OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

Our current environment is ALM QC 12.53 and for performance testing ALM PC 12.53, Vugen 12.53, and UFT 14.

Micro Focus Quality Center helps in end-to-end traceability from releases to requirements to test cases and with defects. The enhanced dashboards capabilities are useful for senior management to view the progress of releases under the portfolio in one go and also drill down to the graphs.

The Project Templates and Enhanced Reporting features are the most useful. We have created domains as per the business units, and per business units, there is one template. It becomes easy to manage the template at business unit level. By standardizing our template, we publish reports at the business unit level.

• Easy integration with open source tools. 
• It has several limitations in adapting its agility easily. 

I feel that the licenses are expensive. 

Test management and reporting. Those are the two most important things. I tell my customers that the two main reasons they have ALM:

• Quality management, project management from a QA perspective - testing, defect management, how testing relates back to requirements.
• And reporting to make good business decisions in the future.

When I was a customer, it improved my organization because I was able to manage, to enforce standards on building tests, executing tests, and manage centralized reporting.

Now, I translate that over to my customers from various levels of the spectrum from complete, "We have no idea what to do to, we're doing stuff but we know we need to change," to "We've got some stuff and we just want to tweak what we're doing now."

I'd like to see the idea of users being flushed out more, so not just, "This defect is now assigned to a particular person," or "This person is assigned to execute a test."

I want to see the users expanded out to teams where you have five users and the sixth user is the manager, so the manager can roll the idea of somebody being responsible and accountable. The idea of things being assigned to a team of users and users belonging to that team. There are ways of getting around this in the tool because it's very customizable, but I'd like to see that separate from the idea of using security groups, which is one way of getting around that.

I'd like to see the concept of teams put into it.

ALM has gotten more stable over the years. It's a stable app. Like any other large, complex application, you run into things every now and again. We have a system to report things and get them taken care of.

I have customers that are small and customers that are enterprise-wide. So I'm able to deploy it in both kinds of environments and customize the tool, depending on size and level of maturity, for any kind of customer. Also within any vertical as well.

I have used tech support. Mostly because I'm with a consulting company and we also support ALM. We have our own internal support organization that people can get into.

In terms of Micro Focus support, because I'm a more advanced user - I've been using this tool since version 7 - I typically don't get a whole lot from first-level support. I tend to want to go right up to second, third, or even directly with the development organization. So I'm more the outlier, edge-case kind of person compared to most customers out there.

Once I get to the people that are at the level that I know I need to deal with, they're good. I'm also dealing with the people on the other side of the ocean, working directly with people who may have actually coded ALM to begin with.

When I became a customer in 2000/2001, when I first started, I was involved in the decision to purchase the solution. Now, as a professional services consultant, that decision has been made and I'm going in there to either deploy, upgrade, or help them use ALM to best suit their needs. In some cases I help them figure out what it is they need to have ALM do for them or how to customize it best.

When I was a customer, we were not using another solution. We were completely manual and I was a department of one. I was the QA organization for a small development company and the two company owners said to me, "We want to invest in this, go look and see what's out there and show us what our options are and what you think the best option is."

What caused us to switch to this solution was the customizability. The fact that we could make it give us the information that we needed to get out of it. The support organization seemed very top-notch. I actually learned a lot from the support organization when I was getting started in it. And I found it more intuitive then the Rational solution.

I've deployed it in many organizations because I'm a consultant. I've deployed it, upgraded it, customized it, in various ways for different customers.

In terms of complexity, it really depends on the needs of the customer.

When I was a customer in a small development organization that only had 20 people in the entire company, I deployed it, I did the customization - that was way back in the day.

Now, I have customers along the entire spectrum from small to large enterprise. Some customers are okay with near vanilla, out of the box. And some customers have very complex sets of business logic that they feel, for whatever reason, need to be enforced as far as how their defect management lifecycle is going to go. How their test construction, test execution lifecycle is going to go, how they want to manage requirements, and that can require significant customization.

Some of my customers have compliance concerns, they have digital signatures and they have FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliance. They have all of these rules that they have to follow and some of them are subject to interpretation, so with one particular rule I have one customer who says, "This is how we interpret the rule," and they have me customize it one way; and I have another customer who says, "No, we're not going to interpret it that, way we interpret this way," and it's a completely different set of customizations.

Back then it was Mercury Test Director, which is now ALM. We were also looking at the Silk products, and we were looking at the Rational, now IBM, products.

When selecting a vendor to work with, I want to see that the technical people are really knowledgeable of what they're talking about. I want to know that the tool can give me what I need, not just, this is a standard proof of concept. I want to see what I need to see, and I want to know that, down the road, I'll be able to either get out of it what I need or be able to learn or have somebody come in to help me get out of it what I need. Because if I'm not getting out of it what I need, then I've wasted my money.

I give it a nine because nothing is perfect, there's always room for improvement, especially when you're talking about an app system as large as ALM is. I've been using it for so long it's kind of second nature for me to think about where its strengths are, and know that if I can't get something done one way there's always another way around it. Or I can integrate something into it or build work flow to make the UI behave the way I want it to.

Regarding advice to a colleague about ALM, remember that your process and your methodology should be driving what you need out of their tool and not the other way around. Tools can do some really cool stuff. You may look at it and say, "Okay, maybe we could get some value out of this feature that we're not doing today." But don't make that the driving force. It really needs to be able to support what you're doing and force the things that you want to get out of it. Because there's a truism in reporting: If you don't capture the data you can't build a report that's meaningful. So make sure it can get you what you need.

Defect Management: This feature allows us to track the defect status for our project, send the notification to the user via email and all the details about the defects can be maintained for the future reference as knowledge center.

Graphs and Dashboard: This is one of the top features, by which we can track the status of the project with ease to keep track of project management and executive reporting.

The live graphs can be exported via public URL's and can be integrated with SharePoint and others as required.

More collaborative, ease of work, and better documentation of all project activities.

Certainly on the UI part, it has to be improved to make it user-friendly and more presentable.

More than three years.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Technical Support is great and always responsive to solve the issues.

Nope, the architecture is simple to implement and scale.

The price is a bit high.

Go ahead with this tool. It is for the project management and test execution.

Do consult a few of the other folks using this tool to understand the tricks.

Being able to quickly and easily compile executables on multiple platforms.

Just over 10 years ago, our organization joined the Australian Bill payment scheme, part of the technical requirements involve having to build a COBOL interface to their rules validation program. So we needed to source a COBOL development environment which would allow us to quickly develop and deploy a COBOL interface.

None that I can think of from my experience, MicroFocus COBOL does everything we need it to do.

More than 10 years

No, we found the support staff at MicroFocus in Australia to be highly knowledgeable and very much of assistance in helping us get our products setup and deployed.

None, the product has been absolutely rock-solid.

No, the solution has coped with tens of millions of dollars worth of transactions over the years.

Very high.

Extremely good.

No.

Yes, setup was fairly straightforward. It needed a little help with regards to the license server on the development platform, but once that was sorted out everything was smooth sailing.

We developed our solution in-house.

Substantial, the payment platform is an essential customer service.

We found the pricing to be very reasonable.

We did, however MicroFocus stood out with their excellent technical support.

It's a very good tool to use for referencing all testing components in the lifecycle of the application end to end. For example, you can include a requirement test case, feasibility of execution, and dashboard reporting for web or mobile applications.

The benefit is to track coverage of functionality, and to have a stronger application without bugs in production.

Integration with other tools would be good, for example, with open-source tools. In the meantime, we do something with JIRA, with Selenium, and so on, and it's good; but we can increase this connectivity with other tools.

For the past month, the solution has been more stable than it has been over the past 10 years. For our mobile center, for example, we started using it this year; but it's not very stable for the moment. ALM, however, is stable.

For the moment, we use it for our projects; but our testing centre is only in one location, and not for offshore. We haven’t had to scale it much.

Technical support depends; frequently, it's not very responsive in resolving our problem, but engineers handle it too late.

In the past, we used a Compuware Solution and an open source solution. We switched to ALM because tracking all activities is better when all your monitoring is on products from the same vendor.

The initial setup was okay.

The IBM solution is very hard to set up and to use. The Silk solution, which is now Micro Focus, is very strong.

With ALM, it’s simple.

Use ALM because it's simple; it has all information you need to communicate with all people involved in a project, whether they are in IT or not IT. This is the aim of the testing lifecycle.

The most important thing when choosing a vendor is that the product is user friendly and can integrate with all your old modules. It helps to have one application rather than multiple applications to connect with all the different companies.

With HP ALM, I think it's the fact that it's self-contained application so we can do everything inside the application. We only need to use this one tool.

The availability and the fact that HPE people want to help is something that I appreciate because they are with us, they try to help, they try to understand what we need and they act accordingly.

I think it sells because it's HP ALM. It's because it's a collaboration tool. It helps everybody collaborate within a project and because of that I think we save time and we have less difficulty making sure that everybody is aligned.

The tech support is sometimes not clear when you speak to them.

We had some issue before but now its been fixed. It's because we migrated from an old version and we went to a new one. That created a couple of issues but now it's solved. We need to go to another version so it will be another challenge, but we're working with HPE to understand the best way to do it.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

It's good but we need to manage exactly what we need from them. Sometimes on the business side it's not clear enough. When it's not clear we don't have the results we need. The next time we need to make sure to correctly define our needs and involve them in that way.

We didn't use any other solution previously.

It's not straightforward because for us it was because it was an upgrade of the infrastructure as well. So at the same time we changed the server, we also changed the infrastructure. It was not because of the product itself, it was more linked to what we needed to do at that time.

The most valuable features are ALM's flexibility and performance. We're also able to customize it to do what we want it to do.

Using it properly is our biggest challenge, as some people use it on the most basic level and others rely on other tools.

I think the biggest challenge with ALM is getting useful data in one place. They're scattered in different parts of the solution right now.

It should also allow us to get quicker access to data from the things we're working on.

The overall usability of it could be improved as some things are a bit slow to get used to.

It has deployed just fine for us without issues.

It's close to being perfectly stable. We have no problem with instability.

It has scaled easily for us and our needs.

Customer service is generally pretty good.

Technical support has been pretty good so far. They tend to be fairly quick to respond to us.

We're using JIRA alongside ALM, but there wasn't a prior solution to ALM.

Setting it up is not too difficult.

We implemented it ourselves.

We constantly keep an eye on competitors, but there's not been anything that we've considered moving to.

The overarching lifecycle view, from requirements gathering through to testing and defect resolution. Additionally the ability to customize the user permissions so they can only see and do what their job role permits.

It added structure to the test process and enabled the developers to better understand the QA process. This in turn led to an improvement in the code developed in-house.

As a standalone QA tool it meets the needs adequately, but it really needs combining with other solutions, such as Agile Manager, to get the best full lifecycle solution.

Around 14 years from when it was originally called Test Director.

There are still some issues when deploying to a few end user machines but the install and upgrade process is very easy. Some of these issues will be resolved in later releases.

Very stable with no reported issues in years.

There are options to increase the scale of use and extra modules that can be obtained with the full ALM license.

On par with other big companies, sometimes you need to get past the front line support to get to the real answers.

Good, quick turnaround with ideas and solutions to try.

QA was driven by spreadsheets before the deployment of Test Director.

The documentation is not always easy to follow but the answers can be found on the support forum and help desk.

The initial deployment was with a vendor over 14 years ago, but all subsequent updates have been done in-house.

It's unknown, but I suspect it to be quite significant.

More recently it was reevaluated against Microsoft Test Manager to see if it was still the best QA tool for our needs.

It is still the best QA tool on the market that integrates with most of other tools we use. It allows everyone who wants to be able to see the current quality of the project and control the QA process.

Fully understand the different options out there and the license types. Other tools may offer similar and you will probably want to customize some of the options to get the best out of it. Have not tried the cloud option which would take away any implementation and upgrade issues.