Rally Software

Formerly CA Agile Central

Agile team work

Work load management

Tracking project progression and success metrics

Tracking individual performance

Created a positive and efficient experience to help push agile into our teams

Provided a great tracking tool for more visibility into what the work is on a team

Had consistent linkage between all the item IDs to be able to create all the required documents

It supports our version and Agile and we have been able to deliver because of it.

It is complicated. A tool should not be complicated but rather easy to use. Rally is not.

It is a lot costlier than tools such as Jira.

Rally Software allows us to understand what was done and how much time & labor was in every task of your project.

It lets our scrum master collect monthly metrics for our team, which we use to adapt our practices to be more efficient

It organizes the organization's initiatives nicely, and allows easy conversation based on the epic/feature code

It slightly slows down and frustrates the development team I'm on, due to the cons I already mentioned

We has improved our accuracy in estimating release capacity and timelines and tracking team throughput.

Team collaboration has improved which is critical for us as teams were distributed at three locations. The Big Room Planning feature allows teams to identify the work to be done as well as dependencies and challenges. It helps team members to stay on the same page.

CA Agile Central has customized dashboards to view information in Scrum, Kanban or custom views. It helps senior management in closely tracking their releases & helps them in taking corrective action in case they feel milestones will not be met.

We are able to deliver every sprint into production since Continuous Integration environment has been setup with ease using github integration with CA Agile Central.

Positive was - it helped multiple teams to use the same tool.

No negatives yet.

We were able to increase our release cadence from one major release every 12-18 months to one release to production every 3-5 weeks, depending on product set.

Over many quarters - and ultimately years - of use, we were able to plan for seasonal spikes in support and new feature delivery based on known throughput from previous time periods. No spreadsheets!

Using the inherent status visibility of CA Agile Central, we gained anywhere from 2-10 hours of time per user by eliminating meetings, status check calls and user-generated weekly status updates.

Positive: fast ramp up didn't crash and burn

Negative: obscures business value of features... the implementation of that kind of view is minimal

Moving from Waterfall to Scrum or Kanban has been a big win for us. The adaptability and customization of CA Agile Central has aided in our success.

Agile methodologies and CA Agile Central has made it easier to integrate business product owners into an agile 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

ROI is cool

Agile is great

DevOps is the best fit

+Rally has definitely achieved employee efficiency as working on Agile softwares that have an easy to see Kanban board allows project managers to track progress easily (and thus assessing road blocks without wasting much time).

+As a person that started less than 6 months ago, being able to look into the histories of user stories that were completed by my team before I joined has allowed me to study the responsibilities that come with my role and team.

- I used to use a different Agile software which had a better UI for the dashboard for editing stories, so it took a while to get used to having to click into each story to edit/add more details and read into them.

It works - we have been able to get the job done. We could probably be doing better with something else.

It helps us manage sprints, tie into auditing.

The visibility Rally gives into the actual development activities is phenomenal - for the team themselves as well as management. No need to have big project review meetings - the data is all right there.

The product is fairly easy to use, which means that the development teams actually use it, as a result they build better sprint plans and are more likely to deliver what was intended by the Product Manager.

I don't know how you measure precisely the ROI from greater predictability, but it is clearly high. When used with other solid planning processes, the visibility Rally offers can give you much greater predictability of a given team's future performance and of the entire organization as a whole.

Rally facilitates significant improvements in communication between Product Management and Engineering because it offers visibility and clear connections between business initiatives and individual user stories that the team is delivering.

Hosted version makes it free from internal IT maintenance and involvement.

Hosted version is available without needing to be on the company network.

Replaced a more complex and expensive solution.