We performed a comparison between Jira, OpenText ALM Octane, and OpenText ALM / Quality Center based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Atlassian, Nutanix and others in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites.
"A stable solution with no unplanned downtime."
"It's really smart how they connected third-party vendors into their own marketplace. You can create and add apps. Anybody can do it."
"Jira's collaborative features, such as comments, notifications, and real-time updates, facilitate better communication."
"The informatics is the most valuable feature. It captures what we need."
"The solution has been very stable overall."
"It's easy to escalate the issues to the product development team."
"The solution provides users with clarity in terms of the scope of work in a given timeframe."
"We use it for capacity planning. We need to gauge and assess whatever is coming to our pipeline and then everything comes to the pipeline, appears as a pic, and then based on that, we create the story points and we take it from there."
"There are a lot of predefined reports. We can attach additional reports for users, like who worked on what defect and when, as well as what is the status of the release compared to the previous release. It is really endless. All the data is really linked together. Then, if all the data is linked together, there is an option to prepare reports out of it. We are very impressed with its reporting capabilities."
"It is a very stable tool. The tool has been in the industry for so many years. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The integration points are very good. Octane gives us a window not only into our manual testing, but also our automation testing and our performance testing. We can see all results from all three streams of testing in one place."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Its end-to-end traceability is one of the big advantages. Most of our agile projects work in a closed team structure. We are seeing what is the flow, where we are, and what is the project milestone. So, it provides end-to-end traceability and good visibility of project milestones."
"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 tools could be useful if we were utilizing them more effectively"
"The execution module and the test planning module are definitely the most valuable features. The rest we use for traceability, but those are the two modules that I cannot live without."
"It has a good response time."
"You can plan ahead with all the requirements and the test lab set it up as a library, then go do multiple testing times, recording the default that's in the system."
"Ability to customize modules, particularly Defect Tracking module on company specific needs"
"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."
"As a stand-alone test management tool, it's a good tool."
"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."
"A more organized hierarchy is important. Reporting and JQL create issues for me. They do not completely cover the reporting part that I need to report in terms of my capacity to plan. In the same token, there is no record at this very moment to provide me with one export with epics story points, tasks, or issues and their sub-tasks at the same time."
"The CACD solutions on JIRA has some plugins, but they are not easily understandable or workable."
"There could be some improvements in the project management and portfolio level features."
"Although it covers the overall requirements and measurements, it'll help if they had their own test execution feature."
"The help desk and services management features are in need of improvement."
"What I don't like is that perhaps there are not so many different apps that can add value over the management side of the product."
"The solution should be more user-friendly and include integration with different tools."
"Workflows can be improved. We don't use workflows because we can't handle that much complexity. Its interface could be more intuitive for workflows."
"We’d like to see Platform One/Iron Bank compliant containers."
"I like their smart analytics; perhaps they should continue to expand and improve there because it's a fantastic start."
"The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale."
"There's a trend in our requests to have the ability to export data, en masse, out of Octane. There are capabilities within Octane to export data, but there are specifics around test suites and requirements and relations, as well as certain attributes, that we would like to be able to export easily out of Octane and into a database or Excel."
"The solution should improve by adding scrum board-like functionality."
"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."
"The product's requirements management feature needs enhancement in terms of functionality."
"There is an opportunity for them to do a little more with the dashboarding. We still feel that HPE Quality Center/HPE ALM reporting is very powerful. We talked with R&D, and there are some things on their roadmap, but at the same time, their strategy is to connect Octane with visualization tools such as Power BI."
"It can be quite clunky, and it can easily be configured badly, which I've seen in a couple of places. If it is configured badly, it can be very hard to use. It is not so easy to integrate with other products. I've not used Micro Focus in a proper CI/CD pipeline, and I haven't managed to get that working because that has not been my focus. So, I find it hard. I've often lost the information because it had committed badly. It doesn't commit very well sometimes, but that might have to do with the sites that I was working at and the way they had configured it."
"Micro Focus ALM Quality Center could improve its marketing. For example, Tricentis is much better at letting the market know about new solutions and updates. The migration of the tool could improve, but it can be difficult."
"An area for improvement in Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is not being able to update the Excel sheet where I wrote the test cases. Whenever I update some test cases, I'm unsuccessful because there is overlapping data or missing cases from the sheet."
"Micro Focus is an expensive tool."
"The Agile methodology is now being used across all the organizations, but in this solution, we don't have a dashboard like Jira. In Jira, you can move your product backlogs from one space to another and see the progress, that is, whether a backlog is in the development stage or testing stage. Micro Focus ALM Quality Center does not have this feature. It is typically very straightforward. You just execute the test cases from it, and you just make them pass, fail, or whatever. They can also improve its integration with Jira. The browser support needs to be improved in this because it supports only Internet Explorer as of now. It does not have support for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or any other browser. There are also some performance issues in it. Let's say that you are doing the testing, and you found something and are logging the defect. When you try to attach several or multiple screenshots with the defect, it slows down, which is a very common problem people face. I would like them to include a functionality where I am able to see the reports across all the projects. When you have multiple projects, being a manager, I would like to see the reports across all the projects. Currently, there is no single sign-on through which we can get all the information at one place. You need to log into it project-wise. If you have ten projects, you can't view the information in one dashboard."
"Client-side ActiveX with patch upgrades"
"There needs to be improvement in the requirement samples. At the moment, they are very basic."
"The version of Micro Focus ALM that we use only works through Internet Explorer (IE). We have to communicate to everyone that they can only use IE with the solution. This is a big limitation. We should be free to use any type of browser or operating system. We have customers and partners who are unable to log into the system and enter their defects because they work on a different operating system."
More OpenText ALM / Quality Center Pricing and Cost Advice →
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.