BMC Helix ITSM replaces Remedy. It is a broad suite of ITSM, tools with strong integrations to other BMC tools and in-built ITAM. The product is used mainly by global brands and is offered in on-premise and SaaS configurations.
N/A
OpenText ALM Octane
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenText™ ALM Octane, formerly from Micro Focus, includes integrated planning, continuous integration, test management, and release management. With these capabilities, it helps Agile teams and DevOps toolchains to deliver high-quality software with insight, traceability, analytics-focused end-to-end visibility, and continuous quality.
N/A
Rally Software
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
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.
BMC Helix ITSM fits our environment particularly well, where standardized, auditable processes are already in place: Incident and Problem Management can be structured cleanly, with clear ownership, escalations, and fully traceable documentation—crucial in a highly regulated banking context. Through the customer platform/portal, users can log incidents and requests consistently, track their status transparently, and use a single central communication channel across service boundaries. This supports a service-oriented setup spanning multiple business services and locations. It becomes less suitable—or at least more effort-intensive—when core foundation data is not yet stable: an immature CMDB, insufficient ITAM data quality, and an unstructured knowledge base limit the value of automation and self-service. In addition, heterogeneous integrations and strict authorization models can increase implementation and ongoing maintenance efforts, especially when SLAs are not harmonized across different customer environments.
If someone is already using ALM Octane, then it is worth the pain to go through the upgrade process to get the current versions. If you need it to tie into Jira, it can do that. Just be prepared for a rough road. If you have some other product that you use for DevOps, PM, and QA, you will probably be better off sticking with what you have. DaVita also uses TFS, but not in a full implementation (i.e. not with a build server for code deployment), so for them, ALM makes a lot of sense. If you are using TFS with a build server, there are other methodologies that won't end up making you want to pull your hair out trying to make it integrate with what you are using.
Rally Software is well suited for large Agile or scrum teams who do sprints and it helps managing sprints and backlogs. It is well suited for organizations who want visibility into work being done and progress. Suitable for tracking is user stories, defects and release planning. Works well with CI CD too. It would not be suitable for small teams or startups. For teams that don't use agile. Teams who want lightweight tools like Jira. Companies with a limited budget.
AI drive incident correlation leading to identifying problems and major incidents quickly.
Digital Workplace gives end-users a modern and personalized UI to submit requests, monitor service health, and receive self-help.
As an enterprise ITSM, it is critical that Request, Incident, Problem, Asset, and Change Management are integrated and flow together. BMC Helix is built on this principle.
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.
Service Level management configs can be lengthy, and when changes are needed to specific SLA, it does take a long time to configure. Templates work but only for certain things, lots of manual work is still required.
The Online product documentation can be confusing or in same cases not correct.
BMC products are sometimes expensive. When partners try to resell licenses or increase their own allotment, it becomes very expensive.
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.
Overall the product enhances the capability of incident management, problem management and change management. The AI based framework helps generated better visibility and reports. The effectiveness of enhanced service desk suuport improves end user experience as the incidents are handled well in time and aged incidents are highlighted at the right time.
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
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.
Their tech support is top notch. They respond and get back to us, even on lower level incidents and issues, very quickly. It is rare that we deal with a support technician who does not know what they are doing.
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.
the trainers dont have so much practical experiences. its mostly follow up and reading existing documentation withou own input. of course experiences people are on shore or have no free time. sad truth
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
I believe Remedy's performance and market share exceeds its competitors. But it is worth mentioning that Microsoft's SCCM has excellent integration with Microsoft enterprise solutions and has is less expensive and not efficient. The IBM solution has better analytics but lacks the wide features and capabilities of Remedy. HP & CA are the real competitors for Remedy but lacks the stability, maturity, and effectiveness in Remedy
Micro Focus ALM Octane use at DaVita goes back beyond my starting with them three years ago. They have used it as part of DevOps as well as for performance measurement of software releases in combo with HP Performance Center (a great combination). Jira is well suited to managing bug reports and development processes with Agile and Scrum, but ALM Octane goes above and beyond that.
Rally and Asana have comparable features and are both valuable project management tools, but Asana's user interface is well-organized and highly intuitive. It's easy to add tasks and collaborators, edit due dates, indicate progress on tasks, close out projects, etc. However, Rally's interface is somewhat cluttered and difficult to navigate. My team ended up choosing Asana over Rally due to these concerns.
Positive: an introduction to ITIL and viewing Asset, User Management from the perspective of ITIL, and how BMC has implemented those processes
Negative: The development team needs to communicate better with the sales and support side, and they need offer an open API
Negative: Currently the Asset Management side has little security and validation of Asset input: anyone can make API (mostly), at any item, which is a problem that I am apart of solving.
The UX needs updating, badly. Its quality is poor: it functions, but it is cumbersome, click-heavy and requires several hours to understand how to function with it. Also, it needs to ditch IE11 support, altogether.
it helped organizing many of the processes management use to communicate tasks with engineers, and provided detailed charts on the speed/blockage during any iteration
with time Rally became the main tool we used to track and report tasks/defects in our projects, but frequent service outages made it very hard to continue consider as a reliable solution
too much features is good, but for engineers a few features (User Stories section, iterations, defects, and Kanban boards) are necessary and the rest is just noise
