OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

Cross project customization through template really helps to maintain standards with respect to fields, workflows throughout the available projects.

Traceability feature really allows you to maintain linkage between all the test artifacts, starting from Releases>Requirements>Test Coverage>Test Execution>Defects. ALM allows you to maintain complete end-to-end process.

Business Views has really come in handy for all users, as different kinds of reports can be created very easily and published to all the stakeholders.

Synchronizer add-in has allowed us to integrate Microfocus ALM to other third-party tools like JIRA, ClearCase and ClearQuest, and helps to eliminate the isolation between these tools.

ALM has brought great collaboration among the team members.

Helps to maintain all the test artifacts in one place as a central repository where all teams can contribute and collaborate with each other.

Dashboard

• Defect ageing reports need to be included as built-in
• Availability of built-in report related to Defect Removal efficiency
• Availability of built-in report for calculating Defect Density
• Availability of built-in report for end-to-end traceability
• Availability of reports specific to Automation projects.

Management- Libraries

• Ability to include Test Set data in Libraries so that Test Set execution can be transferred to other projects using Library functionality

Test Lab

• Ability to upload Test Execution results from Excel to HPE ALM

Test Plan

• Ability to maintain Manual and Automation projects in single HPE ALM project
• Composite execution of manual and automated scripts would be helpful

Defects

• SLA-related ability for defect module where ALM would send automail to stakeholders for the defects which have not been updated in a long time

I have been using the solution for 10 years now.

ALM is quite a stable application. We had some issues during the initial setup but it's been stable since, due to right level of competency/expertise we have in the organization to maintain the ALM setup.

No scalability issues.

Technical support is not that great. We really need to push to get HPE support to provide a resolution for technical issues. Tech support needs to improved now, as it has deteriorated badly.

HPE ALM was our first choice.

Initial setup was not that complex.

HPE has always been flexible in terms of pricing and licensing, but we are a bit concerned with the fact that it is now in the hands of Micro Focus and things may change.

No.

Think about the below before you start implementing this product:

• What’s the total user base you are expecting to on-board?
• How many projects/countries/entities are going to be on-boarded to the platform, and then design the hardware configurations accordingly.
• Do you have any other tools which need to be integrated with this product? Is there any ready-to-use integration already available or do you need to build it from scratch?
• Note that this product does provide the ability to control user access and provides security.
• Talk to your network security team and check if anything specific needs to implemented along with this product, like dual factor user provisioning, reverse proxy, TLS 1.1, TLS 1.2. Does this product support all these?
• Check the organization plan in terms of roll-out of latest Operating Systems, Browsers. Does this product support those latest OSs, browsers, versions, etc?
• Hire a HP ALM administrator expert who can guide you to implement the product in the right manner.

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.

The most valuable feature for us is probably the full Oracle component of ALM. It allows our users to be connected to other products.

We're able to use it with UFT/QTP for defect management. When it records a test, ALM will produce analyses to do cross-project reporting. This becomes a large repository of data and information that's valuable for us to make necessary improvements.

I'd like to see them move away from a desktop-type client and towards a web-based client, although we've also had ActiveX issues with web clients.

ALM, as a group, has probably been in use for 10 years plus.

Once installed, no issues with deployment.

The application itself tends to be very stable, but when switching to an open-source website, that's where the issues are. So it's not so much the core application having issues. For example, you may find that it would be an Oracle issue and not an ALM issue. But really there are very few occurrences, even after all these years, of a serious application fault.

Scalability is fine. We have in the region 15,000 registered users and up to 2,200 concurrent users of ALM. We don't really have any scalability issues.

Any issues would have to do with what a certain server application is up to. You just need to keep an eye on it.

We have the higher level, premium support. Technical support tends to be quick and reactive to issues and we don't have any major issues with it.

As large as it is, it's pretty straightforward to put in and you can configure it in probably less than an hour.

My advice would be to research the full system requirements you need for the initial install. In corporate environments, once you've got it up and running, it's more difficult to get off of it. Also, plan to scale up based on projected CPU and space that you'll need to get.

All features have their own value, but the most valuable ones are--

• Customizations
• SAP Solution Manager integration
• Test set building

Change Management integration - The ability to create change documents on Solution Manager linked to an event and to change its status according to ALM status or to customize it. This is new and I've only used it on one project so far.

Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA) - It can analyze objects on SAP transport requests to create a Test Set according to scenarios created. Also, because ALM is integrated with blueprints that generate requirements that are converted into a test scenario to validate the changes, it checks if those changes will cause an impact on the selected business process.

Manage Regression Testing and Integrated Test - It's the most important and most popular feature for all the projects I have worked on.

I've been using it for five years, and currently use it alongside HP ALM v11.52.

We had problems with Solution Manager/SAP integration and use through customizing RFC calls.

Not with the tool. Usually problems happens because of a network delay or instability.

An HP expertise team was put together for implementation if needed, but there was no need for them.

10/10

10/10.

I had already used IBM Rational, which is good too, but the HP tool is more complete.

It was done in-house. The team that works here has experience with HP Quality Center and ALM on other projects. The team expertise is high.

Depends on how much you pay for this product and the size of the project. For a big project, it's a great tool that will help a lot.

Use all that his product can offer as there is no need to buy others that can do the same tasks that HP Quality Center does. It's a complete tool that you can customize according to business/IT/user needs.

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're primarily using the solution as a testing tool where we're recording our testing data. Our use cases vary, however. Right now, for example, we're merging two companies together. When we are doing that, we have various test cycles and we have gone through three test cycles so far. aNow we're heading into UAT. So we're testing all aspects of the business, including HR, operations, gas, and electric generation. We're doing pretty much our stand-alone tests, or unit testing. Then we will then go into our end-to-end testing where all of the systems are working together. After that is done, we'll be heading into more of our business testing, our UAT.

The ability to really deeply analyze everything down to individual users has been very useful for the organization as a whole.

Most of the features that I like the best are more on the analytics side. We are generating our analytics from the execution module. After your tests are executed, we're able to generate all of our analysis for our presentations and to present findings to leadership. There are a lot of different views that you have access to. You can show your pass rate, your fail rate, etc. You can pretty much drill it down all the way to what each tester is doing. That's one of the really good features that they have at ALM.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The solution is very easy to use, even right out of the box. You don't need to do a lot of configurations.

You can create roles and assign various rights to each of the roles per project. You can really customize the product.

The uploading of test scripts can get a little cumbersome and that is a very sensitive task. They could improve on that a lot. It's really important that this gets better as I'm loading close to a thousand test scripts per cycle.

I've been using the solution for about three years at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is extremely stable. We really have not had any issues even after upgrading and taking the whole system down. It's very user-friendly right out of the box. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale well. If we need to add different modules to it, it has the ability to expand. You do need licensing for that. However, the out-of-the-box features included in the solution are great.

We haven't really scaled it just yet. We have about 250-300 users right now. They are largely tester, developers, admin and project managers.

Technical support so far has been great. I've found that we can tell them about an issue, and they're usually back to us within the same day with a solution. We're quite satisfied with the level of service provided. I'd rate them ten out of ten.

This is the only solution I have ever used. I don't know if the company worked with something else previously.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It's easy. We didn't face any difficulties at all. I wouldn't describe the process as complex.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with ALM.

If you want a good tool that is robust and is very user-friendly and capable of supporting a program with multiple streams or multiple workstreams, ALM would be the perfect tool. It can basically track all of your testing. It also allows you to collaborate with all of your testers, stakeholders, etc. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten due to the fact that it's user-friendly, and it has the ability to track various projects or various workstreams of a program. Also, the test scripts are reusable. For example, let's say if we are going to utilize those same test scripts for another project, a couple of years down the line, they are available, and you can do real-time updates within ALM. That's really helpful.

We are a consultancy. We use ALM Quality Center for handling waterfall type projects. If our clients are taking an agile approach, then we talk to them about Octane, which is the agile solution.

It has a brand new look and feel. It comes with a new dashboard that looks nice, and you can see exactly what you have been working with.

It is pricey.

I have been using this solution for at least 20 years.

It has been very stable. There was only one minor issue that a customer just stumbled upon. It really wasn't that big of a problem. It was something that was introduced in version 15.01 patch 2 but doesn't appear in version 15.5. It is something that they added to the product or fixed with the product, but the issue is back again.

It is scalable. You can have thousands of users running this product at the same time. 

We are a small consultancy, but we have customers who are running hundreds of thousands of users concurrently with the product and have no problems with it. They are running them on a worldwide basis.

Tech support is pretty good overall. There was a time when it wasn't all that great, but it is pretty good right now. It has vastly improved over what it was probably five years ago.

Ours is strictly partnership, so we haven't dealt with any other ALM type of products from other vendors.

It is fairly straightforward to set up. I didn't have any problems with it.

I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it is pricey. When we talked to the sales reps we work with from our company, they say, "Well, Micro Focus will never lose on price." So, they are willing to do a lot of negotiating if it is required.

You need to take a look at what you're doing right now and how your test requirements, defects, and so forth are organized. If you can, try to bring them under one umbrella. ALM Quality Center does all of those things. In the past, I found a lot of customers using a variety of tools to do these different things. One for requirements management, one for defects management, one for testing, and so forth. It is much easier if you can bring everything under the same umbrella, that is, ALM Quality Center.

ALM Quality Center is geared towards waterfall type projects, and a lot of customers are moving away from that right now. Octane is a solution for the agile model. In ALM Quality Center, we have what's called a test lab and a test plan so that you can organize your tests. The same capability is not there in Octane. It would be nice to bring that feature over into Octane so that we can easily see what are the tests and organize the tests any way we want.

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