Rally Software Reviews

We use Agile Central to record all our user stories, features, and then to track down the burndown, velocity, defects.

My launch. How soon or how fast can I go to production, is what this helps me design.

From a solution perspective ,we use the Burndown to see whether the velocity for the entire sprint is okay or not. Am I going, did I pass? Do I need to prioritize? How many impediments do I have? What does my backlog look like? Have I taken up enough in that given sprint? Will I be able to deliver all that? It helps me track that down.

Primarily, producing more meaningful dashboards is what we have given to them, saying "customizable." 

Customized reporting, so that rather than going to them, if I can produce my own UI, that would be meaningful.

The solution is stable. 

Scalability is good. Based on what we have done so far, it is scalable. No problems faced so far.

We have a solution group as well, Testing Services within our organization. If we are looking for any modification within the tool, we can go to them saying, "Okay, when the tool came in it had a particular layout of, say, 100 fields. But based on my requirements, I want to improvise that, I don't need them. Eighty fields are good, but the remaining 20 fields I want to change over to this, make it more meaningful, more for my own organization. Customization.

So when we go to the Testing Services group, they take their time to have it implemented on Agile Central and then we pull a report. For example, the Defect Dashboard. Now, the Defect Dashboard came with some basic things. My anticipation regarding the Defect Dashboard is, I need to see more details, like what was the root cause, sub-root cause. I track it down to that level. So that customization we can easily do. That makes it helpful.

As I said, we have a Testing Services group, so we just give our requirements to them. If they needed to contact CA for any sort of modifications the would have done that. We don't know.

We don't directly interact with the CA technical team. We talk to our technical team and they might internally talk to them.

What we used to do in, say, HPE Quality Center, is now getting done Agile Central.

As a Scrum Master, helping the product group define feature stories, and portfolio management, and helping manage the teams, their scrum backlogs, their performance, and velocity.

It has performed well.

It helps us not to have to use any sticky notes. We project up every day, on a daily standup using the iteration planning part of it, and using the post-it portion of it in the Kanban, to communicate daily with the team on how things are going. 

It helps me to have a dashboard where I can see what things are not being worked on, what things are blocked, for instance. It helps me evaluate teams' historical performance using velocity charts. 

Capacity planning and release planning for the next PI help me figure out what the potential velocity is for each of the teams. It rolls it up, so that across teams we can figure out how many features we think we can get in for the next PI. 

And we've actually used it for virtual PI planning as well. We have teams in different locations, and we actually virtually do PI planning, big-room planning, using the tools so it's been really helpful there.

I like all the features of it, especially the Team Planning board, and the Release Tracking. It helps us track the features and stories that line up with those features. I like it for the most part, and how it works.

I can't think of any off the top of my head.

I have found it to be fairly stable. I know there have been a couple performance issues when we're all on it, but I think that was maybe about six months ago, maybe when we went to the cloud. But since then I haven't experienced any performance issues. I think that's really gone down.

It scales well in terms of setting up the workspaces and the hierarchy, we find that that works really well.

We've used tech support very little. But we're satisfied with the support we've received.

We were using Team Foundation Server (TFS). But some people were using JIRA, so there really wasn't a consistency there. We switched because it was really determined that it was probably the best tool out there to use.

It was actually pretty straightforward, and it did seem more intuitive than what we were using, which was TFS from Microsoft.

When our company is looking for new products, and new vendors, the criteria is more of a consensus, or global acceptance across the board, and executive support. I'm sure price tag comes into play.

I give it an eight out of 10. I tend not to give anything a 9 or a 10, because I always think there is probably room for improvement on it, not that I can't think of anything right now. It's not perfect, but it's definitely very good.

I would tell colleagues looking for a similar solution that Agile Central is very easy to use, and it's easy to build dashboards. It's very intuitive. I'd recommend it.

To manage our work in a common way.

In terms of performance, we're just getting started on it. No issues so far.

It helps me plan the work. Also helps me plan an estimate of how soon or how far out we'll be able to deliver something. Those are big things.

• Visibility across the team
• Ability to see the team's capacity - how much free time, how many deliverables

It could use some templates and patterns that we can follow. There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but something for the Kanban side, I'd really appreciate that.

I don't have a comment on this because we've just started to use it. From what I've heard from other users, it seems like a good, stable product.

We were looking for a tool to support our work, to support our process, especially in the Kanban area. Without that, we started to use Excel, we started to use SharePoint but, really, they were not giving us value, the visibility. Then we started to look for something which is specifically made for supporting this kind of process.

When our company is looking for a new vendor we float an RFP; there is a set of criteria, we get together, list down all the requirements that we have. Any tool that we look for we look for, we typically look at four different vendors, four different tools, and try and compare them.

I would recommend CA Agile, certainly, but it all depends on what processes you have and whether it's a fit for them. 

Release planning, test case writing.

It's performed plenty, I'm happy with the performance.

I get to see what we have, what test cases we need to deliver, per release.

It gives us the visibility into what we're doing and how we're doing on a day to day basis, to see if we need to refocus or to try to change things before it gets down into the negative. The daily iterative working part of it is what I like. And I get to see the visuals of what's going on.

The Defect feature. In one view you can see all your defects and you can push them into the different releases.

I also like the Release view, where you can select different user stories and just dump them into the releases you want them to be in.

I also like the reporting. I can see my Burndown, my Burnup, and other reports that we use to see if we're delivering on time.

One thing that my team struggles with is when they have so many user stories. You have the parent's story, and then you have a child of a child of a child and it goes "down into the drain." Sometimes it's hard for them to quickly search for a user story. I know there is a part where you can just type the user story number, but that's if you know it. 

I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help.

It's been around for a while so it's pretty stable. 

I'm assuming it's our infrastructure, but since its web-based, at certain times of the day, it's slow. At certain times of the day I've noticed it takes a while for the page to come up and for updates and the like. Sometimes you have to shut it down and restart.

I opened up a ticket with CA about it. I don't think I got a response back. It's been a while, I didn't look back into it, and nobody contacted me about it.

It scales.

Generally I'm satisfied with the tech support I get from CA.

I wasn't involved in the setup with my current company; my previous company, yes, I was. I think it depends on who you're working with. With the person I was working with in my old company, it was straightforward.

We had that one on one relationship with CA, and they were on site to help us out. If we had to be on a call for anything they were there.

At my old company we had a demo for VersionOne, then Rally (now Agile Central), and one other tool. One of the reasons we went with Rally is it was easier to use than VersionOne. The reporting was great, it was what we were looking for. And at that time it had another feature called Timesheet, that became the Timesheet in Agile Central.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is that the product be user friendly. It also has to be able to produce. My bottom line is the outcome, so I want to see that it can help deliver correctly, on time, within the budget. Also resource planning, resource management, those are the kinds of things I'll put into consideration if I'm looking for a tool to use.

I think CA has been consistent in trying to improve Agile Central, but they also still have room for improvement, so I give them seven out of 10.

I would tell colleagues to try Agile Central because of the features I noted above. And then, I don't know about VersionOne, but the support for Agile Central is also great.

It helps us find our users stories and allows us to see what everyone on our team is working on, and if we have any blocks.

It's performed pretty well.

It allows our team, and all the external teams that are waiting on us for dependencies, to see where progress is on the stuff that we're about to develop and deploy.

It integrates well with the things that we have. We're able to tie our stories in with our code repository, so that way our check-ins are tied back to our user stories.

I can't really think of any additional features that it needs. It pretty much has everything that we use it for.

It's been really stable. There have been some downtimes with it, but they're fairly short.

I'm not sure how well it scales. It's worked so far with our team.

I know a lot of our teams are using JIRA. The switch is because it has more features.

When looking to select a new vendor, our criteria are

• price 
• feature set.

I give it a nine out of 10, just because of the slight downtimes, which make it hard to go in and update things.

Definitely look into it, because of all of the different tools for user stories and test case management. It's been one of the best I've experienced.

We are promoting SAFe within our organization and we have a organization that actually follows the Scaled Agile Framework. We're using Agile Central right now to track our users' portfolio items, our product features, our product backlog, our iteration status, and to track metrics. That's what we're using it for right now.

It's been pretty good. We've been using it for the last two and half years. We've tried a couple other products in the past, before we moved on to Rally CA or Agile Central 2. So it has really worked out very well.

The metrics - collecting metrics. It's because we've used several other tools in the past, and they don't give you a full indication of how well your teams are performing, at a portfolio level, at a product level, and at the team level. CA Central actually makes it very easy for us to track metrics for our trains, for our teams, to find out what the velocities are, what we should plan for, and what we should anticipate.

It really helps us scale in terms of our organizations, and be more predictable. That's one of the biggest advantages that the Agile Central tool has provided us. As I said, gathering metrics and being more predictable, that really helps us in the long run.

We have a couple of pain points, but I can't remember off the top of my head what those are. Every once in a while we'll submit feedback through their online tool. 

In terms of improvement, perhaps some more metrics. If they could add some additional, that would be cool.

It's quite stable, we haven't had many issues. Every once in a while, we have had some problems with the total number of features that it runs into but other than that, nothing else.

I haven't had much of a problem with scalability. It seems quite scalable.

There are times when we struggle with stuff but we haven't really called customer support yet.

There are some features of the product, a couple of the things, that were not really intuitive. We just had to go through online documentation. They have good online tutorials, support, documentation, where you can go and read up on things, so we just used that.

We started using the product, so we were more of the consumer than the actual installing team. That was done by a different team.

We explored a lot of tools when were trying to promote SAFe or Agile across the entire organization, so we moved through the Scaled Agile Framework. And then there were only three or four tools that we explored, and Rally, or CA Agile Central, was one of those that we thought would really work.

We looked at VersionOne, the Atlassian tool, I can't remember the name of it, I think it's just JIRA, and Rally.

What's most important to us when selecting a vendor are 

• ease of use
• how intuitive it is
• customer support
• metrics, for us, that is really important.

I give it a solid eight out of 10 because of the way that things are laid out. It's more user friendly, it's intuitive. As I said, it's easy to use. I think they've done a good job with the metrics in general.

I would tell colleagues who are looking at this type of solution to do their homework and see which one works best for their company, for their teams, and for their organization. We went with Agile Central because of a lot of the things it provides, in terms of the features. I know every company is different, every team is different, and things that might serve their needs may be different than what is useful for us. My best advice would be to do their homework and explore.

Primary use case is agile development and Mode 2 development.

It has performed really well. We have taken some teams that were non-Agile and tried to do a combined approach. This eliminated some of the heavy documentation that we were used to with waterfall. We have been able to deliver our integration between CA and HPE ALM in a period of time that is about half of where we were before. 

It documents stories in a way where we do not have to be heavy on front-end requirements, front-end documentation, and front-end workflows. We are able to create those stories in a more of a just-in time approach. Since we are doing combine and not scrum, we want to get those stories on as we think of them and immediately work on them instead of waiting for a time box. So, it was the ability to adapt quickly. 

We are very new on agile and Mode 2 devolvement. It has really allowed us to experiment with approaches that we would have been a bit afraid to experience before. So, it has allowed us to try new things and to take risks. 

When you copy a story, I would like the attachment to copy with it. This is a big one for us. We do requirements in one sprint, then do development in the next, which still is a little bit of waterfall. So when we copy those requirement stories and they become development stories, the attachment does not come with it. So, it is a lot of manual effort to do that. It would save us a lot of time. 

We did submit an enhancement request. I think a lot of teams that do very large scale products have the same issue. They just do not realize it would help them. 

Also, there are a few things in the way things trickle up from category to theme to feature that I do not really like. I wish there would be some enhancements there.

It is very stable. It was purchased by CA from Rally, which I was familiar with beforehand. It has gotten better since CA has taken over, adding some new features, but it is a very stable platform. 

Since we are more of a Waterfall shop, as we bring new teams into the agile approach, I think it is quite scalable for us. However, it will probably be a more longer term poll. 

We have used them quite a bit. They have been very responsive. We use a competitor's tool for our waterfall approach. I won't say which competitor it is. However, we have been very happy with the speed and the availability of CA's technical resources.

Our issues have been lower scale problems, but we do not have a support staff to manage Agile Central. What we found was technical support was not only giving us the ability to get help, but also helped us evolve our support team into a team that can be managed well on its own. So, I have felt they have helped us in a lot of ways.

We did not have a solution in place. We were looking at Mode 2 and agile teams and we knew we needed something. Putting post-its on the board was not going to work anymore for a company of our size. While we still do some post-it exercises, it all ends up in Agile Central and we knew we needed something to manage this. We still have PM's who want to see portfolio management, so we knew it had to be digital. It could not be paper anymore.

We took our instance and revamped it from the beginning, which was very straightforward.

We were. We were looking at a few. Not sure if I can say which.

They were not providing a solution that was mature and developed. They were providing solutions that they wanted us to be like a test customer on.

They still feel like a small tech company. The support we have gotten and the way they have managed or accepted some of our enhancement requests. They still treat it like a small company, like Rally was before they purchased Agile Central. They still have that feel, knowing how big they are and seeing how they can act small. It is really nice.

Make sure your agile processes are really well-defined before you go out into the market and look for a tool. Tools do things differently, they call things a feature in one and a subfeature in another. Make sure your processes are defined, and once you have that, look for your tool after that. Do not look for your tool first.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We have price, which I would not say is our most important. We are looking for more of a fit and finish to our process, though price is really important to us. One of the things that we look at is: We want to create a really good process, then find a tool that fits that process. I think a lot of customers do it the other way. So, if our process is mature and we like it, the tool really needs to fit that.

Software development and infrastructure.

Sprint planning and overall work management of the stories and the project lifecycle.

Sprint planning is valuable because it keeps our teams all in the same place in terms of where information is stored. We always know what the status of a project is and anybody can see it.

• Ease of use
• Visibility

As a PMO Manager, I need to be able to look and see what the project status at any time without having to go ask somebody or look for a status report. So, I could go there and see exactly what percentage is complete, what the blockers might be, and just see who is assigned to what, so I can look at resourcing.

It has made our company more organized and it is helping us be more true to the agile principle. When I came to the company, we did not have any agile practices in place. So, it has helped us, because it gives us a framework to put the agile practices in place. 

The integrations with the PPM tool and making sure those two work well together. 

Improved engagement with TFS, because we still used TFS for code management. There is an API between the two. I think that the APR could be easier to set up and the API could be a little more fluid in terms of when the code is checked in. It really relates to how a project is updated based on that.

Stability is better. A couple years ago before CA bought it, we had a lot of problems. Now, we do not have as many problems. So, it has been good.

Scalability is getting better. It used to not be as good, but they are adding some features that make it easier to build portfolio items in.

The problem before was that there were just a lot of little bugs where you create a project in one place and it would not continue to exist in another. Also, there were not very good templates or anything. So, they are improving on that. 

I have not really used the technical support.

We did not have a solution when I started. I picked it because I was familiar with it from a previous company. I actually used it for a couple years before that, as well. I just knew we needed something that we could hit the ground running with pretty quickly.

I was involved in the initial setup and subsequent upgrades. 

I am not really sure how it is now to set up. If you are putting into a GreenField brand new product, I do not know how that would work now. Previously, it was just figuring it out on your own.

Upgrading was pretty straightforward, especially if you are used to using any of the agile tools in the agile practices. Once you get used to some of the unique namings for Agile Central, or formerly Rally, it is pretty straightforward. It is a like-for-like, in terms of what you have learned, in terms of being agile in what you learned on what you are doing on a day-to-day basis. 

The vendors on the shortlist would be TFS's Project Management through Microsoft, ServiceNow's Project Management, and JIRA.

Earlier on, we went a little faster and we did not do a full software evaluation. We actually are doing a tools assessment now. We are going to be looking at replacing CA, possibly, because we want to make sure we have the right tools. We want to make sure that they flow between all the different tool sets that we have. 

It has performed well so far. It has improved over the past couple of years.

For any product, do a full software evaluation and make sure you actually test them side-by-side with like-for-like test cases. Then you know exactly what you are getting yourself into. Otherwise, you build out and realize it might not be the right product for you. So, a full software analysis is important.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Initial support is always important. It is always great when you can have a few free hours to have somebody to come in and help you understand the idiosyncrasies of any software, figuring out exactly what the best way is for it to be set up. Otherwise, you are just trying by trial by error. So, that is important. Also, stability is important.

It's designed around Agile, so it has all of the pieces that match up with the process. For us, at the portfolio management level, we can see everything at one glance, all of the projects, where they're at; and, at the iteration level, we’re able to populate the iteration, and view progress reports on it. We've recently moved all of our defect tracking onto it also - it's nice to be able to pull defects right into sprint plans.

• We're using it to manage the training content development we're doing, so it's kind of a one-off case. It's not your typical agile project, but so far it's working well, and we're able to incorporate most of the agile methodology into our processes. We get all of the transparency that comes with the tool; so we have a clear view of what's happening with all of our projects, what state they're in, and where all the pieces are. Blockers stand out, so they're getting more attention. It's become our single location for project information. Although there's been a bit of a learning curve for the team (more around the processes we're using than with complexity in the product), I've had several team members tell me that it's a good product that they enjoy working with.

I'd like to be able to color code timeboxes, so I have an easy visual way to track the success of sprints. Workflow is not a strength, we've cobbled together our own workflows around changes in State and Ownership.

About a year now. What we're doing in CA Agile Central is pretty stable now, although we still tweak our own internal processes from time to time. Still exploring and learning the wonderful world of Agile.

We weren't involved in it.

It's been extremely stable for as long as we've been using it.

I see no problems with scalability. In addition to what we're doing, I know our Services team and Product Development team are using the product, so I expect scaling is not an issue.

Haven't really used it.

Haven't really used it. Which I like.

Spreadsheets and MS Project. CA Agile Central is designed around Agile methodology, so it was a perfect fit for the processes we wanted to put in place. We couldn't do the things we're doing now with the previous products.

I wasn't involved in setting up the product itself. I jumped in after it was already in use.

Wasn't involved.

The decision to use it came from our development team. The whole development team is using it. Our Services team has been using it for years.

If you're focusing on agile, this is the right product to use. It's built around it. I've tried to do things with MS Project and that sort of thing, and you just can't manage it the same way. It's just not built for the same kind of cycle.

It is a well thought-out solution. It's a great centerpiece for Agile methodology. It works.

I like it because I have several projects, and it keeps me on track for each one. So, I can track each iteration of each project, and see where I'm at and where other people are at, visually. I guess maybe the iteration planning and tracking status is the most valuable feature.

It has helped a great deal in the fact that we are able to take small chunks of data and get them actually moved forward end to end. Previously, we had to wait several months before something would actually be available for the end user. This has helped us to break that and to move forward quickly.

I think I'd like to be able to color-code the words more easily, not just the side. You can change the color on the side, but to actually change the font color would be useful.

Currently, I use an HTML color font to change the title of a user's story or something. If, instead of having to put in the HTML version of it, to make it change the color of the font, and I could easily change the color of the fonts, it would be a lot better.

I have been using the solution for two years.

I think occasionally it will slow down, particularly when we have a lot of users on the same project, especially around stand-up time or whatever, because we're spread out across the country, so we usually do it by phone. So when everybody is on the project at the exact same time, it will slow down a little bit.

Also, if I make a change and somebody else makes a change, you can't retain both changes. It doesn't accept both. The first one who finishes, who hits Enter, Save, Done or whatever, will get the change.

Then, it will warn you. It will say, "Do you want to keep your changes or the other person's changes?" But you don't know what they are changing, and they don't know what you're changing!

It slows down a little bit if you have a lot of information in there. It seems to work really well, however.

I like the personalization of the home screen because I may not want to look at everything, i.e., the same things that other people want to look at. So it's nice to be able to personalize my home screen. I have a lot of stuff on my home screen, and it seems to be able to handle it just fine.

We have an administrator, and I've had to have people added back in because they don't go in there and use it, and get suspended. Then they ask, "How come my name's not in here?" So you have to respond: "Because you never use it."

I haven't really had any help from technical support.

We previously used a different solution. We switched to be able to move more quickly to a resolution. Because the industry changes quickly, we can't still be in development stages on a product that needs to be out in the consumer's hands today. That's why we moved on to something like this where we can actually get things out there quicker.

The setup is very straightforward.

I have no input as far as the cost is concerned. That goes further up the chain than me.

I would definitely say it's a very good solution to have for a company, yes.