We performed a comparison between OpenText ALM Octane and TFS 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."We like Micro Focus ALM Octane because its performance is okay, and its stability is okay, so we use it a lot. The platform is easy to use."
"The user experience is a lot better than any tool that I have used before. Overall, it is great. It has a smooth interface, which is very user-friendly. It makes it easier to work together and have more transparency and customization, which is very good."
"With an Octane project, we have our automation, our requirements, our tests, our pipeline into build-and-deploy, and the ability to identify problem areas. It makes things quicker because it's more along the lines of an automated process."
"The key feature is the usability. It is fast to learn and easy to use. It's very intuitive to work with. Most of the important functions are available via a few clicks, compared to other tools where I have to open a sub-menu and then a sub-menu and another sub-menu, and then press a button."
"We looked at all the market-leading tools, but we did not find anything quite as comprehensive as ALM Octane. When I say comprehensive, it's not just a single tool for Agile planning, backlog management release, sprint planning, etc., but it also has a built-in, comprehensive quality management module. It also has pipelines where we can hook up with our DevOps ecosystem/toolchain."
"The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features."
"We are seeing some real improvements in the way we do things. We are becoming more agile in the way we do it because of that and in a way that stories are managed. Stories are given lifecycles as opposed to just being entities within a tool."
"It's more streamlined because we have it all under one umbrella. And once the business requirements and rules have been created, we can do test cases and apply them to the business rules."
"It's user friendly. We haven't had any issues so far. It's flexible. If we need something, we can always contact the owner in our headquarters to make a configuration."
"The interface is good with TFS."
"I have found almost all of the features valuable because it integrates well with your Microsoft products. If a client is using the entire Microsoft platform, then TFS would be definitely preferable. It integrates with the digital studio development environment as well."
"The biggest value-add is the solution integrates well with most Microsoft products."
"It's an integrated system that includes all the information that we need to deliver our products smoothly and to track the progress of each piece of code."
"From the project management perspective, the tool is efficiently managing teams by giving management information, such as reports, graphs, velocity, capacity, etc."
"Team Foundation Server (TFS) is easy to use, and we have a complete trail and traceability. We also like the access control part."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is its compatibility with Microsoft Windows systems. We have predominantly Microsoft solutions and TFS work well."
"Improvements could be made by way of additional integrations across the lifecycle."
"Currently, Micro Focus ALM Octane is considered an old-world tool in the industry and lacks the perception of being a new-age tool among its customers."
"The elements in filtering need to be improved, meaning the number of filters I can use in widgets or in the grid views in parallel. There's a limitation which bothers a lot of our users. Filtering in text, or having a complex filter is limited. In a given field, for example, I can use a filter only once. I cannot say, 'Include the values 1, 2, and 3, and exclude value 17.' This is not possible but we have requested it often."
"Octane, from an administration perspective, is very limited. The application is improving with each release but what is missing is the ability to manage users and workspaces. I would also like "usable" reporting for more than a few workspaces. Also still missing is the ability to copy a workspace or get data in or out, except for limited REST calls."
"Globally, I don't see many major points of improvement. It's mostly plenty of little things, and it's weird to me that they are not in the product yet. They are really details, but they're annoying details... Today, in the tool, we've got plenty of assets we can handle, like requirements, user storage, defects, tasks and so on. And to all of those elements, we can add comments. We can add comments to any asset in Octane but not to tasks. It's just impossible to understand why it's not available for the tasks because it's available everywhere else. Similarly, for attachments, you can attach files absolutely everywhere except on automated runs, which is, again, awkward. I don't understand why on this element, in particular, you cannot do it. It's little touches like that."
"Because JIRA is a leading tool for both development and requirements management - everybody is using JIRA - I'm pretty there will be a use case where people are trying to connect between ALM Octane and JIRA. The back-end configuration of the synchronization with JIRA could be simplified. The architecture is really complicated. We required a lot of machines to build the cluster and the configuration was not really clearly described within the documentation. This may have something to do with the fact that the software is pretty new."
"They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add."
"The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale."
"The price could be cheaper."
"One of the areas that could be improved is to have an effective full lifecycle management."
"TFS isn't a great tool if you're on the cloud."
"I'd like to see some kind of visualization tool for TFS that would make life much easier."
"As an end-user, I expect the solution's performance to be faster while staying as stable as possible."
"Microsoft should discontinue the use of SharePoint as I don’t really see any value add to TFS, document management features can be included in TFS web portal itself, if required!"
"It has been really dated. When you start to work more in an agile environment, it is not really that flexible. They tried to replicate the look and feel of Jira, but it is not quite there. It was nice to use in the past, but it is not as flexible now with the changing development environments and methodologies."
"TFS and MTM have their own style of working and they are different from other tools like Jira or TestRail, which are simpler and easy to use."
OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 7th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews while TFS is ranked 3rd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 93 reviews. OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2, while TFS is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of OpenText ALM Octane writes "Reporting engine, widgets, and dashboards are a huge plus, and powerful REST interface means we can interact with other tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of TFS writes "It is helpful for scheduled releases and enforcing rules, but it should be better at merging changes for multiple developers and retaining the historical information". OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Rally Software, whereas TFS is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Rally Software and TestRail. See our OpenText ALM Octane vs. TFS report.
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