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.
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Rally Software Reviews
4 Reviews
Engineering
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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.
At my company, I am aware that the the project managers, the operations team, the QA team, and the engineering departments use Rally to work in an Agile environment. I would not be surprised if it was used by the whole organization because having the company staying on one software allows project managers to track company progress more efficiently. For a few years the company has strived to practice the agile methodologies and practiced scrum, daily standups and Kanban Board along with Rally to achieve this. Rally has many features to track progress as well as user friendly tools to optimize and track what other members of the team are doing.
Pros
Their easy to view Kanban board allows the viewers to understand what's in progress, what needs to be done, and what can be released and what is done all in one go. Because our team also practices weekly optimization, the user stories on the backlog are ordered in terms of urgency (allowing users to start stories that are on the top of the stack easily.
Rally's customer support is extensive as they have videos/recorded demos as well as phone support if anything goes wrong with the software or if something functionality is unclear
Rally's reporting tool is extensive and allows custom reporting for different users to create their own reports based on their business objective.
Cons
This software has many features and it's great but I have heard that the project managers do not use the entire package of features making this software quite expensive for what they actually use it for.
Likelihood to Recommend
I believe this software is good for small-medium sized teams. The team I am on (operations) is at most five people that is actively using it and the other teams also have about that many people on a team. It can be used for a larger enterprise as the company is on the larger side; but it is more suited for a smaller scenario. It is also great for companies that are looking for a web based software as everything is online and a company would not have to rely on their own IT department to run the features of this platform. If a company is looking for an extensive Agile software and can afford Rally's price tag, this just might be the software for them.
Rapid visibility of progress or problems across large number of teams.
Portfolio view allows Product Management clear visibility across all their product features.
Strong feedback metrics for the team and individuals as to status and meeting commitments.
Visual UI quickly gives teams visibility into their sprint progress.
Helps enables Agile structure for widely dispersed teams.
Supports traditional scrum and also Kanban.
Completely open API give access to just about everything and enables integration to other systems you may be using.
Team at Rally is very responsive to needs and feedback. They also have a strong SE team to help with best practices. Pretty easy to get one of their Product Managers on the phone to talk roadmap.
Strong community to help with questions and their forums are very active.
Cons
Traditional Agile metrics like sprint velocity and burndown are built in, but still challenging to get metrics beyond these.
Not an inexpensive solution.
Likelihood to Recommend
Their pricing structure is pretty flat - you get lower per seat prices with more seats obviously. Buying at end of quarter will sometimes get you a little better price, but not huge savings. Sometime in the past, I was able to get a discount for being a reference, but now that they have grown and are gaining in market position, this is probably less the case. I have found them extremely easy to work with overall. Never had a problem.
Gives you a good view into your current active work week/ active sprint
Provides a pretty good way to look at prior sprints
Cons
It has so much flexibility and power that it actually makes simpler tasks complex – particularly backlog management and scheduling things into releases and sprints.
It has a tough job of managing “epics” – things with 100s of small features, and being able to prioritize across them. Typically we have 2 epics in a release. We have no problem prioritizing epics, but it is hard to prioritize “stories” across epics. There are typically dozens of stories in an epic.
Likelihood to Recommend
Our core engineering team in our division pays for the application. As a company, we pay $35 / month per person for the Enterprise Edition. In my team, we are living with it because it’s free to us.
If I were to evaluate new tools, I would look at Pivotal Tracker again, and also have a look at Altasian. They have a big product suite that some of the team has used before.
