OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

We used Micro Focus ALM for the bifurcation process. We have different health associations registering on our portal. We import their data into our channels or segments created by us. So, whenever the users import the data, we require a medium to bifurcate it into different divisions. The solution helps us segment the data.

The most valuable feature is its customer service. They were very helpful. The initial phase of setting up Micro Focus ALM was challenging for us. It took us two or three weeks to set up. During this period, the support team devoted enough time to help us. They scheduled multiple meetings with us. Along with this, it was a straightforward program with all the functions we required from their end.

They should specify every protocol or process with labels or names. Whenever we tried to contact the support team, explaining the problems in our internal sections took a lot of work. While communicating the issues regarding channeling, we had to use very general terms. They needed to be more specific to identify which protocols were working fine and which were not. If they label the protocols better, communication will become much more manageable.

We were using the solution till last June or July. We used it for seven and a half months.

It was a stable solution, and it never crashed. I rate the solution's stability as a nine.

We had a team of 42 people using the solution. The solution is entirely scalable for small enterprises in the C2/C3 stage. I rate the solution's scalability of small enterprises as eight and a half. It might not be a helpful solution for large enterprises considering its cost.

We had to involve their support team whenever we had problems bifurcating data. The team was always there to help.

Positive

Micro Focus ALM is better than IBM or other solutions I have worked with.

The initial setup was easy since the support team was with us. They were always there to support us. Initially, the accuracy rate was meager when we deployed it ourselves. It was doing the wrong bifurcation at times. Thus, improving the accuracy rate took us two to three weeks.

The installation is more of a process than exclusively parting it into stages. In the first stage, we had to configure the setup according to our needs. In the second stage, we had to import our data into it, and the third one was to bifurcate it and make a training model. We used our model before sending and receiving the data directly for confidentiality.

I rate the solution's initial setup as a nine.

We implemented the solution by ourselves. We indigenously built a model for integration. We were a team of seven and an executive, meaning eight members were involved. The team included software developers and product managers.

The ROI is worth it.

It was expensive for us. For the first two weeks, we had to employ people now and then as the system needed to be more accurate. It cost us a lot of money. I rate the solution's pricing as a seven or an eight out of ten.

Our team was able to do a part of the maintenance, and we required the support cell's help with some of the features. The support team is excellent and helpful. 

I recommend Micro Focus ALM if you're looking for a solution that can help you for a small duration in the C2 or C3 stage when you want to grow. But it is wise to avoid hanging around with it for long. The solution is a bit costly, but simultaneously, it is cost-friendly for the organization for a reasonable accuracy rate, preferably above 99%.

I rate the Micro Focus ALM as an eight out of ten.

To store all tests including manual and automated tests along with the results of tests after they were executed. Tracking defects, scheduling test sets for automated UFT tests to run unattended from the Test Lab, storing the test cases, and also storing the test requirements in the Requirements Module. 

The Application Lifecycle Management Process with ALM includes the following phases

• Release Specifications: Develop a release-cycle management plan to help you manage application releases and cycles efficiently.
• Requirement Specifications: Define requirements to meet your business and testing needs.
• Test Planning: Based on the project requirements, you can build test plans and design tests.
• Test Execution: Create a subset of the tests in your project designed to achieve specific test goals. Execute scheduled tests to diagnose and resolve problems.
• Defect Tracking: Submit defects and track their progress and status.

Multiple users can execute tests independently on their own computer because the UFT scripts are stored in ALM/Quality Center which is web based. All test cases are stored in one location (ALM) which makes it easier for users to access and maintain.

New users can quickly be added and set-up to have access to given projects in Quality Center in less than an hour.

The Defect Module can be customized to your department's needs. At a former company, we held regular meetings and used the Defect Module with a projector to go over the defects found during the previous week.

• Ability to execute automated UFT scripts from Quality Center and store the results
• Ability to customize modules, particularly Defect Tracking module on company specific needs
• The user can export a lengthy test case with a lot of steps from Excel directly into Quality Center, which saves a lot of time. Conversely, a user can export a test case with all steps from Quality Center to Excel.
• Users can save screen shots of defects and also perform manual testing by using Manual Runner that verifies whether each step passed or failed and save the results along with information such as the date/time executed and who the tester was that performed the manual test.

When a particular version of Quality Center has reached end of life, the customer is forced to upgrade to the newer version to be eligible to get technical support. The upgrade process can be time intensive and requires a lot of planning. Quality Center seems to originally designed for a Waterfall process. However, the newer versions of ALM are more adaptable to Agile testing methodology.

The BPT also known as Business Process Testing can sometimes be very time intensive and sometimes might not be very intuitive to someone who is not familiar with BPT. ALM/QC supports IE but does not support Chrome which a lot of users like/want to use.

History of Quality Center including other names and versions:

On September 1, 2017 the HPE testing tools officially became Micro Focus. It is too early to see how the transition to Micro Focus will change things. I am keeping an optimistic view that Micro Focus will continue to invest in R&D and place a priority on customer support. I believe a lot of long-time customers would like to see things run like they were back in the Mercury Interactive days, which was one of the most innovative software companies of its time. If Micro Focus develops the right strategy, they could become a dominant player in the software testing market.

It is beneficial for the reader to understand the history of Quality Center since it has gone through several name changes and versions, so I have listed the chronological events below:

1. Mercury Interactive originally came out with TestDirector that included versions 1.52 to 8.0.

2. Mercury renamed the product TestDirector to Quality Center in version 8.0.

3. HP acquired Mercury and rebranded all Mercury products to HP. Therefore, Mercury Quality Center became HP Quality Center.

4. HP released version 11.00 and renamed it to HP ALM (Application Lifecycle Management).

5. In June 2016, HP released ALM Octane.

So essentially, the tool at one time or another has had the names TestDirector, Quality Center, ALM, and ALM Octane. Essentially, with each version and name change there has been added functionality.

10 plus years.

Sometimes when ALM is open and there is another browser open, Quality Center will crash.

No issues encountered, in fact, it's very straightforward to add users.

Customer Service:

9/10.

Technical Support:

9/10.

I have worked at companies that used open source tools and ALM/Quality Center. I have also worked at a company that simultaneously used both Quality Center and Rally.  Rally is also a good tool and seems to be developed more for the Agile methodology. However, when using UFT we always used it with ALM/Quality Center because we could store all of the run results from automated tests.

The initial set-up required a lot of resources, such as the Oracle DBA, because Quality Center stores its information in tables in a database. You also have to plan and coordinate with System Analysts what servers will be used along with the architecture.

N/A

Giving an ROI on a software product is a complicated task. I like to use the Space Shuttle as an analogy. From an economist's point of view, he or she might say the Space Shuttle program cost billions of dollars and did not see nearly that amount in hard dollars generated from resources/time saved in return. I believe NASA did get paid to put satellites into orbit via the Shuttle for private companies but it was less than the whole costs. On the other hand, a scientist could say the Space Shuttle program made many significant discoveries and also put into orbit the Hubble Telescope which discovered and took pictures of the Universe that was not possible from Earth. The Economist would just use a formula to calculate a number stating it is a bad ROI. The Scientist would say the Shuttle definitely added value by making new discoveries that advanced science so far that it cannot be measured in dollars and say it is a good ROI. My point here is that "what is the ROI" is a common question at companies and it can vary greatly on how a person approaches and perceives it.

With all this in mind, my answer is that Quality Center definitely adds value to an organization and over the long run has a positive ROI that will keep increasing over time primarily by saving time for users the more they use the functionality of all the modules. For example, using Quality Center to schedule automated test suites to run unattended increases ROI.

For licensing, find out the number of users who will be using it concurrently, and use that number as a starting point for the number of licenses to purchase. Quality Center is pricey, but cheaper is not always less expensive.

No other options were evaluated.

Write out and document all the steps and resources beforehand, and make sure everything is in place before implementing. Make sure you read the minimum requirements listed in installation instructions needed for all hardware (i.e. servers, etc.) and double-check it to ensure it is met.

It gives us a solution where we can keep everything centralized like our test scripts, test data, and our projects. It doesn't matter who is creating the project, everybody can access and execute it. Both our onsite and offshore teams working from different locations are able to benefit from this solution. That's the beauty of it.

When we implemented this solution, we chose to virtualize, so we didn't implement any physical hardware. We're able to scale very quickly for very large projects when we need to run 5,000 user simulations. Afterwards, we can also scale down quickly. This gives us a lot of flexibility in our project executions.

The web client doesn't match the quality of the rest of the features of this solution. HP needs to improve it.

There are some challenges we faced during the deployment. But, we've had no major issues.

We've used versions 11, 12, 12.2, and now, 12.53. They've been very stable in our environment.

We're able to scale up and down as needed. It has great flexibility when it comes to scaling.

There are challenges related to the network security during the set up. But, once you figure it out, solution is relatively easy.

We have done the implementation in-house.

While comparing to the previous solution, this solution gave us as much as 60% cost savings.

Before you start implementing, make a solid plan and try to figure out the challenges before hand.

• Templates: Allows us to standardize fields, workflows throughout hundreds of HPE ALM projects.
• Customizable Events drive workflow: Saves a few seconds of time when we set default values, customizable dependent lists. When we translate this to hundreds of projects and hundreds of concurrent users, the productivity gains are immeasurable.
• Traceability: Traceability from Requirement -> Test Plan -> Test Lab -> Test Runs -> Defects.
• Rich sets of permission settings for different roles.
• Business Views: It is easier to pull reports for novice users.
• OTA, REST API: Utility for adding users and massaging data.

It has improved collaboration between our test teams.

• Client-side ActiveX with patch upgrades
• Support TDD/BDD
• Adding features like Kanban, project plans, resource utilization, and JIRA’s big picture.
• Traceability reporting: If HPE can generate a traceability matrix - Traceability from requirement -> Test Plan -> Test Lab -> Test Runs -> Defects.
• Defects aging report: A look at how long each defect is from the time it is created and how long it has remained at a particular status.
• Reports to build information: Currently, HPE ALM does not support the copy and paste of test instances.
  • 
    How can we duplicate a test set within a project?
  • How do we copy a test set from one project to another, and also copy the associated test plan along with it?
• Reports on automation:
  • How do we capture the number of automation test cases as some automation test cases have multiple test cases in each automated test?
    How do we calculate the ROI of automation?
    How do we determine which test cases should be automated, because sometimes the effort of automation does not have a good ROI?
    How do we calculate the ROI of HPE Sprinter if (1) Automated Script generation is used? (2) Mirroring is used?
    How do we know which testcase is created using Sprinter?
• Requirements coverage reports.
• Cumulative trending reports for test execution and defects outstanding.
• Auto-generation of test summary report.
• Inbuild best practices for fields, such as root cause category.
• Copy of test sets in the test lab.
• Upload of test execution results.
• Offline test defects to third parties and sync upon checking in.

We have been using the service for 18 years.

The solution is very stable, if you have the right person to manage it.

The solution is very scalable, if you have the right person to manage it.

The technical support has been deteriorating since the Mercury days. I would give technical support a rating of six out of 10.

We were looking at other solutions, such as JIRA, due to all the issues I have raised.

The setup was straightforward.

HPE ALM has been sold to Micro-Focus. I am not sure if Micro-Focus will be flexible.

If no flexibility is provided, you can easily move out in weeks, if you have the right resources.

We evaluated Zephyr, QASymphony, XQual, Perforce, and Rational Quality Manager.

For integration purposes, we evaluated Tasktop, Orasi, HP Synchronizer, and ConnectALL.

For automation purposes, we evaluated UFT, Selenium, and Robot.

Below is a checklist for others considering a test management solution:

• CIO sponsorship
• Number of projects
• Number of concurrent users
• Standardization needs
• Ease of control and management
• Access rights for individual roles
• Event driven workflow customization
• Extending beyond test management to TDD, BDD, test data management, test environment, and CI/CD tools.
• Focus on where you want to solve each problem and identify relevant tools for each of these.
• Availability of skilled resources
• Hiring the right resources to manage: There are easily millions of test management users, but it is not easy to find a true-bred expert.
• Keep in touch with what’s happening in the industry. You need to be focused and not swayed easily.
• Know your stuff.
• Support all your users and make life easier for them.
• Integration with automation tools, performance tools, security tools, and Jenkins/Bamboo/Team City.
• Define the test process that ties in with your test management too.l
• Form a training team to constantly train users.
• Open API for customization
• Export of info to MS Excel.
• Ease of migration.

We are actually not utilizing the full capability of ALM as a full application lifecycle management solution, but we use it for quality insurance, depositories, and for our difference management. For that, it is pretty good.

If you have to run a manual test it's very helpful. It has the option to perform manual tests so we have resolves, defects, and linkages. We come from the QA perspective, put our own requirements in and it's like a one-stop shop. It's very easy for QA people to take out their metrics and share those metrics with the senior management.

The only thing I would add is that I was really looking forward towards the new generation filler that was coming. It seems that in order for us to get the full capability of the new generation filler, we have to purchase AGM, but we don't use AGM right now. It would have been really nice if the whole feature was embedded into ALM. Otherwise, everything would have go to licensing and then there's a cost associated to it, then you have to go through the cost benefit analysis with the management and share with them a projected ROI. It kind of adds a level of controversy, and right now all the folks are using JIRA . They will just say, "Oh, for your QA, just connect it to JIRA and let's go." That is where I feel like, if you have to use so many features within an ALM, if you have to use everything, you have to buy.

I think the stability has been fine.

Scalability is good. There's also scope for improvement here, so I would say it's pretty decent.

I don't use technical support because I have a tool administrator. He's the one who deals with the technical support. For him, I act as a user of an ALM, and if I have any issues, I go to him and he'll talk to technical support.

I've been at my current job for the last 11 years and we have been using it from its days as Test Director and QC days. So far, we haven't tried anything else and have stuck with it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

It was done by our tool administrator.

It was already in place when I started, but five years ago there was a process shift and we thought we could read results in ahead from other tools. I think we all just decided to stick with the readouts that we got and that because of the way we used the test capabilities, we didn't want to change. We were then able to convince our management that if they didn't want to use it to its full capabilities that the testing capabilities were worth it and they finally decided to keep it.

It's a big solution, I'm just using one part of it. For the other part of it, there are a lot of improvement that needs to happen, so just looking at my little piece isn't enough.

It all depends what your needs are. If you are very modernized, and have short cycles, you should evaluate other tools also. It all depends on your needs because each organization is very different. Maybe some organizations have lots of money and they want to go ahead and go for the big shop, and they can do that.

We use the solution for test management and gathering requirements and test cases.

Business process management is the most valuable feature of the solution.

Sometimes the product is slow. We do not know if it is an issue with Micro Focus or our internal network. The performance could be faster.

I have been using this solution for one year.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Three of our customers use the product. There are about 720 users in our customers’ organizations.

We do not have any plans to increase the numbers. It depends on our customers.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was taken care of by another team in our organization.

We need one engineer to deploy and maintain the product.

We have experienced business-related benefits from the tool.

We have to pay an annual license fee for the product. The licensing fee is a little expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

We had considered other products like qTest, TestRail, Xray, and Jira. We chose Micro Focus because our clients wanted it.

I will definitely recommend the solution to others. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We're pretty heavily dependent upon that tool, in terms of the test management overall and using UFT as an automation, as well.

The product overall it's pretty good. 

From a DevOps perspective, there are a lot of opportunities that they can give in build solutions.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is very user-friendly.

We are looking for tools that offer quick automation for using a low-code, no-code, model testing, et cetera, which can reach more non-legacy technologies.

We are looking for more automation capabilities.

We would like end-to-end agile delivery, which is coming up. I can't comment on if it will properly suit us or offer the integration with other technologies, such as  Service Now or Azure Boards, et cetera. I've seen a few integration issues. It's my understanding that we have to go for third-party add-ons.

We are still evaluating. I don't have many answers yet however, it does look like we have to rely on third-party add-ons to get this integration done. We'd like to have more built-in capabilities. 

If they can bring in inbuilt APIs to connect to this, at least the standard technologies, like Service Now, Azure Boards, JTOC conference, et cetera, that'll be great. 

As we are behind a few versions, I don't know whether anything available is in the latest version in regards to business process testing, where you can sequence the steps and having a collaboration by notifications et cetera, that would be ideal.

We are working to get to the latest version to see what else may have been added or adjusted. 

We have been using the solution pretty much for 15 years now.

In terms of stability, there's no issue. Unfortunately, due to quite a lot of projects going on year over year, we are a little bit behind on the versions. We are on the 12.2. We have to move to 15.5 from QC. While it's a big jump, we are evaluating it as a big jump and see it as a good thing. However, there is the chance that we choose some other products and move from Micro Focus.

I can't comment much on pricing. The reason is, we get the pricing for Micro Focus through SAP as part of an enterprise contract. We don't actually get it from Microsoft Focus and due to the fact that there's a part of the SAP that's 15 years old, we have one of the cheapest licenses probably in the world. That's one of the reasons why it's hard for us to make a business case to move to any other product at the moment, as the licensing is quite cheap for us.

We are currently evaluating Tricentis Tosca.

We are customers and end-users.

From my perspective, it's a great tool, however, the world is now moving towards DevOps. That said, they could bring some capabilities with open-source tools like Azure DevOps. It might add better value for users. That said, this solution is a very stable, very user-friendly tool. The integration, however, is an issue.

If somebody's looking for an independent tool for test management, it's good, however, for other areas where you need to get the full integration without investment on other add-ons, this solution won't easily allow this.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We are using it for test management. We have distributed teams in three locations with one location in Portland, which is the newest, and also in India. We have a team of around 150 people (developers plus three testers). We are implementing an order migration legacy system to a new system based on AngularJS 5.0. We also have test automation being implemented on this account using Micro Focus UFT. 

Automation is triggered through ALM. We have the test scripts stored in ALM that are triggered through the execution dashboard. Also, the reports are available on the dashboard. 

We do defect management through ALM, which is the typical use case. The defects are raised in our different locations, then the collaboration between the development leads and testers happen through ALM.

We use the Test Plan module where we have test cases related to all our different releases up until now with a few current releases as well. We use the Test Lab tab to pull test cases from Test Plan and do executions accordingly. We have also created some smoke and sanity testing suites where we pull test cases, then execute them when required during the project phases.

Any user who accesses a project gets to know what is the latest status on a test case, from a test case writing or test design perspective as well as test execution perspective. Collaboration is very strong. The communication that the tool sends out along with the log which is maintained is locked in the history. This is for any change at the test case level or within any of the components of ALM. The history helps us to understand what went wrong or when has somebody made a change. Therefore, the history log is a very important feature.

From a collaboration perspective, I can send out emails directly from ALM that, at times, get triggered automatically. If you raise a defect, then it automatically triggers to a particular email ID that the defect has been logged in ALM. This helps to get immediate visibility or attention of the development team from a testing team's perspective.

Initially, we used to lose a lot of time in collaboration. If we do this in a very crude way through Microsoft Excel, then there would be a lot of issues related to version control. Like somebody might say, "I've fixed the defect," and the other guy would say, "It is still open." Now, across the team, we have one single source of truth because ALM helps the whole team to understand the exact status.

Ease of use is definitely one of the strongest points for ALM. It's a very user-friendly tool and the maturity of processes within ALM are amazing compared to other tools. Their in-built reporting does help with getting ready-made reports from the tool. 

The Test Plan and Test Lab setup helps us a lot when pulling test cases repeatedly from a different perspective. If I want to make a sanity pack, then I can pull test cases from that same library of test cases. I don't have to create them again or copy and paste them. 

I love linking/associating the requirements to a test case. That's where I get to know my requirement coverage, which helps a lot at a practical level. So, we use the traceability and visibility features a lot. This helps us to understand if there are any requirements not linked to any test case, thus not getting tested at all. That missing link is always very visible, which helps us to create our requirement traceability matrix and maintain it in a dynamic way. Even with changing requirements, we can keep on changing or updating the tool.

We use the dashboard and have created our own reports. The typical dashboard also helps us a lot to understand test execution progress and the percentage of open defects from a defect perspective. We use the defect aging reports a lot. This saves us lot of time and gives us the right input from the perspective of which defects are aging. Those need to be looked at again and possibly discussed in further detail in the defect triage call about what's the blocker to get them fixed and how we can work in a better way to avoid the defect aging in these manners. 

The vendor is still investing in the product and releasing valuable features. For example, there has been improvements in the overall folder structure. Initially, we just used to have Test Plans and Test Lab. Now, we have the Task Board.

Sometimes I do run my queries from the admin login. However, if I want to reassess all my test cases, then I am still doing this in a manual manner. I write SQL queries, then fire them off. Therefore, a library of those SQL queries would help. If we could have a typical SQL query to change the parameters within test cases, then this is one aspect I can still think that could be included in ALM. Though they would need to be analyzed and used in a very knowledgeable way.

About four years.

It's very stable. We haven't had issues with any sort of stability issues, e.g., no downtime.

We have around 4,000 test cases in ALM, so I don't think scalability is an issue.

We have around 150 users. The hierarchy of ALM users is:

• The admin
• Process leads, who are using it.
• At the lowest level, there are data developers and data testers who access ALM.

70% of our people use ALM and the other 30% don't need to be on ALM.

The technical support is nice. At times, we have needed to wait. However, this is understandable for a few of the issues as they sometimes can be tricky. I would rate the support function as above average. 

The turnaround time varies with the issue, but they're decent enough. The average time is two days. They provide us local support.

I have always used different versions of ALM. I did not previously use a different solution before using ALM.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The process was just about our customization, which we do from our end and is admin guided. This took us around a couple of weeks and wasn't cumbersome at all. ALM is a mature product. We could set up how we wanted to upload our test cases, then structure the different parameters or columns the way we wanted them. The process was quite streamlined.

We did have some internal help, but we didn't have a full-time consultant. We didn't have any external help. We used a team of three people (part-time consultants).

We definitely feel that it has given us a huge advantage from a collaboration and time savings perspective.

It can reduce the wastage that happens in collaboration activities. The effort has definitely gone down. Effort and collaboration have been reduced by 60 percent.

It all comes down to how many people are going to access the tool. When teams go above 20, I think ALM is a better tool to use from a collaboration and streamlining perspective.

At a process level, the maturity within ALM is at the highest level. Now, if I have run the same test case five times within Test Plan, it will gives me a status of that test case based on the last run, whether it passed, failed, or its situation. If I want to know right now from a functionality perspective what functionalities are working for me and which are not, then based on the immediate last run done directly through Test Plan, I can understand that. That's one of its strengths. This is not available in other tools, like TestLink and Jira (we are using both).

Jira has an advantage from agile perspective. For an agile project, it helps to have the dashboard in the way Jira is structured.That's where Jira is pretty useful. We also have three of the defect calls running different ways using Jira. There are a few things from a visual perspective where Jira poses some advantages over in ALM.

TestLink is pretty similar to ALM. It is not really drastically different. It's open source and doesn't have the kind of maturity which ALM has, like the BI page, the history log, or other functions that are present in ALM. It doesn't have that type of strength. However, since it's open source, at times a couple of our clients use it, but I use it very rarely within our projects.

Security is driven by the different user login credentials that are created by the admin. This is pretty typical. In this aspect, all their tools are good.

For risk-based testing, I used to have a different version of ALM that gave me a confidence level. Currently, I don't think our company has bought the version where you implement risk-based testing. However, it does help me to get the required inputs from the tool. Then, I have my own way of going about risk based testing.

I have seen the Single Sign-On. It's nice, but we don't use it in our current project due to a few constraints and a few user experience related issues. Sometimes, people don't want to change and just want to do it the old way. That is why we stopped using it.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10) to keep pushing them to include more features.