I’ve been a Rally user for close to five years now and I’ve recommended the product to many of my clients developing products in highly regulated industries. Rally’s support for traceability is pretty standard among agile project management tools. It supports trace relationships between epics, stories, tasks, defects, test cases, and test results. Craig Lagenfeld discussed one way to handle traceability in Using Rally to Map High Traceability User Stories: PRD to SRS and High Assurance Agile Software Development: Traceability Matrix Examples.
Tracing in Rally still leaves a lot to be desired. Rally’s audit trail, especially for trace relationships, can’t be queried or sorted and it’s hard to use in reports. There is no notion of impact analysis when a requirement changes and typically no annotation on the change. It falls far short of my expectation for a complete trace solution.
That’s improved somewhat now with the recently announced new product integration with Jama’s Contour to tie requirements in Contour together with stories in Rally. I haven’t yet test-driven Contour or the Rally/Contour integration, but it’s something to keep in mind as I search for an integrated solution for agile traceability.