Rally Software Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services 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

4 Reviews

Professional, Scientific, and Technical ServicesInformation Technology & Services3Marketing & Advertising1

Rally helped me to deliver successfully several projects for our customers.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 3, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

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. You see all the important information on one page and you do not need to scroll.

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:

You need to track and improve velocity
You have a budget and you must control time
Requirements are changing often
Requirements are changing in the middle of the iteration
You have to organize the work of developers and QA simultaneously

Evgueny Lemasov

Tech Team Lead, PM, Accounting Software developer in Information Technology at DiatomEnterprises (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

Want the best of Agilecraft (Scaling Agile support) & ALM (Test Management), go for CA Agile Central (Rally)

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 3, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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).

Sourav Singla ,Safe Agilist, CSP, ICP-ACC, CSM, CSPO, SSM, LSSG

Enterprise Agile Coach in Information Technology at Tata Consultancy Services (Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Why we switched from CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

February 21, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used CA Agile Central for our agile process. It was used by the whole company, in all departments. We had our user stories, tasks, and defects in there. We tracked our working hours in Rally also. We are an agile company with two-week sprints, and we used CA Agile Central (formerly Rally) to plan our development work.

Pros

Plan sprints for agile/scrum lifecycle
Create and submit software defects
Create user stories and tasks

Cons

Not too user friendly interface
Defect management is not the best I have seen
Could add more fields for defects

Likelihood to Recommend

We used it in our company for the last few years but decided to switch to Jira. Our management thinks that jira will work better for our wannabe true agile company. It was not hard to see all user stories in backlog, but it's harder to find a specific story/defect report using filters. Also, I don't think Rally is the best tool for agile teams.

Dmitry Shyshkin

Lead QA Automation Engineer‏ in Quality Assurance at FareCompare.com (Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

CA Agile Central (formerly Rally): it was good while it lasted

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

May 27, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Rally in our company through 2015 and beginning 2016 as the main tool to organize our user stories, defects and all other tasks. It was the main communication tool between teams members and their managers on the tasks level.

Pros

structuring teams separately in a clean way. You can add as much teams as you want, and guarantee each team's work would stay separate in browsing, graphs and analytics.
detailed menus and drop-downs listing of features - technically it covers all there is of agile aspects and some more
ability to set your email notifications on/off
ability to split user stories into the next iteration if work isn't done in the previous one - no need to duplicate your user story manually

Cons

the service was intermittently down, sometimes for several hours.
Rally is a very large powerful tool, and that also is the reason why it can't be a good fit for small teams who want simpler interfaces and way less features.
loading pages is slow, add to that if you (like me) keep it open all day after signing in, the systems logs you out automatically.
pening multiple windows (on separate tabs) has some problematic issues esp. when your sessions expires, and you will need to sign in to all other tabs one by one. Also if you attempt to sign in again on one tab, all the other tabs redirect to the same page of the first tab you signed in.
a steep learning curve for agile beginners/novice team member - leaving those members to use the tool without any training makes it almost impossible for them to know what they must do to get by their daily tasks
not enough free documentation online

Likelihood to Recommend

Rally is a great tool for large teams with very good experience in the agile world. It's not well-suited for those little, get-things-done teams, since managing the whole platform becomes really a job by itself. Teams generally might have to consider having a dedicated member in the team to manage and administrate the tool and facilitate communicate with all team members regarding tasks flow and updates. If your team is active, that will generate a lot of noise in the landing page making it hard to focus on one aspect.

Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development (Information Technology and Services company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Want the best of Agilecraft (Scaling Agile support) & ALM (Test Management), go for CA Agile Central (Rally)

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 3, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Sourav Singla ,Safe Agilist, CSP, ICP-ACC, CSM, CSPO, SSM, LSSG

Enterprise Agile Coach in Information Technology at Tata Consultancy Services (Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile