Rally Software Reviews

The valuable features are:

• Tracking progress and other parameters.
• Allowing a better overall picture of activities.
• Facilitating the interaction between team members and teams.

The solution now offers visibility on each activity and its status.

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.

We have been using this solution for a year and a half.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

In order to improve the organization of your work, make sure you put real info/data into the product.

It has most benefited me because as a release manager, it helps me know and mitigate the risk going into production so I can reach out to the different teams. I can, at anytime, pull up a report to show me where the status of a candidate for release is and I can reach out to those teams. Based on the report, we can then decide whether we need to allocate more resources to ensure we're able to release on a certain date.

It helps us track our development life cycle for our development teams. They can keep track of the progress of their user stories and features, from the intake process all the way through deployment and into production. This can be done in tandem with test results, and we have a substantial team with various applications.

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

We're at 13,000-plus companies. We have lots of applications, lots of different teams with upstream and downstream dependencies. Different teams have different maturity levels in terms of how they are using Rally. Some are just getting on board, and some have been using it for a long time. So we're trying to consolidate that.

The technical support with Rally is going pretty well.

I can't even give you off the top of my head how many licenses we have with them, but it's user-based licensing and we have quite a few of them.

I think it's a great tracking tool. There are similar tools out there, but for us it's convenient, it's intuitive.

Planning for the scrum team.

It has performed excellently.

It's the ability to bring visibility to the work. Previously we had another tool. Actually, it's a tool that I built, but it was limited in its ability to provide that start-to-finish visibility. And the traceability, from inception of the project to final test and deployment. Agile Central provides us that, not directly, but with its integrations to other tools in our tool chain, so that's a great help.

The visibility it brings to the plan, the ability to capture tasks, and trace them all the way through the life cycle. Providing that visibility helps both me and the team, or teams, to be able to understand where we are in the development process.

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.

The tool is much more stable that I am. It's very stable. We've had no problems.

Scalability hasn't been an issue. I wish it were, but so far the adoption has been good. We have a ways to go before I would imagine that there would be any scalability issue.

I have not used tech support. We have an application administrator and he handles all that.

Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup, I do know that there was some complexity to it. But not terribly complex. It was not hard to do, because it is a SaaS solution. It was basically: Give us the URL and point us to the training, and that was it.

No, Agile Central, had been on our radar for quite a while.

For me, the most important criterion when selecting a vendor is finding a partner, versus just a vendor who's going to deliver a piece of software and wait for the money to come in.

Don't think just about the tool, but think about the entire lifecycle of the tool, or the lifecycle of your application development. That's very helpful.

The part that I like the most is that we can filter the defects and user stories. We use the reporting features at our own convenience. We use different types of filters and they help us a lot in finding anything we want.

This solution saves us lots of time and it is central for everyone. Everyone can see the revisions whenever anyone has made any sort of change.

For example, if there are changes in the user story, we can track it. That's very useful for us, because in regards to the test cases, we have all the results available for us.

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.

I have used this solution for around two years.

There were no stability issues. It is very rare that we are not able to access the CA Agile solution.

In around two years, we have only faced this issue one or two times. Otherwise, it is up and working fine.

There were no scalability issues.

In regards to the technical support, they can improve and make the procedure easier. In order to import/export any reports or test cases, we have to create certain queries. They should be more user-friendly.

The setup was easy.

We have compared it with JIRA, the other agile-friendly tool. However, we find this solution better.

I would recommend that you use this product for your productivity.

Iteration status tracking: The ability to instantly see what my team status is and to quickly find out about roadblocks to existing tasks is very valuable.

It made it much easier to adopt agile methods of execution. The learning curve on using agile is now much more approachable.

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.

We have not had any stability issues.

For larger projects, the tool gets significantly slower.

I have never used technical support.

We previously used manual methods. Switching to this IT-based solution was a welcome change.

It was a simple setup! Thanks.

I was not involved in the licensing for the company.

I was not involved in choosing this specific product. It was provided by our company’s IT department.

Take the time to go through the Agile Central tool training videos. They are very useful and well worth your time.

We find the most value in the Release Tracking view. We use this view during draft plan review for our scrum teams. This view allows us to see which features each team is working on during a PI. We can easily see where stories for a feature are scheduled within or across sprints, and we can compare that to priority and any logical sequencing requirements. We can also see any interdependencies between teams. This view is also very useful during a PI to track progress using the burnup chart with its forecast based on empirical trend lines. We view these forecasts per team and also in aggregate for an entire release train.

The other features that we find valuable include the task board, which is useful sorted by team member for daily scrum; the iteration status for sprint planning; the team and iteration planning pages, which are useful for PI planning and draft plan review; and various Kanban views at the portfolio, program, and team levels.

The “follow” and “discussion” features are also very valuable for qualitative tracking of work items.

This product is a great fit for organizations using the Scaled Agile Framework. It follows and facilitates best practices for agile and scrum. In many instances, the built-in constraints of this tool have opened discussions about agile best practices, and the comprehensive documentation in the online help knowledge base has provided solid guidance for agile transformation where needed.

One example of this would be the question of what to do with unfinished work at the end of a sprint. Because the right action is counter-intuitive, this is an area of much controversy and contention across the industry; however, there is an established best practice, which the help section explains and which the tool facilitates. See Manage Unfinished Work: https://help.rallydev.com/mana...

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.

I have used Agile Central for two years.

Stability has been an issue at times. We have seen an unacceptable amount of system downtime. This has improved over the last year.

The product team has been somewhat unresponsive to popular community requests for feature enhancements. Technical support has been responsive, and customer service has been acceptable.

We have previously used Team Foundation Server and we have evaluated JIRA. This product was chosen because it was a good fit for Scaled Agile Framework.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward compared to other products.

This was implemented through a vendor team. Because this tool is so flexible and can be used in so many ways, we do not recommend attempting the implementation without outside consultation. It is easy to have the configuration fall victim to local anti-patterns.

Efficiency and effectiveness in our processes have improved by 10 percent with this tool. At scale, and across multiple release trains, this gives us a 15X return on our investment.

Do not try to implement this product if you are not using agile at scale. There are simpler, more elegant and intuitive tools.

It provides overall functionality in project management and release tracking all in one tool. Those are our main things. Additionally, it provides integration with JIRA and ALM. The Rally guys came in and said they would integrate, and that’s a great feature. We don’t have to use our infrastructure, so maintenance of the system is avoided.

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

It is stable, but at times the performance is slow. It doesn’t crash, but it's slow.

Also, because it’s on the CA network, we have API connectivity to Rally. However, our server proxy cannot talk to the Rally systems. Rally has a fix for that, which is working for now, but we need a long term solution.

We have 800-1200 users. I haven’t seen any issues so far. Rally was installed three months ago and the transition is going well.

The response times are good and the support is very good. I deal with a few guys, so when I email them I get a quick response.

Our VP was given a presentation on project management, defect management, and release tracking all in one tool, which excited him. Then we were given a demonstration, and the fact that our existing tool didn’t do those things made Agile Management an easy choice.

Set up of the software is easy but the integration is complex. If you are only using it as a tool, it is good, but the integration is not so straightforward.

If you tell me you are using VersionOne, you would get more for your money with similar costs from CA Agile Management. So more value, that’s number one because being with a bigger company means you get more value with the community. If you are not using any tool, then you should start using a tool, and this is a good start.

The dashboard and planning board are the most valuable features. These help me track the progress of my user stories.

I can review my pending tasks daily. In this manner, I can organize my day-to-day work.

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.

I have been using this product for approximately 30 weeks.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

It is the first agile tool that I have used.

The initial setup was easy to carry out.

The pricing policy is transparent for me.

There is a need for some training, but overall, it is easy to use this solution.