#1 most frequent
United States of America
72.2%1,387 installations of 1,921
What is Rally Software?
Rally 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.
Categories & Use Cases
Product Demos
Who Buys & Uses Rally Software
#2 most frequent
India
6.8%131 installations of 1,921
#3 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
4.2%81 installations of 1,921
Powerful Agile Tool
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
Return on Investment
- Created a positive and efficient experience to help push agile into our teams
- Provided a great tracking tool for more visibility into what the work is on a team
- Had consistent linkage between all the item IDs to be able to create all the required documents
Alternatives Considered
Jira Software
Other Software Used
Jira Software, Alma Suite, IBM Rational DOORS
Rally helped me to deliver successfully several projects for our customers.
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.
Return on Investment
- Rally Software allows us to understand what was done and how much time & labor was in every task of your project.
Usability
User interface could be more intuitive
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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
Most Important Features
- Project management
- Task descriptions
- Timeline allocation
- Project assignment
Return on Investment
- Agile team work
- Work load management
- Tracking project progression and success metrics
- Tracking individual performance
Other Software Used
Jira Software, Asana, Tableau Desktop
Want the best of Agilecraft (Scaling Agile support) & ALM (Test Management), go for CA Agile Central (Rally)
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.
Return on Investment
- We has improved our accuracy in estimating release capacity and timelines and tracking team throughput.
- Team collaboration has improved which is critical for us as teams were distributed at three locations. The Big Room Planning feature allows teams to identify the work to be done as well as dependencies and challenges. It helps team members to stay on the same page.
- CA Agile Central has customized dashboards to view information in Scrum, Kanban or custom views. It helps senior management in closely tracking their releases & helps them in taking corrective action in case they feel milestones will not be met.
- We are able to deliver every sprint into production since Continuous Integration environment has been setup with ease using github integration with CA Agile Central.
Alternatives Considered
ActiveCollab, AgileCraft, JIRA Software and VersionOne
Other Software Used
AgileCraft, JIRA Software, ActiveCollab, VersionOne, HP Application Lifecycle Management
CA Agile Central is the cream of the crop
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.
Return on Investment
- Moving from Waterfall to Scrum or Kanban has been a big win for us. The adaptability and customization of CA Agile Central has aided in our success.
- Agile methodologies and CA Agile Central has made it easier to integrate business product owners into an agile team.
Other Software Used
MS SharePoint, Microsoft Office 2016
