Rally Software Reviews

The most valuable feature is that it follows the agile methodology more than ALM or JIRA. However, I know companies using more than one tool, separating test management and requirements, which I agree to.

Currently, I would prefer to use QAComplete by SmartBear to track test cases, since CA Agile Central doesn’t work well with reporting on that level or for that matter on any level.

One of the jobs that I adopted was to design procedures using CA Agile Central. In the beginning, without a procedure (not sure if the online help has much “method” suggestions, which it should), it does allow the agile process to be followed easily from features > user stories > team capacity > sprint sizing > test management and defect management. If properly used, it can be an amazing tool relaying to scrum masters, project managers and for all management levels to show exactly how a sprint is going. I will say the CA Agile Central Excel plugin is great for real-time extraction of data, i.e., if you know how to use it correctly, and out-of-the-box you will not know the hidden tricks that I have learned. But, CA Agile Central Support is actually very good.

On the test case level, I feel there are a couple fields missing, i.e., I cannot easily create a day-over-day report. I cannot find out what is planned for the QA team, as I cannot track what is “ready”, or as to the day when it’s planned to execute.

I have been using this solution for one and a half years now.

No outages have yet been experienced.

There are always latency issues when accessing anything in CA Agile Central Portfolio Manager; it takes a good 10 seconds to load. This isn’t only due to concurrent users, it can be the case at 1 AM when no one is on. It hasn’t been that much of a nuisance.

I would rate the technical support a 10/10. The funny thing is that I didn’t care much for the CA Online Support. I didn’t know there was a ticket support system. However, once I did, my goodness they were great in returning answers.

We did previously use HPE ALM. HPE ALM didn’t produce much of good reporting, yet neither does CA Agile Central. Plus, the agile process was all wrapped up in CA Agile Central, so we decided in our department not to maintain two tools. Other departments and UHG do use both tools, and some HPE ALM still.

The setup was very simple; it was probably easier than HPE ALM.

One major problem when obtaining CA Agile Central is ensuring the framework is exactly what you want. Many don’t look at this aspect and later realize that they have lost traceability and that they should have created a dropdown menu instead of free text (i.e., there is a defect found in the free text field – this should be a code drop version, adaptable by iteration). Yet, I’m still not sure at the moment what is and what isn’t adjustable since I’m not an admin. However, from what I did hear is, when something changes, it may change the enterprise and not just the project; not sure about that yet though.

Count the cost! Find out what you have in place and how much longer you are charged for and then compare this to your budget. I find it a big waste in having too many tools, but it really matters as to what you want to see and how much you want to maintain. For example: With the SOP that I created for using CA Agile Central, I can create almost perfect reports from Excel. However, the problem here lies in Excel! You need manual intervention to formulate and macro out the data, thus involving more costs.

Only afterwards did I evaluate other options, since I was not a decision-maker; they already owned HPE ALM and CA Agile. SmartBear QAComplete is a great tool and probably my number 1 choice, i.e., if I had the choice. It also works with SoapUI, XML, Selenium and manual scripts.

I would consider it highly. Be sure what you want to accomplish; it’s not reporting-friendly. It is good with team burndown and sizing.

Although, it’s agile-based, it’s not like HPE ALM that informs you via emails when something changes, i.e., even if you enable notifications, it’s fluky, as you get more emails than needed. CA Agile Central has a dashboard per user feature, as to when logged in that must be viewed.

The key thing is process! You must know how it works and how you want to use it, before you implement it. To be honest, there is only one way to use it that I have identified above.

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.

The product is very intuitive to use, which drastically reduces training and onboarding time with new employees. It is highly customizable, which is both good and bad.

CA Agile Central helps us plan, organize, schedule and prioritize hundreds of feature requests into our release calendar. There is simply no way we would be able to release as many new products, enhancements or defect fixes without it!

Customization can be a bit complicated but it is a highly customizable tool, which has its own significant benefits. It just takes a bit of practice working through the tool and its many options.

You need to use caution when adding custom fields as you can only disable them once created; you cannot delete a custom field.

Overall, standard/canned reporting options are probably the weakest part of the platform but exporting a data dump for reporting outside of the tool is very easy.

Rally/CA Agile Central has been in use at our organization for eight years.

We are a hybrid SDLC/agile shop and use the tool heavily to support our release planning and execution plans. We did adapt our SDLC process to use the terminology in the tool (Features, User Stories, Tasks and the Portfolio Hierarchy). We have people build features under a portfolio hierarchy which creates our master backlog. We assign built features across various releases to build our deployment schedule.

We use CA Agile Central with the following enabled modules:

• Integration Hub
• CA Agile Central Portfolio Manager
• CA Agile Central HP Quality Center Integration
• CA Agile Central IBM ClearQuest Integration
• CA Agile Central Idea Manager
• CA Agile Central Quality Manager
• CA Agile Central Support Manager
• CA Agile Central Time Tracker
• SSO
• IP Restriction
• Extension Whitelist

As with any cloud-hosted, SaaS model, we occasionally run into unscheduled downtime but they are usually able to switch data centers quickly where there are issues. They also maintain a system status page to monitor maintenance and repair time/updates.

The tool scales effortlessly. The only drawback is if we wanted to create a new workspace because migrating existing data between workspaces is difficult, especially if heavily customized.

The technical support is outstanding! We have a rep who contacts us quarterly to review what’s new and what’s in their development pipeline. Online and the web knowledge base answers most questions. Support is quick and easy to access and they turn-around tickets quickly, most times on the first call. They also helped us with building custom reports, pages and add-on apps.

I don’t know of any previous solutions, as this tool was here well before me.

I built out the most recent workspace and it was pretty easy after a week or so of trial and error, but that was mostly getting our portfolio hierarchy structure right.

Pricing is competitive for what you get even at the most basic level. It reflects a typical SaaS model of pricing/licensing.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

If you are an agile or even hybrid agile shop, this is an excellent tool. If you are a more traditional PM or waterfall model, it may not be your best option. It’s really built to support agile methodologies.

There are multiple valuable features of this product and the most important for me is the section related to bugs. It helped me during this time to keep track of all the bugs that the app has, the status of each one and at the same time, we were able to keep notes for each element. In addition, the ability to add the concerned developer as a watcher, so in this way if the bug is not fixed, then they would be notified.

This product had helped my organization so much because it helped us keep everything tracked.

We are now able to predict each team member's capacity in a single click.

We use the report to see if we are going to reach our deadlines and we are able to easily make decisions thanks to the available reports.

I think the only area that needs improvement will be the front end. It is very good as is but I think it could be better as the colors are a little faded.

I have been using this solution for almost a year and a half.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I have never contacted the support.

I have used multiple tools before CA Agile Central. I switched because in CA, everything was in the same platform and it is a pretty intuitive tool. I didn’t need any tutorial, as I did for the other tools.

The setup was pretty intuitive.

I don’t have a lot of information about the pricing because I had the IT team handle that for me.

Give it some time. It is very difficult to change this kind of tool, especially when you are in the middle of a project. However, I would advise people implementing it to take their time to check all the different functionalities and think about how to use it effectively.

It has everything that I need in my daily job routine.

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.

• It is easy to use.
• The flexible manner data is entered/viewed.
• Good technical and company support.
• Good range of out-of-the-box reports and easy-to-construct customized reports.

Parts of our business use Agile Central to deliver in an agile and features-based method. It is a much more user-friendly product compared to other products in market.

Pricing could be improved. Compared to JIRA, it is not cost effective for a large user base (1000 user plus). User licenses should be a group level within the company, rather than company level.

Jira is more cost effective once set up – no cost per user seat.

RALLY costs around $60/month/user seat

If you then multiply this cost by the number of users (let's say 2000 – 5000 users), it's a very large amount of money, not effective from a price point of view.

If we could get an Enterprise license at a reasonable price then, management's view of the product may change.

I have been using Agile Central for two years.

It has good availability.

We did not have scalability issues.

Technical support is good. A local resource is always available, is knowledgeable and visits us on site when needed.

Excel sheets were previously used, prior to moving to an agile-based delivery.

Setup was easy in conjunction with technical/local support to discuss the method of working in our company.

There is good pricing for a small number of user licenses (i.e., 50 to 200) for outcome (effective usage including reporting).

We evaluated JIRA and others.

As a requirements engineer, most valuable is user story writing/editing/reviewing with peers.

It is supposed to shorten the project’s lifecycle. I do not have proof of this.

The text editor is for sure an area with room for improvement. Under IE 11, the Backspace key is not functioning as expected; it deletes and also inserts empty rows. If you continue, you end up with a lot of empty rows that you do not want. The DEL key, as well. Formatting is difficult.

A CR (carriage return) always creates a new paragraph. But sometimes you just want to stress something in relation to previous statement, but you do not want it in a new paragraph.

Pasting text from Word can create a lot of formatting issues, mostly in cases when the font is not recognized. Also, features such as graphics and tables are supported but only if coming from Word. So, if you want to eliminate a column or a row, you need to go back into Word, make the update, and then past back in the editor. In fact, if you want to come back to a text and edit it, it is very difficult to maintain the initial format.

These issues slowed down my work.

My comments are meant to help improve the product, not criticize it.

I have used Agile Central for five years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

This is our first solution for agile projects.

Setup was somehow difficult until all folders had been created and the rules on how to use them were set up. This has nothing to do with the product itself.

I had no involvement in this, so no advice.

It was a company decision. I just adopted the company decision.

Be very clear in agile and then “map” your knowledge into the product setup.

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.

We find the most value in the Release Tracking view. We use this view during draft plan review for our scrum teams. This view allows us to see which features each team is working on during a PI. We can easily see where stories for a feature are scheduled within or across sprints, and we can compare that to priority and any logical sequencing requirements. We can also see any interdependencies between teams. This view is also very useful during a PI to track progress using the burnup chart with its forecast based on empirical trend lines. We view these forecasts per team and also in aggregate for an entire release train.

The other features that we find valuable include the task board, which is useful sorted by team member for daily scrum; the iteration status for sprint planning; the team and iteration planning pages, which are useful for PI planning and draft plan review; and various Kanban views at the portfolio, program, and team levels.

The “follow” and “discussion” features are also very valuable for qualitative tracking of work items.

This product is a great fit for organizations using the Scaled Agile Framework. It follows and facilitates best practices for agile and scrum. In many instances, the built-in constraints of this tool have opened discussions about agile best practices, and the comprehensive documentation in the online help knowledge base has provided solid guidance for agile transformation where needed.

One example of this would be the question of what to do with unfinished work at the end of a sprint. Because the right action is counter-intuitive, this is an area of much controversy and contention across the industry; however, there is an established best practice, which the help section explains and which the tool facilitates. See Manage Unfinished Work: https://help.rallydev.com/mana...

The discussion feature should be front and center when opening any work item type. The description and acceptance criteria can become irrelevant as soon as work begins. Those areas are better suited to being buried back in a tab rather than the discussion area. The adaptive changes should be the primary focus once work is underway. Updates, questions, decisions, and suggestions should all be the first thing seen when opening a work item. This is implemented well in tools like Asana.

It should be possible to assign an epic or feature as the parent of a defect. Many organizations struggle to use defects because they do not roll up in the hierarchy to specific features and epics.

Kanban boards should allow local exit criteria. Currently, the policies are set and viewed globally.

I have used Agile Central for two years.

Stability has been an issue at times. We have seen an unacceptable amount of system downtime. This has improved over the last year.

The product team has been somewhat unresponsive to popular community requests for feature enhancements. Technical support has been responsive, and customer service has been acceptable.

We have previously used Team Foundation Server and we have evaluated JIRA. This product was chosen because it was a good fit for Scaled Agile Framework.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward compared to other products.

This was implemented through a vendor team. Because this tool is so flexible and can be used in so many ways, we do not recommend attempting the implementation without outside consultation. It is easy to have the configuration fall victim to local anti-patterns.

Efficiency and effectiveness in our processes have improved by 10 percent with this tool. At scale, and across multiple release trains, this gives us a 15X return on our investment.

Do not try to implement this product if you are not using agile at scale. There are simpler, more elegant and intuitive tools.

Plan, Quality, Track [Iteration status, burnout charts, etc.]: All these menu features are highly valuable.

Highly helpful for defect tracking and maintaining story cards.

At times, when we update the status for cards or defects, it shows a message that says something like, "Someone updated the status before, which one to consider: yours or theirs?"

I have been using CA Agile Central for over 10 months.

We have had no Issues with stability.

We have had no Issues with scalability.

Technical support is good.

No solution was used before.

We didn't evaluate other options.

Perfect product for implementing the agile platform.