What advice do you have for others considering Micro Focus ALM Quality Center?

Overall, I would place OpenText ALM Quality Center at a rating of seven out of ten. There are still improvements needed, particularly in licensing costs and the user interface.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I would not recommend OpenText ALM Quality Center at the moment. I would wait until they enhance the browser-based product tree (ALM Octane) more to a solution for full functionality. If OpenText develops this product further, it could be recommended due to its comprehensive test management capabilities. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I feel that the product is a good test management tool. I feel that everyone needs to use the application. The deficit management capability has impacted the productive quality, and I feel it is a good feature. My company has used the tool to map the test cases. My company can find out which test cases are impacted by defects. The reporting and the analytics functionality that the solution provides to users to help them make informed decisions is one of the good parts of the product, especially since it helps create reports and dashboards easily. OpenText ALM / Quality Center is an easy application to use. Anybody who has experience with IT processes and the development side can easily use the product. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

As a professional tester, the solution's best features are traceability, test coverage, identifying requirements, and mapping the appropriate test cases against the requirements to ensure coverage. The solution provides bidirectional traceability for requirements to test the defects. It is a solid way of tracking and managing the overall testing activities there. The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I would advise users to take the time to understand the tool and work it through. It may seem a little complex at first, but the complexity is a result of the tool's capabilities and sophistication. Once you understand the tool quite well, it meets most, if not all, of your requirements. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. It is a pretty good tool. It's not a simple tool, but it does have a lot of features and considerations. It really depends on the level of the user. For example, some users will be working on the test execution, while senior levels will be tracking the requirement analysis. I work with both levels to track progress. So, it's a tool that can be used by people at all levels of experience.

We are an end-user. I might be using version 15 at this time. We've done a test installation of version 17. When we started the test automization, it was not like today. It's gotten better over time. Now, it's much easier to automate testing. While I could recommend the solution, it's not necessarily state-of-the-art, however. I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Although it is not state-of-the-art, it is still a good tool.

Our team was able to do a part of the maintenance, and we required the support cell's help with some of the features. The support team is excellent and helpful. I recommend Micro Focus ALM if you're looking for a solution that can help you for a small duration in the C2 or C3 stage when you want to grow. But it is wise to avoid hanging around with it for long. The solution is a bit costly, but simultaneously, it is cost-friendly for the organization for a reasonable accuracy rate, preferably above 99%. I rate the Micro Focus ALM as an eight out of ten.

It's important to check that the product is compatible with your use case. I rate this solution seven out of 10.

I rate this solution 10 out of 10.

In my project, I'm using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center version 12.5, but I'm checking if I can use Micro Focus ALM Octane because I have a trial version. My rating for Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is eight out of ten.

I'm both a consultant and a user. I'm a Micro Focus partner. It's all about what you need. If you really want to deploy a good test management tool, which gives benefits and helps you manage everything, and you're really serious about test management and application management, then go for it. If you just want a tool that takes care of something from testing an ALM, you're not as serious and likely don't need this. I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

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 rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is high on maintenance to start with. I have been using the solution for over 20 years and I am very familiar with it and have gained a lot of knowledge using this tool. For me, it is very easy to use. However, it's very difficult to train out because of the new features that they rolled out in the last five years. The features make it a bit more difficult to train out, and you need a lot of support to help people use the tool until they get familiar with it. I rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center a seven out of ten.

Compared to JIRA and other solutions, ALM Quality Center is better for large-scale projects. I would rate ALM Quality Center four out of ten.

I would rate ALM Quality Center six out of 10.

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.

At least sixty people who are part of different departments are using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center in the organization I'm working for now. There are people who use the solution once a day, while there are people who use it twice a week, etc. It depends on their positions. I'm rating Micro Focus ALM Quality Center six out of ten. What would make it an eight or a nine for me is improving the dashboard and adding a management tool that would be useful for management reviews.

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

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. If you are looking in the market to compare this solution with other tools that are maybe less expensive, I think that the ALM is more expensive than the others. I think that ALM is the best in class, depending on the size of your project. I recommend ALM for big companies with 1,000 to 3,000 users. Medium and small companies can use other, less expensive tools.

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.

Usually, whenever I work with the clients, I recommend ALM for the separate deployments and separate implementations because it's easy to use and good with those things. However, because of the cost there are some clients that cannot afford the high price, or can afford it but they don't want to pay that much. As SAP Solution Managers, we try to use it. But people also use Jira. Jira has a very high level test management tool. So people who can't afford the price go with Jira. Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is a good solution. On a scale of one to ten, I would give it a nine.

Generally, it is pretty good for what it does. As a standalone tool for managing testing, it is good. I would give Micro Focus ALM Quality Center an eight out of 10.

We are customers and end-users. From my perspective, it's a great tool, however, the world is now moving towards DevOps. That said, they could bring some capabilities with open-source tools like Azure DevOps. It might add better value for users. That said, this solution is a very stable, very user-friendly tool. The integration, however, is an issue. If somebody's looking for an independent tool for test management, it's good, however, for other areas where you need to get the full integration without investment on other add-ons, this solution won't easily allow this. I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

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

When I look back to four or five years ago, it would have been rated a 10, but now I think that it has 's probably fallen back to a six or a seven out of ten. I would rate Micros Focus ALM Quality a six out of ten. I think if you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant Reports, it pretty much indicates that as well.

This is a product that I do not recommend but if someone were in a situation where they were intent on using it, my advice is definitely to plan it out ahead of time. Don't try to wing it and learn it on the fly. Have someone who knows the tool and can set up the proper authorization because otherwise, it will be like ours, which is a mess. I would rate this solution a three out of ten.

I would advise maybe to look more at ALM Octane if a company is in an Agile and DevOps transformation program. This product wouldn't really be suitable if that was the case. Overall, I would rate the solution at a three out of ten.

My company is just an end-user and customer. We aren't a reseller or partner. I'm using a variation of version 12. It may be version 12.3. If you have a large enterprise like me (I work in a bank and there are 10,000 people who work here) and have a large setup, this solution is very solid. For a minor company that is a smaller startup of maybe 10 or 20 people, it's a good idea to use another tool that is more flexible. Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

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

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're a Micro Focus partner. I'm not sure of which version of the solution we're using. We are configuring the company and we tend to use the latest version of labels. We work with both cloud and on-premises deployment models. I don't recommend Micro Focus tools. It's a very strong company nowadays, however, I'm trying to find another partner. For instance, I've researched solutions that are much better than Micro-Focus in SAP scenarios. I'd advise users looking for a solution to pay attention to their requirements and make sure whichever solution they choose meets them. You'll need to do a lot of research and balance the pros and cons of each option before choosing anything. Overall, I would rate the solution six out of ten.

For anyone who supports the waterfall model, this is a great tool. I would not say that it's not a good tool. It is a great tool for managing processes and tests. It's very stable, but you will see some glitches here and there — that's inevitable. On a scale from one to ten, I would give ALM a rating of seven.

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.

I would highly recommend this product because it is a very stable product. Around 70% to 80% of organizations are using this product. It is a very stable and popular product. I would rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center an eight out of ten.

Depending on your environment, the strong point for me with all of the Micro Focus tools is that it supports multiple applications and multiple development languages. It's easy to use one for everything in your environment. If you have a look at automation, if you have SAP and you have mobile, you can use the same tools. It's the same with Quality Center. It doesn't matter what you want to test, you can use the same tool to support that testing. Make sure that you plan the detail correctly and plan it to the sense that you know where you want to end up. Otherwise, maintenance becomes a nightmare on your dispatchers. I would rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center a nine out of ten.

Security is driven by the different user login credentials that are created by the admin. This is pretty typical. In this aspect, all their tools are good. For risk-based testing, I used to have a different version of ALM that gave me a confidence level. Currently, I don't think our company has bought the version where you implement risk-based testing. However, it does help me to get the required inputs from the tool. Then, I have my own way of going about risk based testing. I have seen the Single Sign-On. It's nice, but we don't use it in our current project due to a few constraints and a few user experience related issues. Sometimes, people don't want to change and just want to do it the old way. That is why we stopped using it. I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10) to keep pushing them to include more features.

Make sure you have an ALM administrator, both technical as well as at the project level or at the application level available to support creating templates, doing a lot of the backend technical work administrative. If things do get blocked, you can push things through. So you do need two technical experts on staff to support the application. The biggest lesson I have learned is that proper training and governance is not really the tool itself. It's how you use it. They pushed it in to satisfy a minimum goal. We utilized Parameters in our test scripts, but the testers then don't utilize them properly and then there's no governance that forces them to do it. Having the structure to support the application the way it's intended is really key. I would rate it an eight (out of ten). Obviously there's always room for improvement, but it's an overall good tool.

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.

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.

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).

Make sure you have your build requirements and which features are important. Are you running projects for DevOps, agile, etc.? Also, make sure that you can evolve your tooling and not stay on the same tooling for years, knowing that your business users grow faster and have different needs. Micro Focus does invest enough, but most investments are now going towards ALM Octane. I've seen that they are investing in adapters where you can say, "We're going to migrate from ALM.net to ALM Octane," if not entirely, then partially. There will always be projects in ALM.net, and they will keep maintaining ALM.net because there are many customers on it. Customers do need to realize that IT is changing and that you need to modernize as well. I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10), though I would rate it less for DevOp/agile.

Do your homework on it to really understand how it works. I've worked at a number of different organizations that have had Quality Center, Test Director, and ALM. They have all been set up differently. I'm also guilty of having gone in as an external contractor and setting it up the way that I want it to run too. But if the time is taken to set it up properly, you will get strong value from it. The biggest lesson I've learned from using Quality Center is that, when it's used well, it's an exceptionally powerful tool. When you use all the features of it, when you have things that are standardized and locked, it's a really handy tool in governance around testing and projects. But in an environment where you've got multiple external contractors or vendors coming in, where they all tend to bring their own way of doing things, it's good that it's flexible enough to accommodate that, but at the same time it leaves you with a bit of a mess to clean up afterwards. It's really about making sure when you do implement it that you understand your process, you understand your workflows, you understand the standards that and the reporting that you want out of it, and you set it up accordingly. If somebody comes in and says, "Oh, I want to know what my defect aging is," you can say, "Well, here's the report that does that," if everything's filled out properly. I've seen it set up really well in a couple of places, and it was really good to have it set up well because we could get the information out of it when we needed it and we could ensure that things were tested properly. When it comes to connecting all related entities to reflect project status and progress, we have to do a little bit of tweaking, but we can customize it. We can always do better with the cross-project reporting. But the biggest issue we have is that we need to re-centralize testing to get the standards enforced. At the moment, since we've moved out and become very Agile, we've become very lax as well in being able to keep the likes of test cases — in particular regression suites — up to date. That is one of our reasons for reestablishing a centralized testing team. It's nothing to do with the product. It's just that everybody decided, "Hey, Agile's the way to go," and a lot of people with Agile thought, "Oh, we don't have the formality and the structure and standards around testing," which was not good. At the moment we're in a bit of a state of flux because we've had the whole Agile movement start to hit us. Unfortunately, that meant that there was a decision to decentralized testing and put it out into the different Agile squads, which in turn meant that there was no standard way of doing things. Now that we're engaging in a transformation program, we need to re-establish that standard way of doing things, because we're working with third-party vendors. We're centralizing, ensuring that things are handed over in the format that we want, ensuring that the third-parties are utilizing ALM as the tool set for their test case repositories, and as the defect management tool as well. Being an industry-wide, and understood, standard tool, it's very easy for us to go to our partners and say, "You've got to use ALM because that's what we're using." We are still going to be Agile, but we'll be doing centralized testing. I wouldn't say Quality Center has reduced the time required for testing. It's a tool. It supports our testing process. It gives the governance and standards around the testing that's done, but as a tool it doesn't reduce the time for testing. Something like automated testing will reduce the time for testing. However, by association, I suppose it might reduce testing time because it's where we execute our automated scripts from. We haven't found that Micro Focus is still investing so much in Quality Center and releasing valuable features. They did do a big push to go towards Octane and we trialed that. Because we have multiple best-of-breed tools in the organization, Octane could plug-and-play with a lot of them, but then it became an overhead to be able to manage and maintain. With ALM in Australia at least, there's enough support and development going on. I know the APIs into ALM have improved, and they needed to because aspects were pretty clunky. Now that we've got a REST API that we can use, that's a lot better. So they're sort of keeping up. I would rate Quality Center at about eight out of 10, but I have a testing background. I'm very stingy when it comes to rating things. I don't think I've ever rated anything to 10.

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.

We are happy. It is a good product. We have benefited from the tool and recommend it. We have received very good feedback regarding its use. From a user perspective, the ability to create test cases and manage defects is excellent. We are planning to integrate automation with Micro Focus ALM. This is in development. We are doing risk-based testing using manual generation of the script, then uploading it. To use the flexibility feature from a requirement to my test cases and get the benefit of traceability per the SDLC process, I would need to keep and map all my requirements. It is on the user whether they are using this feature or not. While I know this feature is there, we are currently not using it. We are manually managing traceability. We are preparing and keeping all our test cases in Excel. When the test cases have built up, we are manually mapping them based on our requirements. We are not currently using mapping test cases. This is a feature of ALM that would allow us to map our requirements, solutions, and everything the test misses. We had a call with the Micro Focus technical team regarding this and about how we can use other features.

If someone is researching solutions, they should know that this solution is stable, centralized, and scalable. If they need integration, then this is the tool to use. When selecting a vendor, some important criteria are availability, knowledge, price, and the site where they are getting the product. For example, if we have people doing a project as a team, then it is best if the solution can work in different languages, like German and English.

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

It’s a great product for managing an end-to-end lifecycle process. It’s easy to use once you get the hang of it. One of the biggest pluses is having all your test assets in one place – requirements, models, test cases, test results, bugs, reporting, tracking (it’s unbeatable in my opinion). It's also great that HP has now lowered the Saas cost for ALM - it was too high in my view.