Rally Software Reviews

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.

The portfolio manager add-in is very valuable for our company, because it allows our business partners to create their road maps, and then link their road map to their user stories, that our engineering teams then work on. They can roll up the progress and see that at the portfolio hierarchy level. That's a very powerful aspect to the tool.

Also, all of their reporting, the dashboards, the custom apps, everything that you can create within the tool, makes it very powerful for us as an organization, as well.

The benefits of the solution are the collaboration and transparency. We encourage everyone across the organization to have an ID and to log in to the tool – daily or weekly, whatever their needs are – to see the data. They log in to the tool to see the real-time data. We have really pushed back on teams that would still want to do external reporting, where the data is old and stagnant. I would say that real-time transparency is one of the most valuable aspects for us.

One of our main challenges right now is that we have not deployed our value streams yet. We still have an organizational hierarchy within the tool. We have the need to be able to report from different levels of the hierarchy. We really need to be able to have a virtual project hierarchy within the tool. I'm looking forward to seeing it. I know that the company's working on a slightly different approach to solve that issue, and we're working with them on those user needs and we'll be working with them on the beta as well.

We're on the SaaS platform; it is very stable. One of my favorite things about being on SaaS is that, when there's an issue, I don't have to panic and try to work internally with a support team to try to bring the tool back up. I reach out to my technical account manager, she gives me updates, and it's usually back up, relatively quickly.

I love technical support. They have a personal touch. When you start to work with someone, they stay on your case. Even if it's a long-term case, you get to stick with that person that knows what you're working on. I've been working with someone for months on a rollout of a new piece of functionality and he's stuck with me the whole time; he'll check in with me. I would say that that's a very valuable aspect.

I was talking to someone at a recent CA conference. They don't use Agile Central yet and she asked me, "What should we do?" I told them that they should take advantage of CA’s transformation consulting group, to come in and provide that entire solution from start to finish, so they don't get stuck like we did and not having their value streams identified, not having the tool set up and the best way to make them effective.

It's a partial solution. It's a big problem for us right now.

• Requirements management
• Development team planning
• Tracking progress against plans
• Linking strategy to execution

We now have a more holistic view of how development teams are executing against the enterprise’s strategic roadmap. This improves our ability to prioritize work and to manage our risks and dependencies.

• Defect and test case management
• Executive-level reporting capabilities
• Project management functionality (financials, EVM, resource planning, etc.)
• Lacks the ability for non-coders to create custom app/widget charts

I have been using Agile Central for eight years.

We haven’t had any stability issues. We’ve experienced reliable uptime and few defects.

I’m currently working for a large Fortune 500 company and we haven’t any issues with scalability.

Technical support is excellent; however, some of our users find it a little confusing as to how to submit a case/help ticket.

We previously used a home-grown solution and wanted to switch to a more scalable solution.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward but there are certain best practices as to how to configure Agile Central. Typically, the CA Agile Central account manager will provide guidance as to how to best configure Agile Central and will be available to answer ongoing questions as they arise.

You can negotiate prices, technical services, and professional services if you need a large amount of seat licenses.

We looked at VersionOne, Pivotal Tracker, and Trello.

Work with your CA Agile Central account manager to determine the best way to implement and configure Agile Central based on your needs. Put together a basic usage policy, training document, and training presentation for users. Limit the number of administrators to a small handful of people. Integrate Agile Central with your other SDLC tools.