OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

What I love about it is that it can be used for the entire lifecycle (from requirements to release) and the dashboard is great for reporting.

The organization I am currently with does not use ALM. I recently moved. At AMC, we began using it during my tenure. When I got there, it was shelfware and they were using spreadsheets. ALM improved our ability to share reports which were understandable to all levels of business. Also having all the bugs for all the projects in one place instead of in a spreadsheet allowed more visibility of issues to all teams. Having test cases in ALM also helped us with spending less time doing rework. Being able to reuse the tests instead of creating new tests saved time.

The product could be more user-friendly. It's pretty easy when you know what to do, but it's not intuitive learning that all the features are available. For example, it’s not obvious that you can update a set of test cases with multi-select cut/paste. This was not available in its previous versions.
A lot of people also think all you get is what you see out-of-the-box. A lot of inexperienced users don’t know almost everything is configurable.

16 years.

No.

No.

I rarely needed any as I am an expert administrator.

Yes, spreadsheets. We switched because we grew from three people to 10 and needed a tool. ALM was one most of the team had used at other companies.

Complex. There are many steps to follow to set everything up for an upgrade, and if you make a mistake, it's catastrophic.

It is definitely overpriced. Most of the cost is for support that you rarely need if you have an onsite admin.

No.

It's better suited as an enterprise tool that can support the licensing cost, instead of for a small shop.

Customization is the most valuable feature. I don’t see other products with such a huge and detailed customization feature.

The Web UI and the Administration Page need to improve. These are not issues, but areas to improve.

Web UI: In some version (I don’t remember exactly the version number, unfortunately), Web UI was introduced with limited functionalities but it was cool in my opinion. Web UI has a lot of advantages and the main advantage is that the customer doesn’t have to install a big thick client on his machine. Web UI is faster, lightweight and easy to configure compared to the on-premise installation. But for some reason, this functionality (all Web UI) was removed in the next release.

Administration Page: It doesn’t have any issues. The main idea here is that it was written using old technologies and it would be great to improve/rewrite it using modern technologies. It doesn’t have an impact on the customer, it is more for developers who should support this area.

I have used this solution for five and a half years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

Previously, I have used Redmine and JIRA. Switching to HPE ALM was not my decision, I changed my job.

The setup was straightforward.

Just want to advise to use ALM SaaS in case you don’t want to use ALM all your life. It is cheaper and provides you with all the ALM features but for some period of time. Also, you don’t need to install it manually, the entire environment is already installed.

As an advise for developers who will develop such applications I would like to say - always try to support the area in an actual state, i.e., by using modern ideas/technologies if possible. Also, listen to the customer's needs, have flexible customization tools and do not forget about performance.

It's robust and leading edge. They are always ahead of the pack. They spend a lot on research and development and that’s the reason they make good products.

The testing tools and everything that comes with it is very beneficial; especially the REST API environment that is best-of-breed.

I am not an end user so I can't really say. But, I would like to see improvement in the price.

The solution is very stable.

You can use it any way, so I suppose it is very scalable.

I am not personally responsible for technical support, but the other team would have used them.

We have always been using HPE products, so we have just grown with it.

Another team was responsible for the setup.

Specifically for this solution, they need to be in a close relationship to co-develop functionality. They also need to know the vendor is there. That is the biggest plus from an HPE perspective.

I administer it, and from what I've seen you can create defects and follow up the resolution with defects based on the scenarios that you have created in default program.

Other valuable features I've seen are:

1. Requirement traceability 
2. Dashboard
3. Camera, which helps us to take a screenshot at a particular instant
4. Customized notifications of different instances

It centralized all the defects in our organization. It also allows us to test scenarios in only one bullet, one database, so it’s easier to manage. All the methodology around the testing scenarios is gathered into the same product, so it’s easy for communications between the business side and the testing side because they all know where to find the information.

I’m not an expert in ALM, but if I have to look into some issues or other occurrences, I can easily find my way around. It’s quite user friendly, I would say.

I supervise the team using and providing support for the product, and there are a couple of things my team feels that could be improved upon.

1) We need to move test cases manually from Test Case module to Test Execution module. This consumes more manual interaction. If this could happen with any in-built functionality, that would reduce the manual work and time involved.

2) Email notification list. Emails are not triggering to any member of the email notification group if just any one of the email addresses is incorrect. So, if one email address is wrong in a group of ten email addresses, no one receives the email notification that they're all supposed to receive.

It has deployed just fine for us.

Stability is fine, except for a few pop ups sometimes. We don't understand why we're getting them, but it's generally quite stable.

Scalability hasn't been an issue.

The defects section is the most valuable.

It has improved our testing designs and test reporting.

• Ability to export test plans (test cases and libraries) in other formats, such as in Excel.
• Test Lab functionality needs to be changed so you can set test attributes automatically with minimal effort.

I've used it for two years, although not in my current role.

My department doesn't do deployments, but I believe that the team doing it does have problems.

We have a specific department that deals with customer service.

We have a specific department that deals with technical support.

• Requirements module
• Test Plan/Case module
• Defect module
• Reporting modules
• API

• Real-time snapshot of project vitals
• Reusability of requirements
• Tests
• Flexibility in assigning multiple testers to a project, rather than assigning each tester to a test case
• Seamless on the fly reorganise test projects due to corporate emergencies and shifting priorities

• Traceability and version control management
• Not able to group project deliverables by builds

I've used it for six years.

When we were installing v10, the installation became corrupted. So when we upgraded to v11, it was very expensive, and at our own cost, to do. This was regardless of our maintenance contract with HP.

No issues encountered.

Our vendor is 10/10, but HP is 7/10.

Our vendor is 10/10, but HP is 8/10.

No previous solution was used.

The installation tools are not the best, even for experienced IT/admin, it self-corrupts, and there is no good tech support to help with install issues unless you pay them to fly in a team.

We did it in-house.

It's 300%.

It depends on your vendor. SkyIt was the best, as they were able to get the initial cost low enough so a small startup could afford it.

• IBM
• JIRA/Test Link

For small companies where audits/lawsuits etc. are not a factor, it's not worth the investment. You should use open source or lower cost alternatives (JIRA project/defect tracking, Test Link open source QC like Test Tool). However, for any company that wants a mature, highly developed platform that is constantly improving, need to survive audits, etc., you must consider HP ALM solutions such as HP Quality Center.

The most useful are the requirements repository, the ability to link requirements to test script steps, and the use of traceability matrix reporting.

Houses requirements and testing with approvals all in one place. Signature approval capability was very useful.

It could be better by incorporating more spell checking and word processing functionalities in steps. Also, it could be more user friendly to "call" other scripts.

I have used the latest version of ALM for about four years, but I have used all previous versions going back to 2001 through to today.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Mostly with the blocking of users when the license limit was reached.

It's 5/10 as our own resources were more useful at solving issues.

It's 5/10 - our own resources were more useful at solving issues due to time constraints with responses.

We did not have a previous solution. This was our first solution.

Make sure it is easy to use for your roles. If you have technical people, other solutions may be better (like resources with VB expertise, etc.). Make sure you implement it as organized by system functionality, not by project.

My current company is just starting to use it, and they keep copying test plans for each project instead of reusing original test plans, which is a waste of time and resources.

• Test Management
• Reporting
• Defect Management
• RTM
• Requirement Management

Quality Center has helped my organization in monitoring the testing process and improving productivity. The test execution and creation monitoring feature in Quality Center is one of the most advanced features available in the industry. You can easily track the testing process as minute as test cases executed on a particular system.

Almost all of the areas are very advanced, but one module which needs improvement is report extraction, and billing module is missing.

I've used it for eight years.

No issues encountered.

Too many users logged in at a particular time affects the Quality Center response time dramatically.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

There was no previous solution was in place.

It was very easy and straightforward.

We used a mix of an in-house team and a vendor team.

We've seen ROI, but I can't share any specifics.

Pricing is high, but with new tools available in the market at a lower price, it is worth doing a decision analysis and resolution.

• Mantis
• JIRA

There are so many other tools available in market, so before investing a huge amount in Quality Center, you should analyze other tools as well.