Rally Software Reviews

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.

Previously, we had an in-house solution that was very difficult to update and customize. Thus, when we had acquired new businesses that we were working with, we weren't able to add the right type of information that we needed or get the right type of support and customers. We weren't recording half of all our new work that was coming in through my team because we couldn't do it. So, when we started using CA Agile Central, those changes could be made in a day or two and we had better data integrity, than my team had ever had before.

Since we went through a series of work changes in the last two years, the most valuable feature is how easy it is to customize it. The ability to customize and change the processes really quickly, so as to respond to what the changes of the organization and processes, were the most helpful.

It takes a very long time to load and, if you make some small changes, then the whole page has to reload. I know that's a major frustration for a lot of people using the tool.

I know that they're constantly updating and providing new features. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I set it up for two different teams. By using it in it's most standard and straightforward route, it is definitely a ten out of ten. However, working at the portfolio feature level, which is what my main team did, there were some functionalities that were missing and over the last two years, I've seen more and more of it come along the way. I would have liked to have the same development support at the portfolio feature level as well, that I was seeing at the user story level.

We are facing some stability issues. This is a pretty regular occurrence, especially when using custom reports.

I've not necessarily put the scalability factor to test yet, but the nice thing is once you have a small handful of people using it, the number of people and information in it has tripled over the last couple of years. So, it was scalable for us in that sense and then, also in terms of the number and diversity of customers, as I mentioned. It's been good in the sense, that we've needed it but I don't think we've really put it to the test.

I had a question when looking into custom scrums and I think, the overall community for CA Agile Central is incredible. Not only does our organization have people here, but there's a wealth of information online as well. When we reached out for technical support via the CA Agile Central team at our organization, when we had some particular requests, they were absolutely incredible. We really liked the tool because it's really easy to learn and there's a really good community.

As I have mentioned eslewhere, we had an in-house solution and before that, it was all managed via Excel spreadsheets. Excel was the worst of it all. The in-house solution was only good enough maybe for the first couple of months, until one or two or more changes came along, that we couldn't afford to keep up with. That's definitely one of the main reasons as to why we switched, since we couldn't keep up with the updates. If we say that CA Agile has stability issues, that again are not poor, but it just takes a while to load, then, our in-house tool was significantly worse.

I thought that the setup was very straightforward, but we also had people on the side of our organization, i.e., a dedicated team, to help get everything set up smoothly. My team intended to change a few things about how you would traditionally use the product. I set it up for two different teams. When I used everything in the straightforward way, it was very easy. When we were modifying and customizing some things for my team, then it got a bit more complicated; just to get my head around the rules and then, having to manipulate them. So, the setup is very easy when the product is being used as it's meant to. When we were manipulating things, it got a little more complex. However, we were able to work through it relatively easily, because of the support that we had.

I evaluated about half a dozen of the other vendors out there and one of them was JIRA, for portfolio management. JIRA was the other top competitor, although we did evaluate other small vendors as well. CA Agile Central was much better. We actually had a relationship on JIRA's side, but I was the first one to venture into the CA side, as we didn't have the relationship in my team. However, CA Agile was just a far more superior product, as compared to what JIRA was able to offer then.

It is important to truly understand it! In order to use it the best way that you can, you really have to understand your process, terminology and the way that CA Agile Central is meant to be used. We had a lot of issues with the terminology; for example, at what level should we be, does this count as a user story, does this count as a feature, etc. So, it is crucial to really do all that work in the beginning and to map out everything meticulously, so as to make sure that the definitions are clear. After that, setting up of the process becomes much easier; but, if there's a lot of back-and-forth in terms of the definition, the setup and adoption will be much more difficult.

This product provides easy storage and accessibility to share documents and objects.

Personalization of the dashboard and its design are the most valuable features of this solution.

There were no stability issues.

Sometimes it takes a few seconds to scale, such as when changing the size of Windows.

This tool was already present before I started working here.

The setup was easy.

It takes time to configure and clear the dashboard to make it useful.

• The ease of user provisioning, i.e., bulk provisioning via API
• The configurable Portfolio Management and parent-child relationships
• The object classification (tags/colors)
• The seamless integration with many other systems such as Salesforce and GitHub
• Consistent uptime
• Rapid response support

Team collaboration is made easy and effective to meet business initiatives, while tracking progress across all the solution groups, regardless of their geographical location.

• The Reporting feature can improve, especially around executive summaries and dependency mapping.
• One report that would be especially useful is a Release Dependency report that displays the relationship of dependencies, across release trains. Currently, Agile Central will show you respective dependencies, but only if they exist within the same release train.
• CA Agile is hosted on a multi-tenant server, which prevents duplicate user names to coincide. This has become bit of an issue, in terms of provisioning users that had demo accounts in the past. In our experience, when provisioning a user who held a demo account with their company's email address, we had to reach out to the user to have them rename their old demo account. This opens the door for us to then proceed with the account creation.

I have used this solution for four years.

CA Agile Central is very reliable, in terms of consistent uptime. We have, however, encountered site latency during peak times of activity (far and few).

There were no scalability issues experienced by us, to date. We had a user base of 500 in 2015, and will have 3,000 by the end of 2017. We have not encountered any noticeable limitations.

The support staff at CA is excellent! They are very responsive and work to resolve any requests or issues, within a time span of a day on the average.

Previously, we were using VersionOne. CA Agile offers a more structured model of Portfolio Management.

VersionOne tends to offer a more open and free configuration setup, in terms of creating portfolio items. For example, in VersionOne, you can create child features, and then produce another set of child features for each parent feature. It is nearly impossible to restrict a portfolio model that allows for consistent reporting.

In Agile Central, you can configure and define your portfolio structure in the administrative console. Each child must roll-up to its assigned parent, i.e., Task > User story > Feature > Epic > Initiative (bottom-up).

The initial setup of Agile Central was straightforward and very repeatable. If you get it right once, the process to scale your subscription is consistent and efficient.

The license costs are fairly high as compared to some of the other solutions out there. CA Agile Central licenses are “one shoe fits all”, i.e., in terms that a Viewer license is the same price as an Editor or Project Administrator license.

A tiered pricing model would be a better approach. For example, the cost of the Viewer's license would be less ($) as compared to the cost of the Editor's license ($$).

CA Agile Central has worked very well in our ever-growing, agile-centric organization. If you’re looking to implement an agile development solution that scales extremely well and is backed by solid performance, stability, and an outstanding support team, this is the solution for you!

We recently went through a rigorous analysis across ALM tools in an effort to justify the continued use of the Agile Central, in comparison to the alternative solutions. CA Agile Central was chosen hands down, as our one and only ALM development tool across our enterprise!

It is the only solution that we are using now for all of the project management activities in our organization.

This tool is basically used for our IT project management in our organization.

In regards to the customization part, sometimes it is not understandable. Things are not so clear, such as how to customize it for our needs. We need to have a lot more user-friendly options.

Most of the things are associated with the user-friendly options. Currently, the reporting and matrix connections are a little bit sketchy.

There should also be a lot of customization opportunities, especially being able to add additional filters for the project management. If those things improved, it would make this tool more beneficial for us.

In my current organization, I have been using this solution for three years.

We did not encounter any issues. The stability is good.

In terms of the scalability, not many issues were experienced.

I've never used technical support. Most of the things are always working all of the time.

Before CA Agile, we were using HPE Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HPE Quality Center software.

HPE was mostly for waterfall and this CA solution was more for agile. That is the reason why we switched to the CA tool.

For the ALM tool, they are still implementing the agile part, so the full functionality was not available on ALM's side.

The setup was complex. We have a very big connection, extremely big. Everything is complex.

I was not involved in any evaluation process because we are an organization level division. We have nearly 20,000 developers in the IT support team and most of them use this tool. This tool's implementation in the enterprise was from the senior management level.

It is easier to:

• Create a new iteration
• Add new user stories
• Copy from the old user stories
• Add tasks
• Search for user stories

The agile methodology has made it easy for all disciplines of software development such as the developer, QA, software architect (SA), and the product owner. Thus, anybody can open up CA Agile Central and find out what they need. That has improved our productivity. It is easy to use this tool.

When you open up a user story, consider opening it up as a modal/dialog box on the top of the page, rather than splitting up the screen. In my opinion, if it opens up by splitting up the screen, then it becomes hard to read.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

In my previous company, I used JIRA. In my current company, I am using CA Agile Central. I found CA Agile Central to be more user-friendly.

The setup was quite straightforward.

Please go ahead and try it out. It is a good product.

The dashboard and planning board are the most valuable features. These help me track the progress of my user stories.

I can review my pending tasks daily. In this manner, I can organize my day-to-day work.

In terms of the loading speed, sometimes I have noticed that the website takes a long time to go over to the Planning Board for the user stories. However, this could be a network issue.

When creating a task, sometimes the Description field is left empty, either because the user is missing or it is a mistake. However, there is nothing in the tool that makes us aware about this missing field. The tool should post some kind of warning message indicating that the Description field is empty.

I have been using this product for approximately 30 weeks.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

It is the first agile tool that I have used.

The initial setup was easy to carry out.

The pricing policy is transparent for me.

There is a need for some training, but overall, it is easy to use this solution.

The part that I like the most is that we can filter the defects and user stories. We use the reporting features at our own convenience. We use different types of filters and they help us a lot in finding anything we want.

This solution saves us lots of time and it is central for everyone. Everyone can see the revisions whenever anyone has made any sort of change.

For example, if there are changes in the user story, we can track it. That's very useful for us, because in regards to the test cases, we have all the results available for us.

One feature that can be improved is the extraction and importing of reports. It should be easier and should be available everywhere.

For example, we have applied all kinds of filters. If we want to extract that report only, then we should be able to extract that part.

Also, we have placed a certain number of test cases in the folder and we should also be able to extract that report from there as well.

I have used this solution for around two years.

There were no stability issues. It is very rare that we are not able to access the CA Agile solution.

In around two years, we have only faced this issue one or two times. Otherwise, it is up and working fine.

There were no scalability issues.

In regards to the technical support, they can improve and make the procedure easier. In order to import/export any reports or test cases, we have to create certain queries. They should be more user-friendly.

The setup was easy.

We have compared it with JIRA, the other agile-friendly tool. However, we find this solution better.

I would recommend that you use this product for your productivity.