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.

With Agile Central, we are able to map out our work and time chunks for our sprints. It forces us to plan our work and enables us to get software builds to our customers more efficiently and quickly.

It has helped us to become Agile. It has helped us to really get our products in front of the customer faster. It's changing the culture of how we build software.

When you look at the old waterfall methods, we weren't adapting to change fast enough. We weren't able to rapidly deploy what we were building. By the time we would build something, there would be changes that came down the line. We didn't react to it fast enough. This allows us to react faster, and to build better products. We're learning more and more every day, and using their coaching.

An Agile Central mobile app is long overdue. At the end of this conference, I want to look at my burn down charts. I want to look at how my teams are doing, and trying to look at the full website on a phone. It's a terrible user experience. We need a mobile application for Agile Central.

It’s a great tool other than that. It's been fantastic. Developers love it. My managers love it. It's been great.

Stability has been very good. Every now and then, there is something. Ironically, it was down a little bit on Monday at the start of this conference, but we typically never have an issue with Agile Central being down.

It's very scalable.

Initial setup was straightforward. It was easy.

We're a long-time CA customer. We actually bought Rally before CA purchased them, so we were already a Rally customer when CA bought them. We were also already a CA customer for other products, so it really worked out well for us. We weren't upset at all over that acquisition.

We compared Rally vs JIRA, but we felt that Rally was the better tool.

We use the dashboards to allocate and track team workload. It allows us to concentrate on deliverables rather than spending more time managing.

I have a team of about ten people. Like me, all our team leaders have difficulty managing their workload. They are spending at least half an hour a day to share their updates with team leadership and this costs us down the line. With Agile Central, everybody knows what their tasks are and the current status. This allows team members and leadership to focus on the current work deliverable rather than managing their work.

There are a couple of accelerators in the market that allow teams to manage meetings and notes, particularly stand-up call notes. Integrating these with Agile Central will be more powerful than manually explicitly adding it and generating reports. The capability to manage stand-up call minutes will inspire this to happen.

It's very stable. We have been using it for quite a long time. We have not seen any issues.

We try to make the most use of the API as much as we’re able, such as for automation updates. But we see a limited use of this regarding the dashboard. Aside from that, this a very good, powerful system.

I would rate technical support 7 out of 10. It has definitely exceeded our expectations especially regarding the integration of additional marketing tools. In these cases, we need the technical support team and they promptly answer us. They help us through the process in case there are any issues and help us determine whether an issue is an application or outside issue.

Originally we were using JIRA and a couple of other products but scalability and technical support were a big challenge. These were issues that kept us from upgrading as fast as we wanted to deliver. Agile Central is more stable and a proven product. CA technical support is much better and they help us progress with more integrations, helping with more with manual interventions.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was in a separate team that does not configure Agile Central. We are the end users.

JIRA was one of the options, but scalability had been a big challenge. They also had limited support. There were open source projects available, but they require a lot of investment to build from scratch and make use of the basic features that are available. In the long run it would take too much effort for us to take it forward. Whereas with an existing product like Agile Central, it’s easy to just start using it.

Agile Central allows us to more effectively plan our sprints. As a sprint progresses, we learn more about what works and what doesn’t. We can then apply that learning directly into the next sprint. When we have perfected our system, we will be able to create things like burn down charts so we can colorize what happened and analyze more clearly our process with little manual analysis necessary.

One of our major criteria for a vendor is whether the product will help us be more productive. We want to know their track record. The market is marching towards CDCA. If we have parts of features already coded, how that can be transformed to this new paradigm is a key area.

The most valuable features are the team-level interactions tracking of stories, features, and sprint. We do all of our budget tracking with it and CA PPM, and then our teams are working through Rally, so for me it's really easy to go in there and be able to see what is going on. I can see where things are assigned and where I should be worried about risks. For example, I can very easily see that a team has 10 stories on a feature and all of them are assigned future sprints, so I feel good about that.

It's also a very simple tool to use. I find it easy to go up and down the hierarchies -- going from initiative to element features all the way down to a story level. I think it navigates pretty well.

Then reporting is probably the other thing that I like about it. It's got a good reporting engine with it.

Lots of customizability. I know we created a few of our own reports and then a lot of the out-of-the-box reports are pretty useful as well.

I think it got everyone aligned. I would say that's probably the most helpful thing, whereas before that I think that teams were just managing backlogs of spreadsheets or whatever they had or whatever they were doing beforehand. I'm not quite sure. I came in right after we started implementing it so I didn't really see what was there beforehand. I do know that just from when I first started to today, everyone is more aligned and has a better understanding of all of the work that is happening, not just pieces of it. It has an API that connects it with CA PPM.

I know you connect CA PPM to other agile tools as well, not just routers. I know a lot of people are hoping for that and a portfolio RPM are kind of pieces of it, but I don't think it's quite there yet. I would like to see it be a little more integrated going forward.

The portfolio side of it needs improving, especially integration into CA PPM. It would be nice to hopefully see some of those have a little bit more connections.

I know we do a lot of high level planning and it seems like there are a lot of duplicate features back and forth, and it's kind of like, pick one or the other at this point. It would be nice if they talked a little bit more. For example, we'd really like a better integration with Rally.

I don't use it daily, but there seems to be no stability issues.

We ran into some problems with archiving some old stuff but we created a separate tree and that's where we put all the archive stuff. It's still there, it's still accessible but it's not messing with the reports of your enterprise.

I've just used our internal technical support.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Make sure you understand your processes and just know that it's not the tool. It's more about the process and how you work with it right. I know we did our last upgrade with Clarity and we didn't have our processes all the way defined. We started implementing things in the tool only to find they broke later, so we didn't have that process defined. Make sure you understand what you need before you start.

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.

Primary use case is agile development and Mode 2 development.

It has performed really well. We have taken some teams that were non-Agile and tried to do a combined approach. This eliminated some of the heavy documentation that we were used to with waterfall. We have been able to deliver our integration between CA and HPE ALM in a period of time that is about half of where we were before. 

It documents stories in a way where we do not have to be heavy on front-end requirements, front-end documentation, and front-end workflows. We are able to create those stories in a more of a just-in time approach. Since we are doing combine and not scrum, we want to get those stories on as we think of them and immediately work on them instead of waiting for a time box. So, it was the ability to adapt quickly. 

We are very new on agile and Mode 2 devolvement. It has really allowed us to experiment with approaches that we would have been a bit afraid to experience before. So, it has allowed us to try new things and to take risks. 

When you copy a story, I would like the attachment to copy with it. This is a big one for us. We do requirements in one sprint, then do development in the next, which still is a little bit of waterfall. So when we copy those requirement stories and they become development stories, the attachment does not come with it. So, it is a lot of manual effort to do that. It would save us a lot of time. 

We did submit an enhancement request. I think a lot of teams that do very large scale products have the same issue. They just do not realize it would help them. 

Also, there are a few things in the way things trickle up from category to theme to feature that I do not really like. I wish there would be some enhancements there.

It is very stable. It was purchased by CA from Rally, which I was familiar with beforehand. It has gotten better since CA has taken over, adding some new features, but it is a very stable platform. 

Since we are more of a Waterfall shop, as we bring new teams into the agile approach, I think it is quite scalable for us. However, it will probably be a more longer term poll. 

We have used them quite a bit. They have been very responsive. We use a competitor's tool for our waterfall approach. I won't say which competitor it is. However, we have been very happy with the speed and the availability of CA's technical resources.

Our issues have been lower scale problems, but we do not have a support staff to manage Agile Central. What we found was technical support was not only giving us the ability to get help, but also helped us evolve our support team into a team that can be managed well on its own. So, I have felt they have helped us in a lot of ways.

We did not have a solution in place. We were looking at Mode 2 and agile teams and we knew we needed something. Putting post-its on the board was not going to work anymore for a company of our size. While we still do some post-it exercises, it all ends up in Agile Central and we knew we needed something to manage this. We still have PM's who want to see portfolio management, so we knew it had to be digital. It could not be paper anymore.

We took our instance and revamped it from the beginning, which was very straightforward.

We were. We were looking at a few. Not sure if I can say which.

They were not providing a solution that was mature and developed. They were providing solutions that they wanted us to be like a test customer on.

They still feel like a small tech company. The support we have gotten and the way they have managed or accepted some of our enhancement requests. They still treat it like a small company, like Rally was before they purchased Agile Central. They still have that feel, knowing how big they are and seeing how they can act small. It is really nice.

Make sure your agile processes are really well-defined before you go out into the market and look for a tool. Tools do things differently, they call things a feature in one and a subfeature in another. Make sure your processes are defined, and once you have that, look for your tool after that. Do not look for your tool first.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We have price, which I would not say is our most important. We are looking for more of a fit and finish to our process, though price is really important to us. One of the things that we look at is: We want to create a really good process, then find a tool that fits that process. I think a lot of customers do it the other way. So, if our process is mature and we like it, the tool really needs to fit that.

Defect management is most valuable, since I am on the QA side. It's a very good tracker.

We have centralized all our agile process on it, so it's been our agile central during the project.

Based on my experience and the level of use, I think this tool fits everything we need.

I’ve been using Agile Central for 1.5 years.

Sometimes the app freezes when creating either user stories or defects in Safari. The performance, in terms of response time when creating elements, is not as expected.

I have not seen any scalability problems.

I have never requested for support before.

I had the chance to work with Atlassian JIRA in a prior project. When I arrived at my current project, it was the first time I worked with Agile Central and I am still using it.

The rampup was very straightforward.

Pricing and licensing it is not my responsibility. I am an end user only.

Choosing the tool was not my responsibility. However, I was using another tool and the rampup with this one was very straightforward.

I would recommend using it without any doubt. I think it fits perfectly with the agile processes.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that we are able to identify individual teams, and those teams can then break down their work, and watch it flow through their process. The benefit is that it provides transparency into the work that teams are doing.

It has brought a lot of light to the differences in the way our teams process the work through. They may be doing the same set of work, but Team A is doing it completely differently from team B. We've identified some of those differences; and we're now starting to align the process.

Our biggest struggle right now is that we're a SaaS customer, and that we don't have access to the database behind the scenes. So we're being asked by our Scrum masters and teams to provide data and reporting that we're not able to get to using the tool.

The stability has been very good. Although, this year and last year, we did notice problems on Monday, just as CA World started. I think it's very coincidental. It was just kind of odd.

I think the scalability is there for our organization. We are not in a position to take advantage of any of that yet.

There have been a couple of cases where we've asked questions, and the answer has been, "Here, go read this site." That's been a little frustrating; but, for the most part, all of the cases have been resolved, timely, and with good results.

We were previously using a different solution, and it was not suiting our needs. We had teams circumventing the process and using spreadsheets, or wall-based paper models, which is good; but we wanted a way to report and review all the work that was being done. So we went with CA Agile Central when we converted. It's been much better and there has been a lot more adaption of this tool than the previous one.

It was very straightforward. We didn't have any trouble rolling it out into our organization. The issues we had were internal in adaption.

We did a side-by-side demo and evaluation with two vendors. At that time, it was CA Agile Central and Version One. We chose CA Agile Central over VersionOne because of the reporting features and ease of use.

The only solutions I've experienced are CA Agile Central and VersionOne, and obviously, we chose CA Agile Central. There was also Serena Agile Planner, which was not ideal. Of those three options, I would way that CA Agile Central is excellent. Among those three, we were very happy with it. We are able to incorporate it into our environment. That is the most important thing for us. We're pretty rigid in the way we do things.

My advice is that they need to understand their environment and what they need. Then look for that in the tools that are provided. CA Agile Central was very flexible. You can configure it without customizing it. That was one of the things we really liked.