Rally Software Reviews

I have a couple of individuals on my team that help manage the utilization of CA Agile Central to make sure that we are being as mature as we possibly can for Agile practices.

Performance has been good. It allows for a lot of customization, which has been very helpful, because we pull key metrics, report up to our unit CIO on certain areas.

The benefit of the solution is enhanced visibility, that is probably the key one. And it provides data points to enable continuous improvement.

The ability, for example, to use the deep export report, and pivot tables and that kind of thing in Excel, has helped us out a lot.

It drives the conversation behind some of the pain points the teams have, based on the data that we're able to pull out of the system. As a result of that, we're able to make better decisions, to become better as a whole.

The customization and the dashboarding that is available. We utilize some of the customization we put into play to help the business see inputs versus outputs, because we obviously use Clarity as well as CA Agile Central. Just being able to correlate the amount of hours someone is working versus what work they're getting out of Rally has been helpful.

More customization capabilities would be helpful. Providing a little bit more structure around how the system should be set up in terms of the hierarchy structure might be helpful as well.

The stability has been good. I don't think we've really had any problems. There have been a couple of issues, but they've been on our side in terms of Okta, the single sign-on solution we use.

Scalability has been good. Again, the reporting, helps with it.

A couple of my direct-reports have used tech support, and it's been fairly useful. If we don't have the solution developed at the point of time when we ask, they are more than willing to help us get to that solution, from a customized perspective.

This was the solution that we had in place when I joined American Express - I'm a year into Amex. Seeing how teams utilized the solution when I initially joined, it wasn't streamlined, it wasn't something that we put much thought into. Creating a process to rally behind was, I think, a key aspect.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but the upgrade, yes. I think the upgrade itself was straightforward. The rolling out across the organization was the complex part. Communicating the new benefits of the upgrade, and that kind of stuff, has proved to be difficult.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria are the scalability and the availability of the data to us, to be able look at in the reporting aspects.

You need to have a good strategy in terms of rolling the product out, if its something that you're getting into the first time. Make sure you have a strategy surrounding how the team should use the product, what it should be used for. Some of the benefits, some of the sign posts for success, need to be set up along the way, as well.

We are promoting SAFe within our organization and we have a organization that actually follows the Scaled Agile Framework. We're using Agile Central right now to track our users' portfolio items, our product features, our product backlog, our iteration status, and to track metrics. That's what we're using it for right now.

It's been pretty good. We've been using it for the last two and half years. We've tried a couple other products in the past, before we moved on to Rally CA or Agile Central 2. So it has really worked out very well.

The metrics - collecting metrics. It's because we've used several other tools in the past, and they don't give you a full indication of how well your teams are performing, at a portfolio level, at a product level, and at the team level. CA Central actually makes it very easy for us to track metrics for our trains, for our teams, to find out what the velocities are, what we should plan for, and what we should anticipate.

It really helps us scale in terms of our organizations, and be more predictable. That's one of the biggest advantages that the Agile Central tool has provided us. As I said, gathering metrics and being more predictable, that really helps us in the long run.

We have a couple of pain points, but I can't remember off the top of my head what those are. Every once in a while we'll submit feedback through their online tool. 

In terms of improvement, perhaps some more metrics. If they could add some additional, that would be cool.

It's quite stable, we haven't had many issues. Every once in a while, we have had some problems with the total number of features that it runs into but other than that, nothing else.

I haven't had much of a problem with scalability. It seems quite scalable.

There are times when we struggle with stuff but we haven't really called customer support yet.

There are some features of the product, a couple of the things, that were not really intuitive. We just had to go through online documentation. They have good online tutorials, support, documentation, where you can go and read up on things, so we just used that.

We started using the product, so we were more of the consumer than the actual installing team. That was done by a different team.

We explored a lot of tools when were trying to promote SAFe or Agile across the entire organization, so we moved through the Scaled Agile Framework. And then there were only three or four tools that we explored, and Rally, or CA Agile Central, was one of those that we thought would really work.

We looked at VersionOne, the Atlassian tool, I can't remember the name of it, I think it's just JIRA, and Rally.

What's most important to us when selecting a vendor are 

• ease of use
• how intuitive it is
• customer support
• metrics, for us, that is really important.

I give it a solid eight out of 10 because of the way that things are laid out. It's more user friendly, it's intuitive. As I said, it's easy to use. I think they've done a good job with the metrics in general.

I would tell colleagues who are looking at this type of solution to do their homework and see which one works best for their company, for their teams, and for their organization. We went with Agile Central because of a lot of the things it provides, in terms of the features. I know every company is different, every team is different, and things that might serve their needs may be different than what is useful for us. My best advice would be to do their homework and explore.

There are so many high-value features it is hard to choose but I will say the most valuable feature is the fact that it provides traceability from the strategic objective to task level with rolled up and detailed reporting. This is valuable as activity is joined up from top to bottom; a developer in a feature team can trace their input at the task level all the way up the hierarchy to the strategic objective they are helping to deliver. On the flip side, the CTO can have a view of real-time progress against the delivery of strategic objectives, drill down to the portfolio epics and business outcomes with the potential to see the value being delivered.

It has enabled the transition from a project-based portfolio to a product-based portfolio.

It could do with a wider range of colours for cards and the Kanban features need some improvement (which I know is on the way this year). The colour swatch for cards in Kanban board views is quite limited; I think there are 9 possibilities. Using these to visually differentiate cards on a busy board becomes less valuable when multiple themes are sharing a card color.

Kanban features should be built around flow, which implies they should not be constrained by time boxes. This is of particular relevance when considering many of the views that, by design, require one to select a time box. This is also true of reporting. There are some things to consider, though, as when viewing a personal or team board, one doesn’t want to see the entire backlog, so it would be useful if that could be limited to a user-defined number of stories.

I have been using Agile Central for seven years.

We have never had stability issues in seven years of use.

It is the most scalable product of its kind out there.

Technical support is excellent.

I have used JIRA, Trello and IBM Rational, but none of them are close to Agile Central.

Initial setup was very straightforward and guided by CA consultants.

If you want the very best, expect to pay accordingly. But you will get ROI from it, especially if you are doing agile well and at scale.

In my current role, the firm evaluated JIRA, Agile Central, VersionOne and IBM Rational (I think).

You will only regret it if you have chosen the Rolls Royce when you could have got by with a Nissan Micra.

CA Agile Central is used for the lifecycle of Initiatives, Features, and User Stories, Defects: from concept through delivery

• It really helped to connect the dots between what the overall vision was down to T-Mobile. 
• Having that view into features and roadmap from product to delivery teams, and where they are going, then execute on. 
• Being able to have the information, helping to facilitate those conversations, and just overall delivery. It is a really powerful tool for that. 

It really helps with getting the alignment between strategy and execution for the product teams, all the way down to the delivery teams. 

What I have learned is that a lot of features that I am looking for, in many cases, are part of a different tool set that CA offers. Really it is more learning about which features and tool, those features would be in. A lot of the features that we would be looking to add, I am learning may not be within Agile Central, but part of another CA tool set. It is about learning which tool that would be and how to integrate it. 

It would be nice if CA had those tools as part of a package rather than having to try and find multiple tools to integrate together. Some of the additional features that we are looking at would be better roadmapping capabilities and increased robustness around permissions. More of a view into the overall lifecycle of the portfolio items, so post acceptance of a story through the pipeline. Those are some of the key things that I would like to see. 

For the most part, we have found that it is pretty stable. There are the occasional outages, but for the most part, it is pretty reliable. 

That is one of the advantages of CA Agile Central: Its ability to scale. Other tools that we have looked at or heard of, that is one of the limitations they have. The reason why we use Agile Central is its ability to scale across teams of teams. 

It is really good. In addition to tech support, we have had the agile success program supporting us. They are very responsive, helpful, and available. When we have needed tech support, they have been able to help guide us through it as well. So, really helpful. 

I would give it about an eight and a half. The reason why it would not be higher is because some of the things we are looking for we had to get other tools to plug into. Whereas, some of the other solutions we have seen out there, it is all-in-one tool set. 

Release planning, test case writing.

It's performed plenty, I'm happy with the performance.

I get to see what we have, what test cases we need to deliver, per release.

It gives us the visibility into what we're doing and how we're doing on a day to day basis, to see if we need to refocus or to try to change things before it gets down into the negative. The daily iterative working part of it is what I like. And I get to see the visuals of what's going on.

The Defect feature. In one view you can see all your defects and you can push them into the different releases.

I also like the Release view, where you can select different user stories and just dump them into the releases you want them to be in.

I also like the reporting. I can see my Burndown, my Burnup, and other reports that we use to see if we're delivering on time.

One thing that my team struggles with is when they have so many user stories. You have the parent's story, and then you have a child of a child of a child and it goes "down into the drain." Sometimes it's hard for them to quickly search for a user story. I know there is a part where you can just type the user story number, but that's if you know it. 

I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help.

It's been around for a while so it's pretty stable. 

I'm assuming it's our infrastructure, but since its web-based, at certain times of the day, it's slow. At certain times of the day I've noticed it takes a while for the page to come up and for updates and the like. Sometimes you have to shut it down and restart.

I opened up a ticket with CA about it. I don't think I got a response back. It's been a while, I didn't look back into it, and nobody contacted me about it.

It scales.

Generally I'm satisfied with the tech support I get from CA.

I wasn't involved in the setup with my current company; my previous company, yes, I was. I think it depends on who you're working with. With the person I was working with in my old company, it was straightforward.

We had that one on one relationship with CA, and they were on site to help us out. If we had to be on a call for anything they were there.

At my old company we had a demo for VersionOne, then Rally (now Agile Central), and one other tool. One of the reasons we went with Rally is it was easier to use than VersionOne. The reporting was great, it was what we were looking for. And at that time it had another feature called Timesheet, that became the Timesheet in Agile Central.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is that the product be user friendly. It also has to be able to produce. My bottom line is the outcome, so I want to see that it can help deliver correctly, on time, within the budget. Also resource planning, resource management, those are the kinds of things I'll put into consideration if I'm looking for a tool to use.

I think CA has been consistent in trying to improve Agile Central, but they also still have room for improvement, so I give them seven out of 10.

I would tell colleagues to try Agile Central because of the features I noted above. And then, I don't know about VersionOne, but the support for Agile Central is also great.

It helps us organize our projects so that we can get down to really detailed work items; really granular, busting up a task, a feature, and parsing it out so that we really understand what's needed. We can put it into small, bite-sized pieces that can be addressed quickly. If somehow there's a misunderstanding or miscommunication, it can be adjusted and corrected fast and easy.

I'm the subscription administrator. I rarely use it as a user. I generally only use it as a user to troubleshoot. So to me, as an administrator, the most important tool is looking up the subscriptions of my customers to see if they had logged in recently.

To me, the biggest thing I see that needs improvement is the navigation. When somebody's using more than one workspace, it's not obvious how to go from one workspace to another. It's simple enough once you know, but is you're looking at the screen, you don't notice it.

I actually have to write documentation, and I sent it out often to tell people how to navigate from one workspace to another when they're on more than one workspace; in a sense, more than one project, though a workspace is a bigger bite of a project. If you're really just on a different project, and they're all on the same workspace, it’s not a big deal. But when they have to switch from workspace to workspace, it's not obvious. So, that's where I see they could improve in their navigation. Make it more intuitive.

For the most part, stability has been good. They did go through a small shaky patch when CA bought them (Rally) and they decided to move data centers. It seemed like there were some outages, but that has been fine since. It can be a little slow at times, but as far as up time, it seems to be quite good.

I don't know about scalability. From my understanding, we're medium to small in the grand scheme of things. There are much bigger shops than us. But we're not small either. We're in the hundreds. So, it seems like there's plenty of scalability.

I have to say, since CA bought it, support has actually improved; which I'm very surprised about. I found in the past, when it was wholly owned by Rally, they forced you to always go through their website first, search their knowledge base, and then post a case. And then they'd contact you within a day or so. It was okay, but it was less satisfying when that's the only way to contact them; and I always had to go that way.

The technical support seems to have improved quite a bit since CA bought them, which, again, I was very surprised that it has improved instead of get worse. It seemed to be able to handle phone calls better and are even more responsive. I'm very happy.

I wasn't part of the discussion to buy initially. It was already here when I started. It seems that we have grown, though, and switched from other tools. It just seems like the granularity it provides and being able to really be good for development teams and really focus on their needs, and that is why we use it so much and it's growing.

Setup seems relatively straightforward. It was easy to learn. Most teams teach themselves how to use the tool and new teams generally hire somebody who understands the concepts, so just a cursory show them the fields and the setup, and they're good to go. There's nice three- to five-minute videos that CA provides from their website that helps teams understand the concepts and the usage.

Just be open and take advantage of the videos to see if they understand what the product is and to reach out to the vendor and ask them questions. They seem very willing to help without necessarily charging. If they feel that you're a potential customer, they're happy to talk to you and give you some guidance. If you need a lot of help, then of course, then they have programs to actually send experts.

I don't know which feature would be more specifically valuable. I guess the portfolio items would be the ones I use the most, but I also am very familiar with the quality module as well.

Some of the reporting stuff would probably rank right up there as well. Those are probably my top three.

I think what it's helped with in general is that we've learned a lot about how to break things down a little more in detail. Going from primarily a waterfall organization into an agile organization, the tool has been very helpful to help people make that transition.

It's a relatively slow process, unfortunately, as it's a large organization we're dealing with, and everybody interprets things a little bit differently. We've had some people that have really spent a lot of time with the CA resources, who really understand the product and help the users use the tool effectively.

I think one of the things that we stumble upon is how to organize the teams. We have one overall workspace, but outside of that workspace we have many, many teams underneath it. I think you can organize them in two different directions. You can organize them by leadership or organizations, or you can organize them by, for lack a better term, product. And those two don't sync together, because you have many organizations contributing to a product that don't roll up to the same leadership level.

So from a reporting aspect, for different things, we struggle trying to get that balance; to get the reporting for the leadership side, and then get reporting for the product side. That is one aspect. It's not necessarily a hierarchical issue, it's a flexibility issue, if you ask me. If you put it in one direction, you can't get it to the other. So you need to be able to balance it both ways. That would be something I think that could be worked on.

I have been using the solution for more than three years.

I personally haven't had any stability issues. The only time that it's been a problem for me is when I've extracted data around test and defect information. The extraction process has to be broken up; you can't do it all at one time. It's not impossible; it's just a little more work. Whether it's just because of the amount of volume we're talking about, or if it's just that there would be no way to fix that, I don't know.

Specifically, in our case, we're getting very close to the millionth test case written in the 3+ years that we've been doing this, and that's a lot of data. But you can't extract it all at one time; you have to break it up into chunks.

I personally have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support at 9/10. That's a very, very strong nine. We work very closely with some of the technical support people, and have for a very long time, and they are great partners.

I think what they do today, especially with their tech support side and the relationship we have with them, they are very open, they listen, and we understand that we're not the only client. We know what our users come to us and ask for. We take that information in and compile it, and have conversations with CA Agile Central, saying, "Here's what we've come across," and they've actually been very responsive to some of the things that we propose.

We know we can't get it all, because they have to make the tool useful to all their clients. So we'll present what we think is viable, and it's just like anything else. Some of it makes it, some of it doesn't. I really can't ask for anything more than what they do. They're very open, they will listen, and they will do it if they can. That's fine by me.

This was the first Agile Central tool that we used on a grander scale. Again, we switched from a waterfall organization to an agile organization, and this tool doesn't support waterfall.

I wasn't involved in the setup process.

I am not involved in the pricing and licensing side of the operation.

I wasn't involved in any such evaluation.

I have had some experience with one of the other tools out there and personally, I like this one better, so I'm a little bit biased around that aspect. If somebody were to ask me, "I'm looking between this and that ...", if I know the tool, I would have my biases towards CA Agile Central, for sure. I think it's a pretty good tool.

The Plan/Plan and Plan/Time boxes have proven to be the most useful for me to keep track of the development progress.

In the past, we used the JIRA system. It was very difficult to track progress. With the agile method, we can break things down to manageable pieces. Our deliverables to production have increased as a result, and I can clearly see if we are moving at the speed and in the direction to best serves the business.

It’s hard to say if it is a product improvement or business use improvement that is needed. But, managing the backlog has proven to be an issue. There are stories written for the same purpose, but in different words. If there was some way to question the writing when the subject is very similar; as to the need for the new story.

I don’t really think this is a product issue. The tools are there, but the business seems to not be utilizing them. The duplicate story issue is a business issue. I don’t see how the application can prevent this; especially since when developing, the same words can be used in multiple stories with minor differences in the tasks desired.

I know initially I thought Agile could put some sort of alert if the wording was similar; but that is a task too large and out of the scope of design.

As a business user, I just need to insure myself and my PM are taking better care in reviewing our backlog

We started using this system about 3-4 years ago. My only issue is that I work on 3-4 different projects and each team uses the application differently.

No stability issues for me. I’ve never been unable to access and/or update.

No issues with scalability for me either.

I’ve only needed technical support to allow a new user access; I would like a clearer process. Currently, I email the project manager and then they take up to a week or more to provide access. If this could be streamlined and expedited, this would be great.

We used the JIRA method and changed as our business leadership directed me to change to Agile Central.

The initial install was complex. But this was due to the lack of training. As with most changes, I was thrown into it first and then had classes. But this is a business practice, not that of Agile Central.

I was not part of the decision process.

Take a course or two before you start using it, so that you understand the process. Especially if it is different from your current business practices. The courses have been well run and informative. But, take care in choosing the class; some are for more experienced users.