OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

We provide support for customers, which require this kind of solution.

The setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution can scale.

I frankly don't recommend Micro Focus solutions. 

The support is not good and the documentation is not consistent. I even opened the issue to the partner. With the support not being great, we faced some stressful situations with the customer. That's why I'm looking for another partner.

I'd like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning features implemented in future releases.

I've been using the solution for almost a year.

I realized there are some bugs in the solution that were not occurring on the last solution. 

Micro Focus bought another company. Since then, my experience hasn't been that great. The quality has dropped. It's not as stable as it used to be. I was expecting it to be more stable.

For the Quality Center, the scalability is quite good. On Load Runner, as a comparison, I faced one issue related to scalability. We face quite a few problems in that area.

The companies that are using Quality Center are quite sizeable. We have around 20 users on that particular solution.

The technical support is not helpful. They aren't responsive or knowledgable and they don't take initiative to solve issues for clients. It can hurt the relationship we have with our clients. We're not satisfied with their level of service.

While the setup is straightforward in general, the configuration is not quite as user-friendly. To configure the solution, you need to have many years of experience with the solution. Those that are new to it may face issues.

In terms of deployment, it takes about three days for the Quality Center installation as a whole. In contrast, Load Runner takes about two days in our case. 

We're a Micro Focus partner.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we're using. We are configuring the company and we tend to use the latest version of labels.

We work with both cloud and on-premises deployment models.

I don't recommend Micro Focus tools. It's a very strong company nowadays, however, I'm trying to find another partner. For instance, I've researched solutions that are much better than Micro-Focus in SAP scenarios.

I'd advise users looking for a solution to pay attention to their requirements and make sure whichever solution they choose meets them. You'll need to do a lot of research and balance the pros and cons of each option before choosing anything.

Overall, I would rate the solution six out of ten.

• Test management
• Defect management, and 
• Test case storage.

Good test management tool.

Defect tracking.

Licensing model is awful.

My prior organization used the test execution and defect modules for QC. As a manager, I was able to set up reports that allowed me to finds areas of improvement for my team. We used the import functionality to import test cases for reusability and execution.

Prior to using Quality Center, my organization used spreadsheets and emails to track testing efforts. Therefore, QC helped my team become more efficient by tracking all testing activities with the tool.

I like the customizable report functionality. I was able to set up reports that allowed me to accurately give a real-time status all of all testing projects that were in process.

• I would love to see QC update and use metric dashboards at the individual and project level. 
• The UI also needs some updating with a fresh new look and feel.

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. 

Definitely the testing. My app test case organization, being able to organize it, and standardize a quality program.

Definitely ease the complexity of the tool: the upgrading part of the tool. It needs to be easier.

Also, it needs easier integrations. I know one of the big reasons we did upgrades to the ALM upgrade license was because you could use Octane, which Tasktop is giving free for a year. That helps integrate with some of our other tools. I think as our organization, one of our biggest challenges is, we have all of these different tools, and getting them to talk to each other. To really have a whole encompassing pipeline, that is our challenge.

Five years.

We don't really have downtime, but we do have where it crashes here and there. So, stability is not great, but okay.

It does not meet our needs. The product is very geared towards waterfall. Very stable, standard things, and as an organization, we want to be innovative. We want to try new things, and it just doesn't seem to do that easily.

It's okay. We've had to escalate things a few times to get answers, but they have provided them in the end.

Setup and upgrades are complex.

Probably one of my biggest issues with the product is that it's so complex and hard to do. We even paid $30,000 for a consultant to come in. One year in, then we wanted this upgrade again, and they wanted to have a consultant come in again. I'm like, "We just did!"

So, we decided, "We're going to try it without it," and so far it's going well, but the complexity of it seems to be daunting to engineers, not like other tools that they implement and upgrade.

The most valuable user feature that we use right now is the camera. It allows us to take the test evidence, and it makes it easier for the user, especially the business user, to capture evidence as they test.

For a test management department, and we are highly audited, by the way, it allows us to have a single repository for all our projects where we do tests, as one go-to place for our test evidence. It has a go-to place for us to generate reporting, retain results, and be able to share it.

I have to say I'm not a huge fan of ALM. I think it's the best out of some of the not-so wonderful tools out there. The example that I usually give people is, if you're an IT person and you use a tool, you know that right click always does similar things. You know that there's functions that from one application to another mean the same thing or has the same features and functionalities. ALM doesn't work that way. I don't think it's a difficult tool to use, but it does need someone to be first trained on it, and then you have to use it a few times before it kind of sticks.

If you use it once, but then you go away and you come back, let's say a few months later, you have to get a refresher course. So it's like a computer application, there are certain functions which are: F1 is Help. Control is something else, and so on.

It's not intuitive in that way, which has always been a problem, especially with business users.

We have had a few unplanned downtimes. There's been situations where we're not able to access the tools.

Scalability, again going back, we're limited by the number of licenses that we have. If we want to have more projects, from our understanding, we just have to purchase additional licenses or purchase additional access for projects.

We have definitely used tech support, and the skill level varies (this is before the Micro Focus integration). When we were trying to figure if QC SaaS can work with Windows 10, it took us three weeks before tech support finally realized that they missed a patch on their end, and it cost us three weeks of wasted time. The IT support even said, "We're waiting for you guys to get synced up on your side," before we could do anything.

Tech support has the knowledge and skill, but it's not consistent.

I previously had used QC at a different company. I know I need a test management tool. When I joined the company, we already had this one, but I wanted to move to SaaS, because I needed something that was not on-premise based.

I was involved in moving us from the client to the SaaS and it was painful. We were on QC 10, and we had to move to QC SaaS. Because we're a bank, we have a ridiculous amount of firewalls.

So, we could not install QC SaaS and our tech support team didn't understand how to get it installed. Therefore, one of my team members had to figure out all of the nuts and bolts, then the HPE tech support was also slow in helping us. It actually took us many months to finally go from QC 10 to QC SaaS. I'm actually close to the end of my three-year license, and I'm seriously like, "Do I stay? Do I move?"

I did look at other solutions, and I didn't accept those only because the camera feature was very important to us. The other solutions that I looked at really didn't have the camera feature yet.

It was Zephyr, SmartBear, and ALM. I have some business users who are also very conservative, and for me to move them away from something they're very familiar with, I have to have some very compelling additions and functionalities to give them in order to say it was worth the effort to retrain them on something else.

I had a demo recently that was actually for Octane, but in that demo, I found out about a couple of tools that I actually have access to now that I didn't know about before. One of them was a JIRA integration and the other was a way to create manual task steps, actually just stepping through the application, which could be automated.

I was like, "Wait, I'm near the end of my three-year license, and I'm just now about this?" I was like, "I could have been using this?"

So, those are the new tools I'm looking at, and it actually came up because, as I said, we're renewing our license, and when my rep was talking to me to find out what was my interest, part of it is, "Well, I need your integration." He's like, "Oh, we think we have that." I was like, "Really?"

For anyone looking at this product, I would definitely have them look at other tools, too, and make some comparisons. I would say to them, "Hey, here's how we had to deal with it, and here's what works for us and what doesn't." For the other tools, since we don't have firsthand experience, I could only suggest that they actually do some research.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: response and customer service. Support is very important. Then obviously, still getting a good value for what I'm spending. The product at least needs to be comparable to the other tools that are available on the market.

I have to say that I definitely was looking to move away from HPE initially when I took over the department, because we were getting no support from HPE at all. However, HPE, because we're small in comparison to their other customers, shunted us off to a third party, their reseller, which may ultimately have been a good thing for HPE (now Micro Focus) as well as for us, because we finally got some attention.

The most valuable feature is definitely its scalability. It covers the life cycle end-to-end, from requirements to test execution and defect management. There are some features we haven't yet explored, such as project planning and libraries, but these also add to the end-to-end view of the life cycle.

It provides our team with a well-defined structure for the way each person should work, giving us a standardized process. For example, with defect management, we can find a particular issue and know exactly who's working on it and where exactly they are in the work flow. Previously, people tended to work on their own thing without coordinating with others.

We found some difficulty in working with it, as we're a large organization. Once we got to 10,000 users, the idea of an individual user lost its value and there wasn't the ability to create teams within ALM. We weren't able to assign particular work to a team, but there's no function for that. This is something that should be built into ALM.

We have no issues deploying ALM.

The stability is very good, especially when compared with some of the other products from large software vendors.

Scalability has been excellent, going from a user base of several hundred to around 10,000.

I've not personally used technical support, but other in my company have. Some of the queries are responded to very quickly.

I wasn't involved in the overall decision, just on which version to select.

We have a lot of internal processes which elongates the process, but as far as the actual installation and configuration is concerned, it was reasonably straightforward.

We considered other options.

• The ability to create and store requirements as well as tests, both manual and automated.
• The ability to determine traceability between requirements, tests and defects found in our testing process is a huge advantage in determining the breakdown in the application business model.

Previous to the utilization of Quality Center our requirements were created and stored in Word documents, and all Test Plans were facilitated through Excel, and there was little coordination or consistency to testing standards. Quality Center has allowed us to better track our testing coverage and plan our releases.

I think there are still some changes to help integrate with agile processes better without having to use a separate product. I think that since Quality Center has had functionality added over such a long period of time, that certain modules and other HP tools could be better integrated.

Initially when we started using Quality Center we had some issues with scaling the solution throughout and updating across multiple teams but these issues have since been resolved.

I would rate the level of customer service very high.

Its very high, and once you establish the proper channels and key contacts to work with it is pretty seamless.

We did not previously utilize a different solution for managing our requirements and testing efforts.

Our implementation and setup was somewhat complex do to our enterprise architecture. We have multiple divisions across two companies that share the same servers and architecture but have different needs with regards to setting up and managing projects.

Initially we implemented Quality Center ourselves but then went with an outside vendor later due to some complications. Depending on the complexity of your organization I recommend working with an approved vendor or service partner to setup your installation.

We haven’t really calculated ROI on our testing efforts as of yet.