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."One of the most valuable features is querying because the jQuery function is very good. Additionally, we can create good designs very easily."
"There are a lot of plugins in Jira and we purchase the ones we need."
"The UI is good. It's simple and not very complicated. It's very good for tracking."
"In general, the GUI is nice."
"We use Jira for project management and tracking."
"I found it super useful, as it is customizable for different teams and users."
"In terms of product management, Jira increases productivity and visibility into the product. Those are the top benefits this tool provides to the team. Also, it's accessible to the executives and whoever wants to sign on to Jira to see what's going on."
"The pricing of the product is very good. It's not too expensive"
"It’s easy to set up."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its ability to manage test scenarios, test results, and test automation, which are its primary functionalities."
"The solution natively supports Agile-Waterfall hybrid software development at an enterprise scale. This is very important to us. Because even though the company wishes to go Agile, we still have projects which follow a Waterfall methodology. In order for us to accommodate both, we needed some sort of hybrid system. Because if we are using a fully Agile system, then the reporting might not be correctly extracted."
"The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features."
"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."
"The most useful feature of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the dashboards, they are 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."
"A valuable feature is the pipeline, so that we can now connect to Jenkins and then have all the results from testing, from external, in the tool, so that we can see the whole approach from there. Also, We can work with labels so we have better filtering solutions than in ALM. And it's much smarter and leaner to use than ALM."
"It provides visibility on release status and readiness."
"We can get an entire project into a single repository where we can view all the data in detail. This is where we keep all our test cases where everyone can reference them. This provides everyone access to the test cases and artifacts via the cloud. There is no need to contact anyone."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the ST Add-In. It's a Microsoft add-in that makes it much easier to upload test cases into Quality Center."
"It's easy to create defects and easy to sync them up with a developer. Immediately, once created, it will trigger an email to the developer and we'll start a conversation with the developer regarding the requirements that have not been matched."
"It is a tool, and it works. It has got good linkage and good traceability between the test cases and the defects. It has got lots of features for testing."
"As a system administrator, HPE ALM can be flexibly configured so that it can accommodate a variety of defined project lifecycles and test methodologies."
"Having used the tool before, I like the use of parameters, being able to do exports and reports of the data for monitoring of executions, and the defect management as well. I feel satisfaction in that area."
"Something I would like to see improved is the traceability feature. When you have a user story, if you can see all the test cases, it would be an improvement if you could see any design documents or any change management."
"Something I do not like about the new version is that there is a need to browse all the way back to the beginning, should a person click on a task that is specifically for his group and wish to go back and look at the other portfolios or people."
"We'd like to see Jira have more integration with a development ID."
"Atlassian has multiple tools and it becomes difficult for a customer to process everything differently. Atlassian should combine them and form a single solution for DevOps by including the Jira Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, and others. This would be much easier for customers by purchasing a package, rather than purchasing bits and pieces. With Azure DevOps and other companies, it becomes easier to go with one company having multiple areas that they can cater to, but in Atlassian, the problem is that you have to select different solutions to have a full package. For example, to have document management customers have to purchase Confluence and for Git repository management they have to purchase Bitbucket, et cetera. There is always another add-on that you need to attach to have a complete solution in Jira."
"I am not sure if Jira can be integrated with our ERP. We have our ERP for the cost estimates or measurements. It would be nice if we can check or view a plan with the real cost. Currently, we have to do a double check of costs. It would be better to be able to integrate it with Jira."
"I would love to have more features to make nice documents, like Release Notes or a feature overview, right from JIRA."
"The filtration could be better."
"The only thing that JIRA doesn't for us is release management in a way that I can create a list of versions easily."
"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 cluster architecture that we implemented was server to server communication: Octane application to Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch to another Elasticsearch service. Recently, we found this is a security gap. The Octane application is interacting with Elasticsearch server, but that was missing from the requirements and prerequisites in the setup. The Micro Focus team has not given advice on how to implement authentication-based communication between Octane to Elasticsearch, and we found it as a gap later, then our security team asked us to fix that gap. So, there was a lot of time spent on rework."
"Technical support can be slow."
"It would help us if ALM Octane got FedRAMP-certified, so our government departments could use the cloud solution. That way our external consultants could access it. We've created a URL to get to it, but if it were FedRAMP-certified and service and had support in the continental United States, that would be better."
"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."
"I like their smart analytics; perhaps they should continue to expand and improve there because it's a fantastic start."
"We've only had a few stability issues. Generally, we have issues following any deployment they do, so if they do a deployment on a Sunday, then we may have a couple of issues on a Monday or Tuesday."
"Improvements could be made by way of additional integrations across the lifecycle."
"We are looking for more automation capabilities."
"It needs Pure-FTPd WebUI and single sign-on."
"Lacks sufficient plug-ins."
"HP-QC does not support Agile. It is designed for Waterfall. This is the number one issue that we're facing right now, which is why we want to look for another tool. We're a pharmaceutical services company, so we require electronic signatures in a tool, but this functionality isn't available in HP-QC. We don't have 21 CFR, Part 11, electronic signatures, and we need compliant electronic signatures. Some of the ALM tools can toggle between tabular format and document format for requirements, but the same feature is not available in this solution. There is also no concept of base-lining or versioning. It doesn't exist."
"It's not intuitive in that way, which has always been a problem, especially with business users."
"It is not a scalable solution."
"I'd like to be able to improve how our QA department uses the tool, by getting better educational resources, documentation to help with competencies for my testers."
"There are always new features and more support for new and legacy technology architectures with each release. But the bad news is a growing list of long-standing issues with the product rarely gets addressed."
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.