We performed a comparison between OpenText ALM Octane, Rally Software, and TFS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian, Microsoft, Nutanix and others in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites."The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the reports. We are able to do customization."
"The filtering options are very good once you learn them. The document reports are also valuable. You can create reports in Word and PDF formats. That's very useful."
"We are seeing some real improvements in the way we do things. We are becoming more agile in the way we do it because of that and in a way that stories are managed. Stories are given lifecycles as opposed to just being entities within a tool."
"The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features."
"It is a very stable tool. The tool has been in the industry for so many years. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"A valuable feature is the pipeline, so that we can now connect to Jenkins and then have all the results from testing, from external, in the tool, so that we can see the whole approach from there. Also, We can work with labels so we have better filtering solutions than in ALM. And it's much smarter and leaner to use than ALM."
"The most important feature is the integration among all the different features in just one tool: Agile management system, requirements management system, test management, defects management, automatic test execution. Really, if you're looking at other tools, you will never find all that integrated into just one tool with all the traceability, with all the elements in just one place."
"The solution natively supports Agile-Waterfall hybrid software development at an enterprise scale. This is very important to us. Because even though the company wishes to go Agile, we still have projects which follow a Waterfall methodology. In order for us to accommodate both, we needed some sort of hybrid system. Because if we are using a fully Agile system, then the reporting might not be correctly extracted."
"It allows us to work in a more dynamic fashion and track more of the development lifecycle."
"Agile Central allows us to log one hundred percent of the work we do and it allows for no hidden work, so teams can't go under the radar with what they're working on."
"CA Agile Central helps the entire organization run like one powerful team."
"The most useful part is how it breaks down tasks into parents and children, manageable tasks. It has a whole project as an initiative, and then it breaks it down further and further. And then you get to actual user stories and tasks that you can sit and develop."
"The most valuable feature is actually creating a field within there for architectural review. So when teams are struggling or have questions on the architecture or strategy that they take, they can actually flag that particular story, release, or project. Those can then be reviewed by the architecture team and the teams actually get additional information on how to course-correct, build on the architecture that we're trying to build throughout the organization, and get over road blocks much quicker."
"It's a good platform to keep track of all the user stories across all projects. So rather than having one off Excel spreadsheets with all of the requirements, it is a good place to have all of that."
"It helps me evaluate teams' historical performance using velocity charts."
"The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. It helps you shape the way you flow."
"The most valuable feature is integration, particularly if you have a .NET application."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is its compatibility with Microsoft Windows systems. We have predominantly Microsoft solutions and TFS work well."
"I like the Kanban board. It is very useful in terms of seeing who is working on what and what the current status of work is."
"It is easy to push our changes from quality to pre-prod and prod."
"The most valuable features are related to source code management. Using TFS for source code management and being able to branch and have multiple developers work on the same projects is valuable. We can also branch and merge code back together."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is the central repository, and you can see what changes other developers did from which branch."
"The most valuable feature from my point of view is project management, which includes user stories as well as task management."
"The most valuable features are the dashboard and task-selection capability."
"The cluster architecture that we implemented was server to server communication: Octane application to Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch to another Elasticsearch service. Recently, we found this is a security gap. The Octane application is interacting with Elasticsearch server, but that was missing from the requirements and prerequisites in the setup. The Micro Focus team has not given advice on how to implement authentication-based communication between Octane to Elasticsearch, and we found it as a gap later, then our security team asked us to fix that gap. So, there was a lot of time spent on rework."
"Updating items, sorting, bulk updates—these things could have a bit more flexibility, but it's still possible to do them."
"The elements in filtering need to be improved, meaning the number of filters I can use in widgets or in the grid views in parallel. There's a limitation which bothers a lot of our users. Filtering in text, or having a complex filter is limited. In a given field, for example, I can use a filter only once. I cannot say, 'Include the values 1, 2, and 3, and exclude value 17.' This is not possible but we have requested it often."
"The reporting is lacking from a requirements matrix and a traceability perspective."
"It could use just some small improvements. I would like additional features, like planning features, user story mapping, or connection to collaboration tools."
"Documentation is not clear."
"When I manage projects that are being created in ALM, I have a standard template, but I don't have a template for them in Octane. I literally have to create the project from the ground up every time, which for an administrator, is a nightmare solution"
"I think the area of release management in the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The navigation within the tool sometimes is a little tricky for me. I'm sure with more use, more practice, I'll become accustomed to it, but some of the things just aren't intuitive."
"One problem I see is that if there is a dependent user story - for example, if my team is working on one thing and there is a dependent user story from another team - we can have a dependency created but we don't know if there is a change of status from the other team. That is something which is very important for Agile Central to look into so that if the other team makes any changes we will be notified as well."
"It could improve by being self-organizing: user stories, different hierarchies, and different perspectives. Not just as a single hierarchical structure, but something that can be multidimensional."
"I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help."
"In Rally Software, the connection with GitLab and GitHub needs improvement."
"In terms of improvement, perhaps some more metrics. If they could add some additional, that would be cool."
"What I don't like about it is that it is really hard to find old work to reference information and use the reporting section of the application in terms of trying to analyze trends. If I am trying to find out which interfaces took this long and I want to compare and measure improvement from one quarter to another quarter, the reporting mechanism within Rally is very troublesome. They have an Excel plugin that you're supposed to use, but you literally have to pull the raw data out before you can do the analysis. You can't do it within Rally, and if you can, it is a secret, and I don't know how to do it. It should have better, easier, and user-friendly reporting without having to use the Excel add-in. It is very clunky. There is a lot of data in there, but it is not organized in such a way that makes it intuitive. You really have to kind of look for where do you put your documentation or dates. Some customization is available, but it is not plug-and-play like Jira. When I switched from TFS to Jira, I just went and started using Jira, whereas with Rally, you kind of have to really get in and figure out what you need to do before you set stuff up, or you're going to get yourself stuck. You can just start using Jira and be successful."
"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)."
"TFS on-premise does not support integration with SharePoint Online."
"They should have design patterns in TFS for the development team, and design patterns for the QA."
"The program and portfolio planning facility can be improved."
"I understand Microsoft is phasing out TFS in favor of Git, so I would steer anyone interested in TFS to look into Git."
"As an end-user, I expect the solution's performance to be faster while staying as stable as possible."
"Since the TFS was an on-prem solution, the private network accessibility was restricted."
"The solution is stable but could improve."
"The reporting functionality is something that they should work on."
