Rally Software Reviews

The most valuable feature of this solution is the Kanban board. The team board that you can see, and enables you to capture the working agreements as well as the date and stage. Because that feature is not available in Jira, I found it useful. In terms of metrics, Rally assists you with capture, allowing you to better understand cycle time and lead time metrics. Those are the features of Rally that I really enjoy.

Rally has the ability to improve the features. We would like to see progress made against the features, probably in the form of a dashboard, where when teams complete stories, the features upload, and the stories are completed, and the feature about them gets updated with the progress. This is available in Jira but not in Rally.

That's something I would like to see because the management wants to see how far we have come with the epics and the features. They want a dashboard that would allow Rally to provide a picture to the leadership of the progress made on the epics and features.

There should also be an automation feature. When the last story in the feature is finished, the feature's status should be automatically updated.

The user interface can be improved. I still don't think the UI is as impressive as Azure DevOps or Jira.

The performance can still be improved.

Rally Software should develop an OKR framework that will allow OKRs to be recorded in Rally. That would be a win-win situation because there would be changes for Rally Software because there are other tools that are attempting to provide, the OKR option, and the tool to this Rally integration is difficult. Rally will be more successful if they can enable the OKR capturing or recording process.

We want Rally to generate OKRs, to allow teams to record the OKRs, and then the OKRs can be mapped to the epics and there is organizational alignment. The organization can execute those objectives using the team's backlog.

I have been working with Rally Software for the last three years.

Rally Software, is a stable solution.

Rally Software is scalable but could be better.

When we try to generate some reports, it takes a long time to load due to the increased number of users.

We did not contact Broadcom directly because everything is handled by the admin team. Whenever we have an issue, we contact the admin team, who then communicates with Broadcom's technical support.

I'm a co-chair and I don't get involved with fixing Rally issues. We explained the Rally issues to the admin team, and they will most likely interact with Rally support to get it resolved.

We also have experience in Jira.

I am not involved with the initial setup. Once we have been given access it is easy to navigate.

There is a Rally admin team that will set it up for us and grant access.

I understand it's a little more expensive. That is why many people prefer Jira.

If they want to compete in this market, they have to price their products reasonably, they must understand the competitive pricing of licenses. I believe it is on the high side.

Given the industry and what is happening in the industry with more organizations attempting to become product-centric, Rally Software is definitely attempting to accommodate a lot of changes.

They should adopt the OKR.  In my company, for my client, we are attempting to implement OKR.

I would rate Rally Software a seven out of ten.

Rally Software is typically used for dealing with all the scrum and agile principles and work orders. It keeps track of whatever workers do in the application development lifecycle before release.

The most valuable features of Rally Software are the executive dashboards, ease of use, and many other features. They have encapsulated everything that a GI can do, such as monitoring, maintaining, and then releasing. It's continuous integration and development. 

I have been using Rally Software for approximately six years.

Rally Software is stable.

The scalability of Rally Software is easy to do.

Our team typically handles all of the support for Rally Software. Only when there are some difficulties is when I come in to give assistance.

We have used Jira and Microsoft Excel previously.

I found Jira and Rally Software similar in functionality.

The initial setup of Rally Software is straightforward. In the beginning, there was more hands-on attention needed but after that, we were in operation.

We are always looking for a discount, if the solution was less expensive it would be a benefit.

My advice to others is when you use Rally Software every day, they must be more hands-on. The employees have to have a level of maturity for gaining knowledge of the software. They need to know what it can do, what it can't do, knowing the ins and outs of the software are important.

I rate Rally Software an eight out of ten.

It is used to track any enhancements or new integrations. We have integrations from mainframe systems to RESTful services. We also have a few SOAP integrations. Essentially, we use the feature level of Rally to document what the interface is and then the engineers make the user stories within the feature to represent the tasks that they need to do to complete the interface, which includes everything from making the design document to the activities that they do in IIB, such as deploying the code to production. Our version has probably been updated within the last three months.

It is kind of set up for Scrum or Agile, but we sort of use it more in a kind of hybrid way. It does help build accountability because, during stand-up, you have to see what everybody is doing, why certain things are in red, and why someone is not where he or she is supposed to be.

We use the roadmap features, and we're getting better at using dates to use the roadmap so that we can see if we're on target for work. 

What I don't like about it is that it is really hard to find old work to reference information and use the reporting section of the application in terms of trying to analyze trends. If I am trying to find out which interfaces took this long and I want to compare and measure improvement from one quarter to another quarter, the reporting mechanism within Rally is very troublesome. They have an Excel plugin that you're supposed to use, but you literally have to pull the raw data out before you can do the analysis. You can't do it within Rally, and if you can, it is a secret, and I don't know how to do it. It should have better, easier, and user-friendly reporting without having to use the Excel add-in.

It is very clunky. There is a lot of data in there, but it is not organized in such a way that makes it intuitive. You really have to kind of look for where do you put your documentation or dates. Some customization is available, but it is not plug-and-play like Jira. When I switched from TFS to Jira, I just went and started using Jira, whereas with Rally, you kind of have to really get in and figure out what you need to do before you set stuff up, or you're going to get yourself stuck. You can just start using Jira and be successful.

It is kind of hit and miss. Sometimes, it is really reliable. I'm not sure if the delays that we see intermittently when it hangs up are because we've all gone remote now, and there are different people with different types of remote devices. I don't know if they are because of Rally.

Different teams that I've been with in the same organization use different tools. I have used TFS and Jira. I would go back to Jira or TFS in a minute. I don't find Rally good for scaling what we're doing. A good percentage of this part of my organization does use Rally, but I don't find it conducive to building transparency across the organization. We should either have TFS, Jira, or Rally. However, because of the lack of reporting, Rally won't be suitable and scalable for the whole organization. People want to see and measure what teams are able to do, and if they can't do that quickly, senior leadership is not going to be on board. If every team had to dig as much as I have to dig, it is not scalable.

In terms of users, we have implementation consultants, which is kind of a hybrid role between a BA, a PM, and a QA. We also have engineers, application developers, business analysts, managers, project managers, and directors. We have senior leadership, like AVPs, who periodically go in there and look at stuff randomly, but for the most part, it is usually used by managers and frontline staff like myself. About 80% of teams in our business unit are using Rally. My team has 15, but the number is easily more than that.

I have not had to deal with them.

I would advise others to make sure that they have full training in terms of the connection between features, user stories, and epics. They should also fully understand how to configure it in terms of providing visibility across teams that have to work with each other.

I would rate Rally Software a six out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for agile project management. We use it to work on some of the challenges we have, including test management. 

The product has excellent customizable reports. There are some custom lists that are deployed in the recent version as well, which have proven to be useful to our organization.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any performance issues in that regard.

We have all the features we need. It's a good product in that sense.

The pricing, for the most part, is reasonable.

The scalability may need to be improved. We'll see within the next three to six months, as we test it.

The product needs to have more integration capabilities.

I've been using the solution for six or seven years or so. It's been a while.

The stability of the solution has been very good so far. We haven't dealt with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable.

I can't really comment on scalability. It seems to be suitable for our needs, however, we haven't tried to scale the product and therefore wouldn't really be able to comment on its capabilities.

We do plan to potentially scale in the next three to six months. At that point, we'll have a better sense of how it will handle an expansion.

I'm not sure how many users are actually on the solution at this time.

I, unfortunately, did not handle the initial setup of the product. Therefore, it would be hard for me to comment on if it was complex or straightforward. I don't have any direct knowledge.

The pricing of the solution is okay. It's reasonable. However, the licensing does increase according to the number of modules. Therefore, it can get expensive.

We are currently using the latest version of the solution right now.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We've been largely very pleased with its capabilities.

It's mainly about test cases and automation of data. I, as a test automation architect, collect all that data and show the metrics.

We were using Quality Center, Application Lifecycle Management, from Micro Focus. That is hosted on an Oracle Database, whereas Agile Central is completely built on web services. If I have to create some metrics, I can do it via simple web services. Web services can be used to pull the metrics and this is much faster. I don't have to write SQL queries to do so. It definitely saves time, perhaps something like 30 percent.

Also, if I had to track multiple teams in Quality Center, I needed to go through different containers. With this solution, I can just add all of them and see them together.

Also, the data is more granular when it comes to tasks, iterations, sprints, and releases.

Some of the services are open so that we can plug in some other tools as well. If I need to do some metrics I can use those services and a simple "get" request from them.

Reporting is much easier and faster than Micro Focus ALM, with CA AC built on web services.

One problem I see is that if there is a dependent user story - for example, if my team is working on one thing and there is a dependent user story from another team - we can have a dependency created but we don't know if there is a change of status from the other team. That is something which is very important for Agile Central to look into so that if the other team makes any changes we will be notified as well.

As of now, we get an email alert but that's not sufficient. We can overlook it. What I'm suggesting is that they have something which populates on the team level so Team One and Team Two can communicate on dependent user stories. That would be really helpful.

In addition, reports are confined to teams. For example, I have five to six teams under me, if I have to pull a report, it will be mapped to a single team. I have to pull five teams' reports and then consolidate them to see what the metrics are. I don't have an option to actually add multiple teams to one report.

Finally, it's not capable of some things such as CI/CD. Agile Central is still not there. For CI/CD you need a separate tool and a separate repository called a GitLab. Then you need to run that through a continuous integration called Jenkins. I want to see a holistic approach when you're going with DevOps. There should be just one enterprise tool which is capable of all these things. As of now, Agile Central is just a test management tool.

The stability is good. I haven't faced any problems up until now. It has never hung. The Quality Center tool would hang. It has some client installation components but Agile Central is all on the server side. So it is much faster.

The scalability is definitely good because for a company like ours, with a huge amount of data month over month and year over year - with every release the data piles up. We are not going to delete any of the historical data. So far the scalability is good.

I have not contacted technical support.

But there is a voting option available for customizations. If I need an additional field or something needs to be enabled, if more than 60 percent of users vote for it, the CA team will enable that. They have responded well to these types of requests so far.

We were using Quality Center, Application Lifecycle Management. The reason for the switch is a decision taken by our leadership team and I don't have any insights into it. Perhaps it was licensing cost.

If you compare Quality Center vs Agile Central, the latter is much better.

It has helped save time, especially when it comes to testing. Uploading a bulk of test cases is much faster. And if the leadership team wants to get any insight from the metrics, pulling in metrics is not so difficult. That is something which I, personally, feel is great when compared with our previous tool, Quality Center.

This solution will be of benefit to somebody who has knowledge of and understands web services, as it is built on web services - Representational State Transfer (REST). 

In our organization, we have about 400-plus users of Agile Central. It is used by the development managers, QA managers, architects, delivery managers, and scrum masters. These are all stakeholders in it.

Across our organization, everyone, including the development team, is following the Agile methodology. We are yet to get into DevOps. Agile Central is the tool which even other departments, like testing, are using.

Overall, I would rate Agile Central as an eight out of ten because of its performance. It doesn't get a ten because of the dependency issue which they need to resolve. And, on the whole, the tool needs to have more of a holistic approach for everything, such as CI/CD and a test management tool. As of now, it is still confined to being only a test management tool.

I was previously using it as a scrum monitor for the team. It helps with billing and the IT team used it, as well. I am very satisfied with this product. 

CA Agile is a product that really needs more than 100 teams working on it. It works best in big organizations. It definitely streamlines workflow for many users in tandem.

The program management is one of the most valuable features in the bank I work for. I was able to create epics for our budgeting concerns and it helped me link everything together. 

I think there is a missing link with the development activity. Some developers are pushing in new versions of the code, but you cannot make the link from the user story to a specific application version.

It is stable.

We are a big company. We have about 170 teams, and we find it scalable. It has been used for more than 1500 people at our company.

I have experience with JIRA. I find Agile has an easier UI. Furthermore, JIRA was more of an IT tool, and Agile has both IT and business capabilities.

It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company. 

When considering a new solution, I always consider:

• UI
• Price

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. 

Execution of software development.

• Plans and prioritizes to quickly deliver value. 
• CA Agile Central provides visibility into how teams are meeting business objectives.
  

CA Agile Central helps the entire organization run like one powerful team. With the Project and Portfolio Hierarchy, we can have deep visibility into the work our teams are doing and how it ties to our business strategy and customer value. 

CA Agile Central does not have a workflow tool included. If possible, it may be necessary for some companies that this type of feature be included.

Now, it delivers quarterly releases and has reduced the backlog, thereby increasing feature velocity while keeping the quality high.