Rally Software Reviews

The connection between user stories, tasks, themes, initiatives and test cases, can be easily linked together. And, it allow users to start from any level of structure. For instance, I can start at the user story level and then only go upstream to create features and link those together. The tools provide the flexibility for the user to configure any way they want based on the delivery team working mode.

The project team can easily keep track of progress and the burndown chart that, if auto-populated by the tools itself, is a good indicator for the team to keep track of their velocity.

For the reporting side, it could have more options besides generating the chart. It would be good if it also allowed infographics.

I have used Agile Central for a year and a half.

We have not encountered stability issues.

I have not used support before.

I did not use a previous solution. So far, I have only used this tool.

The initial setup was quiet straightforward and user friendly. The UI interface is not too complex and allows inline editing.

I am not sure about this, as the licensing subscription is made under company.

We did not evaluate any alternatives as our management introduced this tool to us.

Have a score card for features that HPE ALM has. I do see some project teams uncertain when adopting Agile Central tools, as they don’t have the score card features and thus it is very hard for them to change.

For us, the most valuable feature was writing all the stories. We found features such as figuring out what stories are going to get into which sprint and organizing the backlog and dependencies, to be useful to us.

In terms of improving the organization functions, it gives us a lot of visibility as to what features are getting released and when. It also helps us to track across the organization in a much better fashion. In my opinion, visibility is the biggest benefit that we have received from implementing CA Agile Central.

We would probably like to see a more robust dependency management system.

We have not experienced any issues. So far, things have been working fine for us.

We have started a little slow. There are just a couple of teams that are using CA Agile Central, so we've not really scaled it up for multiple teams across the organization. However, within our group there are 3 or 4 teams that are using CA Agile Central right now.

We've not used them so far. Thankfully, we didn’t need to use them.

We were not using any other solution prior to this. Since our organization was moving to agile, we evaluated a few products and CA Agile Central seemed to be a good option that would fit all of our needs; so that's how we decided to go with it.

Not me personally but there was somebody in my team that was involved in the initial setup. We did not encounter a lot of issues or challenges.

Of course, we had to pull some experts from CA as well just to get their ideas on how we're supposed to set it up, how things work and what are the best practices to follow and so on.

Other than that, the first couple of iterations/sprints we had to learn and tweak a little bit as part of retrospectives. Otherwise, it has been okay.

Initially, we looked at a couple of vendors, namely Pivotal Tracker.

You need to clearly know what you want or how you want to implement and use the product. Once you have clarity then you can figure out how you want to setup the solution and go from there.

For us, the user interface was the most important criteria while choosing a vendor. We found it to be more intuitive than the others. We also felt that it can probably scale up to the needs of what we have within the organization, in terms of integrating with the rest of the ecosystem.

When we started to go to the agile model from the waterfall one, it was a big challenge for us. We had couple of folks move from Paypal to us, and they gave us a success story in a meeting. When they were looking at tools, they came across Rally, and it was introduced to us by the CA team. We had a couple of training sessions on Rally.

The immediate impact of that was when we started using Rally, we didn't even know that we could do agile. But because of Rally, we were able to track all the users' codices, track all the features, track the capacity so that we could plan, and find out as a team what the capacity is as a team to deliver in a two-week sprint.

As an application developer, I can speak only based on what the developer and app teams can do, and this has helped a lot. We were trying to go strictly agile, and I think Rally is helping us big time.

When we started using Rally, we used the user interface pretty often. It was very informative and everyone was comfortable with it. But there were challenges with product backlog and how to track the capacity planning. Everyday you needed to update the status. There were a couple of questions about, what is the capacity of every developer or a QA engineer for this sprint.

It has been stable for us.

As far as I know, there are 16-17 people using it, and since I'm relatively new with the company, I'm not sure what the plans are in terms of scaling its use.

I haven't used Rally technical support yet, but we have a 1-year subscription.

It was straightforward. We didn't have to do a lot. We just went to Rally 101 training, and there was some agile coach for us on site. She trained us on how to use the Rally tool to update our social studies tasks.

I would say Rally is the way to go.

• 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.

Visibility of the backlog hierarchy and issue status are valuable features.

I like the way you can view the hierarchy of issues, i.e., within the tool in a tree view, showing the traceability between epics, features, stories and tasks. This is something that is not available in the other tools that we currently use.

It is not compliant with the FDA regulations on electronic signatures (21 CFR part 11), which is required for regulated industries.

We produce medical devices, which means we have to comply with the FDA regulations if we wish to sell in the U.S. One of these relates to being able to have electronic signatures within the tool, when we close or reject future defects.

CA Agile Central does not have this functionality and when we asked them, they said they had no plans to implement this. As a result, we cannot use this tool for defect management. In fact, the tool has such few security features that you cannot stop anyone with an account from editing, deleting, or otherwise interfering with the records storied within it. As a result, we cannot use the information stored within it as part of our quality system.

I have used this solution for six months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have not used it personally.

We are using Atlassian JIRA. We have not switched tools but currently we use both solutions in parallel, due to the FDA regulation issues.

It is very expensive; currently it is the single biggest tool cost that we have.

Make sure it meets your needs before rolling it out. Don’t buy it just because it is recommended as the “safe” tool.

Defect tracking is the one feature that behaves most like I would expect and I have found a good way get it to work for me.

The features I use the most are the Test Planning, Test Set, Defect, and Defect Suite functionality. The Project Manager has stated multiple times that the reporting features of the User Stories & Sprint Planning work well for him. Though, like every other piece of the app, there are things that either do not make sense or have to be worked around to utilize the system as needed.

The Defect Tracking of CA Agile Central functions well enough with some severe limitations. I believe the intention is for you to put Defects in Defect Suites and Defect Suites in Iterations. You can put Defects in User Stories, but only one User Story at a time. So, if the defect crops back in, you either create a new defect or pull the defect from the previous sprint's User Story, thus changing history.

If you put them in Defect Suites you can add the same Defect to multiple Defect Suites in different Sprints. However, this also comes with some weirdness in removing a Defect from a Suite. You can't pull the Defect from the Suite directly, you have to go to the Defect and remove the Suite from there.

There is a Notes section for each of the Defects. Unlike JIRA there is no way to keep straight who made what comment when in the notes section. You have to manually add your name and date and time to the notes field making it so that if you have a back and forth about the root cause of the defect there is no ease way to facilitate this on the defect itself.

If one defect is causing failures in multiple Test Cases you cannot tag multiple Test Cases in the Defect. You either have to create multiple defects or note in the result that it failed because of the defect.

Test Sets & Test Plans, again, ALMOST function how you would expect. You can fairly easily lay out Test Cases in a Test Plan, unless you want to move a Test Case from one Test Folder to another, then you have to do so from within the Test Case rather than on the Test Plan page. You can move an entire nested Test Folder from one Test Folder to another. Deleting of a Test Folder orphans all the Test Cases making you have to hunt them down manually for deletion.

Test Sets are the method by which it appears you're supposed to keep execution results separate. Unfortunately, there is no way on the Test Plan to choose a Test Set to see the results. Test Plan only reports the latest results with no easy way to view historic execution results by Test Set. You also cannot view a Test Set's results independently. Further, adding Test Cases to a Test Set requires looking them up by Test Folder from the Test Plan. If the Test Folder has nested Folders, you can't search for the Parent Folder and add all Test Cases in the child folders. You can only create Test Sets in the Iteration, not in the Quality > Test Suites and then assign to an Iteration. Yes, It's called a Test Set and a Test Suite in the application.

I use this at a customer’s site. I cannot say for certain it is better than nothing, but I do not know what they were using prior.

Generally speaking, I can usually think of a product that functions better than CA Agile Central for the features that are utilized the most.

I have yet to see a section of CA Agile Central that could not benefit from improvement. As I tell people, it ALMOST behaves how you would expect. There are so many twitchy bits that require workaround for the business process to function. It’s ridiculous and feels almost like it gets in the way more than it helps.

For example, these problems come up when re-executing test cases. I have found no way to easily set up another testing cycle that reports the results independently and I’ve LOOKED. There is no way to assign a test case to multiple stories or a defect to multiple test cases. Associating a defect with a defect suite is easy. Removing it is hard; exceedingly so. Creating test cases in a test folder on the test plan page is easy. Moving those test cases around is exceedingly difficult. I could go on and on and on about how this product has let me down.

I have used CA Agile Central for one year.

Stability hasn’t been TOO bad. There are occasions that I have had to close my browser and start a session over. But what do you expect when using Adobe Flash instead of something more modern.

Opening new browser windows (middle-click) takes FOR-EV-ER, relatively speaking. While it is MUCH faster to just click a link in a given instance/tab, the general user behavior is to open new tabs and that takes WAY too long.

I have not had to utilize technical support.

I was not given the option to use a different solution, as this is the solution my client utilizes.

TestRail is my hands-down favorite test case DB to work with. It has every feature a tester needs to easily create and design test suites, add defects, and retest with multiple configurations. CA could learn a LOT from TestRail about how to manage test cases properly.

Choose a different product for your test case needs, and explore other options of managing of your agile processes, such as TFS.

To manage our work in a common way.

In terms of performance, we're just getting started on it. No issues so far.

It helps me plan the work. Also helps me plan an estimate of how soon or how far out we'll be able to deliver something. Those are big things.

• Visibility across the team
• Ability to see the team's capacity - how much free time, how many deliverables

It could use some templates and patterns that we can follow. There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but something for the Kanban side, I'd really appreciate that.

I don't have a comment on this because we've just started to use it. From what I've heard from other users, it seems like a good, stable product.

We were looking for a tool to support our work, to support our process, especially in the Kanban area. Without that, we started to use Excel, we started to use SharePoint but, really, they were not giving us value, the visibility. Then we started to look for something which is specifically made for supporting this kind of process.

When our company is looking for a new vendor we float an RFP; there is a set of criteria, we get together, list down all the requirements that we have. Any tool that we look for we look for, we typically look at four different vendors, four different tools, and try and compare them.

I would recommend CA Agile, certainly, but it all depends on what processes you have and whether it's a fit for them. 

• 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!