Rally Software Reviews

As a Scrum Master, helping the product group define feature stories, and portfolio management, and helping manage the teams, their scrum backlogs, their performance, and velocity.

It has performed well.

It helps us not to have to use any sticky notes. We project up every day, on a daily standup using the iteration planning part of it, and using the post-it portion of it in the Kanban, to communicate daily with the team on how things are going. 

It helps me to have a dashboard where I can see what things are not being worked on, what things are blocked, for instance. It helps me evaluate teams' historical performance using velocity charts. 

Capacity planning and release planning for the next PI help me figure out what the potential velocity is for each of the teams. It rolls it up, so that across teams we can figure out how many features we think we can get in for the next PI. 

And we've actually used it for virtual PI planning as well. We have teams in different locations, and we actually virtually do PI planning, big-room planning, using the tools so it's been really helpful there.

I like all the features of it, especially the Team Planning board, and the Release Tracking. It helps us track the features and stories that line up with those features. I like it for the most part, and how it works.

I can't think of any off the top of my head.

I have found it to be fairly stable. I know there have been a couple performance issues when we're all on it, but I think that was maybe about six months ago, maybe when we went to the cloud. But since then I haven't experienced any performance issues. I think that's really gone down.

It scales well in terms of setting up the workspaces and the hierarchy, we find that that works really well.

We've used tech support very little. But we're satisfied with the support we've received.

We were using Team Foundation Server (TFS). But some people were using JIRA, so there really wasn't a consistency there. We switched because it was really determined that it was probably the best tool out there to use.

It was actually pretty straightforward, and it did seem more intuitive than what we were using, which was TFS from Microsoft.

When our company is looking for new products, and new vendors, the criteria is more of a consensus, or global acceptance across the board, and executive support. I'm sure price tag comes into play.

I give it an eight out of 10. I tend not to give anything a 9 or a 10, because I always think there is probably room for improvement on it, not that I can't think of anything right now. It's not perfect, but it's definitely very good.

I would tell colleagues looking for a similar solution that Agile Central is very easy to use, and it's easy to build dashboards. It's very intuitive. I'd recommend it.

It helps us find our users stories and allows us to see what everyone on our team is working on, and if we have any blocks.

It's performed pretty well.

It allows our team, and all the external teams that are waiting on us for dependencies, to see where progress is on the stuff that we're about to develop and deploy.

It integrates well with the things that we have. We're able to tie our stories in with our code repository, so that way our check-ins are tied back to our user stories.

I can't really think of any additional features that it needs. It pretty much has everything that we use it for.

It's been really stable. There have been some downtimes with it, but they're fairly short.

I'm not sure how well it scales. It's worked so far with our team.

I know a lot of our teams are using JIRA. The switch is because it has more features.

When looking to select a new vendor, our criteria are

• price 
• feature set.

I give it a nine out of 10, just because of the slight downtimes, which make it hard to go in and update things.

Definitely look into it, because of all of the different tools for user stories and test case management. It's been one of the best I've experienced.

The most valuable features for me as a developer are Iteration Planning and Iteration Tracking.

• Iteration Planning is very helpful for the team during planning sessions. It shows the exact picture of where we are and what is coming.
• Iteration Tracking is a very useful dashboard that shows the status of the stories and details what they are about.

This is the only tool our team is using for tracking and monitoring agile projects (features, stories, tasks and use cases). It’s stable, easy to navigate and fast. It’s not overwhelming with details and fields, but provides necessary placeholders to keep all the information needed for the project and have a picture where we are and what is coming.

I would say use cases is an area with room for improvement. I found it a bit cumbersome and not so easy to grasp a global picture. Some teams prefer to track use cases through the HPE QC tool, keeping the rest in CA Agile Central.

We are using CA Agile Central since the beginning of 2016.

We had a lot of stability issues; however, all of them were solved during Summer/Fall 2016. Recently, it’s been stable and provides the necessary functionality.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I haven’t dealt with technical support.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The setup was done for us already.

I wasn’t the one to decide which solution to adopt. However, I like CA Agile Central as the choice of our management.

Go for it. It’s a nice tool to use.

It has improved our ability to focus on less work, but do that work better and at a higher quality, than we were able to before. 

The main value that we get out of Agile Central is the transparency it allows us to provide, both from the team level all the way through the executive level within the company and the work that we are doing. 

We have been talking about improvements in the quality section of Agile Central. The quality section does allow you to do test cases and test sets, and all these things, but it does not integrate very well with the portfolio and feature side, which causes some challenges. 

We have not had any issues. 

We have had no scaling issues with Agile Central. We have worked anywhere from a couple of teams up to about 15 to 20 teams on Agile Central.

Technical support is very good, considering we have very rarely had to use it. The product has been very stable for us. We have not had a lot of technical support issues even to reach out and ask about.

The upgrades are very simple and straightforward. They generally get pushed out, and you choose whether or not you want to accept that upgrade early, or whether you are going to wait for the general release. 

As far as the initial setup, it can be challenging. There are a lot of options. There is a lot of configuration. There are a lot of decisions that you have to make on how you want Agile Central to work for your company. Those decisions can impact your flexibility in the future. With the initial setup, there is some thought that really needs to go into how you want to do it.

I would give it probably in the seven to eight range. In order to improve beyond that, I think there would need to be some simplification. The team-level side can be challenging and complicated. However, its ability to scale to portfolio and executive-level solutions really drives it up to that seven to eight score. It is something that I don't think there is a lot of other projects out there that allow you to take that from a team to an executive-level view.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: First and foremost, we are buying a product, but we are buying also the people and support. Probably the best thing we have had with Agile Central is not only the tool, but the people that support that tool, and the relationships we have been able to build there in order for us to further our Agile journey.

We use it to track all of our work. We also manage our portfolio in it.

It works. It's a bit cumbersome to manage the Project Picker. As we sunset teams or projects close out - but we still have test cases tied to those teams or projects that are being used in other spaces - we have this monstrous list in the Project Picker that becomes really difficult to manage and find, and we can't clean that up ourselves. It would be nice if it was easier to do that and not lose your history.

There's familiarity. The teams have been using it for a while. Leadership is comfortable with it. That's huge. And from a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs.

Visibility of the data. If teams are tracking correctly and entering their information correctly, it's really easy to see where you're at, within your release, and whether you're on track or not. For our business model, we can't get everything out of the box, but we're a unique business so I understand that, but we know how to massage the reports to get what we need out of it. And so far it's done the best job for us.

I would like for workspace admins to be able to hide projects in the Project Picker and not lose any historical data; make them invisible to certain users, visible to certain users, depending on permission sets. That would be lovely. 

I'd like the ability to customize reports without having to incur Professional Services, or having to write my own code GitHub and then implement that as a custom report. That's untenable. It's not sustainable.

I think it's relatively stable. I've had very few instances where I've had an issue. I think CA is really good about communicating outages. Any troubles we've incurred generally haven't been on CA's side, it has been teams or functional managers not assessing impacts to anything they have in process that could be related to the outage that was communicated.

Scalability works well for us.

I've had pretty good responses with them. If I need help or we run into something that we believe may be a defect, I just open a ticket on the support site and I usually get resolution really quickly. 

There was one issue that we had where I was going to be out of town, and I'm the point of contact for our company, so I had to leave a person in the gap to get it to "done." And within a business day it was resolved. I was really happy with that because I was a little concerned.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are:

• It's got to work.
• It's got to be stable. 
• Cost, to be honest, is a huge factor. It's top three. It needs to be reasonable and affordable. I need to be able to make a business case and sell it to leadership, give them a reason why it's going to work better than what is currently in place. 
• We need reliable support.

I rate it a seven out of 10. I don't rate it higher because of the things I said I needed more autonomy in being able to change. And while I have really good results and feedback from CA Support, I wish that Accounts were as responsive to my needs as the Support side is. And I get that we're probably a small fish in their pond of Accounts, but we still need help getting our work done.

If I were to advise a colleague looking into similar solutions I would say it's a good tool. I'd want to talk to them more about what it is they're trying to accomplish to find out whether this is the best fit or if they want to use something a little different. Agile Central will cover a lot of needs for you, but maybe it's too much for what you need. So I would want to dig down deeper into their requirements to make sure it's the best fit.

• Portfolio management

It is designed 100% 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 senior execs to be able to choose which projects we did and 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 up and running quickly. They could have more controls around user types and what they require permissions to do.

There were no issues with deployment, stability or scalability because 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 guess this is the same for any system, cloud or self-hosted.

Technical support is 6/10. There weren't too many problems, so I didn't have to use them much. However, if support issues were specific to your data, they couldn't really help easily. They had to get permission to duplicate the 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 initial setup was simple as it only does agile.

An in-house team implemented it. The adoption wasn't the hard part. It was the overall agile transformation that required the effort, which was a culture/process thing.

I don't know about ROI but we couldn't work without it.

You have to adopt agile and be true to agile. This is an agile product, 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 features I view as most beneficial are:

• The ability to search at different levels and views
• Having tabs in an opened user story so that one can jump to a tab and check the details without leaving the user story
• Being able to sort on any element in the column headers
• Being able to add new elements to a page type
• Being able to move user stories to different sprints or backlogs easily
• Being able to add content or select a different drop down and have it saved automatically while still working on a user story
• Being able to get to help-rich tool pages and videos
• Having a community for this tool
• Having a dashboard that can be customized to a user
• Being able to write program code to generate a unique report
• Being able to click on maintenance wheel thumbnails to do such things as delete a particular attachment
• Having tool level tabs to select a different view page in the drop-down
• Being able to “split” a user story for tasks that have not been completed

That is just a starter list.

When there are disparate locations in cross-area teams, it is difficult to locate all of the documentation that one needs.

Having the CA Agile Central tool allows for there to be one place that contains all the information on teams and sprint by having features to add and update notes, attachments, and data element values to user stories and tasks.

This encourages team members to make updates as a way for others to learn the challenges and developments that are occurring during sprints and to communicate statuses on where we are now regarding tasks that are in-progress or completed.

I think that the product use of the user-story-split feature that creates child user stories can be abused by users for being so easy to do. It will require one to drill down to the grandchild, or great-grandchild, etc., to see the progression or what happened before now.

Also, it will look messy when seeing a list of nested user stories. Using this feature, a waterfall view is being promoted. Instead, having predecessors and successors as part of the split will allow us to track this “legacy” user story better, which should have been created as smaller user stories to begin with.

In a sense, completion of a user story in a sprint would have been reinforced by not seeing parent and children. Predecessor user stories would not contain unfinished tasks.

I have been using CA Agile Central for one year.

We haven’t had any stability issues, but at times there are IE browser stalls for those who use IE in meeting presentations. I, for one, use Firefox as my browser, so I do not experience issues.

I have not had scalability issues at all.

I have not had a chance to work with technical support yet.

I have not used a different tool, because we did not have one.

Setup was done on my behalf, so I cannot comment.

I think that there is a trial period for this tool, so I would say to try it. However, some training is needed first.

For me, it is the burn up and burn down chart, so I can measure progress easily. It shows me the progress of the team and it helps me show the progress to my business.

The charts that this tool has make it transparent. Also, the information is there for everybody to share and it supports Agile methodology. This tool makes it easier. These are the features that are valuable to us. Our team’s Agile maturity level is close to expertise.

I would like to see it more well connected with the PPM tool. We have Planview. It does connect to it but I would like it to connect more robustly. They just introduced a new milestone feature of the product. I would like it to be more user-friendly.

Stability of the product is good.

We have over a thousand employees using it and it is extremely scalable.

I personally haven't used technical support. We have a PPT tool support group which has used it. So, if we have any issues, we report to our PPT support group and they reach out to CA technical support.

When we moved to Agile, we were just using standard scrambled writings on the wall. We knew with the scale of our organization, we needed something to suit our needs and so we decided to invest in this product. It did meet our needs, especially in terms of scalability as we knew that there were going to be so many licenses we would need. We needed a more robust organization.

In addition, we needed someone who was flexible to work with us. At that time, it was Rally and they were very flexible to work with us. The most important criteria for choosing this vendor was their willingness to work with us, features, scalability and cost; also it needed to fit our organization culture.

I did not choose this tool personally, it was an enterprise decision.

I believe they looked at JIRA as well and they picked CA Agile Central.

Go for it but make sure you learn the tool and understand it. Hopefully, you have a product expert.

I would like the milestone features to be more seamless and user-friendly.