OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

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.

HP ALM helps us consolidate our efforts. All of our projects are in there. We are also in the life science domain so we have many more compliance requirements which we have to adhere to. It's pretty good so far.

As a user we see one version of the requirements for the application, we keep all our assets together, it gives us a huge traceable. It's all the classic benefits of using an application lifecycle management tool that are available.

We look at service packs, what bugs they have and fixes. From a end-user perspective when you have invested heavily in these tools for the last four, five, six years or more, organizations are there from when it was Mercury. We just want to keep pace with where the industry is going, where the shift is in terms of quality assurance and requirement management. HP is very strong on the testing side, but in the last few years with the agile methodology it has lagged behind. It's slowly catching up and eventually it will get there, but we love the eco-system we're in and will continue to move forward.

It's stable

It's very scalable, a very robust kind of solution and we recommend it to anyone who's looking for application lifecycle kind of tool.

We use an HPE partner for our support needs, but tickets do go to HPE eventually, level two, level three. We have never had an issue.

Our organization is very new in this area. We are a pretty young company. We didn't have any formal task-management kind of tool or testing tool per se. When we were looking at the solution one of our implementation partners for one of the projects recommended it and we looked at it and it's capability. Many of the folks who are on the team have used it in other companies. For the current organization it was a no-brainer not to pick this tool.

It's very straightforward.

Since we are in a regulated industry we have to use the workflow we use, what was built for this. For us it was a straight-forward choice. For large and small companies there are a lot of choices for task-management tools. IBM rational tools are there and then there's JIRA, there's also TFS. There are a lot of task-management tools. They can pick any one that they want 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.

I'm using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for testing purposes.

What's most valuable in Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is that it's useful for these activities: test designing, test planning, and test execution.

What could be improved in Micro Focus ALM Quality Center are the dashboard and the management tools particularly used for management reviews. Currently, what's missing in the solution is the ability for users to see the ongoing scenarios and the status of those scenarios versus the requirements. As for the management tools, they also need to be improved so users can have a better idea of what's going on in just one look, so they can manage testing activities better.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is having management visibility on the dashboard. For example, it would be so much easier if there's global information that users could work with.

I've been using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for six months now.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is a stable product.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center should be scalable, but I don't know what's behind the infrastructure, so I'm unsure of its scalability.

I don't deal directly with external support. I'm dealing with internal support, so I can't rank the technical support for Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. I don't deal with their support directly.

My organization previously used HP Quality Center, but I don't remember the differences between that solution and Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. I also don't make decisions on whether to move from one solution to another solution.

I wasn't part of the team who set up Micro Focus ALM Quality Center, so I don't have information on whether the process was straightforward or complex.

I'm not aware of the pricing or licensing cost for Micro Focus ALM Quality Center.

At least sixty people who are part of different departments are using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center in the organization I'm working for now.

There are people who use the solution once a day, while there are people who use it twice a week, etc. It depends on their positions.

I'm rating Micro Focus ALM Quality Center six out of ten. What would make it an eight or a nine for me is improving the dashboard and adding a management tool that would be useful for management reviews.

We use this solution primarily for doing test cases and running UFT cases.

The integration with UFT is nice.

We are having a lot of problems with this solution. One example is that users are able to run test cases, but the permissions are managed by another group.

I don't have the ability to create test sets.

A lot of the testing steps are ad-hoc in nature where they have a lot of prerequisites, but they don't specify what the prerequisites are.

The organization that I am at is not very good in the sense that even finding test cases that need to be run is very difficult.

The UFT tests don't work very well and it seems to depend on things as simple as the screen resolution on a machine that I've moved to. Specifically, if I move to a screen with a different resolution then it throws things off.

I first started using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center in 2011.

We are using version 12. It has a new name, it's called HPE application Lifecycle Management.

The stability of the hardware is okay. It's just the tool itself is not easy to use at all.

The scalability is not great at all, especially with the licensing model.

I have never had to use them because we have an in-house group that manages many of our issues. I don't know what their interactions have been with Micro Focus, but I have personally had never reached out to them.

My experience with it, in general, is that the initial setup is not easy and that upgrades are dreaded. Companies tend to not go through the upgrade process because it causes many different types of issues, especially on the database side. This seems to be a longstanding bug with the management of permissions that goes all the way back to quality center days that have never been addressed. 

I would say that the initial setup is not easy at all.

The licensing model is an area that can be improved.

The cost of licensing depends on the number of VMs that you are running test cases on and it is not cheap. To the best of my recollection, it is several thousand dollars per license.

We are having a lot of problems with this product and we're now looking at other options.

This is a product that I do not recommend but if someone were in a situation where they were intent on using it, my advice is definitely to plan it out ahead of time. Don't try to wing it and learn it on the fly. Have someone who knows the tool and can set up the proper authorization because otherwise, it will be like ours, which is a mess.

I would rate this solution a three out of ten.

It is a test management tool where you write the test plan, test scripts, and test cases. You can log the defects that you found during the testing. You can also use it with other integrations, such as automation using UFT, where you execute the scripts from Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. We are using the latest version of this solution.

You can maintain your test cases and requirements. You can also log the defects in it and make the traceability metrics out of it. There are all sorts of things you can do in this.

It is not that complex to use. In terms of user experience, it is very simple to adopt. It is a good product.

The Agile methodology is now being used across all the organizations, but in this solution, we don't have a dashboard like Jira. In Jira, you can move your product backlogs from one space to another and see the progress, that is, whether a backlog is in the development stage or testing stage. Micro Focus ALM Quality Center does not have this feature. It is typically very straightforward. You just execute the test cases from it, and you just make them pass, fail, or whatever. They can also improve its integration with Jira.

The browser support needs to be improved in this because it supports only Internet Explorer as of now. It does not have support for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or any other browser. 

There are also some performance issues in it. Let's say that you are doing the testing, and you found something and are logging the defect. When you try to attach several or multiple screenshots with the defect, it slows down, which is a very common problem people face.

I would like them to include a functionality where I am able to see the reports across all the projects. When you have multiple projects, being a manager, I would like to see the reports across all the projects. Currently, there is no single sign-on through which we can get all the information at one place. You need to log into it project-wise. If you have ten projects, you can't view the information in one dashboard.

I have been using this solution for more than 12 years.

It is a very stable product. It is a very old product.

Whenever I face any issue or require an item for automation, such as for integrating Excel support, I can get it in the resource library. It has a resource library where you can get all of the stuff.

I don't have any direct contact with Micro Focus support. For any issues that I face while using the product, we have a ticketing system in my company. I just need to log the ticket, and the right person will resolve it. They might be contacting Micro Focus.

The initial setup is pretty simple.

I would highly recommend this product because it is a very stable product. Around 70% to 80% of organizations are using this product. It is a very stable and popular product.

I would rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center an eight out of ten.