CA Agile Central (formerly Rally): it was good while it lasted
May 27, 2016
CA Agile Central (formerly Rally): it was good while it lasted
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)
We used Rally in our company through 2015 and beginning 2016 as the main tool to organize our user stories, defects and all other tasks. It was the main communication tool between teams members and their managers on the tasks level.
- structuring teams separately in a clean way. You can add as much teams as you want, and guarantee each team's work would stay separate in browsing, graphs and analytics.
- detailed menus and drop-downs listing of features - technically it covers all there is of agile aspects and some more
- ability to set your email notifications on/off
- ability to split user stories into the next iteration if work isn't done in the previous one - no need to duplicate your user story manually
- the service was intermittently down, sometimes for several hours.
- Rally is a very large powerful tool, and that also is the reason why it can't be a good fit for small teams who want simpler interfaces and way less features.
- loading pages is slow, add to that if you (like me) keep it open all day after signing in, the systems logs you out automatically.
- pening multiple windows (on separate tabs) has some problematic issues esp. when your sessions expires, and you will need to sign in to all other tabs one by one. Also if you attempt to sign in again on one tab, all the other tabs redirect to the same page of the first tab you signed in.
- a steep learning curve for agile beginners/novice team member - leaving those members to use the tool without any training makes it almost impossible for them to know what they must do to get by their daily tasks
- not enough free documentation online
- 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
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.