Rally Software vs. ZenTao

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

I am very glad about the working speed of this tool. The comfort and support it has provided us in project management are worth appreciating because Project management is a big deal and using ZenTao has made it easy and fun for us as we can as a team better collaborate. But some of its features need to be fixed.

• 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.

• Story could be linked with product, sprint, test case, bug, which makes traceability so great.
• Test module, with test case, case library, test request, test report, very detailed.
• On-Premise available, the package is very small based on LAMPP
• SaaS version even cheaper without your own IT maintenance support.
• Price really affordable.
• API call is easy, so that we could do customizations.

• 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.

Incentivized

• The function of ZenTao mobile version is a little weak.
• ZenTao users need to receive training before they start using the software, because for testers, the first use of the software may be a little complicated, and they cannot execute the same test case multiple times in the same test execution process.
• Although there are many reports built in. But if you want to get the data yourself，You have to know how to write SQL to customize your reports, which can a little bit challenging.

• To keep connecting my people, platform, and process for faster, smarter, better results.
• Making the right contribution to the community. Use Agile and Lean processes to manage the work of your team.
• Once you have tasted the positive result with Rally Software, you don't want to give up and come back to the old school of development pain any more.

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.

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

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.

Incentivized

ZenTao defines bugs, tasks, and stories separately, not just an ISSUE. I can oversee the development from creating a Product Backlog to releasing the increment. I can also collect and record product feedback from the client and share with my team.

• 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
• Kanban board support is lacking

Incentivized

• We are delivering projects on time and can keep an eye on the progress of our projects.
• My team and I can better communicate on a project.
• As it is [in my experience], buggy it sometimes results in disturbing the whole working of our company.