Rally Software Reviews

I think what’s great is the ability for teams to really plan at the team level. CA Agile Central does this very well without much overhead. This allows our teams to really focus on the work, as opposed to the administration of the tool. I think at the team level, that's the most valuable.

At the portfolio level, what’s most valuable is being able to manage the visions, the features, and the releases; it’s very easy, simple, and straightforward to do. I think there's good value, as well, by bringing together the business vision statements and what IT is thinking in terms of delivery, and what's possible in terms of capacity. The objects within the system are integrated well enough to allow for really smooth end-to-end planning.

It has improved the organization's functions by eliminating time wasted waiting for someone to have a prioritized list on their laptop or on some SharePoint site that to which we then have to get access. All of this is simplified and we're not wasting time looking for information. Everything is right in one place, correlated, and related in the right way, and at the right level that allows for planning, execution, and tracking afterwards.

We have pockets of really good Agile maturity in the company and some pockets where more maturity is still necessary. I think the bank as a whole is still maturing in terms of agility, and it's ability to adapt to change. I would describe it as just pockets at this point, but growing very, very quickly.

We use Agile for coaching as well. We try to coach to a few things. One of them is, of course, business value; to say, "hey, focus on delivering high business value first". So again, we are able to take advantage of the prioritized lists at all levels within the tool.

This applies to transparency also; making data visible at all levels and to anybody who is a stakeholder or part of the team. The information is right there, and everybody has the same exact view given the access that they are granted.

We work on predictability also. You're able to see the level of velocity that each team and each release has very quickly. You don't have to go and search for data. When talking about improvement, it's more of a process that we coach. But, enabling those types of conversations around continuous improvement based on accessible, real data from the system is invaluable.

We're focused on multiple areas. We are trying to get teams to think about the system as a whole and not just their small areas. We're trying to get end-to-end visibility of how efficient we are at doing our work. That's where we coach.

We have submitted lots of ideas to the Ideas portal, such as milestones. We would like to make sure that that's a first class citizen, if you will. Make it a little bit more robust regarding our API plans. Reporting I think is a big one too, especially at the bank.

We base a lot of decisions on real data. So if we're not able to get that real data in a very simple way and be able to slice and dice it, then we aren't as effective as we could be at making those decisions quickly. I'd like to see a reporting interface that is easy to use, based on report templates that we can take advantage of.

Lastly, the Insights module within the tool was great when it came out, yet very few people harness it's power today. I think it could be more integrated into their reporting interface, if it's possible. It would really drive true insight right into the data that we are creating around our work.

I think the CA Agile Central is pretty stable. I've used it for over 6 years and it's fairly stable. We use it on the SaaS model. The website says 90% up time, which is fantastic. No real major down times that we've seen.

We use Agile Central at scale already. The tool is being used across the entire bank and across the world. At last count, we had 7,000 or 8,000 people using it across multiple teams in multiple organizations and these are active licenses. I believe we are already using it at scale in a very real way to deliver value.

We have worked with technical support when we have questions of defects. They are very responsive. They approach their work with an open mind or open transparent setup, where they're sharing the latest information and where things stand in terms of questions, or defects, or enhancements, if you will. Overall, we have no complaints at all, from my perspective at least.

I don't believe there was a previous solution in place for Agile teams. Some teams were using Atlassian JIRA and then some are still using version one, but that was in parallel and not a replacement.

I was not part of the initial set up, but I have been a subscription administrator and I'm aware of what goes into it. It's not overly difficult. I think working with the CA setup team, makes it very easy.

When selecting a vendor, the ability to integrate with other internal tools is first. I also look at the stability of the brand and extensibility in being able to extend out. Of course, meeting our minimum needs is a given, such as being able to track and report on data. I want to know how robust those items are. I think most products provide those types of functions, it's just how robust they are and how high a grade they have in terms of being able to deliver that functionality. That is what differentiates vendors.

My advice to others is to start right away. Learn as much as you can. The tool itself is not going to be your impediment or your longest pole in the tent. It’s going to take a long time to figure out what your internal culture and processes are, and the tool is only there to help you reflect what you are producing. So start early.

It is the only solution that we are using now for all of the project management activities in our organization.

This tool is basically used for our IT project management in our organization.

In regards to the customization part, sometimes it is not understandable. Things are not so clear, such as how to customize it for our needs. We need to have a lot more user-friendly options.

Most of the things are associated with the user-friendly options. Currently, the reporting and matrix connections are a little bit sketchy.

There should also be a lot of customization opportunities, especially being able to add additional filters for the project management. If those things improved, it would make this tool more beneficial for us.

In my current organization, I have been using this solution for three years.

We did not encounter any issues. The stability is good.

In terms of the scalability, not many issues were experienced.

I've never used technical support. Most of the things are always working all of the time.

Before CA Agile, we were using HPE Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HPE Quality Center software.

HPE was mostly for waterfall and this CA solution was more for agile. That is the reason why we switched to the CA tool.

For the ALM tool, they are still implementing the agile part, so the full functionality was not available on ALM's side.

The setup was complex. We have a very big connection, extremely big. Everything is complex.

I was not involved in any evaluation process because we are an organization level division. We have nearly 20,000 developers in the IT support team and most of them use this tool. This tool's implementation in the enterprise was from the senior management level.

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.

There are a couple things that our company found really good. One is that it’s scalable, and a lot of the other products on the market for us don't scale. We have close to 20,000 people using Agile Central. So that was one of the keys. Within the company developers, they all have their preferences. So some like JIRA, while some like Agile Central. But from a backend environment standpoint, Agile Central can actually scale for the whole business.

Agile Central helps in terms of Agile management, especially with our scrum teams. It's designed to be used from an Agile standpoint, so I think the teams that have struggled with it are the ones that aren't really set up for Agile. Agile Central is really founded as an Agile tool, so if you're not doing Agile, the tool doesn't work all that well for you.

Our company is large and we've got a very wide gamut of Agile maturity. We have some teams that are very expert in Agile and we have others that are still Waterfall. It's a 100+ plus year old company, so it runs the full gamut. Personally, I have been using Agile for a couple of years, so I'd say I'm pretty familiar with it at this point.

We've been asking for a couple of things. A big one for us has been on the administrative side. Again, I'm coming from a very large company so these are the things that are, at that scale, very important to us, such as access. How do we get access to people? How do you move a large number of people?

The other big one that we've been requesting for years is the ability to move people between workspaces. For us, that's really important. Every time we've had to do this, we have to get technical support involved and it's just a big pain in the butt. Within Agile Central, each workspace is very independent and one workspace can't talk to another workspace.

We have multiple workspaces set up and when a team wants move from one to the other it's very difficult to do. For instance, with a big organization you're always going to have organizational changes. So you may have set the things up perfectly when you first set it up, but things change. Now when they go and change, since we can't move workspaces easily, the new teams that are together can't collaborate because they're in different workspaces. There's no easy, functional way of doing it.

I also think the UI could use some improvement. I believe they're working on it. Also, it's not the most developer-friendly tool. So while management tends to like it, I don't know if developers are huge fans of it, at least in my business, from what I've seen.

I think stability has been fairly good. I don't know whether to attribute the issues that we've had to Agile Central or to our own network. And we have had issues, but they've been pretty quick to respond and try to come to the root cause of what's going on.

We've had some scalability issues but, to be honest, because it's a SaaS product, I'm not sure if it's a function of our network or Agile Central. Sometimes it's difficult to tell, because we've got a lot of internal networking that we're doing in terms of security, etc., that slows things down. So when we have had complaints about it, a lot of times it may be us that's at fault and not so much Agile Central. But, an important factor in choosing Agile Central was scalability.

We actually offer both JIRA and Agile Central within the company. So we try to somewhat make it a user choice as well. What we typically recommend is that if it's a very small project and it's a quick turnaround, JIRA's probably your best bet. If you have something longer term, Agile Central is probably going to be an easier tool for you to use.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup.

We didn't evaluate anything other than JIRA and Agile Central.

I think you have to think through how you're going to organize, especially if you have a large company. We've struggled with the structure of our teams and the way they're set up. So that's something you need to consider. And I don't know if they've done a great job of it. They actually call teams “projects”, which is a bit of a naming issue.

You definitely need to have some foresight when you set it up in terms of how that's going to work. You also need to think about how you're going to do workspaces, because there's no functionality there to change it once it's set up. You've got to get that right from the get-go or you're going to have a lot of trouble going forward.

We use it move projects through the software development lifecycle.

It performs pretty well. It's nice that everybody throughout the whole process has access and is shown the relevant information to their part of the job, their part of the SDLC.

It really does help everything just flow through the cycle better; everybody just worrying about their small piece of the pie. And then the project managers can have a bigger overview of it. I like how it moves things. It moves development through the whole lifecycle. 

The most useful part is how it breaks down tasks into parents and children, manageable tasks. It has a whole project as an initiative, and then it breaks it down further and further. And then you get to actual user stories and tasks that you can sit and develop. You don't have to worry about the whole big picture. It's nice how it breaks everything down into chunks.

I think the interface could be a little bit more visual and less wordy. Right now, it seems like it's just a lot of text on the page. In other ticketing systems where it's more visual, you can see more of a flow. But in this one it's more just a list of tasks. I would like to see that a little bit better, especially considering it has so many great organizational features, like child tasks, different artifacts. It would be great to see it presented more appropriately.

Very stable. I can't think of any down time we've ever had with it, to be honest.

I don't think we've had to worry about scalability too much yet. We just use it for one piece of software still, right now. So it's still very small, we're almost kind of piloting it right now.

I don't think we've needed to use tech support. Honestly, if we did, it wouldn't have been my job in our company. We have a relationship manager that I'm sure would take care of that.

We were using Waterfall, which worked for decades, but it's definitely showing its age. I think they just wanted to switch to the Agile methodology and Rally was probably the best software to do that with.

It just came to us and all of a sudden, management said, "Hey we're going to use Agile and Rally, and good luck." So we've been trying to learn it for the last year. 

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. but they put it out pretty fast, and I have seen changes in it being made fairly quickly. So I would say it's pretty straightforward.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is support. I know as a team lead for a developer team, I've personally worked with other third-party softwares that we integrate with. They've assigned people specifically to our account, which I'm sure happens at a lot of Fortune 200 companies working very big accounts. So the personalization is nice. We can have a weekly meeting with the same person, the same point of contact. If anything goes down, if we need assistance with anything, that person is available. Don't take the people out of IT. We work with computers so much it's easy to get out of touch, so keeping a personal touch is probably the best thing.

I would rate it a "high eight" out of 10. It's a very capable software. Like I said, I just would like to see it presented a little bit more visually. It's definitely got some power but everything's got room for improvement. 

Try to put yourself in the mind a developer and try and use it and see how you think it would flow. Really, it's a whole team collaboration. I'm not in the project support aspect, but I can empathize with them and think how they'd want to see things. Just try using it. See how you can move a project through it.

• The ease of user provisioning, i.e., bulk provisioning via API
• The configurable Portfolio Management and parent-child relationships
• The object classification (tags/colors)
• The seamless integration with many other systems such as Salesforce and GitHub
• Consistent uptime
• Rapid response support

Team collaboration is made easy and effective to meet business initiatives, while tracking progress across all the solution groups, regardless of their geographical location.

• The Reporting feature can improve, especially around executive summaries and dependency mapping.
• One report that would be especially useful is a Release Dependency report that displays the relationship of dependencies, across release trains. Currently, Agile Central will show you respective dependencies, but only if they exist within the same release train.
• CA Agile is hosted on a multi-tenant server, which prevents duplicate user names to coincide. This has become bit of an issue, in terms of provisioning users that had demo accounts in the past. In our experience, when provisioning a user who held a demo account with their company's email address, we had to reach out to the user to have them rename their old demo account. This opens the door for us to then proceed with the account creation.

I have used this solution for four years.

CA Agile Central is very reliable, in terms of consistent uptime. We have, however, encountered site latency during peak times of activity (far and few).

There were no scalability issues experienced by us, to date. We had a user base of 500 in 2015, and will have 3,000 by the end of 2017. We have not encountered any noticeable limitations.

The support staff at CA is excellent! They are very responsive and work to resolve any requests or issues, within a time span of a day on the average.

Previously, we were using VersionOne. CA Agile offers a more structured model of Portfolio Management.

VersionOne tends to offer a more open and free configuration setup, in terms of creating portfolio items. For example, in VersionOne, you can create child features, and then produce another set of child features for each parent feature. It is nearly impossible to restrict a portfolio model that allows for consistent reporting.

In Agile Central, you can configure and define your portfolio structure in the administrative console. Each child must roll-up to its assigned parent, i.e., Task > User story > Feature > Epic > Initiative (bottom-up).

The initial setup of Agile Central was straightforward and very repeatable. If you get it right once, the process to scale your subscription is consistent and efficient.

The license costs are fairly high as compared to some of the other solutions out there. CA Agile Central licenses are “one shoe fits all”, i.e., in terms that a Viewer license is the same price as an Editor or Project Administrator license.

A tiered pricing model would be a better approach. For example, the cost of the Viewer's license would be less ($) as compared to the cost of the Editor's license ($$).

CA Agile Central has worked very well in our ever-growing, agile-centric organization. If you’re looking to implement an agile development solution that scales extremely well and is backed by solid performance, stability, and an outstanding support team, this is the solution for you!

We recently went through a rigorous analysis across ALM tools in an effort to justify the continued use of the Agile Central, in comparison to the alternative solutions. CA Agile Central was chosen hands down, as our one and only ALM development tool across our enterprise!

As a Product Owner/Product Manager on an application team, it was my job to create, prioritize, manage, and accept portfolio capabilities, features, and user stories. The portfolio views and reports were the tools I used the most to do that.

The Agile process my team follows anticipates that requirements and priorities will change from sprint to sprint. Having a real-time view of what has been accomplished, what is in progress, and our backlog, that is easily accessible to all stakeholders, (customers, executives, implementation members, and delivery leads, as well as our staff of multi-discipline Product Owners and Managers) is critical to building and creating a high quality and viable product.

My scrum masters walked through the analysis, development, and testing tasks every day with team members, using the Team Status page to ask each team member (onshore, nearshore and offshore) for status on the prior day’s work and plans for today. As a Product Owner, I monitor User Story status via a Ready To Accept app on my Dashboard for User Stories that are ready to be accepted because all the required tasks are completed.

By using the Portfolio Items page I can adjust priorities and accept completed features from a single page.

It is used as a source of truth on workstream, workstream progress and issue management.

• Bulk priority change of portfolio items
• Portfolio feature
• Dependency reports

In our project, when a feature is completed, we mark it as completed but then don’t want to have it show at the top of the priority list and don’t want to constantly add filters to filter out completed items. So we put the completed items at the bottom of the backlog by changing the priority. There’s no way to do this except one at a time. With thousands of features, this is cumbersome.

There is no good way to get an overall view of feature dependencies except to go to one feature at a time and look at its specific dependencies. The team could have made great use of a report/dashboard of some kind (I failed at coding my own) that gave a larger view of feature inter-dependencies.

We have been using the solution for two years.

Generally, we did not encounter any issues with stability.

There was some slowness noticeable on days of heavy usage by many users (peak usage impact).

I did not use the technical support.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Use relational database concepts to relate items together instead of continuing to use old location-based organization concepts.

Rally Software is typically used for dealing with all the scrum and agile principles and work orders. It keeps track of whatever workers do in the application development lifecycle before release.

The most valuable features of Rally Software are the executive dashboards, ease of use, and many other features. They have encapsulated everything that a GI can do, such as monitoring, maintaining, and then releasing. It's continuous integration and development. 

I have been using Rally Software for approximately six years.

Rally Software is stable.

The scalability of Rally Software is easy to do.

Our team typically handles all of the support for Rally Software. Only when there are some difficulties is when I come in to give assistance.

We have used Jira and Microsoft Excel previously.

I found Jira and Rally Software similar in functionality.

The initial setup of Rally Software is straightforward. In the beginning, there was more hands-on attention needed but after that, we were in operation.

We are always looking for a discount, if the solution was less expensive it would be a benefit.

My advice to others is when you use Rally Software every day, they must be more hands-on. The employees have to have a level of maturity for gaining knowledge of the software. They need to know what it can do, what it can't do, knowing the ins and outs of the software are important.

I rate Rally Software an eight out of ten.