Rally Software Reviews

We run our team and enterprise with Agile Tool. At the team level we determined and managed capacity, created tasks, and assigned hours to the tasks.

Reporting capabilities were better with CA Agile than VersionOne. Both were otherwise quite good. The primary reasons we switched were that our parent company used CA Agile, and that the solution has the built-in ability to track bugs. We still used Bugzilla though.

Easy drill down and drill up, creating a very user-friendly menu. The reporting on stories with features and without parent features was quite helpful to keep the enterprise clean.

Not as user friendly as VersionOne. At first I liked VersionOne better and was very disappointed in the switch. However, after a month or so I was quite happy with CA Agile.  

It has improved our ability to focus on less work, but do that work better and at a higher quality, than we were able to before. 

The main value that we get out of Agile Central is the transparency it allows us to provide, both from the team level all the way through the executive level within the company and the work that we are doing. 

We have been talking about improvements in the quality section of Agile Central. The quality section does allow you to do test cases and test sets, and all these things, but it does not integrate very well with the portfolio and feature side, which causes some challenges. 

We have not had any issues. 

We have had no scaling issues with Agile Central. We have worked anywhere from a couple of teams up to about 15 to 20 teams on Agile Central.

Technical support is very good, considering we have very rarely had to use it. The product has been very stable for us. We have not had a lot of technical support issues even to reach out and ask about.

The upgrades are very simple and straightforward. They generally get pushed out, and you choose whether or not you want to accept that upgrade early, or whether you are going to wait for the general release. 

As far as the initial setup, it can be challenging. There are a lot of options. There is a lot of configuration. There are a lot of decisions that you have to make on how you want Agile Central to work for your company. Those decisions can impact your flexibility in the future. With the initial setup, there is some thought that really needs to go into how you want to do it.

I would give it probably in the seven to eight range. In order to improve beyond that, I think there would need to be some simplification. The team-level side can be challenging and complicated. However, its ability to scale to portfolio and executive-level solutions really drives it up to that seven to eight score. It is something that I don't think there is a lot of other projects out there that allow you to take that from a team to an executive-level view.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: First and foremost, we are buying a product, but we are buying also the people and support. Probably the best thing we have had with Agile Central is not only the tool, but the people that support that tool, and the relationships we have been able to build there in order for us to further our Agile journey.

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 use Agile Center mostly to do two things: 

1. To manage my requirements and I have hundreds of thousands of requirements. 
2. My teams uses it for their daily agile management. They describe their user stories and track the progress of their projects.

We are a former customer before it was acquired by CA. In that time, we were using just a fraction of what was there. This year, we started having more implementation and moving into the newest version. This has allowed us to use some of the high-end features like the label hierarchy, and it is good so far.

The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. You have to adopt yourself to the kind of workflow that it comes with. It helps you shape the way you flow.

Right now, it is the idea of having everything in place for both information and my project in a single network. Everybody who has different kind of users take advantage of the go through from the development guys to the project managers to management staff. Everybody has such great perspective of what is going on. It is very helpful.

There was some evolution, and as we have this old on-premise, it does takes longer. However, this complex requirement management, having different perspectives and different ways to organize the hierarchy of things, that is something that we value. It looks like the tool is at the beginning of having this new kind of approach, and we expecting different things from it.

It could improve by being self-organizing: user stories, different hierarchies, and different perspectives. Not just as a single hierarchical structure, but something that can be multidimensional.

The stability is pretty good. I do not have any complaints about the abilities of on-premise version.

I do not have a bunch of users. I have not tried scaling it.

I use more the sales consultants than the technical support. The consultants are very knowledgeable. They should be more frequently available. I would like to have more of their presence, but their technical expertise and their willingness to help me is pretty good.

We were not using a previous solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

No, I am not thinking about changing. I need to have a lot of pain to start making changes.

There is an ongoing change that is happening. CA has implemented with Rally, so they are still in the early emerging process. I think the evolution and integration of the two with product solutions will come after it.

A solution is not more than a solution. It is a tool. It does not solve your problem. It is fixed by the tool. It is important to think about the problem that you are trying to solve to work with the consultants to come up with the right solution. The tool by itself could not solve your product issues.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: partnership. That is the most important thing. To be there when I need someone to be connected with the evolution of my processes when I have difficulty, both technical or on the business side. That kind of partnership is what I value the most.

Organizing all of our Agile work load, and projects that we have in the pipeline.

It's been good. I don't know that it's best suited for Kanban which is the Agile style that we're using. It seems a little more focused on Scrum. So having some more Kanban methodology built into the product would be nice, but it does allow us to move our stories along the board, and have a good visualization of where everything is in process. 

It probably would be mostly the visualization of what's in flight, and being able to move the cards across the board, and plan our releases based on completed work, which really is the goal of Kanban.

The most valuable feature is actually creating a field within there for architectural review. So when teams are struggling or have questions on the architecture or strategy that they take, they can actually flag that particular story, release, or project. Those can then be reviewed by the architecture team and the teams actually get additional information on how to course-correct, build on the architecture that we're trying to build throughout the organization, and get over road blocks much quicker.

I would like to see more Kanban support. As it stands, it doesn't seem to have the features or the layouts that the teams really need to be able to execute their tasks. It almost tries to force you into more of a Scrum style.

Stability is great. We rarely have problems with it.

The scalability is fine. We don't have a huge development team, so it doesn't really need to scale that big.

We were doing everything Waterfall at the time.

We were looking at two different products, CA Agile and JIRA, and it seemed like there was less customizability for CA Agile, and that was important because we didn't want to have all the teams doing different things. So the lack of customization was a selling point for us.

Also, the reporting, and being able to roll that up across the verticals, was an important selling point for us.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• the support that we can get
• the ease of upgrades
• just having software that works. 

Even though it's not part of our core business, a lot of the supporting tools need to work for us.

Having the right tools is important, but more important than that is actually the culture, the people, and the processes. Take a look at your culture, your people, your processes. Make sure that those are what you need them to be and then select a tool that is going to work well with those objectives in mind.

I have a couple of individuals on my team that help manage the utilization of CA Agile Central to make sure that we are being as mature as we possibly can for Agile practices.

Performance has been good. It allows for a lot of customization, which has been very helpful, because we pull key metrics, report up to our unit CIO on certain areas.

The benefit of the solution is enhanced visibility, that is probably the key one. And it provides data points to enable continuous improvement.

The ability, for example, to use the deep export report, and pivot tables and that kind of thing in Excel, has helped us out a lot.

It drives the conversation behind some of the pain points the teams have, based on the data that we're able to pull out of the system. As a result of that, we're able to make better decisions, to become better as a whole.

The customization and the dashboarding that is available. We utilize some of the customization we put into play to help the business see inputs versus outputs, because we obviously use Clarity as well as CA Agile Central. Just being able to correlate the amount of hours someone is working versus what work they're getting out of Rally has been helpful.

More customization capabilities would be helpful. Providing a little bit more structure around how the system should be set up in terms of the hierarchy structure might be helpful as well.

The stability has been good. I don't think we've really had any problems. There have been a couple of issues, but they've been on our side in terms of Okta, the single sign-on solution we use.

Scalability has been good. Again, the reporting, helps with it.

A couple of my direct-reports have used tech support, and it's been fairly useful. If we don't have the solution developed at the point of time when we ask, they are more than willing to help us get to that solution, from a customized perspective.

This was the solution that we had in place when I joined American Express - I'm a year into Amex. Seeing how teams utilized the solution when I initially joined, it wasn't streamlined, it wasn't something that we put much thought into. Creating a process to rally behind was, I think, a key aspect.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but the upgrade, yes. I think the upgrade itself was straightforward. The rolling out across the organization was the complex part. Communicating the new benefits of the upgrade, and that kind of stuff, has proved to be difficult.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria are the scalability and the availability of the data to us, to be able look at in the reporting aspects.

You need to have a good strategy in terms of rolling the product out, if its something that you're getting into the first time. Make sure you have a strategy surrounding how the team should use the product, what it should be used for. Some of the benefits, some of the sign posts for success, need to be set up along the way, as well.

Planning for the scrum team.

It has performed excellently.

It's the ability to bring visibility to the work. Previously we had another tool. Actually, it's a tool that I built, but it was limited in its ability to provide that start-to-finish visibility. And the traceability, from inception of the project to final test and deployment. Agile Central provides us that, not directly, but with its integrations to other tools in our tool chain, so that's a great help.

The visibility it brings to the plan, the ability to capture tasks, and trace them all the way through the life cycle. Providing that visibility helps both me and the team, or teams, to be able to understand where we are in the development process.

The navigation within the tool sometimes is a little tricky for me. I'm sure with more use, more practice, I'll become accustomed to it, but some of the things just aren't intuitive.

The tool is much more stable that I am. It's very stable. We've had no problems.

Scalability hasn't been an issue. I wish it were, but so far the adoption has been good. We have a ways to go before I would imagine that there would be any scalability issue.

I have not used tech support. We have an application administrator and he handles all that.

Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup, I do know that there was some complexity to it. But not terribly complex. It was not hard to do, because it is a SaaS solution. It was basically: Give us the URL and point us to the training, and that was it.

No, Agile Central, had been on our radar for quite a while.

For me, the most important criterion when selecting a vendor is finding a partner, versus just a vendor who's going to deliver a piece of software and wait for the money to come in.

Don't think just about the tool, but think about the entire lifecycle of the tool, or the lifecycle of your application development. That's very helpful.

We use it to track all of our work. We also manage our portfolio in it.

It works. It's a bit cumbersome to manage the Project Picker. As we sunset teams or projects close out - but we still have test cases tied to those teams or projects that are being used in other spaces - we have this monstrous list in the Project Picker that becomes really difficult to manage and find, and we can't clean that up ourselves. It would be nice if it was easier to do that and not lose your history.

There's familiarity. The teams have been using it for a while. Leadership is comfortable with it. That's huge. And from a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs.

Visibility of the data. If teams are tracking correctly and entering their information correctly, it's really easy to see where you're at, within your release, and whether you're on track or not. For our business model, we can't get everything out of the box, but we're a unique business so I understand that, but we know how to massage the reports to get what we need out of it. And so far it's done the best job for us.

I would like for workspace admins to be able to hide projects in the Project Picker and not lose any historical data; make them invisible to certain users, visible to certain users, depending on permission sets. That would be lovely. 

I'd like the ability to customize reports without having to incur Professional Services, or having to write my own code GitHub and then implement that as a custom report. That's untenable. It's not sustainable.

I think it's relatively stable. I've had very few instances where I've had an issue. I think CA is really good about communicating outages. Any troubles we've incurred generally haven't been on CA's side, it has been teams or functional managers not assessing impacts to anything they have in process that could be related to the outage that was communicated.

Scalability works well for us.

I've had pretty good responses with them. If I need help or we run into something that we believe may be a defect, I just open a ticket on the support site and I usually get resolution really quickly. 

There was one issue that we had where I was going to be out of town, and I'm the point of contact for our company, so I had to leave a person in the gap to get it to "done." And within a business day it was resolved. I was really happy with that because I was a little concerned.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are:

• It's got to work.
• It's got to be stable. 
• Cost, to be honest, is a huge factor. It's top three. It needs to be reasonable and affordable. I need to be able to make a business case and sell it to leadership, give them a reason why it's going to work better than what is currently in place. 
• We need reliable support.

I rate it a seven out of 10. I don't rate it higher because of the things I said I needed more autonomy in being able to change. And while I have really good results and feedback from CA Support, I wish that Accounts were as responsive to my needs as the Support side is. And I get that we're probably a small fish in their pond of Accounts, but we still need help getting our work done.

If I were to advise a colleague looking into similar solutions I would say it's a good tool. I'd want to talk to them more about what it is they're trying to accomplish to find out whether this is the best fit or if they want to use something a little different. Agile Central will cover a lot of needs for you, but maybe it's too much for what you need. So I would want to dig down deeper into their requirements to make sure it's the best fit.