Codebeamer Reviews

I worked in the ALM and PLM industry, and for my various clients, I have evaluated, I have deployed, and I have come up with a strategy for lifecycle management solutions. Now I want to share the same with people around the world so that they can benefit from my knowledge.

Regarding codeBeamer ALM, I have the SaaS version, I have deployed it on the cloud and I have used the on-premise version as well for my various clients.

Our clients' primary use case was for automotive embedded systems, wherein they required ISO 26262 certification. They also use it as a stronger tool to manage the whole of their portfolio.

We are planning to go all out with codeBeamer. One of our clients has agreed. They have decided strategically that codeBeamer will replace their other tools. They will be retiring IBM Doors, XG, PTC Integrity, and Jama.

Two of my important clients were trying to work on a couple of big projects which were spread across the globe. CodeBeamer has provided them with an out-of-box solution that doesn't require any additional infrastructure. 

During this pandemic, my clients were able to conveniently work remotely thanks to codeBeamer. When the lockdown situation started happening all of a sudden in most countries, if you have a solution that is browser-based, you can easily provide access to your employees. CodeBeamer has proven to be a scalable solution for working from a home environment.

The most valuable feature of codeBeamer is something called a Smart Requirement View. This feature really gives me an advantage and it's something that is available out-of-box. I haven't come across this particular feature in any other tool. Another feature that I like is its traceability.

I can do almost 95% of the customizations without any programming knowledge. I don't need to hire a programmer to do customization. I took a look at the other tools, like IBM and PTC Integrity and Polarion — with those solutions, a lot of programming is required to do even small customizations. With codeBeamer ALM, customization is very straightforward.

Smart View is a valuable feature because that particular view gives me the flexibility of how I should look at my project or how I should look at my work items.

The traceability is so simple that I don't need to do any additional configurations related to traceability. 

One more benefit that I am especially fond of is the ability to migrate from an on-premise server to the cloud, which was very smooth when I compared it to other tools. It just took a couple of hours for complete data migration. In contrast, my experience with PTC and IBM took quite a lot of time, and there was indeed a downtime there when we were migrating. With codeBeamer ALM, when we're migrating, there is almost zero downtime. There were just two minutes of downtime.

There are thousands of requirements that are modified or which are reviewed; those reviews cannot be seen at one single point in time. You need to click on each individual review item to check it out. 

The search and replace feature within the tool itself could be improved. Not using any other third-party tools. 

I have used this solution for roughly 15 months.

My impression regarding the stability is that it's an excellent tool.

It's a highly scalable solution compared to any other competitors in the market. In fact, this is one point wherein I rate this tool on top of all the other tools. When I say other tools, I am referring to PTC Integrity, Polarion, and IBM.

In general, technical support is quite good, but you have to reach them during their live chat office hours. They should implement a hotline chat, that would be a good feature. Most of the time, emails are replied to within a day.

I would give their technical support a rating of nine out of ten.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Almost everything is ready to go, straight out of the box — you don't need the assistance of a third-party solution.

The plugins are already ready. You don't need extra time for project configuration.

Deployment takes roughly two days.

We follow a deployment strategy. Our first rollout happened within a week of trials.

We installed codeBeamer and we just enabled and configured the plugins. We tested it on guest servers and we rolled it out immediately within a week. 

Typically, two to three people are more than enough for deployment. One will be the system administrator, another will be the plugin developer and plugin manager, and the third will be the template configurator.

A little bit of maintenance is required, but not much. Specifically maintaining the databases, maintaining the artifacts, managing the access rules, etc. Typically, the admin activities need to be maintained.

Our clients are getting a huge dividend on codeBeamer. It allowed them to reduce their admin load by roughly 35-40%. They also experienced a nearly 65-70% reduction regarding customization and the deployment load.

They're not the most expensive product on the market, but they're not the cheapest either — I'd say codeBeamer ALM is moderately priced.

codeBeamer is a great tool, but having said that, make sure that you have the proper expertise to understand the ALM. As there are around 1,000 plus advantages with codeBeamer, I'd recommend that you go to their website to fully understand just how beautiful that tool is.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten.

one important aspect of codeBeamer is its overall capability in multifaceted domains and readily available templates. We talk mostly about it from the automotive aspect, but this tool is great for all industries, specifically the aerospace and pharmaceutical industries.

I use Codebeamer for controlling or arranging client modifications, test data, and other tickets.

Utilizing Codebeamer has helped my organization by saving time in our processes.

One valuable feature of Codebeamer is its ability to save time.

Codebeamer is not completely compatible with our internal network setup, which could be improved.

I have been using Codebeamer for about ten years.

I am satisfied with the technical support from Codebeamer. When I create a ticket for an issue, the support engineers try to resolve the trouble.

Neutral

I have not used other ALM tools like Polarion.

I am aware of Polarion but have no experience using it.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

I use this solution for requirement management, task tracking, bug tracking, and change tracking.

Since implementing this solution we have better communication and information exchange with customers.

The most valuable feature is the different kinds of trackers and traceability over all of it, including documents and wiki.

Usability needs to be improved. 

I have been using codeBeamer ALM for 15 years.

Our primary use for this solution is computer-based applications and systems delivered to FDA regulated industries like pharma and biotech.

We use codeBeamer for projects in a very conservative and highly regulated industry, where operations are still primarily based on paper and a mass of documents.

We also provide ALM consultancy and configuration of codeBeamer to others reforming their everyday workflows by offering smooth collaboration, full transparency, traceability, and compliance with the regulations.

CodeBeamer provides full traceability, excellent collaboration, regulatory compliance, and instant reporting with its holistic approach from requirement management to testing. 

Concept, project, DevOps - all covered.

We would like to see more industry-specific features that are tailored to the vertical markets.

We have had no issues with stability.

We use multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Docker), and have had no scalability issues so far. Developer provides performance test measures for large (more than one thousand users) systems.

Fully transparent, all support cases, feature requests, and product related questions are accessible for all users.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup takes ten minutes, is automatic, and there are no issues.

We implemented this solution in-house, alone.

Clear wins on project collaboration costs spared via codeBeamer.

Pricing is good when compared to similar ALM solutions.

We did not evaluate other options.