OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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 use it for managing requirements, testing, and defects.

What they do best is test management. That's their strong point.

HP-QC does not support Agile. It is designed for Waterfall. This is the number one issue that we're facing right now, which is why we want to look for another tool.

We're a pharmaceutical services company, so we require electronic signatures in a tool, but this functionality isn't available in HP-QC. We don't have 21 CFR, Part 11, electronic signatures, and we need compliant electronic signatures.

Some of the ALM tools can toggle between tabular format and document format for requirements, but the same feature is not available in this solution. There is also no concept of base-lining or versioning. It doesn't exist.

I have been using this solution since 2010.

It is glitching now. We have an older version, and it doesn't work well with the latest version of Windows. It hangs a lot.

It is pretty easy to ask for additional memory. It is implemented in Azure, so we can just ask for additional space.

We have concurrent licenses. If we count the number of users, we have around 350 users. They use it on a daily basis.

Our license was procured through SAP. It was indirectly purchased, so it is very difficult to contact the technical team. We have to go through SAP to get feedback on our issues. Support is difficult, not very friendly, just because we have an indirect relationship with Micro Focus.

This is the first one that our company used.

It was simple enough. It did not take much time. The first time we used it only for testing. When we used it for requirements management, it was a little bit more difficult, and we had to re-train our users on how to use the tool.

The tool was simple enough to learn by using the manuals. I learned how to configure the tool, and I conducted the company-wide training. I maintain and configure the system.

It is very expensive as compared to other tools. We didn't get their premier version. It is a lesser version, and to upgrade, there will be an additional cost for us. 

I would recommend others to find another tool because the interface itself is very outdated. It looks very '90s. There are a lot of better, cheaper tools out there. That's all I can say.

I would rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center a five out of ten. It must have version control and electronic signatures.

We use it as a test management tool where our requirements and everything we need are entered into it and we manage the test cycles. When new products come out, the requirements are gathered and captured. Based on that, the test scripts or test cases are created and uploaded. Eventually, the functional analysts or testers run different test cycles, such as integration, user interface, and user acceptance test cycles. We log the defects with it as well. Based on the metrics, if a product qualifies, it is moved to the next cycle.

We have seen multiple improvements using this solution. One example is that one of our customers wanted to see the defect numbers in the same grid where test execution happens. We were able to provide that. Whenever a defect was raised for a particular test, the defect number updated automatically in an integrated, single view. That meant we could see the status of that step. If it failed, we could see that the defect number had been assigned to that particular step.

We also have a custom tool that we have created to disconnect a user. Sometimes, a user may lock the test scripts and go for a coffee. Usually, a system administrator would have to be there to disconnect that. But we created a solution where test managers or test leads have an option to use the username and kill the session so that other users can log in and start working. This is one  of the best-practices we have implemented so that the time involved in test execution will be reduced. There are a lot of dollar savings when executing each cycle.

Overall, it has absolutely reduced the time it takes to do testing. Initially it might be very difficult for the users to execute and then update the test script status and the defects. But after two or three days, they are used to the navigation and it can save a lot of time. If we were using Excel or doing things manually, they would need to store the details and pass them on via shared drives. That approach would also make consolidation very difficult and a person would have to collect data to create a report. ALM is an integrated tool from which we can get reports.

The most valuable feature is the Test Lab, when compared to any other tool.

With test execution, you have an option to create custom fields. It is also really user-friendly. With other tools, we only have restricted fields and we cannot customize or add new columns or fields that users can make use of while testing. ALM is very flexible for creating new fields. It is easy for users to understand the application.

It is also pretty easy when managing multiple projects. We can actually create the domains in the tool, and under the domains we can create a project. Based on that, we can manage things very well without any confusion for the users. They can log in based on the domains and select their respective projects. Most of the equivalent test management tools don't have that option.

The solution is also really secure. It will only open within our network. And in the next version it has access roles and a single sign-on feature where users don't need to log in physically with their usernames and passwords. It automatically takes the authentication and goes. That is a very good feature because we can log in to the laptop and it goes automatically, making it very secure. Because in our version, 12.55, we don't have SSO enabled, we are doing a PoC of version 15, which has this feature.

We cannot rearrange the Grid in the Test Lab. It is in alphabetical order right now. But sometimes a user will want to see, for example, the X column next to the B column. If they came out with that it would be useful for us. They are working on that, as we have raised that request with Micro Focus. They have not given any definite dates, as there are multiple requests from different companies, but they are working on it. We have 14 or 15 of our own columns. So every time they want to validate details of, say, SAP security or something along those lines, they need to drag to the right. They wouldn't need to do that if there were an option to reshuffle and save the view.

I would also like to see them provide a better reporting structure. They have a Business Views Microsoft Excel Add-in that appears as an additional tab in MS Excel. If they could improve that a little more, integrating it better with Excel, it would be very useful for all the stakeholders, helping them see the reports.

I have been using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for the last six years.

It's very reliable. It is a mature application. It's very rare that there is a crash.

The scalability is very good. 

We use it for most of the projects in our organization, with the exception being small projects. Currently, there are no plans for increasing usage.

Their technical support is very helpful. They provide support 24/7 and they have resolved whatever issues have come up, on time.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I have been here for six or seven releases, new versions, and their installations. It is a straightforward process. It is not that complex, but we have needed the assistance of Micro Focus at times.

We have dedicated staff for deployment and maintenance of this solution. There are seven of us in the company working with Quality Center. One is a technical admin leader who takes care of Quality Center, and another is a project leader. Under them are project support people who work in shifts, 24/7, and create projects and provide support for users' technical issues.

Pricing is not my area, but in general, what I've seen when reading articles is that it is costly. That is the reason most customers are moving to the other solutions, which are much cheaper. That is the opinion of people I have spoken to in other companies.

Quality Center is a mature test management tool, which is used across the industry and, for the Waterfall model, it is the best solution. JIRA is good for Agile testing. Micro Focus has released Octane, but it is costly compared to other solutions, so companies are not opting for it. JIRA has a low licensing cost.

I've worked with multiple tools, when it comes to a Waterfall model of testing, and ALM is the best tool.

The solution enables us to conduct risk based testing but, as a test manager, that kind of testing is only done when there is not enough time for testing the entire solution. That is when we go through the requirements in the ALM Requirements module and see what the most important requirements are that should be tested. Based on that, we mark it as risk-based testing. We create a column and check it as "yes" or "no". Based on that information, it can be filtered and the same test cases will be handed to the Test Lab for testing. That means that the most critical functionality of the solution will be covered. The solution helps segregate, using the requirements, to test scripts.

Micro Focus is investing in the product. It is really good that they are investing in it and that they are releasing new releases. The newest release, currently, is 15, where there are multiple new features. It is useful for our users and, as a company, enterprise-wise, that they further improve the solution.

In our company, the most interesting thing is that ALM can be used for manual testing. The testers can define, by themselves, how they structure the test and then execute it. All the results, both the positive and negative one, are collected. There is easy defect creation.

On the other side, if you look at it as a project manager, you have to see the results, i.e., the current status of the project.

Afterwards, if you get an outage, it is important that you can show the regulators that you did a good job, you executed everything, and you went in production with a concrete status, with no big issues or critical errors.

Our biggest problem with ALM is the version upgrade and especially the migration.

We have 1400 projects which are active. With the next version upgrade, we expect more than 3000 projects that have to be migrated.

The migration itself takes months. Here is something that can be improved. It is very important for us, otherwise each migration would kill us.

I’ve been using ALM since 2004.

If you find the right patch, then it is stable. You can stay with that for years. In our situation, it takes a very long time to roll out a patch and even more time to bring a new release.

ALM is for sure scalable. We are running 1400 active projects with 15,000 users. Concurrently, we have around 1000 users. If there is a performance issue, we have to find out what the reason is. It is true, in most cases, that we need an additional database server. The application servers, if they have enough power, scale a lot.

For such an experienced team as my mine, who have been working with the product for more than ten years, it is not that easy dealing with technical support. They often do not have the knowledge that we have. It takes a while to train them so they understand what our issues are and we have to connect to second or third level support.

The collaboration between HPE and us, especially over the past ten years, has been very good. For that reason, I try to bring in more HPE products, if needed.