Caliber by Micro Focus (formerly Borland Caliber), is an application requirement management offering. It has been discontinued, but similar capabilities are supplied by Micro Focus by Dimensions RM.
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Rally Software
Score 7.7 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.
I personally would prefer other products on the market right now such as Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Test Manager. I think having a product like Caliber that can only do requirements without integrating with a another system makes things a little more time consuming.
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".
Borland Caliber tracks functional and non-functional requirements pretty easily. You can easily add a requirement and attach a spreadsheet or a picture if needed.
Moving the hierarchy of requirements is fairly easy by just dragging and dropping.
Assigning users to approve requirements is simple by the fields included when adding a requirement and then submitting for review.
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.
I think Borland Caliber visually needs to be updated. It looks very out of date compared to other products on the market. The text box has a notepad feel to it and it's hard to make it visually catching.
Borland Caliber needs to be easier to integrate with other testing and development products on the market.
Having fields more related to URS and FRS would be helpful to auto-link to a document. So enter in a URS or FRS document ID at the beginning of a project in Caliber and then auto-assigning requirement IDs to link to pieces of code or test cases and having the user be able to decide a naming convention.
Borland Caliber needs a specific table for linking to a document ID and then each requirement could auto-generate a sub ID for each requirement to make the process of filling in User Requirements and Functional Requirements more efficient. Then the user should be able to modify the sub ID if the naming convention needed to be different.
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.
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.
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.
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 think Borland Caliber is better than Atlassian Confluence and has way more options for ease of use and reporting. Team Foundation Server is my personal choice as it comes as a package for developers to link to requirements easily and link to test cases. Borland Caliber is visually the least attractive of the three systems I have used. If you need just a requirement manager for tracking and reporting then Borland Caliber is a great choice.
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
