Rally Software Reviews

It allows me to do large team planning operations, where I can do "big room planning" and have all of my Agile teams in one session. We can get through all of our planning through the use of the software. With big room planning, we can get it all laid out, understand what the dependencies are, where the interlocks sit, and which sprints can be optimized. The portfolio tracker tool is phenomenal. It gives us the opportunity to look at our features holistically across the entire landscape of the solution, where they fall within a continuous delivery (CD) release when you're looking at a DevOps model. It allows us to apply those features to the DevOps model. I can take that and apply it across all of my teams, look at it when we can pinpoint exactly when that feature is going to be delivered holistically. This is a huge value to our client, who is Cisco.

We can have high predictability, which is what Agile tries to do. We can have low cost of ownership, dealing with “just-in-time” delivery for the monthly releases, because we release on a monthly cycle. We can look at this information and say when those features are going to become available. The portfolio tracker is huge, a phenomenal piece of the add-on functionality that's been wonderful.

I also like the use of apps, and the ability to use the customized HTML capability of the apps. We're working with the consultants to design a custom look and feel for specific types of reports that we need. It's very open architected, so we can take advantage and utilize the software as we choose to use it, and have a really good experience with it.

There's some room for growth. There's some more functionality we'd probably like to see in it, but at this point, it's been a stalwart product for us.

It's optimized how our organization runs. We can look across multiple teams, using Scaled Agile Framework Methodology (SAFE), so that we can look at various release trains, and how that then flows up to the overall program budget. Each train has its own unique budget line. I can look holistically across all the trains and have it flow up to the program office’s budget. I can track personnel within the software. We can do all of the quality functionality and spread that across multiple tracks. In this way, one track is not going to be heavily burdened by taking on the quality function.

The big value add is not only the ability to do Agile, but scaled Agile as well, utilizing the budget functionalities. It’s really top notch in that regard, with the ability to work with the personnel function of the software. It gives us another holistic view of the overall functionality and operations that we have providing a value add to our customer, Cisco.

The main area to improve is performance. If they can get that performance improved, they'd be golden. They really need more in the DevOps modeling, and the use of Kanban. Their Kanban area is fairly weak. That's probably the one area of the tool that, outside of performance, really needs improvement. If they could add more robust Kanban functionality, then they would have the best of both worlds. You would have a DevOps capability, Scrum capability, and Test Driven Development (TDD) within the tool.

That would also help from the quality perspective. When you're dealing with your DevOps team, especially when you're trying to do releases on a monthly basis, they need to be tied into deadlines and be able to track through a Kanban mode. They need to know about the workflows, the work in progress, and how it moves through the workflow. That would probably be one of the main areas I would tell them to put some energy into the Kanban side of the tool. If they did that, then they would have pretty much the complete solution. They are losing a lot of business to Trello.

There are performance issues that nag the product. I would like them to build out a more robust Kanban workflow methodology system. Then, I would open up the APIs more. I would allow for third-party solutions to be able to plug in easier. There's a little bit of work that they'd need to do.

There's a couple areas where that they can make significant improvements, and I'm sure they're working on it.

Stability is very good. The solution rarely goes down. When it does go down, we make a couple of phone calls and we get a really clear estimate of when it'll be back up. We get e-mail alerts when things aren't going too well. The biggest issue that the product needs is to improve is performance.

Ever since the Agile Central package (formerly Rally) came out, performance has always been an issue. It lags behind, at times, especially when generating large reports. That's probably the number one area for improvement. They know that. I'm telling them nothing haven't heard before. If they can get performance at a much better level, I think the product would be really well received for other companies, who tend to shy away from it from a performance perspective.

One of its main competitors, AgileCraft, is a high performing product. It's got really good performance. They really need to be competitive with some of the other products on the market. I have used it extensively. It's a great product. Its premier focus is being a safe solution, where Rally tends to be a Swiss Army Knife. It's more for all encompassing type of Agile work. Whether you're doing SAFE, standard Scrum, Test Driven Development (TDD), Feature Driven Development (FDD), these are all areas for which Rally can be utilized. That's what makes it a very multiverse tool and allows you to work holistically across an organization, where AgileCraft has a very specific, narrow focus.

Scalability is very good. No problem there. It will scale as you need it to. That's not a problem.

I personally haven't used technical support. My interaction has been through our consultant. We have a dedicated team of consultants with whom we work. If we ever run into an issue, we usually just pick up the phone, call our consultant, and explain what's going on. We do have support through a Cisco support group. They're extremely responsive. When we run into a problem, they usually solve it within about an hour or so.

Vendors who were on our shortlist were JIRA (Atlassian) and AgileCraft. At the end of the day, we chose Agile Central, mainly for its robust capabilities and the ability to talk to other database systems. For example, I can bring in all those JIRA defects or issues, into the CA central product, because of the open API architecture. Using the SOAP API codebase, I can then have one of their consultants write me a custom hook that allows me to bring in all the data from those other databases. The other two solutions didn't have that open-ended modular framework that allowed me to pull in information from older systems, whether it's coming out of Excel spreadsheets, or older systems, like JIRA. That's one of the big things that we look at.

When making a decision to switch products, I consult others on tool choice based on the number of departments they have. I went in as the Agile coach to Cisco and recommended that they move to this solution. One team I was working with used JIRA. It's an option that Cisco allows some of their departments to use. I got them out of JIRA into Rally, mainly because JIRA is older technology, and it's too lightweight for a major corporation such as Cisco.

This tool allows you to talk to the rest of Cisco. If you've got one group running one solution and you've got another group running another solution, they can't speak to each other. They can't share data. They can't assign issues to each other. By moving one off one platform and moving them onto Rally, or to Agile Central, we can now holistically start to work across organizations, and see each other's problems.

The only other big issue is their workspaces need to talk to each other. That's another area for improvement that would be good. There are a few areas they had to work on, but cross-workspace communication is the main one. If they could solve that problem, that would be amazing. I would be so happy. Even in my own group for which I'm providing consulting services, we have multiple workspaces and we can't talk to each other. That can get a little crazy. We have to create this third solution that we all feed into. Obviously, nobody pays attention to it, because everybody is so focused on their own lane.

In terms of selecting a vendor, I look for the responsiveness to quality concerns. Whenever you've got an issue, the timeliness that they'll come back to you to resolve those technical issues is important. I also look at whether or not they have consulting services themselves for customization work The other part of it is just overall “solutioning”. I want to know if they have a complete suite of products, or if it is just a standalone, a one-off. If it is, then I have to go bring in three or four other additional products to augment the single product. Then you've got multiple bids and you're talking across multiple vendors, and that can be a headache. I just want to do one-stop shopping.

That's what CA provides holistically across the entire platform. They're going to give me everything that I need. Another factor is with one vendor, you work on better pricing structures and a better deal. Whether it's in service, or getting a discount on other products, you can weave all that in as an opportunity going to one vendor.

My advice to other is take a test drive. They have a sampling system that you can demo. They'll give you a space to put your product in and try to go through the whole workflow process. Make sure you go through the whole workflow process. Really see and understand exactly the functionality that the solution has to offer. A lot of people stop at the very top level, the one-inch level. Go underneath the wave and dig down into the solution. There's a lot of great opportunity there.

One of the neatest opportunities, because of its HTML capability with its apps, is the ability to embed a lot of my Smartsheets right into the solution. I can take team rosters and embed them. I can track monthly performance reports and a number of different functionalities that are available to me via the Smartsheet. I can update my Smartsheet, and it'll automatically be reflected in Rally. That is huge in the CA Central product. That's significant for me.

For us, the most valuable feature was writing all the stories. We found features such as figuring out what stories are going to get into which sprint and organizing the backlog and dependencies, to be useful to us.

In terms of improving the organization functions, it gives us a lot of visibility as to what features are getting released and when. It also helps us to track across the organization in a much better fashion. In my opinion, visibility is the biggest benefit that we have received from implementing CA Agile Central.

We would probably like to see a more robust dependency management system.

We have not experienced any issues. So far, things have been working fine for us.

We have started a little slow. There are just a couple of teams that are using CA Agile Central, so we've not really scaled it up for multiple teams across the organization. However, within our group there are 3 or 4 teams that are using CA Agile Central right now.

We've not used them so far. Thankfully, we didn’t need to use them.

We were not using any other solution prior to this. Since our organization was moving to agile, we evaluated a few products and CA Agile Central seemed to be a good option that would fit all of our needs; so that's how we decided to go with it.

Not me personally but there was somebody in my team that was involved in the initial setup. We did not encounter a lot of issues or challenges.

Of course, we had to pull some experts from CA as well just to get their ideas on how we're supposed to set it up, how things work and what are the best practices to follow and so on.

Other than that, the first couple of iterations/sprints we had to learn and tweak a little bit as part of retrospectives. Otherwise, it has been okay.

Initially, we looked at a couple of vendors, namely Pivotal Tracker.

You need to clearly know what you want or how you want to implement and use the product. Once you have clarity then you can figure out how you want to setup the solution and go from there.

For us, the user interface was the most important criteria while choosing a vendor. We found it to be more intuitive than the others. We also felt that it can probably scale up to the needs of what we have within the organization, in terms of integrating with the rest of the ecosystem.

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.