OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

The Central Repository is key for us.

It has sped up our regression testing cycle almost three times what it is if we do it manually.

Tighter integration between ALM and UFT, especially from a reporting perspective, for automation reporting. We currently run into reporting issues.

We've been using it for around a year.

ALM's been pretty rock solid for us. Getting it to interact with UFT nicely has been a challenge for us sometimes. There's good integration in my opinion, but it just needs to be a little more rock solid.

It's been able to scale to our needs.

Good, sometimes a little slow, but overall pretty good.

We didn't have any other solution in place, and needed to have a much better solution than doing testing with Excel files.

It's straightforward.

HPE was one of the very few that we actually had on the list. We went with HPE because my boss was very familiar with the product, and felt it fit our organization's needs extremely well.

Give it a shot, if you take the time to invest in it, it works.

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.

I am the QA Manager, so we use it to score all our test cases, results, defects, and reporting, which is very important. We're able to produce a number of reports and graphs. This helps us a lot when working with our clients.

We're doing a lot of agile work and using a number of different agile tools. Agile integration, as right now it does integrate with version 1.0, but I'm not sure about its integration with some of the other agile tools.

We've been using it for about five years.

It is stable. We've really had no downtime experiences. We've had good experiences with it.

It is scalable. We're actually moving onto the SaaS product. We're looking at that right now.

Tech support has been very helpful when we've had some questions or issues. They've been very responsive.

I'll find out over the next couple of months as we are looking to do the first upgrade since I have been using it.

It's a very good tool. We use it throughout the company. There are just some integration points which could be a little better. But if they're out there, I don't know about them. Maybe having the knowledge and knowing about them would help as well.

Requirements, testing, defect management, all integrated in one solution.

In my previous organization, various tools like Excel and other open source test management tools were used. This was causing issues in sharing Test Management data. Once HPE ALM was brought in as a single solution, and data from all other tools were migrated to it, there was a single tool for all needs.

Agile, Devops.

Seven to eight years.

No.

Agile, Devops

No.

Good.

Need of a single solution for all needs.

Not straightforward, it was a complex architecture.

Expensive tool which could become an overload on the budget in the future.

Bugzilla.

Be aware of the cost aspect, it is very expensive.

Test planning, Test Execution, and Defect Tracking, as these are the code artifacts/deliverables for testing.

A centralized and unified repository of requirements and testing artifacts with access across geographies in real time, which improved efficiency and efficacy of application lifecycle management, including integration of Test Automation tool (HPE UFT tool).

• Integration with other open source test automation tools such as Selenium WebDriver.
• Dashboard reporting including test plan versus test execution progress (overall and module-wise), forecasting test planning or test execution progress based on the past progress run rate.
• More options to slice and dice/analyze defect trends, e.g. open defects count/numbers component wise, open defects count/numbers linked to Test Case IDs, defects linked or converted to change requests (CRs), etc.
• For Agile SDLC support, option to define sprints or iterations, effort estimation, release planning and sprint planning and tracking.
• Ease of reuse of Test Automation scripts for performance testing with HPE LoadRunner integration.
• Mobile Testing support with option to assign/mark test cases for mobile testing with mobile device specification of OS, make, screen size, integration of mobile testing on Cloud e.g. Perfecto Mobile.

Two years.

No.

No.

Nine on a scale of one to 10.

Had used Quality Center and Test Director in the past and HPE ALM is much more enhanced and useful.

The initial setup is more secure and procedural.

Pricing may be a factor prompting a look at competitor products and differentiators or open source options with limited product features. Licensing could leverage combo packs with HPE ALM such as HPE UFT, HPE LoadRunner, etc, as well as continued usage of product post-expiration of license without upgrade and technical support.

No.

Get input regarding the evolving core customer's unmet needs to help choose the right solution.

We use it for manual and automatic testing along with defect and requirements management. We can check everything, know who is the sponsor for it, and make a test plan. Everything is very visible. 

ALM uses a waterfall approach. We have some hybrid approaches in the company and need a more agile approach. We have also installed ALM Octane and are trying to see if it fills the approach that we are looking for our company.

It is very stable. We have not had any problems. 

I have a good impression of the scalability. I have been very satisfied. 

I used tech support once. It took a while to solve the issue, but it was solved.

Before, we used Excel for complex testings. Using this solution has been a huge step for us. From reporting to team management, everything is better now. 

We have divided our licenses between Micro Focus ALM and ALM Octane. It works for us. 

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.