Seems to make things harder rather than easier!
Updated December 02, 2013
Seems to make things harder rather than easier!

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Software Version
Enterprise Edition
Overall Satisfaction
Pros
- Gives you a good view into your current active work week/ active sprint
- Provides a pretty good way to look at prior sprints
Cons
- It has so much flexibility and power that it actually makes simpler tasks complex – particularly backlog management and scheduling things into releases and sprints.
- It has a tough job of managing “epics” – things with 100s of small features, and being able to prioritize across them. Typically we have 2 epics in a release. We have no problem prioritizing epics, but it is hard to prioritize “stories” across epics. There are typically dozens of stories in an epic.
- 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.
Product Usage
70 - Software Engineering
1 - One person in our division is the main POC for Rally. In our team, we do everything internally – minimal assistance is required.
- Track what we are doing from sprint to sprint
- Track velocity/progress
- Provides audit trail as we complete work. We can tie the loop off on what code actually changed. This important for SSAE16 compliance.
- We found that the plug-ins offered some nice drag-and-drop functionality when review story status
- We are considering integrating our Ideas board so it will feed directly into Rally
Evaluation and Selection
Pivotal Tracker
- Product Features
- Product Reputation
- Vendor Reputation
We would have spent more time in a pilot mode. It would have been helpful to have a single team trial it exhaustively to determine if it was a good fit.
Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Training
- Online training
Configuration
Keep it simple. While it's tempting to add lots of custom fields it becomes difficult to maintain consistent usage across a large team. Consequently the data become unreliable.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
Some - we have added small pieces of custom code - We added some pre-built plugins. It was easy to do. Based on the plug-ins we saw we wouldn't have spent the time customizing it ourself.
The hook into Subversion didn't seem fully supported, although it did work. Made us wonder if it would break at a later date due to Rally upgrades.
Support
Usability
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
None | Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Difficult to use Slow to learn Cumbersome Feel nervous using Lots to learn |
- It was very difficult to manage epics and their child stories.
- Scheduling of stories into sprints was never as easy as I expected it to be
Reliability
Integration
- Subversion version control system.
Integration to Subversion required a custom module script to be installed. It shows that the check in of the code was prompted by the story. Rally provides a proof of concept/ reference implementation, but the team had to implement it. It is not as bad as it looks. I thought it would be hard.
- Not at this time
Vendor Relationship
I was not involved in negotiating terms
Upgrading
Yes - Yes, Rally lived up to the SaaS standard of carefree upgrades
Comments
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