Rally Software Reviews

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.

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.

• Logging user stories
• Listing tasks
• Estimating and tracking work in progress (WIP) for each project

These features are most valuable to me because they are useful for my job functions. I’m a software developer and I use these features more than any other features of this tool.

It helps us to track work in progress for each project and for each user story. We can also learn project details from a high level.

The search feature may need some improvements. Sometimes it is hard to pull a specific user story just by adding the user story number. It is not straightforward to search for a specific user story using its ID number.

My suggestion would be to add a search button. In this way, the user could search for a specific user story based on a given user story ID number, or on the user story description.

I don’t think that I’ve seen this option. Even if it is there already, it is not intuitive to the end user.

I have used this solution for around two and a half years.

There were no stability issues. However, I have not used this tool extensively enough to comment on this topic.

There were no scalability issues. However, I have not used this tool extensively enough to comment on this topic.

Initially, we were using an internal tool within our company.

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.

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.

Execution of software development.

• Plans and prioritizes to quickly deliver value. 
• CA Agile Central provides visibility into how teams are meeting business objectives.
  

CA Agile Central helps the entire organization run like one powerful team. With the Project and Portfolio Hierarchy, we can have deep visibility into the work our teams are doing and how it ties to our business strategy and customer value. 

CA Agile Central does not have a workflow tool included. If possible, it may be necessary for some companies that this type of feature be included.

Now, it delivers quarterly releases and has reduced the backlog, thereby increasing feature velocity while keeping the quality high.

I use Agile Center mostly to do two things: 

1. To manage my requirements and I have hundreds of thousands of requirements. 
2. My teams uses it for their daily agile management. They describe their user stories and track the progress of their projects.

We are a former customer before it was acquired by CA. In that time, we were using just a fraction of what was there. This year, we started having more implementation and moving into the newest version. This has allowed us to use some of the high-end features like the label hierarchy, and it is good so far.

The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. You have to adopt yourself to the kind of workflow that it comes with. It helps you shape the way you flow.

Right now, it is the idea of having everything in place for both information and my project in a single network. Everybody who has different kind of users take advantage of the go through from the development guys to the project managers to management staff. Everybody has such great perspective of what is going on. It is very helpful.

There was some evolution, and as we have this old on-premise, it does takes longer. However, this complex requirement management, having different perspectives and different ways to organize the hierarchy of things, that is something that we value. It looks like the tool is at the beginning of having this new kind of approach, and we expecting different things from it.

It could improve by being self-organizing: user stories, different hierarchies, and different perspectives. Not just as a single hierarchical structure, but something that can be multidimensional.

The stability is pretty good. I do not have any complaints about the abilities of on-premise version.

I do not have a bunch of users. I have not tried scaling it.

I use more the sales consultants than the technical support. The consultants are very knowledgeable. They should be more frequently available. I would like to have more of their presence, but their technical expertise and their willingness to help me is pretty good.

We were not using a previous solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

No, I am not thinking about changing. I need to have a lot of pain to start making changes.

There is an ongoing change that is happening. CA has implemented with Rally, so they are still in the early emerging process. I think the evolution and integration of the two with product solutions will come after it.

A solution is not more than a solution. It is a tool. It does not solve your problem. It is fixed by the tool. It is important to think about the problem that you are trying to solve to work with the consultants to come up with the right solution. The tool by itself could not solve your product issues.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: partnership. That is the most important thing. To be there when I need someone to be connected with the evolution of my processes when I have difficulty, both technical or on the business side. That kind of partnership is what I value the most.

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.