OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

It's our main hub for everything around testing, especially when it comes to defect and department management.

It gives us a uniform way of working and reporting on defects as a project progresses. We've been using it for so long, it's become a standard part of our working protocols.

ALM bridges our development gap, but it's not quite full-scale yet. We'd like to see more functionalities so that we can use it to seamlessly helps us bring applications from development into production.

We never have issues with deployment.

I'd say it's stable 100% of the time. We never have outages.

I don't know if we're really a large scale user. We have around 230 users, and scalability has never been an issue. I think it's because we've been using it for so long that when we have an issue, we can solve it ourselves.

It depends on the case, but most of the time first-line support is okay, but in most cases we have to go to second-line support.

We work with many partners and contractors, and they always come in and say "we would like to use another tool." I always challenge them and say, "If you can give me clear advantages on paper of going with another tool, then I'll go." So far, no one's been able to convince me.

A comprehensive solution aiming for total Test management. It has bindings with HP QTP which is a test automation tool. With the addition of BPT (Business Process Testing), QC along with QTP has been the choice for test automation in most of the IT businesses.

Maintenance of test artifacts becomes messy when there are many scripts and supporting test artifacts. HP QC makes it easier to maintain the scripts and also organize them into various business areas.

Backup strategy is lacking in QC. Once the QC server crashes, all your automation artifacts are unrecoverable. Though we can create QC project files to create a backup, there is size limitation when you restore the backup.

4 years and 6 months

Configuration of QC contains a number of steps which could be made simpler. Many of these settings can be default with an option for the user to change them.

Getting to the root cause of any issue with QC is difficult. In many cases, restoring the QC projects is the way to resolve issues. Though HP support is available, it is not immediate.

As with the scalability, there are no issues with QC. It handles multiple connections very easily. And also if there is a crash on one machine where one test artifact is locked, the lock is automatically released in some time. But it would be great if there was recovery options built in after a crash.

The technical support is prompt and understand business urgency.

I have worked on TFS. The features of TFS are limited when compared to QC.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

• Test Plan
• Test Lab
• Defects
• Requirements
• Dashboard - Reports

• Improved the work quality
• Centralized location for the testing life-cycle
• Traceability and visibility to all the members and stakeholders of projects
• Standardization of test cases
• Test case execution and validation
• Ease of integration with automation tools like QTP, LoadRunner, SOATest etc.

The performance of this product is really poor, and there is no dashboard (reports) for the groups or users on the home page. Also, instead of one database, there are separate ones for each project.

I've used it for three years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

If you add any custom workflow (scripting), then in the long run there will be a deviation in application performance.

It's excellent.

It's excellent, but they don't support scripting unless it's in your PO.

We used JIRA. Its is also a good tool for defect tracking, but due to the lack of test and requirements management in JIRA, we have moved to ALM.

Straightforward. I've gone through the installation admin, and followed the same steps and it was fine.

We did it in-house.

It's a bit costlier when compared to other tools on the market, and you have to haggle with HP for this product.

We also looked at TFS.

Its a good tool for a perfect software development company where release/project roll outs happen on a planned basis. It's not a supportive tool for an agile environment.

• Requirements
• Test Plan/Lab 
• Defects
• The sprinter is a great feature in the manual runner.
• Reporting
• Analysis
• Version Control
• Exporting and Importing
• Document Generator
• Defects Synchronization to other tools like Borland StarTeam and JIRA, for example

Accessibility! The reason I gave it a 9 not 10, is that I doesn’t support Apple machines or any browsers other than IE, and even then, later than IE 10! This is a big problem if the development team who should be working on defects are using Apple machines, which is very common. This is also a big problem for us if higher management wants to take a look on defects for one reason or the other. They are usually on the run and can’t access it using their iPads, for example.

This is a problem that JIRA solved, and it's now practically accessible from any browser on any type of operating system, and can be opened on a cellphone/tablet browser or through mobile applications. It’s perfect when it comes to accessibility and this is what Quality Center desperately needs.

I have been using it for more than six years.

Performance issues are very common. The degradation of performance and consequent failures continuously happen. “Failed to Login” errors are common as well, and some random issues like creating the issue twice and deleting one deletes the other, etc.

No issues encountered.

It's the perfect tool for testing purposes, but you need to consider other options if development teams do not use the environments supported by Quality Center.

Quality assurance, requirement, and testing.

ALM helps focus on requirements, test, and the execution, track your defects, etc.

• Requirements
• Test
• Release process
• Defect tracking.

Release management and integration with other tools.

• Traceability
• Ability to reuse test cases
• Reports

We now know more about how to test.

Import Library - Synchronization problems are often because the ALM interconnection with HP Solution Manager is too fragile.

I've been using it for six years.

We had a problem with the consultant.

Not really. Our big problem is that our in-house support of Solution Manager is not compatible. It's not a fault with the product.

For migration from v10 to v11, we needed to convert manually each project because the HP consultant, and our project chief, couldn't use ROBOT in Apache.

6/10.

5/10.

MS Excel was our first solution.

We paid for an HP consultant who wasn't experienced. They called everyday about everything to the central development team of HP.

It's not so good because some users don't see its real potential because they are afraid they will lose their job.

Keep it simple for an easy beginning, and don't waste time with incompetent people.