OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

The most valuable thing about the solution is it handles requirements, tests, and defects in one tool.

Most departments and some of our third-party vendors have access, so HPE ALM can be the single source of truth for what we are doing and how things are going.

How they organize content could be improved greatly in an out-of-box way, at least as a possibility for the users. The simplistic folder capability for reqs/tests doesn’t lead the users to a very productive method of test management.

It would be better to have suggested methods such as storing by subject/feature/functional area and to lead users into organizing this way. Then you wouldn’t run into the need to move things around in folders when release schedules/versions change.

Also, the style by which you document your regression tests is more automatic since you stop copying tests to a new folder for each release.

We have used this solution for two years.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

The level of technical support is very good.

I’ve been around a while and designed a few test management and automation solutions while I was with Motorola. I think our solutions were better, but of course, we had to spend a lot of resources on their creation.

The initial setup was straightforward, as I’m new to US Cellular and the tool/processes were in place when I got here. We are making some changes to drive improvement, but we are also analyzing how to go agile which isn’t easy.

I think HPE tools are too expensive, but dumping them for shareware tools, like JIRA, Selenium, etc., is also very dangerous and is not a silver bullet.

It’s too expensive for most organizations compared to some other tools on the market. I’d look at QASymphony, Borland, and of course IBM, before committing to any of them.

ALM makes functional testing much easier for our customers. We tell them that if they use ALM, they will have a productivity gain of at least 40% compared to using traditional spreadsheets, Word documents, and so on. They also need it because their departments are getting larger and larger. They're not sitting in the same place, so they need a tool to combine their teams’ efforts. This is difficult if you are using Excel spreadsheets because you need to send them by email and make sure they have the latest version.

We see the advantage of ALM over Quality Center. You can have templates instead of having specific templates for each product. Once we define the workflow for customer X and the setup for that customer, we include all of that in the template. If we want to make a change, we change it in the template. We'll then do an escalation down through all of the various products so that each and every one gets updated. So it means that things are administratively much easier with ALM compared to QC.

With Octane, HPE is finally trying to combine the agile world together with the functional testing world. It also has an integrated ALI, which means that with Octane you have one point of view of your whole testing process. I see that this as very valuable because we're also competing with JIRA and so on, which has the facilities that we are trying to accomplish with Agile Manager.

JIRA is fancied by developers; so if a war starts between developers and testers, usually what we see - in Denmark, at least, - is that the testers are on the losing side. But if we can get Agile Manager on our side, then we can start competing with products like JIRA.

We should consider not being a testing tool as such. I know that with ALI, we integrated the customer's EDI - the Eclipse, SAP and Visual Studio - but we'll need to do that more. We need to get moving in that direction as well.

ALM is a very stable product. The latest version we install at customer sites is 12.5.3. It's a very stable platform. We have no complaints whatsoever.

Our customers do not generally use HPE support very often; and therefore it's a bit awkward for them to get started with it. They find it pretty difficult. That's not the worst part. The worst part is really when you finally get to someone to talk to, and then they're not qualified. So we instruct our customers, if that happens to you, you should say immediately that I want to escalate this to a duty manager, who can then take charge. It's not as bad as the time we tried to move all of our support functions to India. That was terrible. Thank God we got it back; but I don't think we are there yet. We need more qualified people to take first-line support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We are the experts in Denmark. That means it's a bit easier for us because we know exactly what to do. Various customers use our services to do that for them because it can be very complex if you only do it on a rare occasion. If there is a customer who needs to upgrade from 11.5.2, for example, and they haven’t touched the administrator module for a couple of years, it is easier for us to do the upgrade because we do it all the time.

HPE has failed desperately to offer a competitive enterprise for new customers in this market. If I have a new customer, three years ago I could sell them ALM site licenses. Now I need to sell them ALM global licenses, which is a hard sell because it is double the price. That just doesn't appeal for new customers. So I understand why they take JIRA or stick to Excel spreadsheets because HPE has priced themselves out of that market.

With Octane, you get more functionality; but it's like having Microsoft Word. How much of that functionality do you use? You probably use 20% out of the 80%. So I don't think that adding more functionality solves the problem. HPE desperately needs to get a low enterprise for new customers.

I believe that my largest competitor is our customers who are using Excel, followed by those who use JIRA.

It allows us to track test cases that we create, so for all of our applications that we test we build our test cases, load them into Quality Center, and then we also track our defects inside of Quality Center. It allows us to be able to gather metrics based on the applications that we test.

I would say specific to our business solutions department, we can absolutely take a look for individual applications that we are testing. We can make some decisions about applications being turned over. How defect prone they are. If unit testing is occurring beforehand it helps us at least talk to some "Hey, here is what we received, here is how many defects that we received." It's been helpful with that.

What I am hoping with the latest version of Quality Center is that I would like to see a better interface with being able to load Excel spreadsheets, so a lot of times the key way analysts rewrite our test cases in a spreadsheet, and then we load it up. I would like to see where the interface is better as it's not as user friendly in this release that we have, so I am hoping that it is improved with the latest version.

It's been pretty stable for everything we've been doing.

I would say that at this point I really cannot speak to that.

We haven't used it. I know we are going to upgrade Quality Center this year, so say maybe there will be some more possibilities for us to interact with support.

Quality Center was around well before I got to the company.

It was very easy. LeanFT came with UFT 12.5 and greater. Just deploying the UFT package which we're very comfortable with, we were able to deploy LeanFT as well.

I know there are some other tools out there if you are looking to manage requirements such as JIRA and a couple of others. I know some are really gauged more towards agile development, but a lot of them are used for requirements and they do have the ability to store test cases but we as a organisation use Quality Center.

It works for us in terms of being able to track our test cases, absolutely being able to store results if we want to put in defects and build metrics. It is a pretty decent tool.

Workflow management is a feature we find valuable.

It provides us with common development and test workflow for defect management.

Linking between modules, with actual field values like those between defects and releases.

I've used it for over 10 years.

The desktop deployment causes issues when the enterprise has locked down PC. The application itself is hosted by HP (SaaS).

Very good, 99.9%

It scales to our needs.

7/10 - it could be better, but usually it's good.

8/10 - the TAM and team are very good.

No previous solution was used.

Straightforward, the only issue is doing patch updates as they touch the desktop client which makes it painful to update.

HP hosts the application with no issues, and a vendor does the desktop update. This desktop vendor is expensive and inflexible.

The tool has been in use for more than 10 years, the evaluation was back then and not known now.

Make sure your desktop team have the skills and expertise to handle Quality Center’s client components.

Test Planning and Test Lab modules are the most valuable to capture test cases and track execution. Defect module for tracking defects in testing and to capture production incidents.

The primary HP QC modules, requirements, test plan, test lab, and defect management have become, over time, foundation stones in our project teams development methodology. In each area, the modules provide the fundamental processes to record scope, capture test cases, track execution for each phase of testing (functional unit, string/business process, integration, user acceptance, etc.) and our project management team are all HP QC "savvy" from a standpoint of using the tools to manage the project team, the component releases and change requests, that flow through our team.

The product continues to evolve and improve and we are now on v12.01. The defect module, while fundamental and more or less consistent over numerous versions, is an area we would like to see improved regarding how response time is measured in the standard application. Reporting is another area that could stand improvement - many times the data is simply exported out to Excel for analysis.

We have used HP ALM/Quality Center going back to its days as a Mercury Software product, 2006-2007 and have evolved up thru 12.01 at present.

At Verizon we are 'clients' on a supported application base. Application project teams are supported with domains and projects within a central installation. We didn't deploy the application, per se.

As a client, no, we have not have any major issues with stability. The application is pretty much available during business hours with the exception of routinely scheduled maintenance windows.

No issues to date. We're just a client (one of many project teams supported thru a central HP ALM/QC test tools support team) but the number of project teams that are supported via our central team would seem to imply that the application can scale to support large organizations split amongst multiple project teams.

As a customer/client of a central VZ QA/ALM installation, the few times we have needed to be in direct contact with HP, they have been responsive. We had a better relationship, overall, with Mercury Software before their acquisition by HP, but that was several years ago now.

Most of our technical support questions are fielded by our own in-house QC ALM support team. I can't directly speak as to their relationship with HP regarding direct technical support questions. Where we've had issues with specific installations, etc., they have been quickly resolved, so the assumption, always dangerous, would be that technical support is responsive with the primary vendor.

We have used this application for a number of years now. There have been explorations of a variety of open source, "DevOps-inspired" applications, as a potential replacement. To date, there has been no determination to move away from this application as our standard.

From a project team standpoint, the setup was very straightforward. All the tools are accessible and installable via browser.

We have an in-house one team who are supporting several portfolios within our IT organization. I would say their level of expertise is good to excellent.

I hate to say we haven't taken an independent project level analysis of ROI -- at this point, it's more an integral part of our application support model and a focal point for project level activities. Overall, even if informally measured, it's very high, if by no other measure than how deeply ingrained it has become in our project methodology and project tracking metrics.

Licenses are a major factor -- they are not inexpensive but with concurrent licensing our global IT groups are able to share licenses around the clock.

At the time we first utilized Mercury Quality Center, they were pretty well established as the industry leader in this space. When HP acquired them (2009?) they were the 800-pound gorilla in the test tools field.

For most large companies/installations, you will need to establish a core testing tools support group. This group can handle the care and maintenance of the application itself, the plug-in tools, user management, and deployment to various project teams. I would think taking this one within an isolated project team would be asking for headaches. Many organizations have turbulent histories with centralized testing -- it seems to typically depend on what is business critical -- not only externally, but internally (HR Payroll, for instance -- most companies can't tolerate issues with defects around payroll..

• End-to-End traceability - Request>Test>Result>Defect
• Versioning
• Reporting (since v11 when it uses Word templates)

• Added electronic signature functionality (in-house dev)
• Controlled changes to data allow for validated processes in a regulated environment (record workflow)

• Reporting
• Drill-up, drill-down works sort-of OK
• Multi-project reporting
• User-friendliness, it requires some time to get used to

I've been using it since 2004, when it was known as Mercury Test Director.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

7/10.

8/10.

No previous solution used.

It's simple, but customization adopting for a regulated environment is complex as it requires 15,000 lines of code.

It was done in-house.

Review if the all-to-be licensed functionality is needed as certain modules are not used as they introduce needless complexity. You should aim for concurrent licensing if global us is needed as slack periods in one time-zone can be picked up by another.

No other options were evaluated, we just upgraded from Test Director>Quality Center>ALM, and we are planning to upgrade from v11 to v12.

ALM/Quality Center is expensive, but it has its value and, in certain cases, the Enterprise edition is way too much, but it is very stable and reliable. You should review v12 Webclient solution for requirements management.

Our primary use case for this solution is preparing test cases, and we deploy the solution via desktop.

The independent view of elevated access is good. In addition, the elevated instructions being sent to our SQL is valuable.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but the response from customer service and support could be improved.

We have been using this solution for fifteen years. We are currently using version 12 but intend to migrate to version 16.

I rate the scalability of the solution ten out of ten. There are currently over 100 users using this solution in our organization.

We have had a poor experience with customer service and support, and sometimes, we do not get responses from them.

We have previously used JIRA, but ALM was a better solution for us.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment is done in-house.

I cannot comment on licensing as another department handles it.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I primarily use ALM Quality Center as a conversion tool.

Previously, we stored our test cases and results in Excel sheets, which was difficult to manage. Implementing ALM Quality Center has allowed us to map our requirements with test cases and use cases properly.

ALM Quality Center's best features are the test lab, requirement tab, and report dashboard.

ALM Quality Center could be improved with more techniques to manage Agile processes. In the next release, I would like a time management feature to be included.

I've been using ALM Quality Center for two-and-a-half years.

ALM Quality Center is stable.

ALM Quality Center is scalable.

Micro Focus's technical support is functional and responsive.

I previously used Microsoft Azure.

The initial setup was a little complex in terms of setting up the database. Deployment took between forty-five minutes and an hour.

We used a third-party team.

ALM Quality Center is a little bit costly.

Compared to JIRA and other solutions, ALM Quality Center is better for large-scale projects. I would rate ALM Quality Center four out of ten.