Rally Software Reviews

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.

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 valuable features are:

• User story tracking and team status management, including capacity and burn down
• Allows for the creation and scheduling of detailed user stories including attachments, assigned tasks, discussions, child stories, and revision history
• Allows for the association of defects and test cases. (I have not used these features as we use HPE Quality Center for that purpose.)

Some of the improvements to my organization are as follows:

• Helps my team organize our planning and testing activities.
• Removes the need to have separate products for tracking the various ancillary records for our user stories.
• Helped us to organize team effort and keep the team on track by providing a burndown chart and team status breakdown at the task level.
• The ability to create child stories and track discussions throughout the lifetime of a user story and its children removes the need to maintain additional external documentation.

The following are areas for improvement:

• The UI can be slow to respond at times and difficult to navigate initially.
• The home dashboard can be very slow to load.
• Individual user stories can be slow to respond when navigating from the Iteration Status page.
• The tool can be slow to respond when estimates or statuses are updated.
• The difficulty in navigation relates to the learning curve of the application.
• There is a help page with a great deal of information about the various features and processes, which helps to demystify the application a bit. However, even that page can be cumbersome to navigate.

This application is rarely unstable. Scheduled maintenance is conducted with ample warning.

There have not been any scalability issues.

Good estimates give the burndown chart value. If your burndown looks bad, first look at your estimates for team capacity and user story/task effort estimates, and then look at the members of your team.

• Portfolio management

It is designed 100% for agile, so if you run an agile/scrum organization, it will work for you. With the portfolio management feature we were able to understand our capacity for the first time and visually understand all the various initiatives in-flight. We could provide very clear dashboards to senior execs to be able to choose which projects we did and if they were on schedule.

Its greatest "feature" is also its limitation. Nothing is locked down or mandatory, with no complicated permissions, so it's very easy to get up and running quickly. They could have more controls around user types and what they require permissions to do.

There were no issues with deployment, stability or scalability because it's cloud based. It only went down a few times, which is very inconvenient when you run your entire team on it. But I guess this is the same for any system, cloud or self-hosted.

Technical support is 6/10. There weren't too many problems, so I didn't have to use them much. However, if support issues were specific to your data, they couldn't really help easily. They had to get permission to duplicate the database and then work on that, which in a large organization required quite a few approvals.

I have used JIRA in the past. This is not originally agile-based and requires more setting up to get it right for you.

The initial setup was simple as it only does agile.

An in-house team implemented it. The adoption wasn't the hard part. It was the overall agile transformation that required the effort, which was a culture/process thing.

I don't know about ROI but we couldn't work without it.

You have to adopt agile and be true to agile. This is an agile product, too. If you don't want to plan in sprint and build teams around the agile process, then it's probably not the tool for you.

Visibility of the backlog hierarchy and issue status are valuable features.

I like the way you can view the hierarchy of issues, i.e., within the tool in a tree view, showing the traceability between epics, features, stories and tasks. This is something that is not available in the other tools that we currently use.

It is not compliant with the FDA regulations on electronic signatures (21 CFR part 11), which is required for regulated industries.

We produce medical devices, which means we have to comply with the FDA regulations if we wish to sell in the U.S. One of these relates to being able to have electronic signatures within the tool, when we close or reject future defects.

CA Agile Central does not have this functionality and when we asked them, they said they had no plans to implement this. As a result, we cannot use this tool for defect management. In fact, the tool has such few security features that you cannot stop anyone with an account from editing, deleting, or otherwise interfering with the records storied within it. As a result, we cannot use the information stored within it as part of our quality system.

I have used this solution for six months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have not used it personally.

We are using Atlassian JIRA. We have not switched tools but currently we use both solutions in parallel, due to the FDA regulation issues.

It is very expensive; currently it is the single biggest tool cost that we have.

Make sure it meets your needs before rolling it out. Don’t buy it just because it is recommended as the “safe” tool.

The ability to integrate to the HPE Quality Center is a powerful feature although we haven't used it yet and won't be doing it.

The test case organiser is another useful utility which could help users still using waterfall methods of working if they intend to use it for a while. This functionality is not inbuilt but was showcased by one of their support guys from CA who are happy to share it with customers.

Another notable feature is reporting at Portfolio level, and an organised business area which is set up from scratch with this tool can benefit from this feature. A senior manager will have more visibility as to what is happening in various projects and teams.

It needs to become more mature for large organisations with better integration required to DevOps. 

It has the capacity to let you integrate if you have in-house development capability but not out of the box. 

Solutions are available to integrate it with development tools or Atlassian tools but they are expensive.

I believe Excel imports and the ability to modify workflows are two important improvements which will enhance its competitiveness in the market. 

I believe the feature to use Excel to import issues, tasks, test cases or any other relevant data will be a useful functionality which is missing and many teams are willing to have such a feature. Also, the ability to modify workflows to support custom requirements will increase acceptability of the tool. Currently it has a slightly rigid response to users wanting to tailor the project for their need.

I have used this product for less than a year.

It's a SaaS solution so no involvement in building it up. 

For a large organisation, whether a bank or retail outlet, it has some challenges to integrate with the company's authentication methods. 

Data integrity holds a challenge as data needs to be made secure which takes effort to achieve.

For a large organisation, whether a bank or retail outlet, it has some challenges to integrate with the company's authentication methods. 

Data integrity holds a challenge as data needs to be made secure which takes effort to achieve.

Customer service is 7/10.

I don't know the price but it's certainly cheaper than others.

Atlassian JIRA and HPE Quality Center: They are market-leading tools and still quite competitive with more features to support both waterfall and agile models.

I would suggest to do a comparison chart for your organisation's needs and look at least 5 years ahead for the functionality and budget you are looking for in a tool. Not only the tool cost is relevant but also the resources to maintain it. For a very small organisation, I could certainly recommend a SaaS solution but for an organisation with more than 500 concurrent users, a standalone solution would be more apt, in my opinion.

The ability to plan and assign work. Our project/product teams use this to effectively plan sprints and assign and track work assignments. It has greatly enhanced our ability to understand the work being done, especially on projects you may not be directly related to. By having all our teams use the same tool, we have better communication and coordination.

It greatly helped our adoption of agile project management techniques. More projects are completed on time.

Portfolio management and reporting may be the weakest areas.

I’ve been using Agile Central for 12 months.

We lose connectivity at times when the site has issues. This is a hosted solution.

Technical support is good.

We used a Bamboo Solutions product that interfaced with SharePoint.

Initial setup was relatively simple. In order to match our department organization, there were significant discussions. But the Rally representative helped set it up with us at no cost. It was Rally when we purchased. We had to develop a custom report from the information.

We did evaluate alternative solutions.