Digital.ai Agility (formerly VersionOne) helps organizations harness the power of their people’s knowledge, processes, and technology to build agile practices that scale across the enterprise. Its capabilities enable organizations to align products and investments with strategic business goals by coordinating planning, tracking, and reporting work across large distributed companies. Digital.ai Agility connects business strategy with team execution, providing a unified view at all levels,…
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Rally Software
Score 6.9 out of 10
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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.
Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Chose Digital.ai Agility
The waterfall evangelists wanted MS Project. Some Agile enthusiasts wanted Rally and some wanted VersionOne. We did an evaluation and looked at how each tool supported them. We mainly use VersionOne, but since the PM team is from a center of excellence, they still use …
We considered rally & AgileCraft since they also provides good support to SAFe framework. Though I personally found Rally better equipped but Rally was rejected due to its higher cost.
I did not select Rally; it was chosen by the organization. If I were choosing what to use within my own team, I would use Trello. It's free, very simple to use, and has a much nicer user interface. My company previously used VersionOne however, and I prefer Rally over that …
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) & through Test Management were two critical factors that lead to selection of CA Agile Central (formerly Rally).
Executives want to maintain trace-ability & detailed test management options like we get in ALM along with SAFe implementation support. …
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Rally Software
It was a close race between Jama, JIRA and Rally. We decided to go for Jama as a requirements management tool and use Rally for Agile projects. The cost was another factor that made us select Rally.
I've also evaluated the following agile solutions: ActiveCollab, Agile Bench, Agilo for Scrum, Atlassian JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, SpringGround, Targetprocess. Telerik Teamprocess, VersionOne, ZebraPlan etc. If it’s time to transition to software that’s specific to your Agile …
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
Scenarios where it works well: 1) Retros can be very well facilitated & notes/action items can be captured against the sprint. 2) Product Owner can effectively track the story progress with all the test-cases, design etc. 3) Being good scaling support, it provides good visibility across multiple teams, programs and agile portfolios, providing a centralized environment where all our stakeholders can easily work together regardless of location. 4) It provides easy tracking all of your epics, stories, themes, defects, tasks, tests and issues 5) I like its intuitive UI as for moving stories around, burning hours. 6) It allows top leadership to visualize and report their strategic plans, giving all stakeholders the relevant data that they need to stay dedicated to the project priorities. 7) It can be easily integrated with slack so for few teams we used slack for collaboration Scenarios where it did not work well: 1) Test Management need improvement in terms of tracking tests, team had hard time tracking regression test cases. 2) Version one comes with lot of features like Rally but here we don’t get customizations which is there in Jira where from workflow to issue everything can be customized based on your team/program/portfolio requirements. 3) Lot of navigation to access basic stuff. Example I want to go to bug attachment , there are lt of clicks & navigation need to do which should be pretty straightforward I feel.
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".
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
Although Digital.ai Agility supports customizations, they can be somewhat cumbersome to set up and maintain
The Analytics engine's user experience for digging into the data does not have the same feel as the rest of the system and, as a result, can be hard to work with
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Broadcom
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
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Broadcom
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
VersionOne provides outstanding training. They have Product Owner training that I recommend every Product Owner attend. They have scrum master training and other agile training that was well worth the money paid because it made the teams more productive. And the support for the tool is incredible. These people live and breathe Agile and are evangelists and enthusiasts.
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Broadcom
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
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Broadcom
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
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
JIRA appears to be more extensible with the ability for Scrum, Kanban, bug/incident tracking, and the ability to customize dashboards. However, VersionOne's performance over the same teams is extremely fast in comparison and therefore allows users to be more productive over the same amount of time.
It was a close race between Jama, JIRA and Rally. We decided to go for Jama as a requirements management tool and use Rally for Agile projects. The cost was another factor that made us select Rally.
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