OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

I'm the admin for our organization's Quality Center. I define the guidelines and projects for use. We use also use it for management requirement testing. Though, we are not doing automated tests or defect management right now. 

We can't use the Quality Center for everything because the login is only about the user ID and password. Because of this, we are not using the data in Quality Center for all projects.

It is quite complicated because I have about 200 projects, mostly SAP, and all of them have to work in the same way. I do a lot of reporting and everything has to be more or less the same.

I love to use this solution with single projects. It has helped our productivity. With the metrics that I receive, I can put them onto the management model so I can see them there. It has reduced our time for project management and controls by 20 percent.

We do a risk-based testing in some parts of tests, especially because the applications are very big so they can't test everything. The control of incidents is normally very good, as they don't want critical defects when we do this.

The requirements are the best thing.

The management feature is very important. I also use requirements, tests, and defects.

While I'm using a lot of the business reports, these are very complicated.

It is hard to find the traceability from a defect to a requirement. Sometimes, it is very hard to find the evidence in an executed test case. While it's possible, it could be easier. Only these two things have to be improved: the tracking from a defect to requirement and the evidence of testing.

Quality Center's ability to connect all the different projects to reflect status and progress is quite complicated. We may develop something because there are so many projects. Right now, I have to do something which Quality Center is really not designed for: over reporting. This is a very big problem right now. We may develop some controls, but it is problem at the moment. I love Quality Center for individual projects to work with it. However, if you have a lot of projects for Quality Manager to do cross reporting on many projects, then it's almost impossible. It takes a lot of time. 

I have used it for 10 years.

With my current company, I started to set up their solution two and a half years ago. It has taken that long to get the solution working because it is a big project.

The stability is okay.

All users have to report their projects in Quality Center. Previously, it was voluntary to use Quality Center. From September, everybody has to use it in the company.

We have 300 users currently utilizing the solution. This number should increase to 500 or 600 going forward.

I don't work with the support of the Quality Center.

I haven't had a lot of contact with Micro Focus to know what they are doing.

Previously, we had no application lifecycle management tool, so there was a lack of coordination about requirements and no traceability regarding which requirements had been tested. Sometimes, defects were being reported by email. Now, everything works well, which is a huge improvement for my company.

It is very intuitive and wasn't complex for me. I like to work with it, but there are a lot of new users, and it's very complex for them to understand using Quality Center in the beginning.

We jumped right in and didn't have an implementation strategy.

We had a lot of problems with the new installation.

The implementation team was all internal: two other people and myself.

I started with the testing. Then, after the launch, I was working with the requirements and defects. Therefore, the deployment was a step-by-step process for quite a long time.

Pricing is managed by our headquarters. I am able to get from them for very cheap. The market price is horribly expensive.

I have seen other applications, and I like this application more. We tried SHIELD, Xray, and Confluence. I have also looked at another solution which was more about integrity. However, I am more concerned about requirements management. Other solutions working with integrity and enterprise architect can be very complicated. Though, SHIELD, as a solution, is too simple.

Very quickly, you can work with the solution. Though, there are user in my company in which this solution seems very complex. I would recommend that users take the courses offered to them. In addition to getting the manual, reading, and learning it, users have to try the solution, e.g., I create a playground for them to try out the solution for a few hours. Here they can try out the requirements and play with it. 

If you think logically and practically when using the solution, it works fine.

From the start, visualize the application. The initial tree on how to start is very important.

We would like to implement Single Sign-On, but there is a problem with it in my company. All different solutions have to be signed on individually in our company. Right now, we are trying to work with Oktana, but Oktana won't go into production in our company if there isn't a possibility of another login.

In the last release, there was nothing really new nor useful.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

ALM is a well-known product and is one of the pioneers in providing test management facilities with a 360 degree view of requirements.

ALM has got really a good feature which captures screens, decodes them and puts them in a code format. It becomes so easy to capture your screens and run through various screens and prepare your test cases, rather than typing it in Excel or manually in ALM itself. I think that's a really handy tool to have and it's very intuitive to use.

Certain applications within this solution are not really compatible with certain applications like ERP. The problem is when we're trying to use these applications or devices, the solution itself doesn't scale. It has got a lot of problems scaling up and down with the resolution of the devices that you use, and hence we had to stop using ALM and go for something else that was more user-friendly.

The resolution is very clunky and its fields get hidden in the menu boxes. This is also a very expensive solution. 

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

This is a stable solution. 

The customer support team are good. They used remote access to my PC to resolve an issue.

Neutral

It was straightforward. There were no complications in setting it up at all.

We used a third party for the setup.

This is an expensive solution. 

ALM is a good product but you need to be mindful of how it scales on your devices that you use because we use smaller devices compared to what we used to use in the past. The laptop screens have reduced in size so you need to make sure that they scale to the resolution of the device.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

We use Quality Center to track functional testing and record automation testing scenarios results. There are around 1,000 users at my company. 

ALM Quality Center is a reliable, consolidated product. 

Quality Center's UI is outdated, and it's a little bit slow on the login part and different parts of the application. That's why we're switching solutions. I believe most companies are switching to Octane or something else. Micro Focus should enhance the interface and reports.

I've been using ALM Quality Center for seven years.

ALM Quality Center doesn't break down too much.

ALM Quality Center is scalable. There isn't much impact on performance when you add users.

Setting up ALM Quality Center is easy. It's not complicated to set up the on-premises solution.

I would rate ALM Quality Center six out of 10.

The primary use cases for this solution are testing, recording and auditing results, and creating test cases and test plans.  

The most valuable Quality Center feature, I find, is the solution's integration with some of our automation tools. For us, the ability to capture and record and the ease of use from a user perspective, are all key. Most of the users using ALM are on the business side. In other words, we've got end users that are in there, not IT personnel, which is why it is important that the solution is intuitive and easy to use.

There's room for improvement in the requirements traceability with Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. That could use an uplift. 

We have used ALM tools for probably the last 20 years. 

We have used ALM tools for about two decades and many of our business teams are familiar with them, which is why we ultimately chose this route. 

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center has always met our requirements, which is why any minor issues we've had with requirements traceability have never really been a big deal. But there really hasn't been a whole lot of change in those areas in several years. I'm sure that they are working on a roadmap, which I haven't gotten to see yet only because I haven't been pushing to see it, but I understand that there's much in the works. 

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

We used it for multiple platforms in our organization. The IT platform was divided into groups, into towers, and each tower was using it. I used it for multiple towers together. I was managing it for my individual tower. But if there was a roll-out of the regression plan and we needed to see how many would be impacted, we were pulling out the ALM regression part from each and every tower and building it into one.

It's an effective test management tool. When you have to map all the requirements, and need requirement traceability, it reduces test management time. Compared to managing testing in Excel, it reduces it by 50 percent.

Reporting was the main thing because, at my level, I was looking for a picture of exactly what the coverage was, which areas were tested, and where the gaps were. The reporting also allowed me to see test planning and test cases across the landscape.

I was managing multiple landscapes. We were adding requirements in ALM itself and then mapping those requirements across the landscape. If one requirement was distributed across a project, it was mapped with ALM so that we could trace this particular requirement and see what projects were impacted and what test cases were tested regarding it. ALM provided complete traceability.

In terms of the solution's security features and compliance, I didn't come across any concerns. I checked the ALM SaaS version for the project I'm working on in my current organization as well, and I haven't felt there are any security concerns regarding ALM.

I used ALM Quality Center in roles from test manager to test director and it was the best tool in each role. It was easy to handle, and we could map everything, starting from requirements, and see everything with the test reports. It's a tool for everyone, and one which is very easy for everyone to adopt. Creating test plans, doing test setup, and set up of folders was very easy. The tool was quite flexible. It might take a maximum of one day to set up a whole project. 

I never faced any issues in integrating this test management tool with other tools for test automation. I worked with UFT and another in-house tool as well. We were able to manage and we were able to connect the applications very easily. The auto-run options were pretty good.

When it came to JIRA and Agile adoption, that was not really easy to do with ALM. I tried, but I was not able to do much on that. So for Agile, I've never used it and I'm not sure how good it is. There is room for improvement in the way it connects to and handles Agile projects. When I was trying to manage both Agile and projects with ALM, I had to pick up my defects and reinsert them in ALM. There was no integration that I was able to find for that, although that was about a year ago.

I have used Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for seven to eight years.

The stability is quite good. Their upgrades are quite good. There are formal updates. I was happy with that.

It was utilized, effectively, across the landscape, across our technologies, and across projects. It was widely used.

My previous company was a pretty big organization and had 200 to 300 users of the solution. It was purely for the technical teams, for people like architects, testers, project managers, and test managers. We distributed it with the access required by each. The defect managers and architects only had traceability. The testing teams had full access. Test manager had planning and reporting access.

When you have to ramp up your licenses and you have to scale it up, it's quite a costly product. You have to keep an eye on how many people are using it. You can't just give access to users who are only there to take on excess work and who are not using it. It is not a very economical solution.

At that time, I was also looking at JIRA, participating in a comparison between ALM and JIRA. What I was looking at was how effective JIRA is for test management versus ALM.

In our organization, the manual testing guys write manual test cases through Excel. Then they import them to ALM. They'll move in all the details. Based on that, the automation team will take care of developing the scripts through Micro Focus Unified Functional Testing and they'll add the script into the test plan.

Once the lead has approved the test plan he will move all the test cases into the test labs. If any defect is found in new releases, it is logged in the defects column.

There is a parallel running of automated and manual testing. Based on that, we are able to help the quality of the applications. At an earlier stage, to catch the defects, we introduced API calls and GUI-based. Both are used to catch defects. It helps the guys to understand, quite easily, what the issues are. It is pretty useful for our organization in following the cycle method.

It has reduced the time required for testing. It makes things easy. Everything is already set up, once you have done the requirement map, and it quickens the release cycle. After QA, once it is moved into the build, we'll run both automated and manual in parallel. The automated will be completed within one day and the functional team will generally take three days and they'll know in that time if anything is there or not. Based on that, the business will plan the release.

All the features are valuable. Initially, you can take the response to the requirements and then move into the test plans, test lab, and defect creation. All of these are valuable functions.

Every tab is useful for software testing, but based on some of the requirements for defect creation purposes, we have developed a few of our own tabs. For example, there is a severity/priority module. There we have developed a module or submodule that shows who the business owner is and who the developer is. We also developed tabs so that, when creating defects and root cause, we know to whom it should be reported, so that things are easy to identify.

It is easy for everybody to understand. We can create whatever notes are required. Based on roles we can also make it familiar for business people, so they see what they need to see. That is true for engineers and managers as well. That makes it easy for everyone and gives them access to what they need. It makes things easier.

ALM is user-friendly for everyone. Someone who doesn't know it can learn it quickly, within 20 minutes. At the admin level it might take a little bit more time, since experience is required, but at the user level not much experience is required. It speeds up the validations.

It's easy to create defects and easy to sync them up with a developer. Immediately, once created, it will trigger an email to the developer and we'll start a conversation with the developer regarding the requirements that have not been matched. And we can immediately stop upcoming releases if any vulnerability is found in the application.

One drawback is that ALM only launches with the IE browser. It is not supporting the latest in Chrome. With advanced IE settings, advanced security settings, only if everything is enabled will ALM open. ALM will not launch any of the latest browsers, including Chrome. I'm not sure if this is true for the latest versions of ALM. I'm talking about the older versions. We are not using the latest version in this organization.

It should be launched for all of the latest browsers. If we could test with mobile, it would be better. We need to launch all the browsers to run the UFT scripts. There is a significant UFT mechanism that requires syncing with ALM to run with multiple browsers. 

I would also like to see API calls and AI-based algorithms to run things in an easier manner.

We have also have a minor issue, sometimes, where we are unable to launch the site. There is a back-end server and the allocation space is over what it can handle. We request the server team to clear the server.

Also, sometimes we need to write a query for downloading the execution app. That can be a little bit tricky. It would be better if there were no need to write it and we could simply download it.

I have more than five years of experience using ALM Quality Center. I am an admin-level user in ALM.

It is scalable.

Previously we were using Excel. Then the organization moved the entire thing into the ALM. It is now the central point for whatever needs testing.

When we do a version upgrade, we first take a backup of whatever data is in ALM and move it to a Linux server. There is setup guidance for the installation process. Once we install it, then we'll move the existing data back. 

One good thing in ALM is that there is a predefined template when creating the projects. We just copy that template and everything comes together. Whatever the mandatory requirements are will be there with all the tabs. And, if required based on the business needs and the project, we will create new tabs with whatever fields are needed. That is good.

The licensing determines the number of users we can enable in a particular project. There is a full license and a defect license. Full licenses are used by a few of the guys at our level. We'll give a defect license to the development team only, to access whatever defects there are, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

We did not buy our ALM licenses directly from Micro Focus. We bought them from SAP, which is another solution we are using. We depend on SAP when it comes to whatever challenges come up. The source for us is SAP.

We do have a pricing concern. If we go directly to Micro Focus, they'll sell it at a higher price. If we go to some other vendor, they sell it at a lower price. My manager then says, "Okay, it's the same tool. Why do we need to buy it directly? Whatever problems come up, we can resolve them at our end." Of course, we don't know if we'll have one or two problems or not, and that is the reason to go for the higher price. But they went with SAP to buy the license.

ALM will help your business. It will save time. It makes it easy to validate everything in the latest build. It's easier to plan, cycle-wise. That is one advantage. It also makes it easy for the managers to analyze the results and the progress of the test cases. They are able to track things minute-to-minute. You can use the virtual controls to see the reason a particular test has been edited, using check-in and check-out. That is also a good feature.

Along with ALM the business is also moving to JIRA. I don't know exactly what the business strategy is there, but they're moving to JIRA as one of the sources for creating defects. They're also mapping all the requirements to JIRA.

We are customers of Micro Focus and I'm a senior director of our company. 

The overall licensing and reporting has definitely improved. As a leader, I was able to get the reports I needed and the same applies to developers. Traceability really helps me and is a great feature. When I used to be a test manager, it was very useful. ALM is user-friendly. 

I'd like to see some readily available plugins where we could integrate other tools because we're in an open-source world now, and there are a lot of tools that I need to integrate. It requires a lot of effort to create the APIs to connect to ALM and run the scripts. The solution lacks Agile features. 

I've been using this solution for 15 years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The initial setup is relatively easy but we hired a third-party organization to assist. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

It's a business process requirement and is being used for test cases, test executions, defect locks, metrics, dashboards, etc.

In implementation projects, things work in the waterfall methodology so it's the best tool to collect all the requirements in one place to tie up into the test cases and test executions, so this solution is extensively being used in the company for implementation projects, particularly in test management activities. 

I like all the features this solution provides. It is a good stand-alone test management tool.

Pricing could be improved as it's high-priced. I don't exactly know the pricing point, but previously, I know that it was really high so fewer people were able to use it for their projects. That's the only disadvantage I could think of.

One other thing: I'm not sure if Micro Focus ALM Quality Center has this feature, or other people could be using this feature currently, but if it can be connected to any automation tool then it can pass those automation test scripts, which internally it can reflect that requirement if it passed. If that feature is there, then it's good.

If that feature isn't available, what I would like to see right now is whether it can be done manually. You can say that manually, these test cases that are linked to the requirement have passed.

If this solution, on the other hand, can be connected to an automation tool, then it can update us automatically about the test script and whether there's a link between the test scripts and the requirement, then we can say: "Okay, this requirement ran automation test scripts and it passed, and that means coverage is good."

I don't know whether this feature is currently available. If it's there, good. If it isn't, then that would probably be one last item I would be looking for which I'd like to be integrated into the test management tool.

I'm currently using the Micro Focus ALM Quality Center.

About the stability of this solution, I noticed a glitch. Sometimes if I go into any of the test cases, it will show as if it doesn't have anything, but if you click the box, it'll show the content of the box e.g. company information, steps, or expected results in those test cases. Apart from that, I didn't see any other glitches.

I have no issues with scalability because if you want more projects, you can add more projects, and if you want more texture, spaces, or cycles, you can add them. I find it good.

Currently we don't have any technical concerns on the ALM side, so no improvement needed support-wise.

The setup was a one-time thing and I didn't find it difficult.

I was able to evaluate Jira, Confluence and Xray.

We don't have any technical concerns about the Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. Probably, it's on a different piece of Micro Focus solution called MF Connect which connects the ALM to the DevOps so that's a different one.

My advice to others looking to implement Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is that using it successfully depends on the person and the project. It may not be the same for other people, but installing it and using it offers less hassle, but I won't suggest it for everybody because analysis needs to be done when using this solution for particular projects. Users need to think about their requirements and if their requirements are not being met, then this tool may be obsolete, but as a test management stand-alone tool, it's a good tool.

I've been using this solution full-fledged and I don't see any improvements which I required in this project. I started to use this product when it was in Mercury, and Mercury then went into HP, then into Micro Focus, so I'm a longtime fan of this HPQC ALM thing. But these days, things are working differently in Agile. So Agile: It works on stories and so forth, but there is no repository of requirements or any kind of history of things. There, a project comes and it works in an Agile fashion. I don't know how good this tool is when used in an Agile perspective, but I'm sure that it is a good test management tool.

I'm rating ALM based on two points. One rating is for the product. The product is good, it's great, but when compared to other products with the latest methodologies, or when rating it as a software development tool, then I'll rate it a five out of ten because there's a lot of other great tools where you can interconnect them, use them, scale them, and leverage. It all depends on the cost.

As a stand-alone test management tool, I'm giving it a nine out of ten.

If I'm trying to scale and I'm spending more money, my rating will go down. If it's able to scale with less money like Jira, Confluence, or some other tool like Xray, then scaling may be done faster with less cost to the user.

Wherever you put five out of ten, I would say to upgrade that to seven out of ten.