Rally Software Reviews

Agile Central has really helped us document our Agile requirements. It's really strong in terms of being flexible and how it's set up, getting a team organized quickly and easily. In our particular organization, we're responsible for maintaining the tool portion of it. We are not so much involved in driving the development of the individual applications, so from a maintenance perspective, we kind of admin the CA tool. Agile Central is what you'd consider an Agile management tool. It's a way of logging and storing your requirements, defects, test cases and things like that in a collaborative and Agile fashion. Everybody can go directly into one tool, see what's going on, and track their respective status.

The biggest benefit that we've found has to do with the ease of use. We can get into the data and actually report out of it. Historically, we'd gather requirements in Word documents and things like that, so moving to a tool where you've got easy access to get to the data was a big win for us. The reporting in the tool is pretty good at the team level. It struggles a little more in a big organization. We are trying to look at things across all of the teams, trying to do reporting across the whole tool, so it's a little less good there, but overall it’s pretty nice.

In the next version I'd like to see more of a focus on reporting at that overall level. I want to find a way to do analytics on what's going on within the tool, how many people are using it, and not so much detailed reporting on individual teams. I want to see how the organization is doing as a whole as they use the tool.

As an example, one of the metrics that we'd like to be able to see has to do with this idea of teams that are meeting their commitments when it comes to deliverables. So when they come in to start a sprint, we'd like to be able to say "By the time the schedule ended, you hit this many of your stories, or features." And we'd like to do that, not necessarily for a specific team, but on the whole tool overall. We want to be able to compare between teams, and say "What is this team doing that's better, what is this team doing that's not." I think they could really do some work on the overall analytics. There are parts of the UI that could use a little bit of work, as they are older. It would have to do with changing the analytics and a little bit of the performance.

Stability has actually been really good. We use the cloud service, and while it does go down occasionally, they're on it and it comes back up right away. No major complaints there.

In terms of scalability, we're a pretty big project, with thousands of teams out there, so sometimes we feel like we're pushing the tool to its limits. We start to see slow-downs in response time, and things like that, but it continues to function, for the most part. We'll see as it continues to grow. It usually shows slow-downs in the UI, or particularly in the web service interfaces, that are trying to fetch out data for large projects with thousands and thousands of features. Things can be slow because it's a lot of data to move.

We do use technical support. We are engaged with support and we have several open tickets. The technical support has actually been pretty good. They're definitely responsive. Some of the problems that we run into are a little more difficult to solve, so the response time's not always there, but for the most part, it's good.

I would definitely tell them to make sure that they plan out what it is that they're trying to accomplish with the tool. Making sure that they get a good structure set up, and if they are trying to manage multiple teams, try to establish early on what those teams will look like in terms of size and what they will be doing.

One of the pain points that we see in having so many teams, is that every team has its own slightly different thing that they're doing in it. This is great from a tool perspective that it is supported, but from a metrics and reporting point of view, that makes things difficult because not all teams are doing the same thing.

I think what’s great is the ability for teams to really plan at the team level. CA Agile Central does this very well without much overhead. This allows our teams to really focus on the work, as opposed to the administration of the tool. I think at the team level, that's the most valuable.

At the portfolio level, what’s most valuable is being able to manage the visions, the features, and the releases; it’s very easy, simple, and straightforward to do. I think there's good value, as well, by bringing together the business vision statements and what IT is thinking in terms of delivery, and what's possible in terms of capacity. The objects within the system are integrated well enough to allow for really smooth end-to-end planning.

It has improved the organization's functions by eliminating time wasted waiting for someone to have a prioritized list on their laptop or on some SharePoint site that to which we then have to get access. All of this is simplified and we're not wasting time looking for information. Everything is right in one place, correlated, and related in the right way, and at the right level that allows for planning, execution, and tracking afterwards.

We have pockets of really good Agile maturity in the company and some pockets where more maturity is still necessary. I think the bank as a whole is still maturing in terms of agility, and it's ability to adapt to change. I would describe it as just pockets at this point, but growing very, very quickly.

We use Agile for coaching as well. We try to coach to a few things. One of them is, of course, business value; to say, "hey, focus on delivering high business value first". So again, we are able to take advantage of the prioritized lists at all levels within the tool.

This applies to transparency also; making data visible at all levels and to anybody who is a stakeholder or part of the team. The information is right there, and everybody has the same exact view given the access that they are granted.

We work on predictability also. You're able to see the level of velocity that each team and each release has very quickly. You don't have to go and search for data. When talking about improvement, it's more of a process that we coach. But, enabling those types of conversations around continuous improvement based on accessible, real data from the system is invaluable.

We're focused on multiple areas. We are trying to get teams to think about the system as a whole and not just their small areas. We're trying to get end-to-end visibility of how efficient we are at doing our work. That's where we coach.

We have submitted lots of ideas to the Ideas portal, such as milestones. We would like to make sure that that's a first class citizen, if you will. Make it a little bit more robust regarding our API plans. Reporting I think is a big one too, especially at the bank.

We base a lot of decisions on real data. So if we're not able to get that real data in a very simple way and be able to slice and dice it, then we aren't as effective as we could be at making those decisions quickly. I'd like to see a reporting interface that is easy to use, based on report templates that we can take advantage of.

Lastly, the Insights module within the tool was great when it came out, yet very few people harness it's power today. I think it could be more integrated into their reporting interface, if it's possible. It would really drive true insight right into the data that we are creating around our work.

I think the CA Agile Central is pretty stable. I've used it for over 6 years and it's fairly stable. We use it on the SaaS model. The website says 90% up time, which is fantastic. No real major down times that we've seen.

We use Agile Central at scale already. The tool is being used across the entire bank and across the world. At last count, we had 7,000 or 8,000 people using it across multiple teams in multiple organizations and these are active licenses. I believe we are already using it at scale in a very real way to deliver value.

We have worked with technical support when we have questions of defects. They are very responsive. They approach their work with an open mind or open transparent setup, where they're sharing the latest information and where things stand in terms of questions, or defects, or enhancements, if you will. Overall, we have no complaints at all, from my perspective at least.

I don't believe there was a previous solution in place for Agile teams. Some teams were using Atlassian JIRA and then some are still using version one, but that was in parallel and not a replacement.

I was not part of the initial set up, but I have been a subscription administrator and I'm aware of what goes into it. It's not overly difficult. I think working with the CA setup team, makes it very easy.

When selecting a vendor, the ability to integrate with other internal tools is first. I also look at the stability of the brand and extensibility in being able to extend out. Of course, meeting our minimum needs is a given, such as being able to track and report on data. I want to know how robust those items are. I think most products provide those types of functions, it's just how robust they are and how high a grade they have in terms of being able to deliver that functionality. That is what differentiates vendors.

My advice to others is to start right away. Learn as much as you can. The tool itself is not going to be your impediment or your longest pole in the tent. It’s going to take a long time to figure out what your internal culture and processes are, and the tool is only there to help you reflect what you are producing. So start early.

Being able to control the requirements through the change request lifecycle is one of the most valuable features.

It optimizes the time to market of the requirements.

There should be different ways to decide on the requirements, not only by using a flow chart. There should be more than one way; maybe with use cases or another more graphical way to represent the business requirements.

I wish there was a way to maintain the documentation, the knowledge management of the development team; and to keep a live version.

The stability is very good. There are no crashes.

The scalability is very good. We are planning to complete the whole lifecycle of development activities.

We use technical support a lot. We have our partner, and we use support with them. Technical support is excellent.

We considered IBM Rational.

We have a lot of requirements. We have lot of business areas that continuously places demands on the IT group. We need strong tools that help us keep correctly the requirements in the lifecycle. It's important. It's not enough to do things better. You need to have a better tools. We have a lot of delays that we want to mitigate. We don't have a good time to market. Agile management helps us.

Technical support, knowledge, and productivity are the most important factors when we chose CA as a vendor.

Make sure that everybody in the company and team know the importance of the change.

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.

I like that you can link user stories and tasks to the features and the initiatives. This allows us to see how much were investing in people and effort. Mainly, I like the simplicity of it.

We can very easily run a report that clearly shows the amount of effort we’re investing in initiatives and features. It is very straightforward.

It brought transparency and clarity to our work. We can see from one place everything the engineering team is working on, in a very simple way using a very simple interface.

I would like to see improvements in these areas:

• Integration with Git is not very good. It should integrate more seamlessly with the other tools that we use.
• The ability to inexpensively add custom reports.
• Ability to easily add features, such as saving views, that we need to add to these reports.
• Ability to specify required fields per project and not per workspace.
• Some competitors offer much more flexibility.

JIRA, for example, has much more flexibility in terms of defining your own states, your own workflows, and even when you're in the same work space. Whereas, with Agile Center, you have to decide whether share a workspace with other teams; then you must all comply with the same configuration. For us this is a problem, because many business units are sharing the same workspace even though they have different processes and different flows. So you can either all agree on the same one or move to your own. But in that case, you lose the transparency of everybody being in the same workspace, which is part of the value and core reason why we want to use the tool.

We have had issues with custom reports that were dependent on an internal Agile Center API, but they crashed often. These are now fixed, and other than these, it's been okay.

Technical support is very responsive we were happy with them.

The solution we had just didn't work and required too much time from the engineering team, which I was highly against.

Initial setup was pretty straight forward.

Agile Center was already used in my company by other business units, so it was supported internally. Also, we heard that technical support was good. Since are heavily invested in Bugzilla for bug tracking, integration with Bugzilla was a plus.

We are not expert at Agile. We use a different tool for each development model; Eternity WaterFall and Agile. I think that that's one of the advantages.

In a vendor, we look for good support by people that have a lot of product knowledge. We don’t want to have to wait a long time before new features and customer feedback are integrated into the next release.

The features I like are the backlogs and the transparency through those backlogs.

We have a lot of product owners (POs) and teams that work on the common backlogs, so we need the transparency in these backlogs. We get the transparency between the teams and the departments.

We have teams that are not collocated, so the team tool for managing and showing tasks and work has to support this.

We use a tool that automatically updates all active users screens as
one user updates a task or other work.

This is helping with issues we have seen in Agile Central when more than
one person is working on the same issue, to do a missing update of what needs to be done or started.

I would like to see live updates. Live updates would help us because we have off-shore teams. We're actually using another tool right now because Agile Central does not support it. We're using two tools.

I would like to see some management views on the workflow. The workflow is not lightweight. It's pretty big.

We did not have any issues with stability. Sometimes it's slow, but we have not had any issues.

We have not had any scalability issues. We have scaled it to some degree, four or five teams, but that's just a fraction of where we're going.

I have used technical support for minor issues and they were good.

We were not previously using a common solution.

We decided to invest in a new solution because of the Agile transformation in our company. We needed a tool for that.

I was involved in the roll-out and it was straightforward.

We were looking at JIRA and other options that I cannot remember right now. It was six or seven years ago.

The most important criteria when we selected the vendor was the functionality of the cross-transparency between backlogs. That was the main reason we chose this solution.

Start small.

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.

One of my favorite features is the Iteration view. I am responsible for many tasks and I use the Iteration view to view current tasks and user stories for the current trend. I sort by owner and I determine which tasks I own and what progress I am making. So to me, personally, I think that's the most valuable feature from Agile Central.

I like the way the dashboard is set up. I can customize it, so if it is too cluttered, I can change the view that I want and it gets saved based on my login. I encourage CA to keep playing around with the views by changing it every once in a while so that users are not afraid to change.

We were using the Waterfall methodology, but we moved Agile about four years ago. Agile Central makes the transition easier and we don't have to think twice about how to implement this or keep track of features and user stories. We know we can go to a web page to track features and break them down into user stories. Agile Central has helped make our transition more efficient.

Where I work, there are some teams that don't practice Agile. My team started practicing about four years ago. We customized our processes, changed it around and made modifications to it. We are at a stage where we like our process. We are not afraid to make changes so I wouldn't say we follow 100% strict Agile. We started with what we considered an Agile practice and then made changes to it.

I would like CA to play around with some of the dashboards, some views and reporting features. I know they roll out new reports every once in a while. I don't know what I'm missing, so show me what I'm missing.

Agile Central does do defect tracking, but not all of our teams use it. Some teams use other tools like HPE’s BPM, and a few other tools. We would like to move to Agile Central since that's where we track features and where we do project management. We would like to do defect tracking in Agile Central as well.

Something else that CA could improve in Agile Central is the notification system. The other tools we use have pretty good notifications systems with email notifications and the ability to opt in and out of specific notifications. What Agile Central is lacking is more ways to customize notifications and the ability to opt in and out of notifications; this would help with defect tracking as well. And when status changes, I would like to receive a notification. I know it's partially supported, but it's not really straightforward to opt in and opt out.

Regarding stability, we have noticed there have been a few bugs with the website. My organization is a part of the beta program, so every time there is a beta we are one of the first ones to get it. I really like being able to optionally enable it whenever I want. We have found bugs, which is the point of a beta program.

But, in actual production, we have seen several minor bugs. For example, when you drag and drop an object, it wouldn't do the right thing. Apart from that, nothing major. It's been pretty great.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Any time we have a problem, we use the "Leave Feedback" link on the website and they're usually prompt about getting back to us. They have been pretty helpful. Although I'm not involved with it, I know some of the administrators who are and I've heard good things about technical support from them.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

I wasn't involved with choosing which tool to use, but I know other platforms were evaluated, including some open source tools like Trello. In the end they went with Agile Central.

Don't be afraid to change things. It's something that I try to follow, so that's something I would give that advise to others as well. People will not like new views and changes initially, but once they get used to it, they will like it. It's similar to what Facebook does. They make very subtle changes and they force it on you and initially, you don’t like the changes. But, then once you use it for a few days you find that it works out.

Most important to me when choosing a vendor is good technical support and customer service. This is very helpful when learning a new tool. If I have questions, I want someone to be available at the other end, to be ready to answer my questions. I want them to show me how this tool is going to work for my specific use case. That's the biggest thing I look for in a vendor.