IBM Engineering Workflow Management Reviews & Product Details - Page 5

Very well equipped tool for implementing Scrum Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Integration with other tools is not helpful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

IBM is a great product that has been around to prove it's worth. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have few dislikes about this software program. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rational Team Concert, or RTC for short, works best as a full SDLC development, test management, and release management suite. When you have your software architecture and project work management integrated into it, and have tasks assigned and processed the way they should, it really gives the management and end-users great visibility of their projects and where they are in their various phases. However to do that requires that EVERYONE learn and use RTC fully. And that is just way too high a barrier to entry for many places to surmount as they need to continue DOING rather than learning, which is admittedly inefficient and stupid and leads to bad practice becoming ingrained in an organization and thus institutionalized. However, until senior management grants enough time for people to learn to RTC fully as it should be, which is the role of the braver middle managers to push, i.e. be real leaders instead of yes-men goons for the seniors, it a such an easy set of tools to misuse, abuse, waste the potential of, and otherwise turn it into a mediocre partial solution as part of your kit for the SDLC.

That said, the following things are good:

Strong admin controls and powerful automation capabilities in concert (no pun intended) with tools like UrbanCoder for deploying releases.

Good universal work item reference system. Everything can always be found using these, unlike other systems that will use different (i.e. non-universal) references for different things, confusingly enough.

Great for managing work-streams and giving your client/business stake-holders views of your progress via easily managed browser-accessible dashboards.

Relatively easy to manage the forked development of existing stable releases by different teams, or even within the same team if need be for experimental bifurcated development.

Everyone in the SDLC has a role in RTC. Truly everyone. This makes access really nice to control. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The admin controls are powerful but there is a steep learning curve and you WILL need support from IBM to help you there. It's just too damn powerful to manage easily at the start if you're new to it as an admin.

The concept of the SDLC in RTC is very good and plainly obvious but if you're bringing this tool into an existing organization, your devs, testers, etc. will NOT accept it readily. You MUST ensure that they have adequate time to be trained with it, have sessions to just experiment and be able to ask questions, and offer unlimited retraining sessions. Seriously. Make the RTC admins own that, because ultimately that will save YOU time and frustration as an admin as people will start learning the RTC method and become less and less likely to cause huge alarms and panics in the last hours before a deployment is scheduled. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

RTC is great for organizing work using agile principles. It's better organised than some other tool I've used. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are widgets that can be used to summarize data. What I don't like is the inability to write my own query for the widgets - I'm stuck with whatever data choices someone else already picked for me. Also, there's a prioritized list view that uses a number to rank. I'm not able to create a query that will give me this rank number. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The user friendliness of the software, doesn't take too much time to train in it's use! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is not much to dislike about this software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Once established, it is easy to manage and monitor requirements elicited and to analyze. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is a learning curve to getting used to the software Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I liked its ease of use the best. The intuitive user interface made performing Scrum development a breeze. The task tracking and the ability for my IDE to use the My Work View made things much easier to keep track. In addition we had a small development team, so the fact that we were able to get 10 free licenses up front really helped us out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There isn't much to dislike, except for the fact that RTC is huge and there is a steep learning curve to grasp all of its capabilities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to use and track. used to track epics, stories in a sprint. Items can be assigned a priority Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Have to custom cteate queries to track things. Some of these should be provided by default. Email notifications doesn't work properly Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

RTC allows team members to fully own their work, progress, estimates, etc. This ownership removes the extra time and miscommunication that is associated with communicating status to a PM and the PM then entering your status and tasks in a plan and communicating it back to the team.

RTC also provides the ability of the team and each individual to create queries and charts to help them better understand the progress of their team and any issues that might be present. The dashboards are very visually pleasing, easy to set up and understand.

Keeping track of your own work and updating progress on it is very easy in RTC. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

RTC's navigation model is difficult to understand for new users. It is not very intuitive and the UI is inconsistent in some cases which adds to the confusion. Once the user has spent a few months using RTC, this confusion is resolved, but it takes a little time.

RTC does not allow a central way for a PM or a manager to manage work allocations of team members. I hope that this is resolved by an enhancement in the future. We have found that it is not effective approach to rely on each team member across a large organization to keep their allocations up to date at all time. Access to their allocations allowed to their manager would be great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I liked its ease of use the best. The intuitive user interface made performing Scrum development a breeze. The task tracking and the ability for my IDE to use the My Work View made things much easier to keep track. In addition we had a small development team, so the fact that we were able to get 10 free licenses up front really helped us out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There isn't much to dislike, except for the fact that RTC is huge and there is a steep learning curve to grasp all of its capabilities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.