benr75

I have tweeted twice in regards to Rally Software's agile project management system.

"RALLY STOP STEALING MY #$%^(*& FOCUS."

and more recently:

"RALLY IS THE WORST FUCKING PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE I HAVE EVER USED. FIX THE UI ALREADY, THIS IS 2008."

Now I must admit that the second tweet was knee jerk and in the heat of frustration. Rally has developed a product to help with Agile Development practices and it has allowed a team I work with to organize and complete a very large project. I appreciate their representative getting in touch with me after the nasty tweet and offering to help me out with some training. I like training, but feel that quality web applications these days have labored over their UI to provide a dead simple interface so that it can help and not hinder productivity. To quote a master in this art, 37signals, "Simple interfaces are easier to use, easier to understand, more intuitive, faster loading, and easier to maintain". I would like to offer Rally some constructive criticism, a much better alternative to cursing on Twitter.

My first tweet, "RALLY STOP STEALING MY #$%^(*& FOCUS.", was in reference to my session timing out. When this happens Rally pops a javascript dialog box stealing focus. Furthermore the default session time is EXTREMELY short at 30 minutes. You can increase this up to 4 hours in your profile, however software should have reasonable defaults. Rally is supplemental software to my day, it will be open ALL day, so don't keep kicking me out.

The actions menu is out of tune with its context. If you are on the Tasks page for a User Story the most likely thing to do is add new tasks. HOWEVER that menu includes all the actions for a story, INCLUDING making a new story. The "New Task" item is at the bottom of the list. I cannot tell you how many times I have created several "tasks" only to realize I hit the wrong option and now have added several unnecessary stories. Another small issue I have with this screen is that navigation items on the left do not emphasize the current page as you move around.

You can set the status at both the Story level and the Task level. The two do not seem to interact well and will sometimes result in stories that are marked complete that actually have tasks still in progress. A story should not be marked as complete until all tasks within the story are marked complete.

Pop up windows are another huge gripe I have with pretty much any site these days, and almost everything you do in Rally will eventually result in a pop up. I can only do one thing at a time and most things I do, especially when it comes to project management, are linear. Eliminate the pop-ups, simply take the user to a new screen.

I would be interested to know if others out there share any of these issues, feel free to leave your comments.