Rally - very extensive but pricey (worth it?)
February 15, 2016
Rally - very extensive but pricey (worth it?)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Rally Software Development
At my company, I am aware that the the project managers, the operations team, the QA team, and the engineering departments use Rally to work in an Agile environment. I would not be surprised if it was used by the whole organization because having the company staying on one software allows project managers to track company progress more efficiently. For a few years the company has strived to practice the agile methodologies and practiced scrum, daily standups and Kanban Board along with Rally to achieve this. Rally has many features to track progress as well as user friendly tools to optimize and track what other members of the team are doing.
- Their easy to view Kanban board allows the viewers to understand what's in progress, what needs to be done, and what can be released and what is done all in one go. Because our team also practices weekly optimization, the user stories on the backlog are ordered in terms of urgency (allowing users to start stories that are on the top of the stack easily.
- Rally's customer support is extensive as they have videos/recorded demos as well as phone support if anything goes wrong with the software or if something functionality is unclear
- Rally's reporting tool is extensive and allows custom reporting for different users to create their own reports based on their business objective.
- This software has many features and it's great but I have heard that the project managers do not use the entire package of features making this software quite expensive for what they actually use it for.
- +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.
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.