Rally Software Information Reviews & Insights

Score6.8 out of 10

122 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

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.

Rally Software Reviews

5 Reviews

InformationComputer Software4Internet1

Powerful Agile Tool

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 21, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Kathy Ding

Design V&V Engineer in Research & Development at Philips Respironics (Computer Software, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

Love Rally!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 25, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Verified User

Manager in Product Management (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Rally - very extensive but pricey (worth it?)

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 15, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Megan Kakitsubo

Technical Producer in Engineering at Connexity, Inc. (Internet, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Rally Software a great for large self-directed teams

Rating: 10 out of 10

November 22, 2013

Pros

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.

Gary Allison

Vice President Research & Development in Engineering at E2open (Computer Software, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Seems to make things harder rather than easier!

Rating: 6 out of 10

October 31, 2012

Pros

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.

Verified User

Director in Engineering (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience