenses.

We looked at VersionOne, Pivotal Tracker, and Trello.

Work with your CA Agile Central account manager to determine the best way to implement and configure Agile Central based on your needs. Put together a basic usage policy, training document, and training presentation for users. Limit the number of administrators to a small handful of people. Integrate Agile Central with your other SDLC tools.

Portfolio management is a valuable feature.

It is 100% designed for agile. So if you run an agile/scrum organization, it will work for you.

With the portfolio management feature, we were able to understand our capacity for the first time and visually understand all the various initiatives in-flight.

We could provide very clear dashboards to our senior executives in order to be able to choose which projects we did and to check if they were on schedule.

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.

I have used this solution for 18 months.

We did not encounter any stability/scalability/deployment issues; it's cloud-based.

It only went down a few times which is very inconvenient when you run your entire team on it. But I assume this is the same for any system whether cloud-based or self-hosted.

I would give the technical support a 6/10 rating. There weren't too many problems, so I didn't have to use them much.

However, if the issue was specific to your data, then they couldn't really help easily. They had to get permission to duplicate your database and then work on that, which in a large organization required quite a few approvals.

I have used JIRA in the past. This is not originally agile-based and requires more setting up to get it right for you.

The setup was simple as it only does agile.

We implemented this product in-house. The adoption wasn't the hard part. It was the overall agile transformation that required the effort which was a culture/process thing.

I am not certain but we couldn't work without it.

You have to adopt agile and be true to it. This is an agile solution too. If you don't want to plan in sprint and build teams around the agile process, then it's probably not the tool for you.

The Kanban board is probably the most useful feature. It is very customizable and is great for somebody who doesn’t need to run the project with a scrum approach. The second most important feature is the overall ability to customize almost all of the solution’s features and work products such as user stories, defects, and features.

The product helped engage the business product owners by increasing both their view into the development cycle and their responsibility to assist in setting up work priorities.

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.

We have not had many stability issues. It is a stable product, but in the past, CA has fixed some server-side issues or implemented an “improvement” without any patch notes. That is usually just frustrating but one time, an “enhancement” broke our link to TFS. It took us two days to re-enter all the users.

We have no scalability issues. We have 185 users. However, because we are a cloud product, we are at the mercy of the internet routers and traffic.

Technical support is good once you get their attention. What is critical to you might not be critical to them. As an example, we had a broken TFS connector. It took about six hours for them to understand the problem, and that they were the ones who broke it. Once that happened, they were very helpful.

We used Microsoft Project. At that time, it was very weak with agile projects. Prior to purchasing this solution, we created a vendor grading scorecard with the features that were important to my company. We started evaluating six products. We then eliminated three, re-compared them, and settled on this solution.

Since we bought the cloud option, there was no specific setup. There was, however, lots of customization that we have done since 2012. It is straightforward once you are familiar with the product.

We also purchased five days of CA Agile Central on-site training. It broke down like this: one day for developers, two days for project managers/scrum managers, a half day for product owners, and a half day for administrators.

CA seems willing to give deep discounts when you have 100+ licenses.

We evaluated five other options. They have changed so much since we evaluated them in 2012, so it wouldn’t be fair to name them.

Make sure you have adopted an agile methodology on a few small projects first and then work with IT and business colleagues to accept that methodology. We did that before we looked for a tool. That makes the purchase, acceptance, and customization of this tool much easier.

I was previously using it as a scrum monitor for the team. It helps with billing and the IT team used it, as well. I am very satisfied with this product. 

CA Agile is a product that really needs more than 100 teams working on it. It works best in big organizations. It definitely streamlines workflow for many users in tandem.

The program management is one of the most valuable features in the bank I work for. I was able to create epics for our budgeting concerns and it helped me link everything together. 

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.

It is stable.

We are a big company. We have about 170 teams, and we find it scalable. It has been used for more than 1500 people at our company.

I have experience with JIRA. I find Agile has an easier UI. Furthermore, JIRA was more of an IT tool, and Agile has both IT and business capabilities.

It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company. 

When considering a new solution, I always consider:

• UI
• Price

The product is very intuitive to use, which drastically reduces training and onboarding time with new employees. It is highly customizable, which is both good and bad.

CA Agile Central helps us plan, organize, schedule and prioritize hundreds of feature requests into our release calendar. There is simply no way we would be able to release as many new products, enhancements or defect fixes without it!

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.

Rally/CA Agile Central has been in use at our organization for eight years.

We are a hybrid SDLC/agile shop and use the tool heavily to support our release planning and execution plans. We did adapt our SDLC process to use the terminology in the tool (Features, User Stories, Tasks and the Portfolio Hierarchy). We have people build features under a portfolio hierarchy which creates our master backlog. We assign built features across various releases to build our deployment schedule.

We use CA Agile Central with the following enabled modules:

• Integration Hub
• CA Agile Central Portfolio Manager
• CA Agile Central HP Quality Center Integration
• CA Agile Central IBM ClearQuest Integration
• CA Agile Central Idea Manager
• CA Agile Central Quality Manager
• CA Agile Central Support Manager
• CA Agile Central Time Tracker
• SSO
• IP Restriction
• Extension Whitelist

As with any cloud-hosted, SaaS model, we occasionally run into unscheduled downtime but they are usually able to switch data centers quickly where there are issues. They also maintain a system status page to monitor maintenance and repair time/updates.

The tool scales effortlessly. The only drawback is if we wanted to create a new workspace because migrating existing data between workspaces is difficult, especially if heavily customized.

The technical support is outstanding! We have a rep who contacts us quarterly to review what’s new and what’s in their development pipeline. Online and the web knowledge base answers most questions. Support is quick and easy to access and they turn-around tickets quickly, most times on the first call. They also helped us with building custom reports, pages and add-on apps.

I don’t know of any previous solutions, as this tool was here well before me.

I built out the most recent workspace and it was pretty easy after a week or so of trial and error, but that was mostly getting our portfolio hierarchy structure right.

Pricing is competitive for what you get even at the most basic level. It reflects a typical SaaS model of pricing/licensing.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

If you are an agile or even hybrid agile shop, this is an excellent tool. If you are a more traditional PM or waterfall model, it may not be your best option. It’s really built to support agile methodologies.