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Rally’s Recent Release Confirms That It Is Sticking Around
Rally Software has been viewed as a go-to application lifecycle management (ALM) software for organizations looking to adopt Agile development methods into their project portfolio management practice. Its out-of-the-box support of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) made this solution particularly attractive for organizations looking to use Rally as a foundation and centralized platform to scale Agile and coordinate work across the organization and up into the business.
Source: Rally Software at SoftwareReviews, accessed April 16, 2020
However, Rally Software has gone through significant changes that can make prospective customers wonder its future viability:
- Rally Software was acquired by CA Technologies on July 2015.
- CA Technologies was acquired by Broadcom on Nov 2018.
- Rally rebranded as CA Agile Central but was then rebranded back to Rally.
At the time of Rally’s acquisition by CA, Rally appeared to be a good compliment to CA’s comprehensive portfolio of development, testing and deployment solutions. Even though Rally may not currently have the extensive third-party and community marketplaces as its Atlassian Jira and Microsoft Azure DevOps competitors, it made strides to extend its out-of-the-box integrations with many of today’s popular tools.
Broadcom still sees value in maintaining and enhancing its Rally product despite losing the prominent position it once held. The most recent Rally On-Premises Version 2.0 release saw a number of changes to its UI, architecture, and connectors in addition to new features and fixes. This release builds upon a recent update made in late 2019. Some notable enhancements include:
- Updates to the Team Board, Work Views, and Quality Management pages.
- The ability to save and share a view of the Team Board and Work Views pages.
- Inclusion of risks as a work item type.
- Enhancements to the Portfolio, Release Tracking feature that allows users to view all features in a selected release that have dependencies on other features.
However, there remains a feature disparity between its On-Premise v2.0 version and its SaaS offering.
Our Take
Rally Software can help organizations bring Agile practices into their project and portfolio management practices. The added benefit of a vast Broadcom portfolio of development, testing, and deployment tools makes Rally an enticing option. Unfortunately, having and supporting a diverse portfolio (built through CA Technologies, Broadcom, and Broadcom Limited acquisitions) has its own unique set of challenges.
Rally remains considerable a player in the ALM space. However, it appears to be slowly losing ground to its competitors in a constantly changing marketplace.
Source: Application Lifecycle Management Category at SoftwareReviews, accessed April 16, 2020