Rally Software Reviews

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.

• Logging user stories
• Listing tasks
• Estimating and tracking work in progress (WIP) for each project

These features are most valuable to me because they are useful for my job functions. I’m a software developer and I use these features more than any other features of this tool.

It helps us to track work in progress for each project and for each user story. We can also learn project details from a high level.

The search feature may need some improvements. Sometimes it is hard to pull a specific user story just by adding the user story number. It is not straightforward to search for a specific user story using its ID number.

My suggestion would be to add a search button. In this way, the user could search for a specific user story based on a given user story ID number, or on the user story description.

I don’t think that I’ve seen this option. Even if it is there already, it is not intuitive to the end user.

I have used this solution for around two and a half years.

There were no stability issues. However, I have not used this tool extensively enough to comment on this topic.

There were no scalability issues. However, I have not used this tool extensively enough to comment on this topic.

Initially, we were using an internal tool within our company.

What I like the most about Agile Central is that it is the only system I need to have full control and visibility of our entire body of work plus the activities and processes required to deliver it. This visibility is particularly good from a high-level portfolio view to individual tasks, staff.

There are few customisation options. For instance, the workflow for story cards cannot be changed out of the box from the standard (Defined, In-Progress, Completed and Accepted). However, this will not be a big problem for most organisations that follow a standard scrum framework.

The issue is mostly relevant to team using Kanban boards with customised workflows. A very common flow for instance is: To Do - > Analysis -> Development -> Testing -> Completed. So teams wanting to bring that kind of workflow to Rally will not be able to our of the box. And Rally will rightly discourage that kind of workflow.

And I’ve seen teams doing Scrum that have added additional columns to their workflows such is “Waiting” or “Blocked” and other not having the “Accepted” column.

Rally of course offers other options to manage blocked stories/tasks so perhaps the “improvement” tag might not be entirely fair. They do offer the functionality so what I was referring to was the ability to customise that functionality to more personal preferences.

I have used Agile Central for close to one year.

We have not had any stability issues. The system is web-based and hosted by CA. There is very good communication around system maintenance and upgrades.

We haven’t had any issues with scalability. We have increased our user base seamlessly.

We haven’t really required much technical help as things have worked as expected. The CA Agile Central website provides updates on maintenance schedules or any other unplanned outage. When we have required help on how to use the tool, the CA Agile Central team has been quick to respond with solutions or suggestions.

Team Foundation Server (TFS) was quite suitable for us when we started to use agile as a delivery methodology, but as our maturity increased, the need arose for a more sophisticated tool to give us better visibility and control and CA Agile Central has certainly given us that.

Setup was very simple actually. There is some work required upfront to define standards, best practices and governance on how to use the tool but CA Agile Central itself was very straightforward to set up. Everything is web-based and very intuitive. We had a CA Agile Central coach here for a few days and that was enough for us to get started.

Licensing depends on a few things. The assessment starts by looking at your portfolio of work, number of projects, resource profiles, etc. Then you need to assess the level of maturity the organisation has around agile. Teams should not be forced to start using agile methodologies if they are not willing and ready, so you might want to start with a small pilot.

We evaluated JIRA and also looked at the TFS roadmap for future improvements and upcoming features.

The most important thing is to have very clear requirements as an organisation. That includes having all the internal processes, governance and ways of working well understood so that the selected tool can be assessed against those requirements with confidence.