OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

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.

• Being a large SAP shop, having the ability to track individual issues to a defined release is a key function.
• We also use the tool for our performance testing and automation efforts, including the test library repository. These functions within the tool are easy to use and allow our internal user community simplicity in the needed access to these.
• Scalability is a must with our business and this tool has it.

It has a very large footprint, and takes an inordinate amount of time to load the components and seems to need to do this quite frequently. Also, with many of these tools, there is always room for improvement with the UI in terms of intuitiveness and functionality.

I've used it for five years.

Just the amount of time to install as well as the reinstall frequency.

No issues encountered.

No. Scalability is another key reason for using this tool as mentioned above.

As with any big company, HP support is good but costly.

I have not had to deal with them.

We really started using ALM about five years ago when our testing automation efforts kicked into high gear. Up until then, we were tracking testing using various other smaller tools.

Setup was straightforward once the needed hardware was defined and in place.

It was done in-house.

We have other tools with HP, so it's bundled in with these and hard to measure ROI specifically for one tool.

You need to negotiate with HP.

It's a great tool for a company looking to establish a scalable solution that will give you flexibility as you grow, BUT I would highly suggest you have individual(s) with the expertise to care for and feed it.

We've mainly been using the product for service requests and for migrating code and scripts for Oracle events.

The solution's value is its ease of integration with the Oracle e-Business Suite.

It's not a very user-friendly product. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is reasonably scalable.

Compared to other solutions, licensing costs are in the mid-range. 

We also evaluated Jira and we've recently decided to move to that solution. 

It's important to check that the product is compatible with your use case. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

As a system administrator, HPE ALM can be flexibly configured so that it can accommodate a variety of defined project lifecycles and test methodologies. As a project user, HPE ALM can provide a logical approach in conducting comprehensive test planning, execution, and defect management.

My organization uses HPE ALM to track the progress of testing and quality assurance efforts across projects that we are formally engaged in. The product has provided my team with metrics that provide various insights into the management and delivery of projects with respect to documented business needs.

HPE ALM’s out-of-the-box reporting can be perceived as rigid and limited, to an extent. Knowledge of HPE ALM’s data model is important when setting up certain reports, and can be challenging depending on reporting requirements. Even so, these reports may not translate into appropriate insights that will provide value to a project or management team. The performance of the product may also be a concern, depending on the amount of active connections and data processing that it has to conduct at any given moment.

Four years.

HPE ALM is relatively stable, especially with more recent versions (12.5X). However, it is important to consider utilization frequency of HPE ALM at any given time and ensure that hosted application/database servers are configured to handle resource-intensive transactions to minimize performance/availability/data integrity issues. Micro Focus has published certified/supported configurations for running HPE ALM servers and client computing devices.

In general, HPE ALM has the potential to be very scalable from both a feature and usage perspective. HPE ALM has the capability to create project templates which may then be linked and applied to different projects. The solution also allows for customizations to be applied by individual project. However, an organization must exercise discipline in applying consistent processes to manage and govern any projects which use HPE ALM, to avoid data/information management problems.

HPE’s technical support services are fair but leave a lot to be desired. An alternative to the direct HPE offering would be to pursue outside, well-known, thirrd-party professional support services that have extensive knowledge in HPE ALM and associated tools.

No, I have not used a different solution in the past.

Initial setup of HPE ALM is relatively easy. However, it does become more complex when the product must be configured to meet company needs and compliance policies. This includes site configuration parameters, migrating existing projects from a previous version, securing access, and implementing integration to other HPE products such as HPE Performance Center. Many of these considerations are documented within the HPE ALM Installation and Upgrade Guide.

It appears that most companies choose HPE Quality Center Enterprise or HPE ALM. HPE ALM contains everything included with Quality Center Enterprise, and further adds features focused on cross-project customization, planning, and tracking.

Seat and concurrent licensing models exist; the latter is recommended if a large number of different users will be utilizing the product. There is also the option of utilizing HPE ALM/Quality Center Enterprise as hosted on HPE’s SaaS platform.

This product was already chosen from a historical perspective. Although some high-level research around alternative solutions (Helix/TestTrack, Microsoft) was performed, none of them seem to be as comprehensive or as well suited towards satisfying existing needs.

HPE ALM is a relevant product that assists with test delivery, execution, and management within a project-driven environment. I would recommend others to check out the HPE ALM Help Center and product pages for additional information before making a decision.

We mostly use the Defect module and then Test Plan, Test Lab. But if you ask about the most valuable feature it is the customization of any action in the ALM client. We can customize any action, window, or workflow of not only the Defect workflow but also any other entity. There is no other tool that can do it in such a way.

The testing methodology we use means we do not need any other tool for requirements, testing and so on.

• Dashboard complexity
• Quick generation (for many entities the reports are very slow)
• Test Lab is very complex, it should be simpler

We used it for more than 10 years (from version 8 as Test Director from Mercury).

The clients, of course, are not stable, but it is acceptable.

Scalability is not a problem at this time because the hardware is better than the software needs.

Technical support is good.

Yes, we used Rational ClearQuest. It was very customizable too but it was old and tough and we need a better and more elegant solution.

Initial setup is very simple, but the upgrade on Linux is impossible so we moved to Windows.

Pricing is very big, so it's good is to negotiate with its vendors. The solution is not so important and should not cost so much.

Yes, we evaluated three other options but it was about 10 years ago and it is not relevant now to specify them here. The other options also have very good solutions.

Do the simple implementation, do not customize it because you will have more problems.

LeanFT:

LeanFT is a new solution, but in general, it's opened us up to a wider audience such as the developers, so they can actually do their unit testing. We couldn’t do that with HPE UFT. This is the big advantage of this tool.

The second thing is you can use more technologies than with UFT, including using different languages like Java.

The third part is that we can use the Cucumber test framework, which is something that you can use easily with LeanFT.

Quality Center:

Quality Center is our testing management tool. When you're running a global team with more than 120 QA staff around the world, you need one repository to write, run, monitor, and share your test cases between teams.

This is the most valuable feature of this solution and you can do it very easily. The UI is very user-friendly. With one click, you can see the status of each project that you're executing. Quality Center is the Rolls Royce of solutions and I would give it the highest rating.

LeanFT:

LeanFT should include more technologies. For example, I would like it to include the Scala programming language. That is one of the main language that we use.

Quality Center:

There is a new product, HPE ALM Octane, which might be the solution for the gaps. I would like to see more connection to more products and processes, and including the DevOps into Quality Center.

Stability for both is okay.

Scalability is becoming more complex. Scaling involves more experienced people because it’s not easy to scale.

LeanFT:

Because this is a new product, we're not at a stage to scale something. I don't know how it's going to scale. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it should be okay.

Quality Center:

Since Quality Center is a web application, it's easy to add more users and products.

Technical support is good. We are located in Israel, with an Israeli team, so it's easy to contact them. We have the right phone numbers and from that standpoint, it's great.

There's always room for improvement and additional customization that would be nice. In general, both solutions are quite easy to install.

LeanFT:

There is a debate between this solution and Selenium, and we use both of them. Your choice of tool depends on the technology and the gaps in each of them. We are not an “all-HPE shop”.

Quality Center:

We looked at IBM’s RTC for an ALM solution. We use it now for implementing SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), which is designed for feature tasks, user stories, and program board elements.

We chose HPE because I had good experience with them when I was Test Director. In term of overall experience, HPE provides a good experience for the users and a lot of benefits which you cannot find with other vendors.

We have a pretty strong emphasis on quality, so ALM is our gold source repository for quality. That's where we store everything, from requirements, test cases, defects, and all of the artifacts around certifying that quality is evident in every release, in every STLC product we produce.

The UI is terrible in the sense that we actually use automation scripts to avoid being in the UI, which is just fascinating, and then the data model.

I would say it's stable in the fact that it's up and it works. We have challenges with the data architecture. We're excited about Octane. It has some interesting capabilities, but it's our standard. We're used to using it, so I guess it's the things you want to enhance in it, we're just working through that process from that standpoint, but relatively it works.

We're already at enterprise scale, so it's used across the enterprise. I would say that we're at that point.

We invest very heavily on having strong domain and subject matter expertise, so we use support less. One of the things I would love to have is a pay-per-ticket model or a pay-per-patch model. I think that when we call support, it's either a defect or enhancement. It's not just, "Hey, I need customer support," because we're not novice users. We're on the high end of maturity so we're pushing the products in the spaces that I have very much through limits and it's really getting on their solutions and enhancements team.

From that standpoint we get good interaction. There's a really long cycle time though. That's my only disappointing thing around the support is that tickets tend to age, because they're enhancements. Enhancements have a longer cycle, you have to develop it, get it in a backlog, etc.

I have an entire team, so I'm a director and I have an entire tools team that does that. I did get involved in the planning and the strategy of how we're going to do it. My team said that first installation is relatively easy. When we go to upgrade and migrate, that's where there's pain.

Almost every customer will say the upgrades and migrations are very painful. They could be way easier. A lot of it has to do with having to upgrade the data, the in-place database or stand up in entirety, it's just cumbersome. It's very cumbersome and it takes a long time, longer than it probably should. That's a pain point that I think everyone has. Fortunately in our case, we've never had to call professional services to do it. I have a lot of customers say they couldn't get through the upgrade without it. Now, on the support side, it was really helpful, they were on the phone our first major migration for 72 hours.

It was great to literally be in that, "Hey, we're going through it," they were there the whole time, which was really awesome. We didn't have to involve professional services, but that was a good story to say, "Hey, they're on the phone with us. They're grinding it." So the whole 72-hour period we had someone from support cycle in. They did the hand-offs and all that stuff while our team was grinding off. So that was a good story there.

I think it's a great platform. It does a lot for us, but the fact that our users don't want to be in the application is weird. They'd rather work in a spreadsheet and then upload their results to the actual server. Now it could just be their behaviour pattern, but I think if it was a little easier for them to kind of work in, they would have an easier time with it.

Although on the plus side, the fact that it's open like that and you can just connect, maybe that's a positive too. So it's kind of a plus/minus. The UI they said, "Hey, I don't really like UI," but the fact that you can just upload your stuff from your work space, which could be a spreadsheet, it could be Eclipse, it could be a script that you're working in and it just directly uploads, they love that.

When you talk about easy use from an integration standpoint, definitely high marks there, but the UI is just something they really do not like. I personally, as the person who has to get all the data and metrics out of it, the data model is horrible. It's a constant complaint that I have. The new Octane platform kind of solves that. I just wish they had put some of that into ALM because the product marketing strategy is you have to have both.

Have a well-defined process, have a strong reporting structure, meaning in your process you want a lot of measurability. If you define your output, the reports and the questions you need to answer from what you're doing, which your process should be managing for you. In our company, we are very specific about what our executives and stakeholders want.

We have a very well-defined set of measurements that we have to take. We then put a process designed to ensure those measurements are always taken. That then allows you to deal with your outputs and your reporting structure, which then allows you to properly architect your tooling. The technology is very flexible. You have to decide as a client area how you really want to use it and that's going to start with what your business needs are the values that you're trying to get out of it.

That's the biggest advice that I have, it's not even on the technology. The technology will do great things for you if you have a plan and a structure and you know what you want it to do for you. Half the time they don't know, they want the tool to do it for them and it's the other way around. So that's what I advise people to do.

Think about it, have a vision, have a plan, tie that to outcomes, and measure those outcomes. If you're answering the right questions and asking the right questions, your technology will really enable you. You've got to look at it from that standpoint.

We use ALM with our QA Department and it provides a way for us to show our work as a repository for our test-cases. We're able to show what we do on a daily basis. It's very easy to use and it's worked well for us.

Over the past year, we've been able to decrease our defect reduction by executing and making sure we have test-base coverage in all the areas. I don't quite know the percentage exactly. We've been able to reduce the defects.

We've done our source code in another application for so long, to have developers come over to help QA integrate it would probably be an impossible effort.

It's been okay. I think the problem with us is, it can be used for the entire SDLC process, as far as requirements, development and that type of thing, but we only use it for QA.

What happens is, we're having to use multiple products to come to one goal. That's kind of frustrating for the teams. I think if we could get to the point where we could use it as one solution, it would be so much more beneficial.

We haven't scaled it yet, but we're looking to do that. We're working with a company now to look at some different solutions, or at least the ART tool. It's looks very impressive to us. We're in conversations about the ART tool, because we really need something like that for our analysts.

It's an educational tool, so you are able to link your education and link it with Rally. If you have a module that you want to teach, you can just teach them through that. It's a direct connection to HP ALM.

I've never used tech support. We have an individual that works closely with HP. Any technical issues that comes across the team, he tends to work directly with HP to handle those.

We use ALM for all of our applications and didn't use anything before. We're a maturing software company, so we're really getting into these distinct processes, like ALM. We're currently going through a transformation into Agile, so we're really just ramping up to get to that mature stage as a software company.

I was there, but I wasn't involved. I was an independent contributor.

I wouldn't rate it a 10 because it doesn't have the ability to do all the things the developers use today, like TFS. Overall I would recommend it, because of its ease of use. It doesn't take much to get up to date on it and to learn the process of using it for your test-case execution in ALM.

You don't have much time to spend on education. You don't have two weeks for them to learn an application. So, because it's easy to use, I would definitely recommend it for that reason.