Love Rally!
October 25, 2017

Love Rally!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)

Our Product and Engineering teams rely solely on CA Agile Central for all aspects of our Application Lifecycle Management. We coordinate backlog management, current sprint and release planning, and portfolio planning with a mix of co-located and remote team members. CA Agile Central streamlines tactical Story and Defect management as well as strategic Portfolio Feature and Initiative planning while also providing one source of the truth for the enterprise.
  • Portfolio Planning features allows all team members to understand how individual stories and tasks roll up to larger milestones and releasable features.
  • Highly customizable visual feedback - CA Agile Central allows each user to create their own work space and also allows creation and sharing of custom visualizations for the product and engineering teams.
  • Artifact Edits are a straightforward mix of inline editing of common fields and detailed updates of entire artifact records.
  • Drag and drop artifact arrangement has gotten better in the past few releases, but is still a bit difficult to use.
  • Integrations with customer-facing bug tracking systems is possible, but requires more direct intervention than expected.
  • Renaming the product from Rally to CA Agile Central is confusing in the market - Rally was a known entity and even CA has to call their own solution "CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)." Not good.
  • 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.
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.
Well suited for one or many SCRUM development teams with five or more people. For distributed teams, CA Agile Central's shared content management is great with no on-site IT overhead.

For singular, small teams with concise product portfolios and few or no integration requirements, there are better, no-cost options in the market.