We performed a comparison between Jira and OpenText ALM / Quality Center based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."A most valuable feature involves the ability to customize the entries and to update them quickly."
"The initial setup was pretty straightforward."
"The informatics is the most valuable feature. It captures what we need."
"The most valuable features in Jira are the dashboard, reports, and boards that help us to control the advancement of the project."
"I've never had a bug or a bug message that I needed to open a ticket for."
"This product provides you a good view of the status of your projects."
"The solution offers a lot of plugins."
"The most valuable features of Jira are the dashboards and user interface. The processes within Jira to monitor, maintain and release are beneficial. It is a continuous development solution."
"It has a good response time."
"Within Quality Center, you have the dashboard where you can monitor your progress over different entities. You can build your own SQL query segments, and all that data is there in the system, then you can make a dashboard report."
"I love linking/associating the requirements to a test case. That's where I get to know my requirement coverage, which helps a lot at a practical level. So, we use the traceability and visibility features a lot. This helps us to understand if there are any requirements not linked to any test case, thus not getting tested at all. That missing link is always very visible, which helps us to create our requirement traceability matrix and maintain it in a dynamic way. Even with changing requirements, we can keep on changing or updating the tool."
"The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is the alignment of the test to the execution and the linking of the defects to the two. It automatically links any issues you have to the test."
"It is stable and reliable."
"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."
"I personally found the defect tracking feature very useful in my ongoing project."
"The enhanced dashboards capabilities are useful for senior management to view the progress of releases under the portfolio in one go and also drill down to the graphs."
"The sprint-related graphics need to be improved."
"The performance could be improved in the future."
"Some of the interfaces, especially on the administrator side and for permissions, are not so clear. They aren't very user-friendly."
"As the solution is highly configurable, it has very poor governance."
"They can maybe dumb down the directions for building the automation a little bit because to be able to build out the automation, I had to play around with it and learn what all the fields meant and what they were referencing. I don't have an IT background originally. My background is in biology, and I got into project management by chance. I am good at it, but I haven't really worked with coding languages. In terms of writing automation, it is easier for devs because they intuitively know what they're being asked, but as a PM who originally didn't have IT experience, it was a little bit daunting at first. It could also have an extra hierarchy to be able to allow tasks under stories. It could be the way it is set up at our organization, but currently, under stories, you can have sub-tasks, but you can't create a task. Being able to customize your hierarchy a little bit more would be beneficial because sometimes, the devs would say, "Well, here's a story, and now we need sub-tasks," but as we were building out the sub-tasks, sometimes we had to go a step lower to dig in a little bit more, and we couldn't do that."
"I do know the initial setup was pretty complicated. The user interface could be better organized and easier. "
"The history with Jira is that it is a bit complex for many users."
"If I'm comparing it to ALM Octane, the documentation is not as robust as ALM Octane's documentation. So, they can improve on the documentation side."
"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."
"There were multiple modules and stuff to the solution so maybe the requirements can map to test scripts. It can't map to test steps. If you've got a process that's set up and you've got multiple test scripts that are in it, each script has to be linked to the requirement and the whole set can't be. If we're doing process-driven testing, it's more difficult to do it at the script level, which is what we're finding from a traceability perspective."
"Quality Center's ability to connect all the different projects to reflect status and progress is quite complicated. We may develop something because there are so many projects. Right now, I have to do something which Quality Center is really not designed for: over reporting. This is a very big problem right now. We may develop some controls, but it is problem at the moment. I love Quality Center for individual projects to work with it. However, if you have a lot of projects for Quality Manager to do cross reporting on many projects, then it's almost impossible. It takes a lot of time."
"The UI is very dated. Most applications these days have a light UI that can be accessed by pretty much any browser; QC still uses a UI which has a look almost the same for the past 20 years."
"Requirements management could be improved as the use is very limited. E.g., they have always stated that, "You can monitor and create requirements," but it has its limitations. That's why companies will choose another requirements management solution and import data from that source system into Quality Center. Micro Focus has also invested in an adapter between Dimensions RM and ALM via Micro Focus Connect. However, I see room for improvements in this rather outdated tool. I feel what Micro Focus did is say, "Our strategy is not to improve these parts within the tool itself, but search for supported integrations within our own tool set." This has not been helpful."
"The downside is that the Quality Center's only been available on Windows for years, but not on Mac."
"I would like to be able to search easier, not just do SQL queries, being able to do free keyword searches on the data. That's valuable."
"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 have to rate it with a lower score 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."
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Jira is ranked 2nd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 243 reviews while OpenText ALM / Quality Center is ranked 6th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 197 reviews. Jira is rated 8.0, while OpenText ALM / Quality Center is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Jira writes "A great centralized tool that has a good agile framework and is useful for day-to-day planning, task management, and work log efficacy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText ALM / Quality Center writes "Offers features for higher-end traceability and integration with different tools but lacks in scalability ". Jira is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, IBM Rational DOORS, OpenText ALM Octane, Polarion ALM and Digital.ai Agility, whereas OpenText ALM / Quality Center is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, OpenText ALM Octane, Tricentis qTest, Zephyr Enterprise and Tricentis Tosca. See our Jira vs. OpenText ALM / Quality Center report.
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Micro Focus ALM is a complete Test Management tool that can cover Requirements management, Defects management, Test Plan, Test Execution Suites as well as automation test executions with MF UFT (former HP QC). If you have a testing heavy project then MF ALM covers all the testing expectations well.
However, in an integrated environment with development, releases, and testing, JIRA can offer a better experience for JIRA issues (for requirements and incidents/defects), add-on for testing from JIRA marketplace (e.g. X-Ray) and offers a better fitment for DevOps. Developers and testers can work with the same tool for defects. requirements i.e. JIRA and manage testing with JIRA add-ons for Test Management.
I don't know enough about Micro Focus ALM but based from what I have seen it does provide a lot more than JIRA. I have worked with Azure DevOps and know that it can also provide more than JIRA. AZURE DevOps seems to be similar in comparison with Micro Focus ALM. So I would say if it was between JIRA and Micro Focus, then I will choose the latter.