Rally Software Reviews

It is a very good tool is well suited for Agile methodology, and lends itself to user story management. With the introduction of test case management and defect management, it has really boomed and it is at par with some of the existing systems, apps, test management tools such as HP ALM. I really like Agile Central.

It is a single platform that your Agile team can talk about. If you talk about a user story management, then you can talk about it as well. If you want to do test case management, you have all the QA team and developers who can work on it. It's a single tool that works with all team members in a scrum team. Before any communication, you don't want to go on another systems, but rather use a single system; a one-stop solution that solves it for you.

We wanted to have a hub, a faster time to market, high quality, and we wanted to move from Waterfall to Agile. I’m an intermediate user. We use this tool for coaching. In terms of best practices, we have certain guidelines that you need to follow. For instance, with Agile maturity, you should have your acceptance criteria selected when you have user stories and the test case results present. You can then attach your proof of testing. This tool supports these best practices.

You should have the ability to run various automation tools, irrespective of their organizations. Some of the teams are using HP products, or other products, such as open source producst. If your tool can run those products, that would be great. If you are able to run those tools from Agile Central, then it would make sense and be a good improvement.

It is pretty stable and it's fast also, compared to other products, like HP ALM. It's fast and performs well.

Scalability is good. I have not faced any issues so far.

We have a team which connects directly with Rally. You have a help feature where you can raise requests and they can be solved. We have support available from CA.

I would say a thumbs up to the solution. It's pretty good and you should leverage it and try to use it. CA Agile Central gives you flexibility performing custom quoting on top of the solution. This makes it interesting and you can achieve many things with this tool.

We use it at the enterprise level, from the leadership to managers to teams, and everyone can use the same software easily.

It's very user friendly and intuitive as the information can be viewed and customized easily.

It's the first software that allows everyone to use the same software that is actually user friendly.

An improvement would be if at the leadership level, they want to view certain teams, it’s easy to break down. For example, if a portfolio is 60 teams, as a director, I can filter and easily see only my teams and the stats I want.

Also, the defect-management cycle needs work. It's already there, but the functionality isn't all the way through.

It could offer more functionality and spread those functionalities to individual users in a way they can understand. That would make it more intuitive, but I understand that doing so is a challenge.

We've been using it for over five years.

We haven’t had any stability issues.

It’s meant for scaling and that’s the top functionality.

They were great. Never any issues.

It was already in place when I joined.

I've performed installations in other organizations, and it was very intuitive.

We also looked at products that have good scalability because of the size of our enterprise.

My advice would be to use it. As with any tool it has advantages and disadvantages.

The linkages between artifacts, going from epic to feature, from feature to user story is very native and works very well. The in-built support for scrum, so having good parts on the side and the tasks go across works. We can't do that with Trello. We can do that with LeanKit.

I think as for scrum adherence, it's very mature because I think it started as a scrum tool, and you can kind of tell that. The support for scale works very nicely.

It supports the SAFe toolkit so that you can create artifacts and define a whole bunch of teams. So you have a project pull-down, you have all the teams, and then program layer, and then the portfolio layers, so you've got the features live at the program. There's a top layer and a middle layer and then the bottom layer. It supports it very well.

Being a Kanban team inside of SAFe, some of the fields that you have to fill out are a little awkward, because then you can't use the views the way you want to. You have to assign it to all the SAFe people, and that might not be a Rally thing, only a SAFe thing.

I think you can kind of tell that they started from scrum so the Kanban support kind of feels like an afterthought. I'd like to see more maturity around Kanban metrics. So, here's your cycle time, here's your lead time. But I'd like to know why was my lead time that. I want to drill in. I want more ability to drill into the data with analytics.

Deployment hasn't been an issue.

I haven't noticed any crashing or poor performance. It's pretty solid.

It's scaled fine for us.

I've not used it, so I don't have an informed opinion.

We've used Physical, we've used Trello, we've used Gyro, we've used LeanKit, and we landed on Rally.

I think I was very involved in LeanKit and less so involved on the Rally side.

Sign up for the demo and play around with it, as painful as it is to try to maintain both tools at the same time. If you have a tool and you want to try a different tool, you almost have to actually use it. You can play around with it, you can look at the demos, and you can look at the documentation, but until you actually use it, you're not going to see where maybe the pain points are.

The most valuable features are the team-level interactions tracking of stories, features, and sprint. We do all of our budget tracking with it and CA PPM, and then our teams are working through Rally, so for me it's really easy to go in there and be able to see what is going on. I can see where things are assigned and where I should be worried about risks. For example, I can very easily see that a team has 10 stories on a feature and all of them are assigned future sprints, so I feel good about that.

It's also a very simple tool to use. I find it easy to go up and down the hierarchies -- going from initiative to element features all the way down to a story level. I think it navigates pretty well.

Then reporting is probably the other thing that I like about it. It's got a good reporting engine with it.

Lots of customizability. I know we created a few of our own reports and then a lot of the out-of-the-box reports are pretty useful as well.

I think it got everyone aligned. I would say that's probably the most helpful thing, whereas before that I think that teams were just managing backlogs of spreadsheets or whatever they had or whatever they were doing beforehand. I'm not quite sure. I came in right after we started implementing it so I didn't really see what was there beforehand. I do know that just from when I first started to today, everyone is more aligned and has a better understanding of all of the work that is happening, not just pieces of it. It has an API that connects it with CA PPM.

I know you connect CA PPM to other agile tools as well, not just routers. I know a lot of people are hoping for that and a portfolio RPM are kind of pieces of it, but I don't think it's quite there yet. I would like to see it be a little more integrated going forward.

The portfolio side of it needs improving, especially integration into CA PPM. It would be nice to hopefully see some of those have a little bit more connections.

I know we do a lot of high level planning and it seems like there are a lot of duplicate features back and forth, and it's kind of like, pick one or the other at this point. It would be nice if they talked a little bit more. For example, we'd really like a better integration with Rally.

I don't use it daily, but there seems to be no stability issues.

We ran into some problems with archiving some old stuff but we created a separate tree and that's where we put all the archive stuff. It's still there, it's still accessible but it's not messing with the reports of your enterprise.

I've just used our internal technical support.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Make sure you understand your processes and just know that it's not the tool. It's more about the process and how you work with it right. I know we did our last upgrade with Clarity and we didn't have our processes all the way defined. We started implementing things in the tool only to find they broke later, so we didn't have that process defined. Make sure you understand what you need before you start.

When we started to go to the agile model from the waterfall one, it was a big challenge for us. We had couple of folks move from Paypal to us, and they gave us a success story in a meeting. When they were looking at tools, they came across Rally, and it was introduced to us by the CA team. We had a couple of training sessions on Rally.

The immediate impact of that was when we started using Rally, we didn't even know that we could do agile. But because of Rally, we were able to track all the users' codices, track all the features, track the capacity so that we could plan, and find out as a team what the capacity is as a team to deliver in a two-week sprint.

As an application developer, I can speak only based on what the developer and app teams can do, and this has helped a lot. We were trying to go strictly agile, and I think Rally is helping us big time.

When we started using Rally, we used the user interface pretty often. It was very informative and everyone was comfortable with it. But there were challenges with product backlog and how to track the capacity planning. Everyday you needed to update the status. There were a couple of questions about, what is the capacity of every developer or a QA engineer for this sprint.

It has been stable for us.

As far as I know, there are 16-17 people using it, and since I'm relatively new with the company, I'm not sure what the plans are in terms of scaling its use.

I haven't used Rally technical support yet, but we have a 1-year subscription.

It was straightforward. We didn't have to do a lot. We just went to Rally 101 training, and there was some agile coach for us on site. She trained us on how to use the Rally tool to update our social studies tasks.

I would say Rally is the way to go.

It has most benefited me because as a release manager, it helps me know and mitigate the risk going into production so I can reach out to the different teams. I can, at anytime, pull up a report to show me where the status of a candidate for release is and I can reach out to those teams. Based on the report, we can then decide whether we need to allocate more resources to ensure we're able to release on a certain date.

It helps us track our development life cycle for our development teams. They can keep track of the progress of their user stories and features, from the intake process all the way through deployment and into production. This can be done in tandem with test results, and we have a substantial team with various applications.

The reporting functionalities need improvement. Also, there's too much lag, but they're fixing that.

We're at 13,000-plus companies. We have lots of applications, lots of different teams with upstream and downstream dependencies. Different teams have different maturity levels in terms of how they are using Rally. Some are just getting on board, and some have been using it for a long time. So we're trying to consolidate that.

The technical support with Rally is going pretty well.

I can't even give you off the top of my head how many licenses we have with them, but it's user-based licensing and we have quite a few of them.

I think it's a great tracking tool. There are similar tools out there, but for us it's convenient, it's intuitive.

It provides overall functionality in project management and release tracking all in one tool. Those are our main things. Additionally, it provides integration with JIRA and ALM. The Rally guys came in and said they would integrate, and that’s a great feature. We don’t have to use our infrastructure, so maintenance of the system is avoided.

The UI had some issues, but I attended sessions at CA World 2015 and they updated this. But they still need to improve performance.

It is stable, but at times the performance is slow. It doesn’t crash, but it's slow.

Also, because it’s on the CA network, we have API connectivity to Rally. However, our server proxy cannot talk to the Rally systems. Rally has a fix for that, which is working for now, but we need a long term solution.

We have 800-1200 users. I haven’t seen any issues so far. Rally was installed three months ago and the transition is going well.

The response times are good and the support is very good. I deal with a few guys, so when I email them I get a quick response.

Our VP was given a presentation on project management, defect management, and release tracking all in one tool, which excited him. Then we were given a demonstration, and the fact that our existing tool didn’t do those things made Agile Management an easy choice.

Set up of the software is easy but the integration is complex. If you are only using it as a tool, it is good, but the integration is not so straightforward.

If you tell me you are using VersionOne, you would get more for your money with similar costs from CA Agile Management. So more value, that’s number one because being with a bigger company means you get more value with the community. If you are not using any tool, then you should start using a tool, and this is a good start.