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. 

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.

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.