Rally Software Reviews

CA Agile Central is used for the lifecycle of Initiatives, Features, and User Stories, Defects: from concept through delivery

• It really helped to connect the dots between what the overall vision was down to T-Mobile. 
• Having that view into features and roadmap from product to delivery teams, and where they are going, then execute on. 
• Being able to have the information, helping to facilitate those conversations, and just overall delivery. It is a really powerful tool for that. 

It really helps with getting the alignment between strategy and execution for the product teams, all the way down to the delivery teams. 

What I have learned is that a lot of features that I am looking for, in many cases, are part of a different tool set that CA offers. Really it is more learning about which features and tool, those features would be in. A lot of the features that we would be looking to add, I am learning may not be within Agile Central, but part of another CA tool set. It is about learning which tool that would be and how to integrate it. 

It would be nice if CA had those tools as part of a package rather than having to try and find multiple tools to integrate together. Some of the additional features that we are looking at would be better roadmapping capabilities and increased robustness around permissions. More of a view into the overall lifecycle of the portfolio items, so post acceptance of a story through the pipeline. Those are some of the key things that I would like to see. 

For the most part, we have found that it is pretty stable. There are the occasional outages, but for the most part, it is pretty reliable. 

That is one of the advantages of CA Agile Central: Its ability to scale. Other tools that we have looked at or heard of, that is one of the limitations they have. The reason why we use Agile Central is its ability to scale across teams of teams. 

It is really good. In addition to tech support, we have had the agile success program supporting us. They are very responsive, helpful, and available. When we have needed tech support, they have been able to help guide us through it as well. So, really helpful. 

I would give it about an eight and a half. The reason why it would not be higher is because some of the things we are looking for we had to get other tools to plug into. Whereas, some of the other solutions we have seen out there, it is all-in-one tool set. 

Release planning, test case writing.

It's performed plenty, I'm happy with the performance.

I get to see what we have, what test cases we need to deliver, per release.

It gives us the visibility into what we're doing and how we're doing on a day to day basis, to see if we need to refocus or to try to change things before it gets down into the negative. The daily iterative working part of it is what I like. And I get to see the visuals of what's going on.

The Defect feature. In one view you can see all your defects and you can push them into the different releases.

I also like the Release view, where you can select different user stories and just dump them into the releases you want them to be in.

I also like the reporting. I can see my Burndown, my Burnup, and other reports that we use to see if we're delivering on time.

One thing that my team struggles with is when they have so many user stories. You have the parent's story, and then you have a child of a child of a child and it goes "down into the drain." Sometimes it's hard for them to quickly search for a user story. I know there is a part where you can just type the user story number, but that's if you know it. 

I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help.

It's been around for a while so it's pretty stable. 

I'm assuming it's our infrastructure, but since its web-based, at certain times of the day, it's slow. At certain times of the day I've noticed it takes a while for the page to come up and for updates and the like. Sometimes you have to shut it down and restart.

I opened up a ticket with CA about it. I don't think I got a response back. It's been a while, I didn't look back into it, and nobody contacted me about it.

It scales.

Generally I'm satisfied with the tech support I get from CA.

I wasn't involved in the setup with my current company; my previous company, yes, I was. I think it depends on who you're working with. With the person I was working with in my old company, it was straightforward.

We had that one on one relationship with CA, and they were on site to help us out. If we had to be on a call for anything they were there.

At my old company we had a demo for VersionOne, then Rally (now Agile Central), and one other tool. One of the reasons we went with Rally is it was easier to use than VersionOne. The reporting was great, it was what we were looking for. And at that time it had another feature called Timesheet, that became the Timesheet in Agile Central.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is that the product be user friendly. It also has to be able to produce. My bottom line is the outcome, so I want to see that it can help deliver correctly, on time, within the budget. Also resource planning, resource management, those are the kinds of things I'll put into consideration if I'm looking for a tool to use.

I think CA has been consistent in trying to improve Agile Central, but they also still have room for improvement, so I give them seven out of 10.

I would tell colleagues to try Agile Central because of the features I noted above. And then, I don't know about VersionOne, but the support for Agile Central is also great.

It helps us organize our projects so that we can get down to really detailed work items; really granular, busting up a task, a feature, and parsing it out so that we really understand what's needed. We can put it into small, bite-sized pieces that can be addressed quickly. If somehow there's a misunderstanding or miscommunication, it can be adjusted and corrected fast and easy.

I'm the subscription administrator. I rarely use it as a user. I generally only use it as a user to troubleshoot. So to me, as an administrator, the most important tool is looking up the subscriptions of my customers to see if they had logged in recently.

To me, the biggest thing I see that needs improvement is the navigation. When somebody's using more than one workspace, it's not obvious how to go from one workspace to another. It's simple enough once you know, but is you're looking at the screen, you don't notice it.

I actually have to write documentation, and I sent it out often to tell people how to navigate from one workspace to another when they're on more than one workspace; in a sense, more than one project, though a workspace is a bigger bite of a project. If you're really just on a different project, and they're all on the same workspace, it’s not a big deal. But when they have to switch from workspace to workspace, it's not obvious. So, that's where I see they could improve in their navigation. Make it more intuitive.

For the most part, stability has been good. They did go through a small shaky patch when CA bought them (Rally) and they decided to move data centers. It seemed like there were some outages, but that has been fine since. It can be a little slow at times, but as far as up time, it seems to be quite good.

I don't know about scalability. From my understanding, we're medium to small in the grand scheme of things. There are much bigger shops than us. But we're not small either. We're in the hundreds. So, it seems like there's plenty of scalability.

I have to say, since CA bought it, support has actually improved; which I'm very surprised about. I found in the past, when it was wholly owned by Rally, they forced you to always go through their website first, search their knowledge base, and then post a case. And then they'd contact you within a day or so. It was okay, but it was less satisfying when that's the only way to contact them; and I always had to go that way.

The technical support seems to have improved quite a bit since CA bought them, which, again, I was very surprised that it has improved instead of get worse. It seemed to be able to handle phone calls better and are even more responsive. I'm very happy.

I wasn't part of the discussion to buy initially. It was already here when I started. It seems that we have grown, though, and switched from other tools. It just seems like the granularity it provides and being able to really be good for development teams and really focus on their needs, and that is why we use it so much and it's growing.

Setup seems relatively straightforward. It was easy to learn. Most teams teach themselves how to use the tool and new teams generally hire somebody who understands the concepts, so just a cursory show them the fields and the setup, and they're good to go. There's nice three- to five-minute videos that CA provides from their website that helps teams understand the concepts and the usage.

Just be open and take advantage of the videos to see if they understand what the product is and to reach out to the vendor and ask them questions. They seem very willing to help without necessarily charging. If they feel that you're a potential customer, they're happy to talk to you and give you some guidance. If you need a lot of help, then of course, then they have programs to actually send experts.

I don't know which feature would be more specifically valuable. I guess the portfolio items would be the ones I use the most, but I also am very familiar with the quality module as well.

Some of the reporting stuff would probably rank right up there as well. Those are probably my top three.

I think what it's helped with in general is that we've learned a lot about how to break things down a little more in detail. Going from primarily a waterfall organization into an agile organization, the tool has been very helpful to help people make that transition.

It's a relatively slow process, unfortunately, as it's a large organization we're dealing with, and everybody interprets things a little bit differently. We've had some people that have really spent a lot of time with the CA resources, who really understand the product and help the users use the tool effectively.

I think one of the things that we stumble upon is how to organize the teams. We have one overall workspace, but outside of that workspace we have many, many teams underneath it. I think you can organize them in two different directions. You can organize them by leadership or organizations, or you can organize them by, for lack a better term, product. And those two don't sync together, because you have many organizations contributing to a product that don't roll up to the same leadership level.

So from a reporting aspect, for different things, we struggle trying to get that balance; to get the reporting for the leadership side, and then get reporting for the product side. That is one aspect. It's not necessarily a hierarchical issue, it's a flexibility issue, if you ask me. If you put it in one direction, you can't get it to the other. So you need to be able to balance it both ways. That would be something I think that could be worked on.

I have been using the solution for more than three years.

I personally haven't had any stability issues. The only time that it's been a problem for me is when I've extracted data around test and defect information. The extraction process has to be broken up; you can't do it all at one time. It's not impossible; it's just a little more work. Whether it's just because of the amount of volume we're talking about, or if it's just that there would be no way to fix that, I don't know.

Specifically, in our case, we're getting very close to the millionth test case written in the 3+ years that we've been doing this, and that's a lot of data. But you can't extract it all at one time; you have to break it up into chunks.

I personally have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support at 9/10. That's a very, very strong nine. We work very closely with some of the technical support people, and have for a very long time, and they are great partners.

I think what they do today, especially with their tech support side and the relationship we have with them, they are very open, they listen, and we understand that we're not the only client. We know what our users come to us and ask for. We take that information in and compile it, and have conversations with CA Agile Central, saying, "Here's what we've come across," and they've actually been very responsive to some of the things that we propose.

We know we can't get it all, because they have to make the tool useful to all their clients. So we'll present what we think is viable, and it's just like anything else. Some of it makes it, some of it doesn't. I really can't ask for anything more than what they do. They're very open, they will listen, and they will do it if they can. That's fine by me.

This was the first Agile Central tool that we used on a grander scale. Again, we switched from a waterfall organization to an agile organization, and this tool doesn't support waterfall.

I wasn't involved in the setup process.

I am not involved in the pricing and licensing side of the operation.

I wasn't involved in any such evaluation.

I have had some experience with one of the other tools out there and personally, I like this one better, so I'm a little bit biased around that aspect. If somebody were to ask me, "I'm looking between this and that ...", if I know the tool, I would have my biases towards CA Agile Central, for sure. I think it's a pretty good tool.

The Plan/Plan and Plan/Time boxes have proven to be the most useful for me to keep track of the development progress.

In the past, we used the JIRA system. It was very difficult to track progress. With the agile method, we can break things down to manageable pieces. Our deliverables to production have increased as a result, and I can clearly see if we are moving at the speed and in the direction to best serves the business.

It’s hard to say if it is a product improvement or business use improvement that is needed. But, managing the backlog has proven to be an issue. There are stories written for the same purpose, but in different words. If there was some way to question the writing when the subject is very similar; as to the need for the new story.

I don’t really think this is a product issue. The tools are there, but the business seems to not be utilizing them. The duplicate story issue is a business issue. I don’t see how the application can prevent this; especially since when developing, the same words can be used in multiple stories with minor differences in the tasks desired.

I know initially I thought Agile could put some sort of alert if the wording was similar; but that is a task too large and out of the scope of design.

As a business user, I just need to insure myself and my PM are taking better care in reviewing our backlog

We started using this system about 3-4 years ago. My only issue is that I work on 3-4 different projects and each team uses the application differently.

No stability issues for me. I’ve never been unable to access and/or update.

No issues with scalability for me either.

I’ve only needed technical support to allow a new user access; I would like a clearer process. Currently, I email the project manager and then they take up to a week or more to provide access. If this could be streamlined and expedited, this would be great.

We used the JIRA method and changed as our business leadership directed me to change to Agile Central.

The initial install was complex. But this was due to the lack of training. As with most changes, I was thrown into it first and then had classes. But this is a business practice, not that of Agile Central.

I was not part of the decision process.

Take a course or two before you start using it, so that you understand the process. Especially if it is different from your current business practices. The courses have been well run and informative. But, take care in choosing the class; some are for more experienced users.

When we went into Scaled Agile Framework, we could not have done it without the use of Agile Central. So for us, it allows us to scale our Scrum teams, and it also enables us when we do our remote big room plannings.

Agile Central allows us to log one hundred percent of the work we do and it allows for no hidden work, so teams can't go under the radar with what they're working on.

Let's look at the portfolio level. Let's take a look at what capabilities are needed to scale our teams and really add them to the tool.

The stability of the product is pretty solid, and the tech support that we get with it is phenomenal. We don't talk to anybody because we don't need to. We use the web application for all of our support management.

For scaling, we look for Agile Central to be the leader for the software that's going to get us to the next 4.5 Scaled Agile Framework.

I'm a proud user of Rally and Agile Central for the last six years and the ease of use - I don't even know when a new release is coming and I don't need to because it's so easy to use what's new.

When we go out and look for a vendor, we're looking for a partnership. So we're not looking for a vendor, we're looking for a partner.

On a scale of on to 10, I would give it a solid 9.9.

I work with our business units and they hand over a project to me. Then, I break it down and dissect it at the project level and break out all the features. Then, for each one of the features, I write all the user stories. Then, I coordinate with my software development team to get the work done for all of the user stories.

We take it through the entire process from the conceptual stage to the business of getting the work done and showing the business that we got it done.

I guess the main thing is that it allows us to pull all of our user stories and manage our agile process together for our agile team.

It enables us to document our epics and features and user stories all the way down to a fine level.

I'd say that there are a few things to improve.

On the main screen, I think it's called the Team Planning screen, it should be able to run a backlog. For example, if I have 300 stories in my backlog, it would be nice to be able to filter those out by project because that's the main place that I look at them and my team looks at them, and you get 300 stories out there for numerous projects for our team, because we work on 85 different applications. There are five or six primary ones, but the rest are back-end components.

We've got some technical stories for back-end stuff and we've got some continuous improvement items for our assisting applications. Within that backlog, to be able to have some type of filtering mechanism so that if I want to see all of the stories for a certain project, I can pull them out and view them, would be useful.

Right now, I have to scroll down through 300 stories and try to group them all together and find them and then, by the time I go and group them together, somebody's going to ask me to group them another way. Then somebody's going to say, "All right, well, can we prioritize them in that backlog?" Well we can, but then I've got to change all my groupings.

All this takes time. Basically, what I end up doing is just pulling those out, either copying, pasting or exporting them into a spreadsheet and then I'm back to managing them on a spreadsheet rather than in the tool and it's just time consuming.

There are certain things that I think I would like to add that would make my job or my function easier. One example is that they have different levels of access within the system and I do not have the highest access, so there are certain things that I can't do. There are other people within our organization that can modify the system or make certain changes, but I can't.

Also, for each one of the user stories, you can throw different tags on them so you can do searches or filters by those tags. Everybody can add a tag, and you can create new ones, but I'd like the ability to go in and modify and clean up those tags.
I've asked to get that access and they said I don't have the right level of security so then, it's a matter of working with somebody back and forth to try to get everything cleaned up.

For example, we have an internal system that we do a lot of work on. It's called Service Desktop. Well, there are about 10 different tags out there for Service Desktop; one of them is "Service Desktop", another one is "SD", another is "SERV D", etc.

Because we have multiple people working on this and they've created their own tags for their own stories on different things but they all mean the same thing, so, to me, it makes sense to have only one so that everybody is on the same page with that same one.

I would like to get it all cleaned up, so that when I do some sorting or filtering or running different reports and I'm basing it on a tag, I want to make sure that I've got everything and I don't even know all the different tags that are out there for Service Desktop.

If I had those abilities to make these changes or create some of the modifications or to build some of the panes and windows that I would like to see, I guess I would probably give the solution a higher rating.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. We typically pull in 15 to 25 user stories every sprint so maybe 100, 125 stories for a specific PSI, and it has no issues meanwhile.

I have never called the technical support in over three years.

We switched because in my organization we have multiple teams. I'm just on one team, we probably have another 12 to 15 teams that are working on projects, and this is just one centralized repository across our organization.

We have multiple sites, so everybody could use the same thing to put their work efforts into rather than individual spreadsheets where nobody could get access to them.

When we originally got the product, I basically had to take my workload and transfer it into CA Agile Central at the beginning and that took me a few days to get done, but after that, we just built everything right from there.

At my level, I didn't do the evaluating. One of our staff within the organization did. I had no idea if they looked at other options or not but I think they chose CA Agile Central because of the versatility and the ability to handle multiple teams in multiple locations. It seemed to work out to help all of us transform to the agile methodology.

Have a good plan, an overall plan, of the goals that you're trying to achieve. For those organizations that are going into CA Agile Central or going into agile or if you're currently doing agile, then do the following.

1. Go through a process of learning the system or having a handful of people learn the system so that they know it well.
2. Get the system customized because that's one of the strong aspects of CA Agile Central. We have a couple of CA experts within our organization and they connect directly with the folks at CA and make changes from time to time within the system.
3. Get all of your modifications and everything done up front and then start inputting the details and all of your teams and individuals and work efforts.
4. Just start using it!

To me, it was very simple. A very simple type of tool to use.

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.