TrustRadius Insights for Rally Software are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Powerful Agile DevOps Planning and Tracking: Many reviewers have found Rally to be a powerful tool for agile DevOps planning and tracking. It provides rapid visibility of progress or problems across a large number of teams, allowing users to effectively manage and prioritize tasks.
Portfolio View for Clear Visibility: Reviewers appreciate the portfolio view feature of Rally, as it allows product management to have clear visibility across all their product features. This feature helps in effectively managing and prioritizing tasks by providing a comprehensive overview of the project's progress.
Strong Feedback Metrics for Task Tracking: Users have mentioned that Rally provides strong feedback metrics for both teams and individuals. This feature helps in tracking the status of tasks and ensuring that commitments are being met, contributing to efficient task management.
My team used Rally as a project management tool. Specifically, it helped provide insight into workloads, timelines, requirements, impediments, and task status. It was certainly useful in that scope, but it wasn't the most user-friendly and we found that collaboration was easier via other software (such as Jira and asana).
Pros
Task status updates
Outlining projects
Completion timelines
Project success metrics
Cons
User interface is not intuitive
Collaboration
Likelihood to Recommend
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".
VU
Verified User
Employee in Research & Development (10,001+ employees)
Rally Software is used by agile development teams to track sprint development work. We also use it to track informal defects and as a requirements repository. It is flexible and powerful to use while also providing export tools for linkage and traceability. Project management, developers, testers, and other stakeholders all use Rally as a comprehensive tool to track, log and assign work.
Pros
Great to use as a requirements repository for software
Great for creating sprints and assigning user stories as work
Great for exporting requirements and defects for reporting
Cons
The UI for sprint work is not visually as helpful as Jira's
Cannot customize fields within defects and user stories within different teams if a different team owns the license
Likelihood to Recommend
I find being able to go to a page to see just defects, user stories, test cases, etc. is very helpful. You cannot do that in Jira and that is a big usability limitation. In Rally Software, it is really easy to change the statuses of the stories right on the dashboard page, which is great during a live planning meeting. The export tools work really well and have helped with reporting and building out trace matrices within a regulated industry.
We use Rally software across the organization for strategic planning. In our Program Increment (PI) planning, we capture the needs and wish lists of the client-facing staff to create a backlog and then plan out our quarters. Throughout each sprint, each dev team tracks progress (or lack thereof) and determines the next item to bring in.
On the client-facing side, reports run by our Product Owners let them know what tools they will have to make their job easier. On the dev side, it keeps us on track. On the executive side, the company can assess where we are in terms of tools to make doing business easier. Our accountants love it as it directly interfaces in with our time reporting so they can know what cost center to put work in.
Pros
It does help us keep track of velocity and where we missed the mark.
It lets you see your completed to planned ratio.
It allows a clear view to project success throughout the organization.
Cons
It is overly complicated in some views.
Project Filtering seems buggy. Pinning a project does not always seem to help. Seems to default back to previous projects.
Whereas it is great for project reporting, it is not nearly as easy as Jira for devs to use.
Likelihood to Recommend
CA Rally is well suited to companies where upper management needs a view of what is going on. It is well suited for that. For Scrum Master, Devs, and Product Owners it is overly complicated and hard to figure out just which screen to go to in order to get the needed information. It is maybe better for an established company. Startups or midsized companies are probably better off with Jira.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
<div>On our projects, the distribution we use JIRA about 50% of the time, Rally 45%, and Microsoft TFS 5%. The choice depends on the different project features. I have personally used Rally Software and JIRA since 2009 and I would advise using Rally if you have serious budget requirements/restrictions for the project, you have a team of 5 to 20 developers (or several teams), and you know the release date.</div><div>
</div><div>The main advantage of the Rally is that on any day of the iteration, you know how many hours are in the "TO DO" column. Moreover, the fact that UI/UX of Rally is in a tabular form makes using this tool convenient for all project participants - from programmers, QA people and Scrum master to Product Owners and C level guys. Y<span style="letter-spacing: -0.05px; word-spacing: -0.85px;">ou see all the important information on one page and you do not need to scroll.</span></div>
Pros
Easy to set up, plan and estimate user stories.
Easy track hours and update "to do" hours.
Iteration Burn Down report is the best.
Project development process is standard for all teams and customers.
Cons
Rally Software monthly price for user is a little bit expensive.
It is a little bit hard to set up relation between Epic stories vs Child US.
Search by text is hard when you have a 2-3 year old project.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is perfect when:
<ul><li>You need to track and improve velocity</li><li>You have a budget and you must control time</li><li>Requirements are changing often</li><li>Requirements are changing in the middle of the iteration</li><li>You have to organize the work of developers and QA simultaneously</li></ul>
Rally is being used across my entire organization. Initiatives are codified as Epics and Features in Rally, and the company collects metrics on the progress of these initiatives. The metrics are also used within teams to track velocity and performance over time.
Pros
Organizes work into well-defined structures
Allows useful metrics to be collected
Is very customizable depending on what each team member wants to see
Has a wealth of features and can be used in many ways, depending on the organization's needs and desires
Cons
The user interface is slightly "clunky"
It is easy to overwrite others' changes if you haven't refreshed your page in a while, since updates do not happen automatically
For my team's needs, there are way too many features and fields and it can be confusing to dig through that to find the subset we use
Likelihood to Recommend
I would imagine that Rally is fantastic from the perspective of someone overseeing a large organization. Having everyone on the same feature-rich tool means that every team can customize it (to a degree) for their needs while still providing useful metrics upward. However, for small organizations or single teams, it is probably overkill.
VU
Verified User
Contributor in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
CA Agile Central is currently used by Development & support teams for all aspects of Application Lifecycle Management. After agile adoption, few of the development and support teams had been piloted on CA Agile Central
while a few are still using HP ALM. Most of the features of CA Agile Central are being used by those teams like agile portfolio management, work visualization, road-map planning, Rally insights, iteration planning defect management and regression test management. In CA Agile Central, management can set the overall roadmap and then see what teams are doing and how this aligns with your business strategy using various dashboards that provide friendly and useful metrics at the team till portfolio levels that help get an easy visual representation of what's going on.
It also helped in expanding team collaboration and with story, task and Kanban boards, it makes team members feel like they are working in co-located model which was the main reason behind choosing this tool.
Pros
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.
Cons
Workflow is fixed in CA Agile Central & can not be customized as per your team needs, which can be easily carried out in Jira. Example: In CA Agile Central we have states “Defined”, “In progress”, “Completed” and “Accepted” and there is no way to change those names or add new states into it.
Burn down charts can be generated only with fixed attributes. So if your team is not burning hours or your team does not create tasks, you will not get to see burn down charts.
Dependencies on stories cannot be managed properly here and it is easy to lose them. Also, after a change is done, instead of returning to the last page, it moves to home page.
Some of the options, are not available when the user story is viewed in the short view at the right pane. Most of the options are visible in the detailed view only. Trivial issue but very frustrating.
UI needs improvement. Every screen there are no popup windows. Its single frame UI makes it very difficult to open different tasks/stories & more frustrating if the senior management wants to track various stories or teams.
CA Agile Central comes as full kit of functionalities and you can not customize it. In Jira we can buy plugins & only pay for the features we are using.
Likelihood to Recommend
If your organisation is planning to adopt Scaled Agile Framework Methodology (SAFe) without being worried about cost, CA Agile Central is one of the best tools. Here, you can look at various release trains and how that then flows up to the overall program budget. You can look holistically across all the release trains with minimal effort and have it flow up to the program office’s budget. It also helps by easily maintaining backlogs and integrating more seamlessly into software developers releases, iterations, and features. It has no conformance issue as it supports almost all the browsers like IE from version 8.0, Firefox from 3.6 and the newest versions of Chrome (from 6.0) and Safari (from 4.0).
It is used by multiple departments across the organization. It helps us to streamline and in the functioning of multiple projects running on Agile. All projects can be managed under one tool for Business Engineers, QA and Developers. It also helps the management to pull up customized reports as needed. Integrates well with JAMA.
Pros
Highly customizable.
Managing user stories are easy. Ability to split them for next iteration makes the job much easier.
Integrates well with Jama.
Ability to create test cases.
Ability to link between user stories, test set, release and iterations.
Cons
Report generation can be improved. More filters can be added.
Would like to have an easy way of integrating with ALM.
Cant find enough documents for help online.
Likelihood to Recommend
Works well for scrum projects. Defect tracking and Test Management are available. Not very user-friendly for test case creation though. Portfolio Management allows Release Planning & Tracking, Capacity Planning, and Timelines. Additional (and better) Test Management plugins are available at $25/user/month.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Quality Assurance (201-500 employees)
Our Product and Engineering teams rely solely on CA Agile Central for all aspects of our Application Lifecycle Management. We coordinate backlog management, current sprint and release planning, and portfolio planning with a mix of co-located and remote team members. CA Agile Central streamlines tactical Story and Defect management as well as strategic Portfolio Feature and Initiative planning while also providing one source of the truth for the enterprise.
Pros
Portfolio Planning features allows all team members to understand how individual stories and tasks roll up to larger milestones and releasable features.
Highly customizable visual feedback - CA Agile Central allows each user to create their own work space and also allows creation and sharing of custom visualizations for the product and engineering teams.
Artifact Edits are a straightforward mix of inline editing of common fields and detailed updates of entire artifact records.
Cons
Drag and drop artifact arrangement has gotten better in the past few releases, but is still a bit difficult to use.
Integrations with customer-facing bug tracking systems is possible, but requires more direct intervention than expected.
Renaming the product from Rally to CA Agile Central is confusing in the market - Rally was a known entity and even CA has to call their own solution "CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)." Not good.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for one or many SCRUM development teams with five or more people. For distributed teams, CA Agile Central's shared content management is great with no on-site IT overhead.
For singular, small teams with concise product portfolios and few or no integration requirements, there are better, no-cost options in the market.
It's used in tech engineering to manage agile development on several teams developing integrated software, firmware and hardware products.
Pros
Handle the complexities of multiple teams.
Visual indicators for individual story states.
Adaptable as your teams go through the learning curve in Agility.
Cons
Portfolio management... poor graphical presentation of portfolio (as compared to Aha! for example).
Release management... the model and implementation are not cohesive, require many manual steps to maintain release plan integrity, seems to support SAFe at the expense of other, more Agile, practices.
Visualization, in general... minimal capability for user-defined charting (unless you want to do SDK programming), and most canned charts offered are with an old internal SDK that doesn't support new features
My big gripe is that in the two years we've had the product, an unbelievably SMALL amount of work appears to have been done. Glaring gaps and inconsistencies (conceptual and practical) continue to go unaddressed, while apparently great effort is being spent on new features having marginal utility.
Based on this experience I have concerns for the ability of CA to bring the product up to modern standards and to restore its conceptual integrity after years of piecemeal incremental improvement. For a large development team, they don't seem to be delivering much new value.
Likelihood to Recommend
Standard Scrum from story grooming to delivery is good. Allocating features to releases is not good because in order to visualize you also have to assign stories to releases. Release management in general uses a narrow and often inscrutable conceptual model, so we have avoided it. We use milestones instead but they have only limited support.
It is used primarily in IT by developers and quality control engineers, by business analysts and scrum masters from the PMO and by business product owners. The problem that CA Agile Central solved was providing a solution for an Agile Development and Management Life Cycle that MS Project couldn't provide in 2011.
Pros
The ability to tailor the tool for each product. For example some simpler projects can be managed with simple user stories, a Kanban process and board. Large projects are managed with iterations, releases, tasks and burn down charts.
Create a home dashboard and customize it to show user stories and tasks assigned to you and a personal burn down chart.
A portfolio management capability where you can link and view the entire hierarchy from theme to initiative to feature to user story(s) and finally to tasks.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
The only scenario we have had some issues with is when we need to work with an organization outside of our domain that uses a Waterfall process. CA Agile Central doesn't adapt well into a hybrid methodology like ScrumFall or pure Waterfall. In all other scenarios of large or small projects CA Agile Central has worked very well.
