Rally Software Reviews

What I like the most about Agile Central is that it is the only system I need to have full control and visibility of our entire body of work plus the activities and processes required to deliver it. This visibility is particularly good from a high-level portfolio view to individual tasks, staff.

There are few customisation options. For instance, the workflow for story cards cannot be changed out of the box from the standard (Defined, In-Progress, Completed and Accepted). However, this will not be a big problem for most organisations that follow a standard scrum framework.

The issue is mostly relevant to team using Kanban boards with customised workflows. A very common flow for instance is: To Do - > Analysis -> Development -> Testing -> Completed. So teams wanting to bring that kind of workflow to Rally will not be able to our of the box. And Rally will rightly discourage that kind of workflow.

And I’ve seen teams doing Scrum that have added additional columns to their workflows such is “Waiting” or “Blocked” and other not having the “Accepted” column.

Rally of course offers other options to manage blocked stories/tasks so perhaps the “improvement” tag might not be entirely fair. They do offer the functionality so what I was referring to was the ability to customise that functionality to more personal preferences.

I have used Agile Central for close to one year.

We have not had any stability issues. The system is web-based and hosted by CA. There is very good communication around system maintenance and upgrades.

We haven’t had any issues with scalability. We have increased our user base seamlessly.

We haven’t really required much technical help as things have worked as expected. The CA Agile Central website provides updates on maintenance schedules or any other unplanned outage. When we have required help on how to use the tool, the CA Agile Central team has been quick to respond with solutions or suggestions.

Team Foundation Server (TFS) was quite suitable for us when we started to use agile as a delivery methodology, but as our maturity increased, the need arose for a more sophisticated tool to give us better visibility and control and CA Agile Central has certainly given us that.

Setup was very simple actually. There is some work required upfront to define standards, best practices and governance on how to use the tool but CA Agile Central itself was very straightforward to set up. Everything is web-based and very intuitive. We had a CA Agile Central coach here for a few days and that was enough for us to get started.

Licensing depends on a few things. The assessment starts by looking at your portfolio of work, number of projects, resource profiles, etc. Then you need to assess the level of maturity the organisation has around agile. Teams should not be forced to start using agile methodologies if they are not willing and ready, so you might want to start with a small pilot.

We evaluated JIRA and also looked at the TFS roadmap for future improvements and upcoming features.

The most important thing is to have very clear requirements as an organisation. That includes having all the internal processes, governance and ways of working well understood so that the selected tool can be assessed against those requirements with confidence.

Iteration status tracking: The ability to instantly see what my team status is and to quickly find out about roadblocks to existing tasks is very valuable.

It made it much easier to adopt agile methods of execution. The learning curve on using agile is now much more approachable.

General performance could be improved. The tool is not the fastest or most responsive. Creating stories, saving story changes, updating status; regular transactions are not instantaneous and make the tool feel sluggish. More complex tasks, such as automated reports and aggregate information queries can easily take a few minutes. Improvement could be through backend software optimization.

We have not had any stability issues.

For larger projects, the tool gets significantly slower.

I have never used technical support.

We previously used manual methods. Switching to this IT-based solution was a welcome change.

It was a simple setup! Thanks.

I was not involved in the licensing for the company.

I was not involved in choosing this specific product. It was provided by our company’s IT department.

Take the time to go through the Agile Central tool training videos. They are very useful and well worth your time.

I like the Story Board since it helps me keep track of my stories and any tasks assigned.

It keeps everyone involved accountable to make sure the project moves along in a good pace. Since it is also viewable to all involved, it allows everyone to see where the project is at any moment.

I think the areas for improvement are mostly related to the user. There are things we often forget to update or change.

I have been using Agile Central going on 3.5 years.

We have not had problems with stability.

We have not had problems with scalability.

I haven’t requested any technical support.

I haven’t used anything but Agile Central.

It’s been so long, that I honestly don’t recall the initial setup. It must not have been difficult, since it’s not something that sticks out in my mind.

I was not involved in any of the pricing or licensing. I’m just a user.

I liked the overall user interface of Agile Central. It’s so much more user friendly. The Kanban view really helps daily tracking of user stories. The reporting tools available are easy to configure and use.

Previously, to upload test cases we usually used the Agile Central add-in for MS Excel. But as per recent changes, they have made Single Sign On to access Agile Central due to which, the add-ins seems not to be working.

I have used Agile Central for two years.

I remember that there were two incidents Agile Central was down or I was unable to login.

We have not faced any issues.

I haven't had a chance to use technical support.

I have not used a previous solution.

I’m not aware about price and licensing because of my role.

CA should keep doing what they're doing to make it better.

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.

I really value the customizable dashboards, taskboards and easy filters.

New features with Team Capacity Plan have helped our organization.

• Performance is very bad especially late evening and on Fridays.
• Enterprise backups could be improved.

I have used it for three years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

There were some scalability issues after integration with internal tools like TFS.

Technical support has lots of room for improvement. We do not get the support that we need for problem resolutions.

Initial setup was straightforward.

This is expensive compared to other tools like JIRA.

We evaluated JIRA and VersionOne.

Compare other products before making a decision on features and pricing along with customer support reviews.

The most valuable feature is the ability to track projects; not so much the reporting, but what you enter and the use of the product, and that's for tracking purposes. That's why it's important to me.

It allows us to better scrum and Kanban. It allows us the opportunity to not need a board and physically co-locate it. We can do it online.

Building custom reports is difficult and cumbersome. Trying to find the correct field name to test is only part of the problem. The field name and qualification changes depending on what level I am trying to report.

When reporting at the task level, the story needs the story qualification whereas when reporting at the story level, the qualification is not needed. When reporting at the task level, I cannot qualify based on Feature Group. This limits my ability to programmatically limit my results. The syntax of the reporting is also cumbersome. The help is only limited help and is not written for non-programmers.

Solution: Provide a query help that actually lists all of the fields at each level. Even when selecting “To see a list of all fields available for each type of work item, check your Web Services API documentation

It is easy to put information into Rally but it is all overhead without an easier way to get the data back out. I have team members who continue to double entry the Rally data into a spreadsheet just so they can more easily produce the reports that are helpful to them.

I have used it for about three years.

Over the last couple of years, it's had moments of slowness, but it seems like they've resolved that, and every so often it goes down, but that just seems like it's a few minutes, so that's more like a support type of thing. So, it's not a big stability problem.

It is very hierarchical in structure, rather than relational. Maybe if it was built on a more relational database concept, it might be a little bit easier to manage.

I don't see any scalability problems.

I've talked with tech support but mostly about reporting and trying to get the information back out of it that we need. I use internal support teams, so it's Comcast employees that are supporting me.

It was a corporate direction to switch. The tool that we were using before was very poor at accomplishing what it needed to accomplish, so anything would have been better.

I wasn't involved in the setup; I was a consumer.

I was never part of the pricing and licensing. Training definitely; everybody that's using it should go through some training, but a lot of the training was very generic in terms of using CA Agile Central and it wasn't specific to the team's application.

The tool actually includes a lot of things that most teams don't do. That information was included in the training, but was never applied, and yet some of the things that we needed to do weren't covered in detail in the training like they should have been, so it was a lot of groundwork to come up to speed on that.

My advice would be to make sure that you're implementing it in conjunction with agile methodology. If you implement this tool with waterfall, you will see that it's very oriented towards agile, and it's set up and structured to support agile and not set up and structured to support waterfall methodology.

I think that it isn't that flexible for helping with teams to migrate to agile; it's not very flexible with customizing for my team. There are a lot of pieces of data that my team needs, and we're having to use non-ideal fields for those. I know that that's the way that it's installed in our application, but a lot of the customization that's available in CA Agile Central isn't available to me to do. So, I would say that it would need to trickle down to the group admins, the ability to be a little bit customized, to be able to customize it to the team.

• Sprint tracking + Kanban board (Iteration Status app): Informs me how well we are doing in our sprint, and what is the next part to work on.
• Burn-down graph.
• List of stories sorted in priority order.
• Kanban Board to visualize work in progress.
• Sprint planning (Iteration Planning app): Helps me draft plans based on my team’s velocity, and visualize my team’s roadmap for feedback on my team’s priorities for the upcoming sprints (user story level).
• Team sprint capacity management (Team Status app): Useful app to elicit the conversation of how much capacity does each team member have for the upcoming sprint, and calculate whether we are stretching our team members too thin. In addition, we can easily trade tasks from one user to another, as needed.
• Release planning (Release Planning app): Helps me draft plans based on my team’s velocity and visualize my team’s roadmap for feedback on my team’s priorities for the upcoming months or quarters (feature level).
• Portfolio hierarchy (Portfolio Items app): Allows me to define the epic, feature, story breakdown of my team’s work. Also, it allows me to visualize the dependencies between teams.

It provides teams the ability to define, prioritize, and monitor the progress of both their operational and project work. The big win is the fact that we are using the same tool outside of IT. It’s a huge win when your internal customers are also using the same platform for defining, tracking, monitoring progress on their objectives. The non-IT departments that have teams using the tool are marketing, operations, training, and human resources.

Provides portfolio, department, and program managers the ability to define, prioritize, and monitor progress on larger initiatives being delivered by multiple teams.

Make it easier to export information outside the tool for additional data visualizations and metrics. The tool does have a REST API, but that requires us to use a developer. The tool does have CSV exports for everything, but that’s a manual step.

Make it easier to share CA Agile Central information to non-CA Agile Central users. Not everyone in our organization is a licensed CA Agile Central user. Those users who are not licensed and provide work to the users on our platform, have a hard time tracking their work requests.

Provide the ability for team members to customize their custom fields/custom workflows without needing a tool administrator to set it up for them.

Mobile friendliness: It would be nice if we had the ability to view and change the state on assigned tasks from a phone.

CA Agile Central integration is great! Currently, everyone who has an CA Agile Central license has a Flowdock license. Unfortunately, it costs a lot of money to add non-CA Agile Central users to Flowdock. And a messaging platform is useless if you can’t message all your stakeholders within the organization.

There is no ability to easily create a work intake portal where a stakeholder can enter new work, have it routed to the appropriate team, and be able to track the work status. You can buy an integration engine that syncs your ticketing system with CA Agile Central, but again, that’s more money.

I’ve used CA Agile Central for four years.

Once in a while, it has performance problems. Nothing terrible and nothing we have not seen with other SaaS vendors.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support is fine. They assign a customer success coach that we use for tools training and tips. We are pretty self-sufficient now that we do not have to lean on them very often.

We did have other tools before CA Agile Central and we currently still use other vendors for managing other types of work. The best tool for the job really depends on the type of work you do, the work management methodology the team uses to get work done, and who the team’s stakeholders are.

Setup was easy for team-level usage. It gets more complex as you try to scale up your agile practice. Scaling up only happens when teams agree to portfolio standards such as your work hierarchy and planning cadence.

It is an expensive tool. Bring in a good negotiator. The money is worth it when you are trying to do agile at scale.

We evaluated:

• VersionOne
• JIRA
• Trello
• Smartsheet
• Taiga.io
• Tuleap

The nirvana for all organizations is to implement end-to-end enterprise business agility. It’s a lot easier to do that when you have a tool that allows you to capture all the data you need and systemically roll that up for your enterprise portfolio reporting. CA Agile Central is a tool that enables you to do that. BUT, in order for data to be entered consistently, you really do need an enterprise coach. If you are not implementing agile at scale, I would recommend a cheaper tool that is also mobile-friendly. CA Agile Central is a tool that solves the agile-at-scale challenge, and is still user friendly enough to handle non-IT work loads.