OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

The overall task management. Managing all the assets and metrics.

I'm not familiar with all the changes, but they definitely have to be more DevOps friendly. They have to certainly be more open source friendly. That's the world we live in, where we can cut costs away from large-scale vendor contracts and service contracts. The ability to seamlessly integrate and provide more capability for those, managing those infrastructures and solutions, is going to be critical historically.

A lot of the vendor products - not just HPE or, in this case, Micro Focus, or whomever that I've dealt with over the years - were much more proprietary, much more exclusive. And what we're finding now is that the world doesn't work like that. Particularly as you move left and shift towards DevOps, application teams now don't consume from a central resource, they consume based upon decisions made internally to that application team.

Ultimately, what they need is flexibility. So any vendor product needs to have that intrinsic in its fiber, to be able to adopt open source, and integrate basically into almost anything, to expand out the choices available to an application; to make the decisions that need to be made independently at the time that they need to make them.

Not having looked at the latest, ALM Octane, just coming from the old world, at the time that it was necessary to implement a test management system to gather more information, metrics across different teams, different platforms, it served the purpose.

Things change constantly these days. There's a lot more going on. There are a lot more integrations available. I think if we're looking at the legacy owned product, I think its kind of come and gone as far as its ability to do what you need to do in a DevOps world. Any solutions in the future - I know ALM Octane is the heir apparent to the old infrastructure - it's going to have to be more DevOps friendly. It will need to be able to enable the consumers, the application's users who ultimately become the developers, to see the value in a more organized test management practice, versus more of a kind of hidden, under the sheets unit testing.

It's actually a whole trajectory of different solutions, different tests, that need to follow the pipeline for those folks. Anything that's not DevOps friendly, that's not DevOps easily consumable, to make the case for a more formal test management practice, is really going to end up by the wayside at the end of the day.

11 years.

My experience with the solution is that it has been fairly stable. What lies underneath is what creates the instability at the end of the day, the architecture that you are providing the solution on top of. I think once you figure out a viable, scalable approach to it, then the software itself, at least in my experience, has been very stable in running a test management operation.

It has met our needs. Just as long as you have the right architecture from the old days of physical server hardware to more of the newer stuff, which is VMware within datacenters - more virtualized.

And certainly the next rage for everybody is moving into Cloud infrastructure. So things are becoming much more self-service. You're getting model scaling. You're getting the things that are making the system more maintainable. But from a scalability standpoint, you want to be able to scale to the needs at the time that you need them. The Cloud certainly provides that capability.

I think like every company, they're changing the landscape. Support, in my experience, has been pretty good. There are always challenges based upon the routing/tier structure of who gets the issue first, how it gets routed, how it gets filtered down to the specific expertise that you need. That depends on your acumen as far as knowing your tooling, knowing your approach, what that's going to be.

Somebody who is very savvy, will obviously have frustrations coming into a tier-one support desk. Who they really need to go talk to at the end of the day may be somebody, and it will vary by company, like a tier-three, real low-level, very experienced resource support tech who fixes those issues. So it's going to vary based upon the customer's competency versus how they are routed through a support desk.

Testing is going to be testing. And the same challenges that you have in any of the different industries are going to be the challenges that you have in the ours, the insurance and financial industry, as well.

You know from DevOps to Agile, to Shift Left to Cloud, to managing your test assets efficiently and effectively, industry is really not going to make a difference.

I've been in a number of different sectors over the years. I've been in QA about 25 years, and having been in the natural gas industry, financials, insurance, HR systems. They are all pretty much the same challenges around testing. So I don't see a discrepancy in terms of the application you're testing. It's almost agnostic to the challenges that are innate with trying to test, within any type of development environment. Now, it just happens to be a more self-service DevOps model, where application teams make those decisions. But there's still always going to be those QA challenges.

I like the traceability, especially between requirements, testing, and defects. Being able to build up a traceability matrix, being able to go through and show what's been covered, where your defects are, etc.

It's allowed us to be a little more consistent across the board. We have probably 80% of our QA teams using Quality Center. It is a system of record.

It really does allow our testers to work in a single application. It's not as good if you don't set things up in advance to work with other applications. But we're working on that part.

I'd like to see an easier way to upgrade and install. I'd like to see it less required to have a client. I know that Octane doesn't require a client, but Octane is not mature enough for our organization. I'd like to see some of the good points from that integrated into it.

I would rate it a 10 if it had the template functionality on the web side, had better interfaces between other applications, so that we didn't have dual data entry or have to set up our own migrations.

It's been around a really long time. It is very stable. It does require a little more work to upgrade, add patches, because you have to take it down. But then again, while it's running, we've had very little down time, very few issues from a system perspective.

When we do have to take it down, we usually take a full weekend, because we're a very large instance. But usually the install and upgrade goes through and takes three or four hours, and then it's just going through and running repair/realign or upgrade on the existing projects.

Quality Center is very scalable. We have over 700 active projects on our instance. That's projects, not users.

I've seen a lot of improvement over the years, from tech support. We are premier customers, or whatever the newest term is. We do meet biweekly with them and when we have an issue, we can escalate it and we get very fast response times.

We're a company that has gone through a lot of mergers and consolidations, and we've gone through and actually consolidated a lot of instances into ALM and, with that, the complexity is more with the users than it is with the application.

Getting it installed, getting it set up, that's the easy part. Getting people trained to use it, that's a little bit harder. But once people start using it, they find that they're not sure how they did their job before.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with are:

• They need to be stable.
• They need to be financially sound.
• They need to have a good technology and support base.
• They also need to be responsive to the company, because it's a big company, so we expect people to respond.

I would advise a colleague considering this solution to start with a plan. Make sure you know what it is that you want to accomplish with Quality Center, and only add fields that will meet that. Use your current documentation, your current processes, to help design the fields and the projects for it, rather than just adding things one at a time. Don't allow a "wild west," which is where anybody can add fields, add workflow. You want to manage that from the top down.

ALM: You cannot just say one feature is most important. You get the most value
using all modules from Management to Defects. When you use the tool end-to-
end, you can pull efficient project reports (especially scorecards) from the
Dashboard. So everything is integrated and only then you can evaluate the tool
fairly. ALM is very flexible and each module can be used independently, but
when you do that you are only using the tool as storage, not as a test
management tool.

UFT: It became much more stable tool in terms of object recognition over the
years. It is easy to use as long as the user has basic software development
knowledge and understands that the software automation process is not just a
record/playback.

ALM: We currently successfully manage all testing projects due to ALM’s invaluable capabilities, which are listed below:

• Built on best practices with a flexible structure, organization, and documentation for all phases of the application testing process.
• Serves as a central repository for all testing assets and provides a clear foundation for the entire testing process.
• Establishes seamless integration and smooth information flow from one stage of the testing process to the next.
• Supports the analysis of test data and coverage statistics, to provide a clear picture of an application’s accuracy and quality at each point in its life-cycle.
• Supports communication and collaboration among distributed testing teams.
• Reduces time needed to create test execution summary reports.
• Reduces the time needed to write and execute manual tests with HPE Sprinter tool.
• Users can capture their actions automatically as steps in a formal test.

UFT: We save time executing smoke and regression tests. We also use UFT to create test data.

I would like to see better Reporting functionality especially more sophisticated graphs, for example Actual vs. Planned or high level progress graphs using indicators like traffic lights. I would like to see more sophisticated or flexible Dashboard views, such as editing and resizing. I use scorecards and pull them into the Project Reports using customized templates. Scorecards can only be refreshed from the Site Admin, which then test leads has to depend on the ALM Admin to refresh the reports if needed after the scheduled auto run. There should be ability to refresh scorecards (execute KPIs) from the project itself or give more frequent auto refresh option like even every 5 min. This is a really burden on the team.

I would like to see Requirements mapped to test steps so we can combine multiple requirements validation in to one test case but map the verification steps to the associated requirements, so if the step fails only fails one requirement not all. When we are operating in an Agile world we do not have time to write test cases to capture one-to-one coverage. I know ALM allows many-to-many mapping but we cannot get true requirement pass/fail status if we use many-to-many option. Test configuration option kind of on the right path, but can only be use for data driven test cases, I cannot add design steps. If we can add design steps to a subset of a main test using Test Configuration option, I think we may be able to differentiate individual requirement that was failed without failing all the requirements mapped to the main test case.

We have used this solution for 17 years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

In terms of technical support, I usually get solutions to my issues. I did not have any issues to call technical support for a long time.

If you follow the instruction, the setup is straightforward. It definitely requires an experience user to do the installation and setups, especially for upgrades.

I always used ALM and UFT. However, I had training and evaluated IBM JAZZ tools.

In ALM, the most valuable features are the overview, the primary requirements, test cases, defects, and traceability. Manual applications handle the regulations, so we must have the tracking capabilities. Even some of the core systems are not allowed to go down. It's very important that we know what we have tested and what is working and what is not working. That we can find out from ALM.

Stability is no problem.

The first time we installed it was a long, long time ago. We bought small, five license versions of Test Director from Mercury in 2007 and it has continuously grown since then. Today we have 600 users and 130 active projects. The environment gets bigger and bigger all the time.

It's complicated to upgrade. For ALM, we have roughly 600 users. In ALM, we have roughly 130 active projects. So it takes a long time to upgrade. Some of the big projects are 5 GB of data. To migrate that to a new version takes maybe two or three hours, even if we have huge hardware. 

It's very complicated. We'd gladly like to upgrade to newer versions. We plan to use Octane, but we will not end up in a situation where we have two tools. We would like to, but we must find a smarter way to do some kind of migration. Several of the applications have regulations that we follow and we must be able to track 10 years back. We can't just throw away the data we have in there. 

If not upgrading ALM, probably they would like to search and would like to find something else. They really need to find a smart way to migrate some part of it. Of course, it's a totally different tool.

We have looked at many alternatives. We have compared ALM to almost everything. We even have JIRA for smaller projects now. ALM and JIRA are two totally different products that are for two totally different needs. 

For example, we have an on-premises solution of ALM. You have to log into the active directory, so it's not so easy to give to someone outside the company. It's also struggling with different browsers. It's doesn’t work very well on a Mac, for example. The Mac developers and the Mac teams don't like ALM. Now it works much better on Chrome, but we're struggling there as well. They haven't been following the world with browser support. It's problematic to use ALM in Edge, for example.

But with JIRA, on the other hand, you don't have any requirements. It's easy to set up. It's easy to start up and have your backlog there. But after a while, you figure out what is going on. For maintenance and for testing, you need a plugin for this, you need a plugin for that, and you need a plugin for something else. It's not so easy to get the overview or the helicopter view of it, if you compare that with ALM. But I understand why some like it and it has some kind of need. I hope we can mine that capital when we upgrade to Octane.

ALM is a giant library, and Performance Center and LoadRunner require it to run.

We use it to support Performance Center and it runs underneath it as one big system. The advantage is that we can test applications before they go to production, and as long as we're testing in a production-sized environment, we have a pretty good idea how an application will perform in production.

It's like the overall software framework, and Performance Center is just leveraging that framework for storing things such as tests, scripts and test results. ALM works together with LoadRunner and Performance Center as one big system. As newer protocols are developed and newer technologies come along, it's nice to see HPE be ahead of that as much as possible so that by the time that it's really needed, they're already ahead of the curve and they've got most of their performance issues resolved as far as how the software's going to run.

The stability on the old versions is good. On the newer versions, the bleeding edge is still being worked on.

It's very scalable. No issues with scalability.

Premium support is great, but before that when we just had general support, it was not all that great. We had issues with trying to get support to call us back on tickets and turnaround time on resolution.

We previously used IBM Rational.

It's not exactly straightforward. Their instructions were not all they could have been, but we still got it installed.

As far as we know, it's the best tool on the market right now. They're considered the Cadillacs of the testing tools right now. Don't necessarily go with their most recent version code release right now. It kind of depends on what your needs are and the size of computer shop that you've got.

There are many valuable features HP Quality Center has to offer, but if I had to narrow it down I would say the following for me are the most valuable:

1. QC has the ability to integrate and execute test cases with HP QTP with viewable test results.
2. QC has the ability group test cases in a hierarchical format as well as the ability to reuse test cases by calling a test.
3. The ability to integrate with MS Excel.
4. An extremely useful feature of QC is that it allows linking defects with higher level artifacts.
5. Requirements Module, Test Plan Module, Test Case Module, and last but not least, defect module and generating reports.

What makes this product very useful in improving the quality of an organization, is the fact that it has the ability to create a test script and then to write them in detailed steps. For all test case executions, we are able to generate customizable reports and charts, which is very useful for sending reports to higher management. With these great features, QC has made communicating between upper management and the QA team much easier, which gives better insights to our defect tracking and managing. This reporting is then better used for tracking the finances for the team.

There were few issues I faced while using Quality Center, but I’m sure they have been fixed in the new ALM version. One issue I have faced was that while I was importing test cases from Excel to Quality Center, it was not asking to check out the test cases but instead it would overwrite the default test cases and create a new version for it. This was not a consistent issue but it did happen a few times.

I have used HP Quality Center for about 4 years. I have knowledge on the current ALM version but personally have not used it in any projects yet.

Quality Center has a Starter Edition which is usually for entry-level quality assurance organizations and the Enterprise version (originally called Mercury TestDirector) which is for medium to larger level releases. The new release of the software is HP ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) 11 has integrated the capabilities of Quality Center Enterprise with Project Planning and Tracking, Enterprise Release Management, and Asset Sharing for requirements management through application delivery. HP ALM’s intended use is more for large and global organizations.

I’ve personally never had deployment issues.

Quality Center for the most part is pretty stable besides some common issues.

Scalability-wise, Quality Center is an awesome tool. Quality Center itself doesn’t actually place a limit on creating projects or folders. Most of it will depend on the users, servers, and hardware and not the Quality Center client itself. But the more data the user has in a specific module, makes it slower to load on the client. Most of all, it will depend on the implementation.

HP Quality Center is not a new product and has been out in the market for quite some time so there are plenty of online support and help that can be found. Quality Center forums can be found for almost any issues that can come up anytime.

Quality Center has a very intuitive GUI which makes it fairly easy to use and follow. Even if you are a beginner picking up on how to use this product will not take much time. But it can be difficult to implement as it is dependent on the size of the organization on the amount of teams. Identifying current methods of communications is critical to implementing HP Quality Center.

Quality Center can be a bit costly, but the ROI is great for all the great features you get.

Quality Center is a very powerful tool. It is not only a defect tracking tool but also a management tool. It can be used for everything from creating requirements and test plans to test creation, execution and defect reporting.

It is underutilized at the moment because we use this solution for tracking the test scenarios, test results, and defects.

We are looking at integrating a tool that can provide integrations with the other DevOps tools.

At this time, we don't feel that this solution has any value. We are communicating with Micro Focus to address this commission where we feel that it has more value added to it.

The integration needs improvement. It is not integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. It's a stand-alone tool right now used for testing and defects. We are considering and testing Octane because it seems to have more integration with the DevOps ecosystem.

I started using this solution when it was Test Director. This was before it was upgraded to Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. 

I have been using it for the last 10 years.

We are not working with the latest version. Rather than upgrade to the latest version, we are considering moving to Octane.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is quite stable.

It is not a scalable solution. I am not satisfied with the scalability of this product.

We have less than 50 concurrent users.

This is a product acquired from HPE. Before this, we were not satisfied with technical support. Micro Focus seems to be trying to improve their support quality, but we haven't seen it yet.

It doesn't take a long time to install this solution.

It's a perpetual license.

We are reviewing other solutions and looking to upgrade to Octane. We are currently, in the testing phases with Octane.

I would rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center a four out of ten.

We use it for recording our requirements. We use it for recording our test cases and the data is done within the ALM itself. And, during execution, we use it to update services and to log defects.

The solution reduces testing time, although not in all cases. But it is capable and in some cases, like for web testing, where we are easily able to capture screenshots and videos within the ALM workflow itself, or the test execution steps, it really saves us time. Otherwise, the guys have to keep on capturing screenshots into a file. Here, they can upload  everything in one shot. In that aspect, we have seen some savings in execution and, while they are not that drastic, it does help.

When it comes to the test planning cycle, if I have my regression cases, they could be almost 40 percent of the cases and they are repeated. So instead of uploading them again, I can easily replicate them in ALM. That is one way I am able to save and I would estimate that saves around 25 to 30 percent. The other part is when it comes to the execution steps. The savings are not so drastic but they could be between 5 and 10 percent.

The best thing is that you can see your current status in real time. Our people are deployed mainly offshore, and we have some guys working onsite as well. We have close coordination of the teams using calls. To see real-time updates, you just log in to ALM and you can see exactly what the progress is. You can also see if the plan for the day is being executed properly, and it's all tracked. From the management side, I find those features very valuable.

The ability to connect all related entities and to reflect project status and progress is the main thing that, as a manager, you are able to see: progress in real time. If the guys are updating the status in real time, meaning that as soon as they finish execution they update the status, it is really helpful.

If you ask the testing guys what is most valuable, for them it's like a one-stop, central location for every project, where every artifact and everything else is recorded. It is a single point where you can store everything. It's very easy to track and escalate. The solution does a lot of things which will support you in your project delivery phase.

When it comes to managing multiple projects, as long as everybody is actually recording all the requirements in the Requirements module of the tool, and from there the test cases and test plans — if everybody is doing that — it is really helpful. When we look at the status, we can actually map it to the requirements and we can see which of the requirements have been completed end-to-end, what we're spending, and so on. However, one thing we see is that not everybody uses the Requirements module to log the requirements. For certain projects, people just start using ALM from the time they upload the test cases, during test planning. In such cases, I am not able to see all the information. But for the projects where ALM is being used end-to-end, it is really helpful. The tool itself is really good. It all depends on how you are using it.

In terms of the solution’s ability to handle a large number of projects and users in an enterprise environment, I am sure the solution is capable. Our current usage here is not so large. But I previously worked in companies where around 300 users were using ALM for everything. In that setting, it was a central location where we could see all the results in real time. Here, I handle around six or seven projects simultaneously. But I have seen people who are handling up to 30 or 35 projects simultaneously, all using ALM. I've seen other organizations where people use it completely, for all their projects. There may be different managers, but it is a single location where everything can be tracked. It is scalable and it is pretty user-friendly as well.

In ALM, when you start to execute something, you can record and capture screenshots and videos. Once the team was trained in those features, I could see that they started recording and that they were doing the execution. When they close the last test, the recording is attached automatically. The tool is capable and, again, it comes down to how people are using it. If they are using it in the right way, we are able to capture everything.

ALM only works on Internet Explorer. It doesn't work on any other browser. In my opinion, Internet Explorer is generally a bit slower. I would like to see it work on Chrome or on other browsers. We have other applications that work perfectly fine with Chrome. It is not a major problem, but browser compatibility is an issue. And if you're using a Mac, it doesn't work.

We have a digital platform and we have done a lot of automation using Selenium there. Those tools have the ability to work in Chrome. But I am not able to integrate ALM completely, end-to-end. For example, using the automation tools we have to initiate test execution from ALM and then take all the results and upload them back. So I'm not able to work end-to-end because of the browser compatibility issues.

The majority of our guys are working on Windows and they have IE. For manual execution, I've never seen a problem. But when it comes to automation, I have an issue.

We've been using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for about eight years. Our company has been around for almost 11 years. Out of that, for about eight years we've been using HP QC, now known as ALM. We've been using it continuously throughout that time.

I just recently returned to this team. When we started the testing phases here, I was leading the team. I moved out and I just joined it again three months ago. When I left, we were on version 11 so we must be on 12.55 now.

The solution is on the cloud, it is not on our premises.

It is pretty stable. I don't think we have seen any issue. The availability is always 99.999 and it has never been down unless there is a planned outage. 

In the last two years, we have seen issues for two or three hours, but that is the maximum we have seen. 

When there is a planned outage they always notify us in advance. Otherwise, the application is always available. Our guys work in multiple shifts. They work throughout the day and they work at night as well and it's always available.

If we request any kind of support, they are always there to help. They are very good.

Before ALM, we were only using Excel. But along with ALM right now, we also have some projects that are using JIRA, and there are some people who are using Confluence. The digital teams here are using JIRA.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had engineers come in and they gave us training and showed us what we would be doing. They were very supportive, from the customer onboarding perspective. They did a very good job. Initially, there was all this complexity. We didn't know how to manage it because it was very new to the team. They came and trained us very well. To put it simply, the onboarding process was amazing. We have monthly sessions with their team and we have continuous contact. It's pretty organized.

They started the planning two months ahead. Everything happened in a proper, planned way. That is something I really like about Micro Focus. The initial installation took almost two months. In part, that was because of internal problems. We were using Excel and some other tools. To migrate from there to ALM took some time. That included moving the data. We had to make sure that whatever data we had was not lost and that even the number of test cases was the same as what we had before.

Upgrades happen in a single day, or sometimes two to three days.

In terms of the implementation, it happened a long time ago. They first asked us for a timeline and they then held multiple sessions on the features and the abilities of the tool, with multiple teams over the course of two to three weeks. After that they came and deployed ALM itself and tested the compatibility with our machines, because we had some desktops and laptops. That took some time. Micro Focus gave us an installer that we had to push to all our machines. Once all the machines were updated with the installer, we started using it.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in Micro Focus. Imagine the amount of hours that our guys would be spending tracking stuff in Excel. If you look at the number of man-days that my team would have to spend on that and at the licensing costs, of course it is worth it. I'm very happy with it.

The pricing has been the same for the past few years. It is reasonable. It is not very high. Of course, the cheaper the better, from our point of view. But the tool and its quality are amazing, really good. And including the support their team is giving us, I think the price is justified. It's a fair price.

We did not evaluate other tools at that time. My manager and I — we came from different organizations — had both been using HP. I was using HP QC 9.0 when I moved here. When we started off our testing stream, the only tool that came to mind was HP. In addition, HP was one of the vendors that was being used for testing other stuff in our company.

Even now, we are not looking at other tools. 

It's all about the mindset. ALM has a lot of features. We, ourselves, are only using about 30 percent of the features. If you are expecting that when you start deploying ALM you'll be using everything it has, that's not the case. Of course the tool has all the features, but there are some customizations that can be done based on your needs, and the Micro Focus team will be able to help you with that. It's all about setting expectations and telling them exactly what you want.

Initially, we were not sure what we wanted to see. But after some time we understood that there are so many features. For example, the reporting part: ALM has automated reports but they require some things to be entered at first. If your team has the skill to set up your own stuff, that's good. If not, the Micro Focus team can support you. ALM can automate reports so that, at the end of the day, it sends out an email so your team doesn't actually have to prepare all that information and send it.

To make full use of ALM you have to invest some of your time. It has a lot of features. Most people will just use the basic stuff and they will be happy with it. But if you start exploring it, you will find it has a lot of capabilities. And they are all included in the licensing cost. Don't just go with the flow and keep doing what you're doing. Spend some time and ask ALM the right questions and they'll be able to help you. You will get more benefit out of the tool. That is one thing I have learned in using the solution.

Micro Focus is still investing in the product and releasing valuable features. We have been asked to upgrade our version so that means they are working on upgrading features and are fixing bugs. In previous versions, I was seeing that things were a bit slower. It took time to actually load. But now, my team is saying that it is fine.

In terms of security, ALM has controlled access. Every user has his own login and password. We restrict access. There is one admin on our team and he's the guy who controls who accesses our systems. Before we create a user ID for someone, they have to go through a review process. We need to understand which team he is working for and for how long he will need access. In that way, we keep things in control. As for uploading our data, I don't think anybody will be able to access it. It's pretty secure.

Right now we have 35 licenses for 35 concurrent users. But the number of actual users is around 400. It's being used by our testing guys as well as business people and even our senior management. If they want to see reports in real time, they log in and see them. From that perspective, it is really helping us.

We don't have many people involved in maintaining it. I don't have a dedicated person on our side to manage it. Micro Focus manages everything. I have one point of contact and she takes care of everything.

For me and for our organization, it's a really good product. I'm really happy with it. It's a 10 out of 10. It meets my needs completely.