Rally Software Reviews

I was previously using it as a scrum monitor for the team. It helps with billing and the IT team used it, as well. I am very satisfied with this product. 

CA Agile is a product that really needs more than 100 teams working on it. It works best in big organizations. It definitely streamlines workflow for many users in tandem.

The program management is one of the most valuable features in the bank I work for. I was able to create epics for our budgeting concerns and it helped me link everything together. 

I think there is a missing link with the development activity. Some developers are pushing in new versions of the code, but you cannot make the link from the user story to a specific application version.

It is stable.

We are a big company. We have about 170 teams, and we find it scalable. It has been used for more than 1500 people at our company.

I have experience with JIRA. I find Agile has an easier UI. Furthermore, JIRA was more of an IT tool, and Agile has both IT and business capabilities.

It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company. 

When considering a new solution, I always consider:

• UI
• Price

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. 

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.

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.

We use Agile Central to record all our user stories, features, and then to track down the burndown, velocity, defects.

My launch. How soon or how fast can I go to production, is what this helps me design.

From a solution perspective ,we use the Burndown to see whether the velocity for the entire sprint is okay or not. Am I going, did I pass? Do I need to prioritize? How many impediments do I have? What does my backlog look like? Have I taken up enough in that given sprint? Will I be able to deliver all that? It helps me track that down.

Primarily, producing more meaningful dashboards is what we have given to them, saying "customizable." 

Customized reporting, so that rather than going to them, if I can produce my own UI, that would be meaningful.

The solution is stable. 

Scalability is good. Based on what we have done so far, it is scalable. No problems faced so far.

We have a solution group as well, Testing Services within our organization. If we are looking for any modification within the tool, we can go to them saying, "Okay, when the tool came in it had a particular layout of, say, 100 fields. But based on my requirements, I want to improvise that, I don't need them. Eighty fields are good, but the remaining 20 fields I want to change over to this, make it more meaningful, more for my own organization. Customization.

So when we go to the Testing Services group, they take their time to have it implemented on Agile Central and then we pull a report. For example, the Defect Dashboard. Now, the Defect Dashboard came with some basic things. My anticipation regarding the Defect Dashboard is, I need to see more details, like what was the root cause, sub-root cause. I track it down to that level. So that customization we can easily do. That makes it helpful.

As I said, we have a Testing Services group, so we just give our requirements to them. If they needed to contact CA for any sort of modifications the would have done that. We don't know.

We don't directly interact with the CA technical team. We talk to our technical team and they might internally talk to them.

What we used to do in, say, HPE Quality Center, is now getting done Agile Central.

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.

I am from the QA team and am using this especially for test automation. We have so many test scripts and this would take some time. Earlier, we used to have a different tracking system, but the difference is that, if there are any new changes, then it was very hard for us to get them into the system. However, with the CA Agile tool, we were able to have two-week scrums and two-week sprints. After each sprint, we were able to pull any new tricks that came up and we could easily prioritize, prior to the two-week period, instead of having to wait for a long time. We were able to easily create and track the user stories. We were able to understand the graph as to how the trend is going, so all this was really helpful.

I find that tracking of all the user stories feature is extremely beneficial, because I can know in terms of the user stories, how much work is completed and how much is still pending in the backlog.

During the last four years, there were four projects in there, that I was handling. However, one of the issues that I am facing is how to remove the old projects, as one of the projects is over. Although, CA Agile is still showing me all of those four projects and I don't want that information now. So, there should be a way to remove that project.

I am not sure whether CA has their own bug tracking tools. However, if there are some tools like that, then it will be very much helpful, i.e., to have one integrated system, where the configuration management as well as this bug tracking tool are integrated. Bug tracking we have with NetApp's internal tools, but I don't think we are able to do the integration between CA Agile Central and what we have.

So, it would be good to have one single complete solution for complete development, such as for tracking agile work, the bug tracking tool, and Perforce management, the version control system. Thus, an integrated system would be very much useful, I think.

I am not sure if CA has the integration tool part, currently or not; however, I am unaware of that. Hence for me, the integration between other tools will be a very useful add-on feature. In the market, there are other tools that are available as a complete solution, providing tracking tools, bug tracking features and necessary support as a package. If CA Agile Central could also provide that kind of integration such as the bug tracking, a version control control system as a single solution, then it will be very much helpful.

Sometimes, we have noticed that our CA admin sends out an email, maybe that could be in regards to the maintenance work that is internal to the NetApp.

There weren't any scalability issues. For my work, it is perfectly suitable as of now, so I don't see any scalability related issues, for my work as of now.

If we experience any issues, then we have the NetApp internal support and will basically reach out to them. Thus, we don't directly contact CA Agile Center support, as we have enough people internally to get NetApp support. I would give them a 8/10 rating.

Initially, I was using Microsoft Project. Since it was not compatible with the agile environment and we then started using the agile methodology in our project, we started using this solution. Also, NetApp is providing support for this tool.

The setup was simple but I also remember that the one thing that is missing in CA Agile Central is the integration of data, as when you compare it with Atlassian JIRA or similar tools.

I did not evaluate other options because my company is providing the tool. I believe that before choosing it, my company may have done some kind of comparison with other tools, and then selected this one.

More than a team or a manager decision, this was a company-wide decision.

This is a very helpful solution, especially for those who are planning to switch over to the agile environment. Although I have not evaluated any other tools, I do have experience with other tools as well, but I have never compared both of them.

This is a great solution, especially in terms of the graphs and how the trend is going on. That is the one of the main features, which is helping me a lot. During a two-week sprint, if I look into it, I can exactly know where the trend is going or whether all the work is getting completed or not. Thus, it provides a good forecast as to how much of your work is getting done or is still pending. This is a good positive aspect to suggest to others.

I am a software tester, so the features I found that are valuable to me are importing of test cases, creating new test cases, editing test cases, executing test cases, and generating test reports.

Creating test cases is important to me because it allows to me write test cases in an MS Excel spreadsheet and quickly import them into CA Agile Central, saving me a lot of time having to manually rewrite the test cases.

Editing of test cases is also very important because I can quickly make changes to reflect changes in the user stories.

Generating reports is a great tool and is very important because I can create a test case and results, and share with other members who don’t have CA Agile Central access.

Using CA Agile Central, my organization was able to develop, test, and deploy software much quicker than we used to under the waterfall methodology.

The ability to customize reports needs improving by providing users with features for selecting what they want to see on the reports, how they want to lay out the reports, and create a schedule for a report to be generated automatically and sent by email.

When I create a custom report (see below screen), I want to be able to have my report run automatically once a day and email the scrum master.

We have used this solution for over five years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have never had to use technical support.

I am not aware of any other previous solutions.