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OpenText ALM Octane pros and cons

Vendor: OpenText
4.1 out of 5
686 followers
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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

OpenText ALM Octane offers comprehensive integration of agile management, requirements management, test management, defects management, and automatic test execution in a single tool.
Its pipeline integration allows seamless connection with DevOps ecosystems and tools like Jenkins, improving workflow by consolidating testing results in one place.
High traceability and project visibility are achieved with end-to-end visibility, providing insights into agile project flows and milestones across teams.
The flexibility to support Agile-Waterfall hybrid development at an enterprise scale is a strength, accommodating diverse project methodologies.
Robust reporting capabilities, including customization and document reports, make it possible to create detailed visual and status reports efficiently.

CONS

OpenText ALM Octane lacks integration with some solutions, making it less compatible with newer or less popular software.
There are concerns about the tool's complexity, making it difficult to use and scale effectively.
The documentation is not clear, which can impede efficient use and setup.
Reporting features are lacking, especially regarding a requirements matrix and traceability perspective.
OpenText ALM Octane requires a significant amount of resources during setup, which is onerous for users.
 

OpenText ALM Octane Pros review quotes

reviewer953499 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 14, 2021
The key feature is the usability. It is fast to learn and easy to use. It's very intuitive to work with. Most of the important functions are available via a few clicks, compared to other tools where I have to open a sub-menu and then a sub-menu and another sub-menu, and then press a button.
JP
Nov 25, 2018
It's brought our entire team into a single tool. We're all looking at the same real-time data. Our project management office has been able to set up dashboards for individual teams, and do comparisons by teams, of integration, and cross-team integration, burn-up, burn-down, and cumulative flow...
ST
Feb 11, 2019
We are seeing some real improvements in the way we do things. We are becoming more agile in the way we do it because of that and in a way that stories are managed. Stories are given lifecycles as opposed to just being entities within a tool.
Learn what your peers think about OpenText ALM Octane. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
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TL
Nov 22, 2018
With an Octane project, we have our automation, our requirements, our tests, our pipeline into build-and-deploy, and the ability to identify problem areas. It makes things quicker because it's more along the lines of an automated process.
Reviewer3273 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 6, 2018
The integration points are very good. Octane gives us a window not only into our manual testing, but also our automation testing and our performance testing. We can see all results from all three streams of testing in one place.
AG
Dec 20, 2020
There are a lot of predefined reports. We can attach additional reports for users, like who worked on what defect and when, as well as what is the status of the release compared to the previous release. It is really endless. All the data is really linked together. Then, if all the data is linked together, there is an option to prepare reports out of it. We are very impressed with its reporting capabilities.
GF
Nov 11, 2018
A valuable feature is the pipeline, so that we can now connect to Jenkins and then have all the results from testing, from external, in the tool, so that we can see the whole approach from there. Also, We can work with labels so we have better filtering solutions than in ALM. And it's much smarter and leaner to use than ALM.
SB
Dec 15, 2020
On the user side, what I like a lot is the reporting capabilities. There's no tool, to my knowledge, that gets anywhere close to Octane at the moment when it comes to the reporting capabilities. I can do everything with the reporting. There's nothing missing. I have all the options. I can create graphs, including graphs of several types and looks.
reviewer1095564 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 18, 2020
Its end-to-end traceability is one of the big advantages. Most of our agile projects work in a closed team structure. We are seeing what is the flow, where we are, and what is the project milestone. So, it provides end-to-end traceability and good visibility of project milestones.
VC
Oct 28, 2018
We looked at all the market-leading tools, but we did not find anything quite as comprehensive as ALM Octane. When I say comprehensive, it's not just a single tool for Agile planning, backlog management release, sprint planning, etc., but it also has a built-in, comprehensive quality management module. It also has pipelines where we can hook up with our DevOps ecosystem/toolchain.
 

OpenText ALM Octane Cons review quotes

reviewer953499 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 14, 2021
The elements in filtering need to be improved, meaning the number of filters I can use in widgets or in the grid views in parallel. There's a limitation which bothers a lot of our users. Filtering in text, or having a complex filter is limited. In a given field, for example, I can use a filter only once. I cannot say, 'Include the values 1, 2, and 3, and exclude value 17.' This is not possible but we have requested it often.
JP
Nov 25, 2018
There's a trend in our requests to have the ability to export data, en masse, out of Octane. There are capabilities within Octane to export data, but there are specifics around test suites and requirements and relations, as well as certain attributes, that we would like to be able to export easily out of Octane and into a database or Excel.
ST
Feb 11, 2019
We've only had a few stability issues. Generally, we have issues following any deployment they do, so if they do a deployment on a Sunday, then we may have a couple of issues on a Monday or Tuesday.
Learn what your peers think about OpenText ALM Octane. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
830,455 professionals have used our research since 2012.
TL
Nov 22, 2018
When I manage projects that are being created in ALM, I have a standard template, but I don't have a template for them in Octane. I literally have to create the project from the ground up every time, which for an administrator, is a nightmare solution
it_user683523 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 11, 2018
The Requirements Module could be better, to build up a better requirements process. There's a huge improvement from ALM.NET to Octane, but it's still not really facilitating all the needs of the product owners, to set up their requirements in Octane.
AG
Dec 20, 2020
They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add.
GF
Nov 11, 2018
Also, while there is a Requirements Module in Octane, it is very plain. It's okay to have some requirements described there, but it's not really following the whole BDD approach. I would like to have more features for requirements in there.
SB
Dec 15, 2020
Updating items, sorting, bulk updates—these things could have a bit more flexibility, but it's still possible to do them.
reviewer1095564 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 18, 2020
The cluster architecture that we implemented was server to server communication: Octane application to Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch to another Elasticsearch service. Recently, we found this is a security gap. The Octane application is interacting with Elasticsearch server, but that was missing from the requirements and prerequisites in the setup. The Micro Focus team has not given advice on how to implement authentication-based communication between Octane to Elasticsearch, and we found it as a gap later, then our security team asked us to fix that gap. So, there was a lot of time spent on rework.
VC
Oct 28, 2018
There is an opportunity for them to do a little more with the dashboarding. We still feel that HPE Quality Center/HPE ALM reporting is very powerful. We talked with R&D, and there are some things on their roadmap, but at the same time, their strategy is to connect Octane with visualization tools such as Power BI.