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IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management vs. Rally Software

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management

    Score7 out of 10
    N/AIBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) is an end-to-end engineering solution used to manage system requirements to design, workflow, and test management, extending the functionality of ALM tools for better complex-systems development.N/A

    Rally Software

    Score6.8 out of 10
    N/ARally Software headquartered in Boulder, Colorado developed the Rally agile software development / ALM platform which was acquired by CA Technologies and rebranded as CA Agile Central. After CA's acquisition by Broadcom the software was once again rebranded as Rally.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM Engineering Lifecycle ManagementRally Software
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Engineering Lifecycle ManagementRally Software
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM Engineering Lifecycle ManagementRally Software
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
    JIRA is simpler and much more intuitive, especially when bundled with Confluence. TFS is obvious choice if working with Microsoft technologies and has superb API.
    Incentivized
    Broadcom
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    88%
    Would buy again
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    IBM Engineering Lifecycle ManagementRally Software
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    monday dev
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Jama Connect
    Score9.4 out of 10
    Planview AgilePlace
    Score9.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Jama Connect
    Score9.4 out of 10
    Planview AgilePlace
    Score9.9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Engineering Lifecycle ManagementRally Software
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.8
    (22 ratings)
    7.0
    (17 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.0
    (6 ratings)
    9.0
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    2.1
    (4 ratings)
    7.6
    (5 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    5.0
    (3 ratings)
    5.7
    (5 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM Engineering Lifecycle ManagementRally Software
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS former IBM Rational DOORS profits very much from the mighty market position it had till today. It had been the most favored requirement engineering tools suite with the highest investments in the infrastructure concerning hardware, software, and knowledge sources. It was embedded in knowledge sources of test stands, hardware labs, and knowledge database servers. It allowed for some of the highest profit changes and made the fame with it. But the paradigms of requirements engineering change. If not were superseded by completely different approaches for the target solution worlds. The foremost position in the selling tables is unstable if changes are not solved or coped with by the strategist at IBM and their customers. Since the highly successful alternative suits are already at the market, and some are from IBM already the lifecycle for IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS is at the later highs. But the suite is still at the very top and very popular. There are still many problems unsolved and many wishes at the customers to make the use more comfortable and efficient at the overall level. If the time of setting up the software package is passed the adoption get more extended and complicated. There is a lot of work at the stage around and the expertise will be required for a long time from now.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    Rally is well suited to help outline the specific tasks of a project, create timelines, indicate progress/status of tasks and provide views of team members' workloads. My team used it for our weekly stand up meetings in order to update one another on our progress, and our manager used it as a way to determine who had capacity for additional tasks. It facilitated our transition to a more agile work environment and we used it to implement 2 week "sprints".
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    IBM
    • Easy to use with well defined template and user defined fields. New team can setup a project area easily by copying an existing template and adding customized fields for their special needs.
    • It can be used during almost the whole project cycle and give us a better view and control on the projects.
    • Lots of built-in report functions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    • There are dashboards that provide friendly and useful metrics at the team, program and portfolio levels which help get an easy and quick visual representation of what's going on.
    • Story management made easier, It offers a quick way of quickly entering a number of user stories without losing the overview, by just typing the title and selecting a few attributes directly in the overview screen.
    • Sprint management is seamless in CA Agile Central . It allows you to drag stories from the backlog to the sprints and back again. When a story is dragged into an sprint, it automatically checks the velocity for that sprint and indicates how many more story points can be chipped in. No more manual checking needed by scrum master with respect to allocation and team velocity.
    • Though CA Agile Central has many inbuilt apps, but it also has an App-SDK that allows you to build free app extensions using JavaScript and HTML. So, as per their needs, teams can customize & build various apps & dashboards.
    • Dashboard is an awesome feature which allows you to select and drag panels with all kinds of graphical information about the current sprints and releases.
    • It offers tremendous support for scaled Agile & almost all scaling frameworks are supported specifically tuned to SAFe .
    • CA Agile Central includes several applications but it also integrates well with Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, Eclipse, Subversion, IBM, HP, Salesforce.com and many other products to allow users to organize projects to their specifications. So you can still use Jira at a team level & CA Agile Central at the program & portfolio level for efficient tracking & management.
    • The custom tags are very helpful in segregating the user stories based on the project needs. Even though it's a very small feature, it is very effective ( you will realize why specifically if you are using Jira).
    • CA Central Agile enables agile delivery with ease and provides comprehensive features to track time-boxes, Work In Progress items of the forecast increments.
    • Backlog management is hassle free since you can either drag and drop your user stories to the desired position on the backlog, or change a setting and manually enter priorities as a number.
    Read full review
    Cons
    IBM
    • Wireframes are quite basic. If you need intuitive and interactive wireframes to elaborate the requirements. you probably need to define outside the tool and then upload as image.
    • ER (define data dictionaries) modeling is not there.
    • Use case modeling is quite basic. You can visualize the use case and actors relation but the tool does not enforce the rules.
    • Does not support offline work.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    • User management is pretty basic and could be better. For example more filters and reports and more ability to do mass updates.
    • The report generator is very, very basic and is not WYSIWYG. It has limited filters to generate reports. Often a Scrum master will need to export data to Excel or a tool like Crystal Reports to get enhanced reporting capability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    IBM
    At the moment we are required by contract to continue to use the IBM DOORS software for our current client. Given that it can be expensive, if we were to use it after our current client's needs were met, we would have to secure other projects in order to justify the continued use of the software.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    • To keep connecting my people, platform, and process for faster, smarter, better results.
    • Making the right contribution to the community. Use Agile and Lean processes to manage the work of your team.
    • Once you have tasted the positive result with Rally Software, you don't want to give up and come back to the old school of development pain any more.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    IBM
    The UI is terrible and not intuitive. Users need training in order to complete tasks. Much like SAP, it's not the clearest tool. The tracing feature is especially complicated because you must write the scripts yourself. There is a learning curve. Also, even the setup, installation, and logging in each time takes a considerable amount of time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    Great UI, recent refresh was terrific. Great graphs and metrics, inline editing for updates, and a multitude of views on sprint progress make for a great team collaboration experience. There is also an active community and forums so that if you do need help, it is readily available
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Broadcom
    Don’t recall ever being unavailable.
    Read full review
    Performance
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Broadcom
    The screens render relatively quickly but many actions that you would expect to require a single click require multiple clicks and pop-up windows. The extra windows and clicks make the product feel ponderous.
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    IBM
    It does a basic job and has the potential to complete some robust reporting tasks, however, it really is a clunky piece of software with a terrible user interface that makes using it routinely quite unpleasant. Many of our legacy and maintenance projects still use DOORS but our department and company use many alternatives and are looking for better tools.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    I've had to use support only one time and my issue was eventually resolved but not because of my ticket--because others complained about the functionality taken away so they brought it back. My ticket was never answered or addressed. So I can't really say much for the support factor for Rally.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Broadcom
    It more or less confirmed that we are using it the way they had in mind. We were hoping for a epiphany in terms of how we could use it better.

    They also want to be a go to source for agile processes and have an online resource center. It’s not that great but had a couple of nuggets. It hasn’t really helped us too much and we are not too far off from the classical interpretation of agile.

    I would recommend training, in particular for organizations that multiple on-going projects. The product seems optimized for larger, more complex teams and getting proper training on how to configure, administer and use the system would be beneficial
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    Implementation Rating
    IBM
    No problems
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    Implementation of RALLY services and program satisfaction among various group,... 1) Dev Outcomes: How were our resiliencies, development, learning & practitioners “make them do the work,” but that they ask you to do it “in a way like before. 2) The Ops group: Just wish to make sure any change won't break current production envirements All the stake holders has to be on the same page
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    It was easier to do all the change management-related activities, even configurations were handled very effectively. New process definitions and initiatives made it easier for better project deliverables. Effective resource allocations and better reporting and defect management. The overall cost of the tool is great too and well within budget.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    It was a close race between Jama, JIRA and Rally. We decided to go for Jama as a requirements management tool and use Rally for Agile projects. The cost was another factor that made us select Rally.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • If you can setup DOORS to your project, you will experience lower costs.
    • Also, less rework in the project, which means lower times to achieve your milestones.
    • Finally, the cost of setting up a related project is considerably lower, and the estimates obtained in the process are much more precise.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Broadcom
    • it helped organizing many of the processes management use to communicate tasks with engineers, and provided detailed charts on the speed/blockage during any iteration
    • with time Rally became the main tool we used to track and report tasks/defects in our projects, but frequent service outages made it very hard to continue consider as a reliable solution
    • too much features is good, but for engineers a few features (User Stories section, iterations, defects, and Kanban boards) are necessary and the rest is just noise
    • Kanban board support is lacking
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots