OpenText ALM Octane Reviews

I work for a section of our company where what we do is host enterprise tools that our consulting projects can use. Potentially, as we get more and more users, we can have hundreds of projects at a time. We're not a typical use case where we have one way that we're using the tool. The tool is being used on various consulting projects.

Our use cases vary drastically. We have some people who have told us they just use it for testing, there are some people who just use it for defect management. People are familiar with other tools, like JIRA and ALM and even AGM. Octane is new, so some people are trying to take baby steps into adopting it.

Day-to-day, how we typically use it, and how we're promoting it should be used, is for Agile project management with manual testing, including release management, sprint management; end-to-end type of use. We use it to manage our releases in sprints. Other teams within my group also use it for testing and defect management, and that's how we promote it, and train our consulting project teams to use it.

For our use case, 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 types of things. So from a PMO perspective, there is a really good overview, from how we've set up our dashboards, to know where each team is and how they're progressing and how much work they have that integrates with other teams. That's really helpful.

The feedback that we've gotten is that the way testing is closely tied into the product Backlog has made it more intuitive, or easier to manage the relationship between building out an application and testing it. In other tools, that is more segregated. The way it's designed in Octane, people have said it makes more sense to them, and that it's easier for them to understand their data and to maintain and test their solutions.

Very generally, the feedback that we've received is that people really like the user interface overall. It's intuitive to use, it's easy to learn, people like the usability features, the user experience. 

Another thing that people really like about Octane is how easy it is to customize. In some previous tools, that has been very limited, or you had to know how to write code to do some of the customizations, or it was very confusing. Going back to the user interface, they've made the customization of the tool, the workspace settings, very easy for people to figure out and use. We've gotten a lot of good feedback on that.

In general, I think people really like the Team Backlog and the capacity bucket for each individual team member. They like that ability to track capacity and progress very easily that way, by individuals.

I work pretty closely with Micro Focus, particularly on ALM Octane. Right now we have a backlog of some 60 or 70 enhancement requests, varying in priority from very high to low.

In general, 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.

One of the things that a lot of our project teams have complained about is the simplicity of reporting that's available in Octane, and that they have to export data out of it in order to create the types of reports that their PMO or their client wants to see. Octane provides solutions around OData, and integration into reporting tools, but what people really want is smart and good reporting, advanced reporting, within the tool. They don't want to have to go out to another tool for reporting.

In general, we also have some requests to beef up the manual testing abilities and the ability to report on testing progress. All the basics are there, but there's an issue of maintainability. For example, one thing that we brought up to them recently was: Once you plan a test and it creates a run, more particularly a suite run, you can't edit the suite run afterward. It locks you in, and we're saying that that is not realistic with how people work. Mistakes are made and people are humans and we change our minds about things. So the tool needs to allow for a bit more flexibility in that testing area, as well as some better widgets to report on progress.

Overall, we haven't had any issues with stability. There are two things that do come up.

It seems like we have issues with Elastic, the integration to it. Intermittently we have these issues where global search isn't working, or widgets aren't populating, so there's something a little bit unstable with that integration. It could be on our end, or it could be something with the setup, I'm not sure.

We're also having performance issues. It's not really stability, but we do see some slowness in the system and in our performance testing, so we're working with Micro Focus on that to figure out how to resolve those issues.

The performance issues that we have come about when we have load on the system. We're trying to figure out if the source of those issues is the environment, and what the optimized settings would be for the environment: memory size, number of disks, things that we're doing in our performance testing, etc. But we're also looking at the software to see if there are any issues there.

We are working with about 180 to 200 concurrent users, which isn't a terribly high number. We're looking at all sorts of angles but we're currently in the middle of it, so it's hard to tell what the source of the issue is.

Micro Focus has definitely been good about helping us out with all of that, giving us advice, hardware related, on what our settings should be. Maybe we're not sized exactly correctly. According to Micro Focus - they also, of course, do their own performance testing - and they haven't seen the results that we have.

Because we're a partner and we've been working with them for years,  we'll have quick calls twice a month, at least for Octane, to talk about new enhancement requests that are coming up, providing them with feedback on the tool as we're hearing it from our project users, and to review our highest priority requests and their statuses and if they have been included in their release planning for upcoming releases.

We have a pretty good dialogue going back and forth with them, so we know when to anticipate the functionality that we're looking for is going to get delivered. That helps us when we're making decisions around which upgrades to take.

Tech support does a pretty good job. Sometimes it's a little frustrating because they're the Level 1 support, the helpdesk support. They often are trying to rush us to close out tickets. I understand that they've got metrics, but that part is a little bit frustrating.

When we get it escalated, when we're working with their research and development or with the customer service contacts that we have, they're much more amenable to our requests. They like listening to what we need and the type of support that we're requesting. They take us pretty seriously when we escalate and have high priority issues, and they really try to get us resolutions as fast as they can. We definitely appreciate that.

We have ALM implemented and we're still using AGM. We are making the switch to Octane because we implemented AGM with integration to ALM so that we could have Agile project management and a manual testing tool for our project teams. The nice thing about Octane is that it doesn't require integration. Integration always introduces a potential for points of failure. If you can house those capabilities within a single tool, why not go in that direction? It provides ease of use, less maintenance, etc.

Also, this is the direction the vendor is going in. Several years ago, our organization made the decision to go with HPE, now Micro Focus, for the majority of our suite of enterprise tools. We're following the direction that the vendor is going, but also recognizing that there are advantages to the tool that has good capabilities. We're not blindly following them, we're doing our assessments and saying, "Hey, this looks like a good thing for us." Of course, if it requires fewer tools, less maintenance, less setup, we'll go in that direction. That's how we made the decision to go with Octane.

There are other things that we haven't deployed yet, but the advantages of the direction they're going in for integration into the DevOps world to support CI and CD, that's a direction we want to go in. I'm on the Agile solution team, but we have the testing solution team, so they're very interested in those types of capabilities as well. Octane is opening that door for us to get more and more functionality hubbed in a single tool.

I don't do the software installation or that side of things, but in terms of our implementation strategy, we have four environments in which there are seven servers. In our lower environments, our base environment, we have one server that gets installed. 

We don't have any integration that we support currently, so it's a standalone environment. We do integrate into an Elasticsearch farm, as well as to LDAP for user creation, password validation, etc. We have those basic types of integration setup, but we don't have integration to other tools such as DevOps tools, yet. We are currently working on integration to PPM, and that's going to be deployed in the next couple of weeks.

Once we get up to our stage and production environments there are multiple servers on a load-balancer, so that adds an extra degree of complexity to the setup. They're also externally exposed to the internet so that our clients and external users can have access to the tools.

It was just us and Micro Focus.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Octane. At that point, we were in pretty deep with HPE. But before we chose HPE as our vendor for the bulk of our enterprise tools, we did an evaluation of different vendors, different suites of enterprise tools that we could possibly host, before we made that decision to go with ALM and AGM and UFT.

The way that we approach it is that we don't rush into a decision and say, "This is the tool that we have to use." One thing that's nice is that there's always an option for a SaaS trial for 30 days or 60 days. Micro Focus has been very kind to us and given us extensions on our trial versions so that we would have enough time to evaluate the tool and the SaaS version before we make a full, educated decision about how we want to move forward. That's a good place to start: Plan on getting a trial version and plan out your assessment, what your objectives are, what your requirements are for the tool, and then just get in there and start using it.

I use Octane in my day-to-day work, but I'm mostly an administrator of the tool's usage on our consulting projects.

With respect to how tools and processes are evolving to adapt to the change from traditional Waterfall, one of the things our organization is finding is that it's not a switch that you turn on - that you're "traditional" one day and you're "Agile" the next. So, having tools that are flexible enough to accept variability, and that are flexible enough to adjust to project teams transitioning and becoming more Agile as they go along, is important. Octane, because of some of the additional features that are there and that are not in some of the other Agile tools we've looked at - like the Quality module, the quality story, the ability to customize workflow and business rules, and also having the Requirements module - lets you still be a little bit traditional when you need to be, while you're learning to become more Agile. There's some transitioning that the flexibility in Octane lets you do, where other tools might be more rigid in enforcing pure Agile project management.

As for lessons we've learned about adapting tools and processes for Agile, I feel that's very similar to what I just said. It's this journey that people are on. Where we started was with very traditional project management tools and, as Agile became more the trend, we recognized the need to add more tools into our landscape that would support it better.

The way that we work is that, while we host all of these enterprise tools, we don't enforce that these are the tools that are to be used on projects. We have to be a bit more flexible than that. Recognizing the need to have enterprise tools available for project teams that couldn't find their own tools, or clients that didn't have their own tools, that's where we brought in AGM and then, eventually, Octane when it came onto the market.

The other thing that's helpful to recognize with this transition, is that you can't become Agile on day one, once you make the decision that's the direction you want to go. It's very good that we have the ability to integrate our more traditional project management tool with our Agile tool. Currently what we support for project teams that are doing a bit of both, what we used to call "hybrid," is their integrating of their Agile project management tool, like AGM or Octane into a traditional workplan tool like PPM so that they can see the full breadth of their project progress across both more traditional tasks and Agile tasks in a single place. We're bridging that gap by using multiple tools and integration.

In general, ALM tools help in the transition from Waterfall to Agile because you have a tool enforces some processes, and provides a little bit more rigor than you would have otherwise. Having those ALM tools available has helped us enforce some consistency and adherence to Agile processes.

To date, we've had 136 projects, that's 136 workspaces, and about 1,000 users.

In terms of increasing usage of Octane, we deployed AGM and ALM four or five years ago. The problem in our organization - and this is another thing we've talked to Micro Focus about, and they're hearing similar feedback from other places - is that people are used to what they know. If people have used AGM or ALM on a previous project, they're just going to go with that.

We do have some early adopters. People have been keen, they've heard about this new tool Octane, checked it out, and those early-adopter types were on the bandwagon pretty soon. There are some people that are lagging behind and kind of skeptical. We're dealing with the psychology of that. Part of that is knowing there is not really a great reason for us to continue supporting two tools that do very similar things. AGM and Octane have a lot of overlapping capabilities. We're looking at our strategy for how long we want to continue to maintain and support two tools that do the same thing.

We're trying to encourage people who are used to using AGM, or are leaning more that way, that they should come over onto the Octane side, because that is the direction that the vendor is going in. That's where the investment is going, and that's where all the new functionality is coming out. We're trying to increase adoption in a variety of ways to get those people onto the Octane side.

We have an assessment planned early next year to strategize when we might scale down AGM, and maybe even cut off provisioning new projects, but we don't know the timeframe of that yet.

In terms of maintenance of Octane, their roles are project manager-types, people who do the server administration, and DBAs. There's also a QA group and a PMT group that we enlist on a very short, annual basis to do our performance testing.

I would rate Octane at seven out of ten. There's definitely some functionality that I think could make our lives a lot easier, especially around the extraction of data and the reporting. Those things would really help us out. I'm conservative on rating things.

Implementation of SDLC in large companies based on Agile methodology, with accent on test automation. 

Migration from VModel projects to Agile

We implement most of our test automation projects based on Octane. Very compatible to what customers need and I can deploy very fast. The projects start working from day one even with default configurations. 

We can deliver to customers a holistic view over all projects... an integrated view. In a company most projects are interdependent, the status view delivered live on all of them is very important. This is a big asset for us.

The most valuable feature of ALM Octane is an easy implementation of Agile projects. It perfectly respects the theory of Agile. If you fill in the predefined fields you will get a good implementation of your Agile project.

If I go in details a little we can offer insights to easy identify bottlenecks in the projects, overloads of teams, stagnating tasks, TRENDS ANALYSIS and based on this info we can improve the SDLC 

Areas for improvement would be installation and configuration. In the next release, I would like them to include simpler to read documentation or an installation engine like UFT or LoadRunner provide. I would also like to see integration with all continuous integration tools on the market, now it has many of them onboarded but this market grows fast and many other new CI/CD products appear.

Since it appeared

very scalable for Scaled Agile For Enterprises

I've only used technical support for very serious/difficult problems,  slower responses are normal in these situations. 

Positive

I used many solutions in the past... I will keep using Octane

You need technical knowledge in order to install this product, the documentation is complex but it could be made easier to read

iQST is the vendor team... very good expertise

The investment in this product may not be cheap, but you can get high value out of it. Please consider consultancy to have a complete and detailed configuration tailored to your needs for best ROI

ALM is very compatible and has all the necessary integration. Octane is an improvement on previous versions because it comes as preconfigured as possible, which simplifies the whole process of integration in a company's ecosystem. When implementing this product, make sure to call in a specialist team who can make sure everything is configured properly. I would give this product a score of ten out of ten.

We are using it for agile projects. Our company projects run using Agile models, so we use all the important modules of Octane, like Backlog, Epics, Feature, and user story in Tasks. We are also using the Product Backlog and Team Backlog modules as well as the Quality modules under quality, test and defects. This is primarily for agile and are all the modules and dashboards that we use. 

Another use is for waterfall projects. To some extent, we are using the requirement documents and Quality modules for our waterfall projects.

We just started analyzing and using a module called Pipelines Analysis. We are trying to integrate our Jenkins with Octane to start using it. This is in the initial stages.

After taking input from the OpenText sales team, deployment team, installation team, and professional services team, we are using Octane to its full capabilities, except for with the Pipeline Analysis and dashboards. We still need to focus more on dashboards, because Octane does support plenty of dashboards. We want to start using those in a big way along with the Pipeline Analysis. We are already using all the other modules in a big way. We started configuring dashboards for agile, waterfall, and various built-in widgets, but this is also in the initial stages. We need to explore more the dashboards and Pipeline Analysis, which is where we are seeking support from OpenText.

It is purely for project milestone progress, project environment, project development, project execution, software development, and software execution. Then, we are using it mainly for holding and maintaining the repository of Product Backlog, Epics, Features, testing test cases, system integration testing, and user acceptance testing. That is the scope that we have defined.

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. 

In real-time statistics, anyone can go and configure it easily. The user interface is very user-friendly. 

We built a status dashboard within Octane by adding some additional user defined fields (UDFs) that use real-time status about how much a project progressed, how much testing is done, and how much testing is left. Then, project management can help with visibility of the progress for every project within Octane.

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 OpenText 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. They should have helped us with a clear requirement. This requirement has slipped from the initial requirements and drafting during the installation, causing additional rework for us after installation. This means my admin team and I have to work to fix that gap. I already gave this feedback to my customer success manager, "Security related prerequisites and requirements should be thoroughly explained to the client." Hopefully, they can apply this and avoid future rework.

For the requirement document, the module should provide multiple templates to be prepared, or customized quickly, and be reusable.

For the Pipeline Analysis, job or application grouping has to support Jenkins job grouping, because we have thousands of jobs running. Unfortunately, we are unable to group those by using multiple filters. They could help us with these features in upcoming releases in the next six months. That would be great because many testing and production jobs for Jenkins users need filters and grouping.

We started using the tool in the last four to five months. Now, all our users are using OpenText ALM Octane.

For the last four months since we have been using it in a big way, we have not seen any downtime or surprises from the stability from an availability point of view. 

We have dedicated administrators who handle support for Octane and other tools.

It is scalable. We do need to explore it more to determine its support for a scalable framework. 

We are in touch with them. Their support is very good. We are constantly communicating with our customer success manager, who is helping us with a lot of queries. He is trying to resolve them. He brings in his R&D team to sort out our issues, which is good. We are getting good support, but there are a few product limitations that we have highlighted. We have asked them with help fixing those limitations by providing alternative solutions.

The requirement document has to be more flexible for the features, user interface, modules, and capabilities. It needs more advanced features, like copy paste of the various templates. It should have an inbuilt capability to build and design any template with reusable capability.

We moved from ALM Quality Center to Octane. We mainly switched because we have more than 50 percent of our projects running on an agile model, and ALM Quality Center doesn't support agile. 

We wanted to have interim projects for traceability and milestone visibility. We also wanted to have a tool where my team could write scenarios for user stories and those user stories would be available in a single tool. So, Octane is a better tool for the future.

Octane supports DevOps integration tools.

The actual Octane installation is straightforward, but it was a complex process for us because it is a cluster architecture. We have two Octane applications, three Elasticsearch, two databases, and seven to nine servers. While complex, we are not experiencing any issues so far. 

It was a nine week activity where we did the initial setup. The process was complex. We found issues while doing the integration between Jenkins and the DevOps and automation tools. 

When we started the integration with the other tools, like Jenkins, Selenium, or UFT, and tried to automate things or integrate with Jira, then it took more time because of the compatibility issues. It may not be working as expected and my automation framework may be different as well as Octane may not support my automation framework. My automation framework may be using Selenium, so I have to change my automation framework to ensure that it works with Octane. These things have to be in front of the client in advance to work out and give advanced information about compatibility issues of the automation framework and compatibility with the Octane, so an evaluation can be done during the due diligence on the first week of the kickoff meetings. Then, we can save time during the implementation.

The OpenText team should be providing more end-to-end view during the installation and user acceptance testing. They should provide more knowledge on the usage of the tools and various important capabilities, e.g., how do we use that? That is the missing part of the Professional Services. We had to go over it again by raising many queries and tickets. Therefore, the knowledge transfer of capabilities has to be given more focus during the installation.

Integration with other tools, compatibility, and frameworks has to be thoroughly checked by the OpenText team in conjunction with the client team for faster integration and to avoid surprises during the implementation.

For deployment, I was involved as a manager and there were two more guys from my admin team, who looked after the tools. There was one person from OpenText Professional Services along with a OpenText project manager. There were two team members actively involved throughout the project to open firewalls, do the setup, install, and troubleshoot. There was also one more guy for automation purposes when we were working on the automation integration for Selenium and UFT, and he worked for two to three weeks of time. Overall, three people worked for eight weeks.

We are not using this solution for operations. We are using the Octane tool for purely project solution delivery. For operations, we use Remedy tools, not Octane.

Jira has its own limitations, so we thought Octane would be better.

Our testers and manager do conduct risk-based testing implicitly, but we don't call it that. We apply it unconsciously and do it on the fly. We upload 100 or 200 test cases, depending on the timeline, and prioritize them. At the end of the day, we execute 70 or 80 of them and roll out the project. Eventually, all the functionalities are covered and no defects slip to production.

Currently, Octane's support for single sign-on is implemented separately, so we are not using it. Maybe in future we will use it.

We are ready to explore a couple of the solution's capabilities. I would have given a nine out of 10 had I explored those capabilities and been satisfied with them, but I am unable to do that. However, I can give the overall tool after the installation with support an eight out of 10.

We use Octane to track our testing plan for projects.

Octane works well with the Jira portfolio to track the project with two methods: Agile and Waterfall. We can track all the testing in Waterfall or Agile and synchronize it with Agile tools.

The limitation of Octane is that we can't do a release outside of the sprint. We can only plan the release in the sprint. With Agile and JIRA tools, we can plan the release outside the sprint and do a global release of all the projects from the sprint. It would be helpful if Octane had a portfolio follow feature so we could follow the project portfolio. We need the all-view of a project to track it step-by-step and stay on deadline. 

We started using Octane two years ago.

Octane has been stable so far.

Octane is scalable. We're looking to scale up in the next year.

The end-user in charge of testing could easily deploy Octane, onboard new users, and train new users.

I think we can give ALM Octane an eight on 10. For now, we recommend using Octane to track the test plan for testing.

The fact that it works on all the different browsers, it easily integrates into all the other tools, and that it looks like it will work with our pipeline 2.0 with a kind of DevOps in mind.

It helps us go to the true DevOps model, which means we can do shorter cycle times. Go from releasing every month, to every day. It's got a nice clean interface that people don't mind using. It integrates into the developers IDEs, like IntelliJ, which means that everybody gets to work in the tool they want to work in. Then it easily integrates across, so everybody can see the information in any place they want to see it.

It's the idea of, how do you share testing microservices across different projects? Today things are separated into different projects. I want to understand what the vision is of how you're supposed to test those across, because everything's interrelated now. You're not just testing for one project or for one application. Many of the applications have shared services. How are they gonna do that?

The next thing is, how do you test deployment objects? So after you're done testing your stories, your features, you want to build a deployment object. I want to take those same tests in automation, and then rerun them, and understand, now I've tested them, but now it's a deployment object, and I've included all the code, and it could include scripts and database changes.

The stability is good. Granted it is a new product; we use the SaaS version of it. But it's been relatively stable, and we haven't had too many issues. They are releasing new versions of it almost every six weeks, and we really haven't noticed problems with that.

I imagine it should scale very well. We're using it kind of in a limited basis now, but going forward we're going to use it for a very large project with up to 100 testers. Because we're using the SaaS solution, and because we used the ALM HPE QC product before, and SaaS, I don't see any reason why it can't be scaled the same way. So, not too worried about the scaling.

Yes we use the tech support. We use the ticketing system through the tool. We also talk to our customer success person, and generally speaking, the support's been pretty good. The development team also sometimes reaches out to us and asks us, are there any features we'd like to improve, or if there are any issues with the products. It's pretty interesting. I never talked to the actual developers of a product before, and been asked what we're looking for, so that's pretty cool.

I'd gone to the Discover Conference in the summer, and saw them talk about Octane. And they presented it right at the moment that we were really looking for something. Half of our group that do the testing are on Macs, and were having to go through the Citrix clients to get into HPE QC. Everything they said just hit right on what we were trying to do with DevOps, and the fact that they developed it using DevOps principles, and they "drank the Kool-Aid" that they're trying to sell the product to be used for, was very compelling to us.

We did the SaaS version, so if anybody has loaded up Octane SaaS, you just put in your email and request a version, that's basically the setup. So it's just as easy as implementing any kind of open source tool, maybe even easier, because you have built-in support right there. It's extremely easy to do.

We looked at JIRA with Zephyr. We built our own internal one in ServiceNow. We also looked at something called TestRail. We went with Octane, just because of the reputation of HPE. It looked like everything they were doing was going the right way. We did an evaluation between Zephyr and Octane, and we really liked the interface in Octane. We just weren't really happy with JIRA, we were already using our own storyboard that we built in ServiceNow, so it really didn't make sense, and Octane just seemed like a much better choice.

When selecting a vendor, I think what's important is being able to scale to enterprise. Somebody that's going to be a partner, and somebody that's flexible and willing to help us. Some of the open source tools are great, but when you're dealing with an enterprise of $10 billion, you really want that real, dedicated support that you get from a dedicated corporation.

Regarding Octane, there are some features that it still needs, but apparently they are in the roadmap. I've given it to our most "open source" kind of DevOps developers, and they said, "Well, it's actually a pretty good tool." And these are the guys it was impossible to get into a test tool before. So just based on the adoption, it just seems like it's going to be much easier. So I'd rate it much higher in that sense.

I would say, you can go out and get a free trial of it, demo it. The integrations are extremely easy. Just try it out in parallel with production, and see how you like it. I think it's something worth looking at, and then understand the roadmap. And if you're truly going through a DevOps transformation, then this is a tool that's gonna align with what you're trying to do better than a lot of the tools out there.

We use ALM Octane for lifecycle management and for testing.

The most valuable feature is the test lab. For example, we use it for both mobile testing and browser testing.

The interface is user-friendly. 

I would like to see the mobile testing improved so that we can simply select a mobile device, then specify what parameters we want, and the testing will be run based on that. This feature would be a very good addition.

I have been using ALM Octane for about eight and a half years.

We have not had any challenges in terms of stability.

This is a scalable product. We have more than 50 users in our company. Some of them are Q&A while others use a different license for development. We will very likely increase our usage in the future.

The technical support is really good. They have a support portal, which is helpful.

The initial setup was not complex. It was very good for us.

We have two people who are responsible for maintenance.

The look and feel of this product have improved over previous versions.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View the comparison document and quality of the document for informational and sharing purposes.

Octane creates a gentle approach to Agile-based projects.

The most valuable feature is CI/CD integration, and it is a good fit into the Agile lifecycle.

Improvements could be made by way of additional integrations across the lifecycle.

One use case was for development life cycle management for a pool of developers using it in an Oracle and .NET development environment.

One of the benefits is the integration with different platforms. Having the defect management, and being able to relate defects and testing to the initial user requirements—having this complete life cycle—is one of the major advantages with Octane. It's the "life cycle" way of thinking that the solution provides. That is a very important component of Agile and DevOps. Octane integrates with your CI server for continuous integration and delivery. This "life cycle" approach gives us end-to-end visibility.

It also provides a single platform for all automated testing and that definitely helped facilitate the testing, the test scenarios, and collaboration between the test team and the development team. Having both together on a single platform allows us to ease the integration between the different teams. One of the major things we talk about regarding Agile, and one of the major components we talk about regarding DevOps, is this seamless integration between the teams.

In addition, it gives you a single, global ALM platform that supports all your Agile and Waterfall needs. One of the big challenges for DevOps is the adoption of a tool among the teams. The fact that the tool facilitates and supports this definitely helps the adoption.

ALM Octane also reduced testing costs overall. It's hard to say exactly how much, but I would estimate by 20 percent. It also definitely reduced integration costs by building a streamlined application delivery pipeline connecting to all IDE, CI, and SCCM tools. In this case the integration costs were reduced by 20 to 30 percent. Finally, it helped to produce releases faster, again by about 20 percent.

The valuable features start from the defect management in the life cycle and go into the part for versioning control.

The defect management gives us full-fledged capabilities for handling defects, including capturing the details of the defects and even screenshotting the defect cases. The defect management is comprehensive. 

Also the integration capabilities with other development platforms we were using was helpful. The out-of-the box integrations are definitely a big part of making Octane comprehensive when it comes to DevOps quality management. It is full of features and gives us flexibility to provide the needed integrations with different platforms.

The solution natively supports Waterfall, Hybrid, and Agile software development at enterprise scale. That's very important because there is a big shift going on from the Waterfall environment into Agile in DevOps. Having a tool that can give us both practices was important.

In addition, Octane's Agile support is good at both the team and the portfolio levels. It has dedicated capabilities for Agile and is very flexible and comprehensive in these two areas.

Security and security management, meaning the integration of the security, could be enhanced. We know about Fortify, but it would be better to have security features in the original Octane platform without the need for another solution or another application.

We've been implementing solutions with OpenText ALM Octane since 2016.

From the stability perspective it's okay.

We did not stress-test it to see what it would be like in a mega environment. Usually we deployed it in a medium-sized environment, with 20 to 30 developers, and the scalability was okay.

I would rate technical support for the solution at six out of 10. Usually there is a lack of connection among the teams for handing over support cases. You often need to do or redo some work whenever support cases are opened. If it is handed over to a new engineer, you need to start doing things over from the very beginning. You have to explain things again.

The initial setup of Octane was straightforward. Because you are talking about development and software developers, it's not like a normal tool for business users. It was not complicated for people to get along with the tool and use it and integrate it.

Usually, deployment takes, on average, a maximum of two months. The deployment plan definitely depends on what the current technologies are, the integrations needed, and on what types of development environments and what types of IDEs are involved. It also depends on whether there are other systems and tools available already.

Just one person is required for deployment and maintenance of the solution. Rather than a developer, that person would be an administrator for the system.

The benefits I've mentioned can be reflected as monetary benefits, which I would estimate at 35 percent annually.

Microsoft is a big challenge for OpenText when it comes to pricing because they are much cheaper. But it definitely depends on the complexity of the environment. If it has multiple technologies, at that point, looking at other options and Microsoft would be a feasible approach.

We work with Microsoft TFS. We also use JIRA, but I don't consider JIRA a competing component, rather we integrate it. One of the pros of TFS is definitely its integration and supportability if you are a Microsoft development environment, using .NET and the like. There's a lot of seamless integration there. Also, from a pricing perspective, usually Microsoft can provide you with very cheap packaging options. Those are the two main pros for Microsoft TFS.

Dedicate someone for the administration. Often companies assign a developer to take care of it but this is not the proper approach. Someone needs to have responsibility for the administration. Also the process when using the solution should be a consultative approach. First look at your process and your development life cycle and then reflect it in the tool. Also, be clear about the integration points before starting the implementation so that the technical requirement and scope, etc., are clear.

Regarding reducing manual testing time, this didn't happen in the extreme because we were already automating most of the environments. There was a lot of automated testing. But it helped in facilitating the "life cycle" approach, especially if the environment already had Microsoft TFS. You integrate it and put it on top and you gain big benefits.