Rally Software

Formerly CA Agile Central

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.

Overall, Rally Software is a better and more powerful tool than Jira for the same exact purposes. Jira cannot function as a requirements repository so it needs plugins or separate tools to do the same thing. There is no space or option to see all defects or user stories or tasks in a project. There are no export tools.

We have used Jira in the past. Jira is easy to use and seems to be an industry standard. Rally is clunky and expensive. The dev side did not pick it, the business did due to its reporting capabilities.

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 solution.

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. There are many features under tests feature which allows you to maintain your test suites. Also, if you want to scale agile while connecting the highest level initiatives down to the task level with accurate data,CA Agile Central is one of the best tools for that. It allows you to look at various release trains and how that then flows up to the overall program budget. On the top of that, the learning curve was not much with this tool as the Rally videos are extremely helpful. They are so short and so easy to understand, so team went through the videos with no external training before working on this tool.There are three editions available for selection & we opted for Unlimited edition. It costs around $49 USD per user per month. Pretty costly!

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.

Our evaluation was done many years ago, but at the time Rally provided the best mix of SCRUM-driven features, visibility and economy for our product engineering teams.

Selected because the others seemed worse two years ago when the decision was made. VersionOne seemed ugly and too restricted. Might look better now. Microsoft TFS, now VSO, looked limited but also might look better now. Microsoft is improving it at a remarkably rapid pace. Jira was considered and rejected because their solution is too piecemeal requiring too much administration.

The process we used to select a tool was to create a scorecard of IT and Business stakeholder needs. We then reviewed seven tools and graded them against the scorecard requirements. We took the top two products and had a one day hands on demonstration with selected IT and Business stakeholders. We graded them again and selected CA Agile Central based on the overall score.

We used CA Agile Central (formerly Rally) before but recently switched to JIRA. I used JIRA before Rally too, and I think it was easier to manage defects in JIRA. Also, I think JIRA is better for teams and companies that want to implement agile/scrum life cycles. It's easier to see in JIRA what all a team is working on, what stories/defects/activities, etc.

We started exploring new tools, and found better adaptation of our team toward JIRA. JIRA provided engineers with simpler interfaces and more reliable service, even though less unnecessary features. Also the managers found in JIRA better ability to eliminate noise and focus on what's more important; the content. Rally however have better user interfaces focusing on deadlines and estimates.

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 needs, check out some of these options for your team’s communication, reporting, and assessment requirements. Once you find a better tool set, your projects will be within the deadline.

Rally has much more features with regards to the the traditional Agile methodology and has more extensive tracking features for the project managers. Pivotal Tracker was used for a smaller company and smaller teams but since my current company is larger in scale and has more to track as a whole organization, Rally was a better choice. Although I personally preferred Pivotal Tracker's dashboard, I do like that when I have to write a task summary into a user story, being able to open each story into a new tab/window makes it easier for other people to read.