OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

When I use it, it is mostly for test management. The instances I've used are mostly on-prem.

It is a tool, and it works. It has got good linkage and good traceability between the test cases and the defects. It has got lots of features for testing.

It can be quite clunky, and it can easily be configured badly, which I've seen in a couple of places. If it is configured badly, it can be very hard to use. It is not so easy to integrate with other products. I've not used Micro Focus in a proper CI/CD pipeline, and I haven't managed to get that working because that has not been my focus. So, I find it hard. I've often lost the information because it had committed badly. It doesn't commit very well sometimes, but that might have to do with the sites that I was working at and the way they had configured it.  

The feature that I would have liked to see is more integration into CI/CD pipeline and agile pipeline. It should have integration with third-party tools such as Jira, DevOps, and the cross-platform type of thing. The versions I've used are older, so these features may have already been included in the new versions.

I have been using this solution for 10 to 12 years.

I've had many cases where I've lost data. I had bugs where I couldn't record, and the records got lost or locked, but rather than the actual product, it had more to do with the way it was set up at the sites I was working at.

It is scalable. I've seen big organizations using it.

I've not had to deal with technical support.

I also use Microsoft Azure DevOps. I don't really have a preference. It is horses for courses, and it depends on the type of application you're running. For older style waterfall projects, you can probably go with Micro Focus, barring pricing and others things. For agile or particularly a Microsoft Azure-based product, I would go with DevOps because of the better pipeline and the whole end-to-end integration.

I never had to set it up from scratch.

I've never been in the procurement process for it. I don't think it is cheap. Some of the features can be quite expensive.

Generally, it is pretty good for what it does. As a standalone tool for managing testing, it is good.

I would give Micro Focus ALM Quality Center an eight out of 10.

On-premises

ALM helps us keep track of all the functional testing that we do for projects before deployment and even after it goes live. We also use it for tracking future enhancements, and all the functional defects. Test requirements are maintained in ALM.

It saves time, and definitely mitigates risks in having products which are not very well built, to having a product which will perform well and function well once it goes live.

I work in a bio-pharmaceutical company, so we have lot of validated applications, and when we do functional testing for these validation applications, tracking the e-signatures is very important.

I know there are plugins to track the e-signatures, but the problem is that it's very hard to get them implemented. There's no out-of-the-box way, as far as I know, to implement track changes continuously, that comes with add-ons, and those add-ons operated by third parties as well. They are not very mature and there is a huge learning cycle in adopting them. Due to these reasons, the effectiveness of ALM for an industry like ours is less than what we would see in LoadRunner.

It has been challenging in the past, specifically when a new version is released and we have to upgrade. We haven't been upgrading that often, and because of that, it may mask some other issues which we would encounter because by the time we upgrade the new version we would have gone through some of the new patch fixes and so on. We wait for a couple of years and then apply the fixes. By that time, most of the big bugs are fixed.

It scales for our requirements but we have been finding it more and more expensive for LoadRunner. They're introducing new protocols, but they are quite scalable.

We haven't used technical support directly from HPE. We go through Avnet for all the technical support. They're a value added reseller partner of HPE.

We acquired HPE products a long time ago before I was around.

We have been using ALM and LoadRunner throughout. I can't recall having used any other solution before that. But one thing I have noticed is that there's less and less emphasis on load, scalability or performance testing, and the emphasis seems to be shifting away completely. This is feedback based on the fact that there's less emphasis on performance and load testing in these seminars as opposed to the last few years.

It supports the full test management life cycle. We have other test management tools in place, such as JIRA and a couple others, but ALM provides the broadest coverage from project creation to death.

We have developers, project managers, stakeholders, everybody referring to one single point-of-truth for everything that is related to a project, from requirements, test cases, coverage, defect tracking, and reporting.

The client installation is sometimes quite painful. You need to register some components on the client that need administration rights, which is really tough on the organization. For each upgrade of the software, every minor upgrade, you need to reinstall the client, which means basically somebody needs to travel around and do the upgrades on each client. Basically, what we really would like to see would be a proper web client that has good coverage. There is a web client, but it only covers a very small part of the product, so you can't use it for the full life-cycle, and so we decided not to use the web client.

It deploys without issue.

For us, it's stable. We're happy with the stability.

We have no issues with scalability.

We have had a bit of trouble at times and, in all fairness, sometimes we felt quite left alone. We've approached technical support with real problems and either they referred us to "well, check it on some of the Internet based forums", or "look at the FAQ", or something like that. Also, we sometimes feel left alone. In the end, it turned out that we were better off sorting ourselves on some forum instead of contacting support and opening a ticket. We're in a quite agile environment and if a support call is stuck for 6 or 8 weeks, it doesn't help us.

We were using JIRA before and still are using JIRA. But that is only a section of coverage, so we needed something that has a broader coverage of the process, and the ALM was the choice.

ALM setup was pretty straightforward. We had standard problems like connecting to the active directory and making sure that the missions are set correctly and so on.

Make sure you have full acceptance of all involved or possibly involved groups. Make sure that your management supports it and everybody is happy to use the tool and happy to share a good level of information in the development life cycle. This is where, for us, the most benefit came out of it. If you have a defect, you can easily with a mouse click get the full information.

• End to End traceability (requirements- test cases- defects)
• Analytics (reporting, charts, dashboards, etc.)
• Ease of defect management
• Ease of email alerts, etc.

In my last organization we identified HP ALM as our strategic test management tool to standardize tool usage across the organization. Different business teams were using different tools like Bugzilla etc. but with the procurement of HP ALM everything was, eventually, standardized. By means of ALM we were able to deploy some testing standards and processes. Personally, I found ALM very handy for test managers and project managers as an entire project test life-cycle can be managed in one place and leadership get end-end visibility. I also like the reporting function in ALM, very useful.

Overall the user experience of HP ALM is very good, there are some small improvements which can help those who are doing defect triage and management, and also the actual testers who use a test lab. For instance, when I open the defect list using a report or dashboard drill down, I can’t update individual defect without actually opening it. However if I select a defect shortlisting criteria and get a list of matching defects from defect module (defect list view) I can very well update defect log without actually having to open the defect. This seems like a small thing but believe me, when you are dealing with multiple defects and have limited time on a defect triage call, this small functionality really makes your life easy. There a such few small enhancements which HP can probably do to make this wonderful tool even better.

I've used it for two years and three months.

Yes, some minor issues but these were not tool issues but more to do with lack of testing after deployment.

No, ALM is pretty stable.

Only once but that was because we reached the maximum floating license capacity at a particular time due to many testers from multiple projects logged in at the same time.

I have never had direct interaction with customer service.

I did not personally, but in my previous organization Bugzilla was used. ALM replaced it because it was a complete package, and also the company had bought other HP testing tools like UFT & PC to meet end to end testing needs.

I wasn’t the admin for ALM so can’t really comment, but from an user standpoint I found it pretty simple.

We had an in-house admin team.

I don’t know the ROI in monetary terms, but certainly ALM helped me get more people to follow testing standards and practices.

In my current company we have multiple tools. I am currently exploring various options to standardize the tool set up. Some of these tools are JIRA, and Bugtracker, etc.

If you want AN end to end testing lifecycle product, I think HP is the winner. It has test management (ALM), Automation (UFT) and Performance (PC) testing, and it all is in the bundled package from HP, so all end to end testing needs are managed. From a pure test management standpoint, ALM also stands tall as it provides a very good solution to manage requirements, test cases, defects, traceability and reports, and not just bug management.

Very robust API to interface with the tool and you can customize how its used. Maintains data integrity very well. Very customizable. Great for larger organizations.

Reporting is almost useless, but it does allow you to extract information directly from the database through a robust API and report with your favorite tool [excel, Crystal]. Not easy for lay people to administer.

We primarily use the solution for test management.

The solution has dozens of excellent features. It's hard to pinpoint just one.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not too hard to deploy.

The pricing of the product could be improved.

The solution needs to offer support for Agile. Currently, ALM only supports Waterfall. Whereas ALM Octane is a product that Micro Focus has full for Agile projects. It's not really and apples to apples comparison between those two products, however, it shows that the company has an understanding of Agile and it would be nice if they could support it on both products.

I've been using the solution for over ten years. It's been quite a while since we actually started using it - about a decade. Therefore, I have quite a bit of experience with it.

We have multiple clients using the solution. The number of users for each entity varies.

I can't speak to if any have plans to scale or increase usage in the future.

The technical support aspect of the solution isn't the best. That said, I haven't met a vendor that has very good technical support.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward in general. A company shouldn't have any issues implementing it.

I can't speak to how long the deployment actually took. It varies from client to client. We've had clients that deployed in two to three weeks, and others that took months. It depends on many factors.

We are implementors. We help clients set up and deploy the solution.

The licensing costs vary from client to client. There are different prices for SaaS versus on-premises deployments, for example.

There are only Micro Focus and Tricentis that are playing in this space properly. Anything else really isn't competing.

I would advise maybe to look more at ALM Octane if a company is in an Agile and DevOps transformation program. This product wouldn't really be suitable if that was the case.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a three out of ten.

On-premises