Rally Software Reviews

I am a software tester, so the features I found that are valuable to me are importing of test cases, creating new test cases, editing test cases, executing test cases, and generating test reports.

Creating test cases is important to me because it allows to me write test cases in an MS Excel spreadsheet and quickly import them into CA Agile Central, saving me a lot of time having to manually rewrite the test cases.

Editing of test cases is also very important because I can quickly make changes to reflect changes in the user stories.

Generating reports is a great tool and is very important because I can create a test case and results, and share with other members who don’t have CA Agile Central access.

Using CA Agile Central, my organization was able to develop, test, and deploy software much quicker than we used to under the waterfall methodology.

The ability to customize reports needs improving by providing users with features for selecting what they want to see on the reports, how they want to lay out the reports, and create a schedule for a report to be generated automatically and sent by email.

When I create a custom report (see below screen), I want to be able to have my report run automatically once a day and email the scrum master.

We have used this solution for over five years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have never had to use technical support.

I am not aware of any other previous solutions.

• Real-time status tracking
• Capacity planning
• Ease of configuration of reports and dashboards
• Iteration and release planning
• Ability to personalize views
• Ability to see vital information in one screen as opposed to having to navigate to multiple pages

Capacity and resource planning help us understand how much work an individual can accommodate per sprint and if any one person is over-allocated.

Release planning is made simpler by the Agile Central interface.

Honestly, I can’t think of any areas that need improvement.

I have been using Agile Central for four and a half years.

Once or twice in a couple years we experienced outages, but not frequently.

I have used Agile Central in small organizations, as well as large organizations working in a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) environment.

I have never had to use technical support.

I have not previously used another solution, but I have to use JIRA now and I would rate JIRA a 3/10 compared to Agile Central at a 10/10.

I was not an admin of the tool, so I’m not sure how complex the application setup was.

I don’t know about the pricing.

I was not in charge of making the decision to purchase the product.

There are so many high-value features it is hard to choose but I will say the most valuable feature is the fact that it provides traceability from the strategic objective to task level with rolled up and detailed reporting. This is valuable as activity is joined up from top to bottom; a developer in a feature team can trace their input at the task level all the way up the hierarchy to the strategic objective they are helping to deliver. On the flip side, the CTO can have a view of real-time progress against the delivery of strategic objectives, drill down to the portfolio epics and business outcomes with the potential to see the value being delivered.

It has enabled the transition from a project-based portfolio to a product-based portfolio.

It could do with a wider range of colours for cards and the Kanban features need some improvement (which I know is on the way this year). The colour swatch for cards in Kanban board views is quite limited; I think there are 9 possibilities. Using these to visually differentiate cards on a busy board becomes less valuable when multiple themes are sharing a card color.

Kanban features should be built around flow, which implies they should not be constrained by time boxes. This is of particular relevance when considering many of the views that, by design, require one to select a time box. This is also true of reporting. There are some things to consider, though, as when viewing a personal or team board, one doesn’t want to see the entire backlog, so it would be useful if that could be limited to a user-defined number of stories.

I have been using Agile Central for seven years.

We have never had stability issues in seven years of use.

It is the most scalable product of its kind out there.

Technical support is excellent.

I have used JIRA, Trello and IBM Rational, but none of them are close to Agile Central.

Initial setup was very straightforward and guided by CA consultants.

If you want the very best, expect to pay accordingly. But you will get ROI from it, especially if you are doing agile well and at scale.

In my current role, the firm evaluated JIRA, Agile Central, VersionOne and IBM Rational (I think).

You will only regret it if you have chosen the Rolls Royce when you could have got by with a Nissan Micra.

The UI/UX of the tool is good with friendly navigation.

We can track of our tasks and project estimations.

It’s a good tool to use. Charts and dashboards should be more interactive.

I have used Agile Central for over two years.

Stability is good.

Scalability is good.

I rate technical support 8/10.

I used to use JIRA.

Setup was easy.

They should go for it.

I evaluated JIRA.

They should definitely use it.

The most valuable feature is that it follows the agile methodology more than ALM or JIRA. However, I know companies using more than one tool, separating test management and requirements, which I agree to.

Currently, I would prefer to use QAComplete by SmartBear to track test cases, since CA Agile Central doesn’t work well with reporting on that level or for that matter on any level.

One of the jobs that I adopted was to design procedures using CA Agile Central. In the beginning, without a procedure (not sure if the online help has much “method” suggestions, which it should), it does allow the agile process to be followed easily from features > user stories > team capacity > sprint sizing > test management and defect management. If properly used, it can be an amazing tool relaying to scrum masters, project managers and for all management levels to show exactly how a sprint is going. I will say the CA Agile Central Excel plugin is great for real-time extraction of data, i.e., if you know how to use it correctly, and out-of-the-box you will not know the hidden tricks that I have learned. But, CA Agile Central Support is actually very good.

On the test case level, I feel there are a couple fields missing, i.e., I cannot easily create a day-over-day report. I cannot find out what is planned for the QA team, as I cannot track what is “ready”, or as to the day when it’s planned to execute.

I have been using this solution for one and a half years now.

No outages have yet been experienced.

There are always latency issues when accessing anything in CA Agile Central Portfolio Manager; it takes a good 10 seconds to load. This isn’t only due to concurrent users, it can be the case at 1 AM when no one is on. It hasn’t been that much of a nuisance.

I would rate the technical support a 10/10. The funny thing is that I didn’t care much for the CA Online Support. I didn’t know there was a ticket support system. However, once I did, my goodness they were great in returning answers.

We did previously use HPE ALM. HPE ALM didn’t produce much of good reporting, yet neither does CA Agile Central. Plus, the agile process was all wrapped up in CA Agile Central, so we decided in our department not to maintain two tools. Other departments and UHG do use both tools, and some HPE ALM still.

The setup was very simple; it was probably easier than HPE ALM.

One major problem when obtaining CA Agile Central is ensuring the framework is exactly what you want. Many don’t look at this aspect and later realize that they have lost traceability and that they should have created a dropdown menu instead of free text (i.e., there is a defect found in the free text field – this should be a code drop version, adaptable by iteration). Yet, I’m still not sure at the moment what is and what isn’t adjustable since I’m not an admin. However, from what I did hear is, when something changes, it may change the enterprise and not just the project; not sure about that yet though.

Count the cost! Find out what you have in place and how much longer you are charged for and then compare this to your budget. I find it a big waste in having too many tools, but it really matters as to what you want to see and how much you want to maintain. For example: With the SOP that I created for using CA Agile Central, I can create almost perfect reports from Excel. However, the problem here lies in Excel! You need manual intervention to formulate and macro out the data, thus involving more costs.

Only afterwards did I evaluate other options, since I was not a decision-maker; they already owned HPE ALM and CA Agile. SmartBear QAComplete is a great tool and probably my number 1 choice, i.e., if I had the choice. It also works with SoapUI, XML, Selenium and manual scripts.

I would consider it highly. Be sure what you want to accomplish; it’s not reporting-friendly. It is good with team burndown and sizing.

Although, it’s agile-based, it’s not like HPE ALM that informs you via emails when something changes, i.e., even if you enable notifications, it’s fluky, as you get more emails than needed. CA Agile Central has a dashboard per user feature, as to when logged in that must be viewed.

The key thing is process! You must know how it works and how you want to use it, before you implement it. To be honest, there is only one way to use it that I have identified above.

The most valuable features for me as a developer are Iteration Planning and Iteration Tracking.

• Iteration Planning is very helpful for the team during planning sessions. It shows the exact picture of where we are and what is coming.
• Iteration Tracking is a very useful dashboard that shows the status of the stories and details what they are about.

This is the only tool our team is using for tracking and monitoring agile projects (features, stories, tasks and use cases). It’s stable, easy to navigate and fast. It’s not overwhelming with details and fields, but provides necessary placeholders to keep all the information needed for the project and have a picture where we are and what is coming.

I would say use cases is an area with room for improvement. I found it a bit cumbersome and not so easy to grasp a global picture. Some teams prefer to track use cases through the HPE QC tool, keeping the rest in CA Agile Central.

We are using CA Agile Central since the beginning of 2016.

We had a lot of stability issues; however, all of them were solved during Summer/Fall 2016. Recently, it’s been stable and provides the necessary functionality.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I haven’t dealt with technical support.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The setup was done for us already.

I wasn’t the one to decide which solution to adopt. However, I like CA Agile Central as the choice of our management.

Go for it. It’s a nice tool to use.

The product is very intuitive to use, which drastically reduces training and onboarding time with new employees. It is highly customizable, which is both good and bad.

CA Agile Central helps us plan, organize, schedule and prioritize hundreds of feature requests into our release calendar. There is simply no way we would be able to release as many new products, enhancements or defect fixes without it!

Customization can be a bit complicated but it is a highly customizable tool, which has its own significant benefits. It just takes a bit of practice working through the tool and its many options.

You need to use caution when adding custom fields as you can only disable them once created; you cannot delete a custom field.

Overall, standard/canned reporting options are probably the weakest part of the platform but exporting a data dump for reporting outside of the tool is very easy.

Rally/CA Agile Central has been in use at our organization for eight years.

We are a hybrid SDLC/agile shop and use the tool heavily to support our release planning and execution plans. We did adapt our SDLC process to use the terminology in the tool (Features, User Stories, Tasks and the Portfolio Hierarchy). We have people build features under a portfolio hierarchy which creates our master backlog. We assign built features across various releases to build our deployment schedule.

We use CA Agile Central with the following enabled modules:

• Integration Hub
• CA Agile Central Portfolio Manager
• CA Agile Central HP Quality Center Integration
• CA Agile Central IBM ClearQuest Integration
• CA Agile Central Idea Manager
• CA Agile Central Quality Manager
• CA Agile Central Support Manager
• CA Agile Central Time Tracker
• SSO
• IP Restriction
• Extension Whitelist

As with any cloud-hosted, SaaS model, we occasionally run into unscheduled downtime but they are usually able to switch data centers quickly where there are issues. They also maintain a system status page to monitor maintenance and repair time/updates.

The tool scales effortlessly. The only drawback is if we wanted to create a new workspace because migrating existing data between workspaces is difficult, especially if heavily customized.

The technical support is outstanding! We have a rep who contacts us quarterly to review what’s new and what’s in their development pipeline. Online and the web knowledge base answers most questions. Support is quick and easy to access and they turn-around tickets quickly, most times on the first call. They also helped us with building custom reports, pages and add-on apps.

I don’t know of any previous solutions, as this tool was here well before me.

I built out the most recent workspace and it was pretty easy after a week or so of trial and error, but that was mostly getting our portfolio hierarchy structure right.

Pricing is competitive for what you get even at the most basic level. It reflects a typical SaaS model of pricing/licensing.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

If you are an agile or even hybrid agile shop, this is an excellent tool. If you are a more traditional PM or waterfall model, it may not be your best option. It’s really built to support agile methodologies.

There are multiple valuable features of this product and the most important for me is the section related to bugs. It helped me during this time to keep track of all the bugs that the app has, the status of each one and at the same time, we were able to keep notes for each element. In addition, the ability to add the concerned developer as a watcher, so in this way if the bug is not fixed, then they would be notified.

This product had helped my organization so much because it helped us keep everything tracked.

We are now able to predict each team member's capacity in a single click.

We use the report to see if we are going to reach our deadlines and we are able to easily make decisions thanks to the available reports.

I think the only area that needs improvement will be the front end. It is very good as is but I think it could be better as the colors are a little faded.

I have been using this solution for almost a year and a half.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I have never contacted the support.

I have used multiple tools before CA Agile Central. I switched because in CA, everything was in the same platform and it is a pretty intuitive tool. I didn’t need any tutorial, as I did for the other tools.

The setup was pretty intuitive.

I don’t have a lot of information about the pricing because I had the IT team handle that for me.

Give it some time. It is very difficult to change this kind of tool, especially when you are in the middle of a project. However, I would advise people implementing it to take their time to check all the different functionalities and think about how to use it effectively.

It has everything that I need in my daily job routine.