Atlassian Strategy Collection, with Align vs. Rally Software

This product is useful for a team/company working with multiple customers. Employee count anywhere larger than fifty or sixty will be benefited [from] this. Considering this product is expensive(as I’ve heard) this will not serve [many] purposes to smaller companies and startups who are having a very less customer base and [fewer...] employees.

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".

Incentivized

• Jira is a great project management tool when it comes to tracking the progress of deliverables and milestones. Each member of the team can track individual deliverables and milestones. Jira comes with filters and search functions to perform these tasks.
• Jira is highly flexible when it comes to maintaining tasks and deliverable backlogs. You can plan and organize your sprints in such a way that you include your previous backlogs in them.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The initial ticket creation screen lacks some important features, such as assigning "point values" (a measure of effort needed for the ticket).
• The browser needs to be manually refreshed to see new tickets, which can make things confusing when several people in a meeting are simultaneously creating tickets.
• The interface on some smaller portions of the software are sometimes difficult to understand.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

There is nothing that can be better than Jira but it needs to keep improving certain areas especially the attachment size area.

Incentivized

Assuming we were paying - right now my group gets it for free as the broader engineering organization pays for it. There would be switching costs. There would be pretty minimal data migration, but the biggest cost is getting people to learn a new tool and starting off on the right footing. Evaluation and identification of the right product is a big part of switching too

As I have mentioned, some older, less tech savvy, team members have not found it as intuitive. I found it the same when I started using it although it quickly made sense. I think this is because there are lots of features we do not use so this can get in the way of what we do use

Incentivized

Great UI, recent refresh was terrific. Great graphs and metrics, inline editing for updates, and a multitude of views on sprint progress make for a great team collaboration experience. There is also an active community and forums so that if you do need help, it is readily available

Don’t recall ever being unavailable.

The screens render relatively quickly but many actions that you would expect to require a single click require multiple clicks and pop-up windows. The extra windows and clicks make the product feel ponderous.

It is average. It needs to improve overall if you are paying the amount of money it costs. For now, it does the job, but with so many new features being added it would be very helpful to kick this up a notch.

Incentivized

I've had to use support only one time and my issue was eventually resolved but not because of my ticket--because others complained about the functionality taken away so they brought it back. My ticket was never answered or addressed. So I can't really say much for the support factor for Rally.

Incentivized

It more or less confirmed that we are using it the way they had in mind. We were hoping for a epiphany in terms of how we could use it better.

They also want to be a go to source for agile processes and have an online resource center. It’s not that great but had a couple of nuggets. It hasn’t really helped us too much and we are not too far off from the classical interpretation of agile.

I would recommend training, in particular for organizations that multiple on-going projects. The product seems optimized for larger, more complex teams and getting proper training on how to configure, administer and use the system would be beneficial

Implementation of RALLY services and program satisfaction among various group,... 1) Dev Outcomes: How were our resiliencies, development, learning & practitioners “make them do the work,” but that they ask you to do it “in a way like before. 2) The Ops group: Just wish to make sure any change won't break current production envirements All the stake holders has to be on the same page

Incentivized

Atlassian JIRA Align (formerly AgileCraft) has an excellent suite of tools that integrate well with other tools and offers full support for various agile frameworks, including SAFe. It's just a complete integrated package, whereas some other tools seem to be lacking in different areas. Several plug-ins can be integrated to help with pro serv invoicing and integration with GitHub, Jenkins, Confluence, and other tools that we use.

Incentivized

Rally Software and Jira are both good. Rally Software is better at handling large scale projects. It offers advanced reporting, release tracking and portfolio management. Jira is more flexible but Rally Software is definitely better for large organizations. We selected Rally Software because our organization needed robust support for our Safe framework with detailed tracking across multiple teams and enterprise level reporting. Rally Software's ability to offer visibility into progress at all levels gave it the edge.

Incentivized

• Able to forecast & plan releases well using agilecraft leading to quality on time delivery.
• Distributed teams are able to collaborate well, be it be daily scrum, retrospective, estimation though this. Also team members love the gamification part & they have fun using this tool. Earlier we use to face challenges due to distributed teams but after AgileCraft, collaboration & communication was no longer a challenge & we are able to see improvement not only in team velocity, but also team satisfaction.
• Simplest tool to implement safe, scaling is always a problem with most of the agile tools but agilecraft helps in smoother implementation of safe practices & principles.

Incentivized

• 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.