OpenText ALM / Quality Center Room for Improvement
There is room for improvement in the scalability and stability of the solution.
View full review »MR
Manoj Ray
Quality Lead at Vodafone
It takes time because it has a 360 view of all the processes when talking about test case, design, and defects. There are so many things to track. Therefore, if I try to inject Micro Focus ALM into a small agile, delivery project, there is resistance. If there is resistance, is there flexibility for customization based on project scale? I don't know if this is possible.
Also, it adds time when I upload and execute all my test cases to Micro Focus ALM. For example, when I prepare test cases, I need to run them individually, then upload them to my sheet. After 10 days, I might have finished all my testing after tracking everything in Excel. Moving to ALM at this point adds time and overhead. It increases my testing timeline, e.g., if my testing takes eight days, when I add on time for ALM, the testing time is now 10 days.
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.
View full review »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.
In a future release, the AI which is implemented in the new version could be marketed better with more details of its capabilities.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
OpenText ALM / Quality Center
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about OpenText ALM / Quality Center. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
LV
Leon Van Niekerk
Head of Testing at Pick n Pay
Browser support needs improvement. Currently, it can only run on IE, Internet Explorer. It doesn't work on Firefox, doesn't work on Chrome, doesn't work on a Mac. Those are the new technologies where most companies move towards. That's been outstanding for quite a while before it even became Micro Focus tools, when it was still HP. Even before HP, that's always been an issue.
Other smaller things need improvement. If you log a defect, you have the ability to upload attachments, but it will only allow you to add one attachment at a time. If you have ten screenshots, for instance, you have to do it one at a time. You can't go and highlight all ten and upload.
Finally, the biggest problem in our environment, and it's the reason we're not necessarily upgrading our solution every time, is when we do an upgrade or even install a patch, there are always changes to the UI. What it means is that we need to have local admin rights on our machine. The next time we log on, we unload all those components to our machine. Now in an environment like Pick n Pay, where not everyone can have local admin rights, it's quite a mission if we upgrade to go around and get to the 60 to 70 PCs or laptops that are impacted to get the users to log on or get IT support to log in with local admin rights to install the browser portion after an upgrade. There are a few .net downloads that need to happen on the browser side in IE and that takes some time.
BJ
BRIANJOHNSON2
Program Test Manager at B and H Designs
Micro Focus ALM Quality Center should improve the reports. Reporting on test execution progress against the plan. However, they might have improved over two years since I have used the solution.
View full review »They should specify every protocol or process with labels or names. Whenever we tried to contact the support team, explaining the problems in our internal sections took a lot of work. While communicating the issues regarding channeling, we had to use very general terms. They needed to be more specific to identify which protocols were working fine and which were not. If they label the protocols better, communication will become much more manageable.
View full review »LG
Lisa Gordon
IS Director, ERP PTP Solution Architecture at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
It's really customizable, so I don't know if we're using it well enough, but with the way requirements are managed, there's no inherent workflow or statusing native to the application. Reviewed and not reviewed is the standard. I would like to see the ability to manage the requirements a little bit better.
There were multiple modules to the solution so the requirements can map to test scripts but 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.
Having a way to connect requirements to test steps would be helpful.
View full review »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. While I have a larger list of issues that make day to day work harder than it needs to be, these are the Top Five that I do wish would capture someone's attention in upcoming releases. All hit the tool's ROI pretty hard.
#1) Jump To Source - The Silent Code Killer: In older QTP versions a double-click on any function in the Toolbox window would take the developer to the function's source code, while a drag from the Toolbox would add it to the code window. Since 12.0 a double-click on a function in UFT's Toolbox window now ADDS the function (same as drag) to the Code window - to whatever random location the cursor happens to be at - even if it is off screen, and it will replace sections of code if it is highlighted. We are not sure what the intention was, but our Best Practice is to avoid the Toolbox window entirely to avoid the real danger of losing days of work and needless bug hunts.
Now Jump to Source is not all bad. A right-click on any function called from a Script takes us to the code source, which is great! But it only half works: in a Library, only for functions declared within the same library. Our advance designs have well over twelve libs so a whole lot of extra time is spent searching the entire project for a function's source on a daily basis.
Lastly, while we can add custom methods to object, a Jump To Source from these methods is long overdue. So again our only option is to search the entire project.
#2) Object Spy: It needs to have multiple instances so that you can compare multiple object properties side-by-side. It lacks a Refresh button, so that automation engineers can quickly identify the property changes of visible and invisible objects.
Or HP could skip to option #3...
#3) Add RegEx integer support for .Height or .Width object properties when retrieving object collections. If this were possible, our framework could return collections that contain only visible objects that have a .height property greater that zero. (Side Note: the .Visible property has not returned a False value for us in nearly five years - a recent developer decision, not a product issue) Eliminating the need to separate the non-visible objects from visible ones would decrease execution time dramatically. (Another side note: Our experiments to RegEx integer-based .Height properties found that we could get a collection of just invisible objects. Exactly the opposite of what we needed.)
#4) The shortcut to a treasure trove of sample code in the latest release 14.0 has been inexplicably removed. This impeeds new users from having an easy time learning the tool's advanced capability. In fact the only users daring enough to go find it now will be you who is reading this review.
#5) Forced Return to Script Code. This again is a no-brainer design flaw. Let's say we run a script and throw an error somewhere deep in our function library. Hey it happens. In prior QTP versions when the Stop button would be clicked the tool would leave you right there at the point where the error occurred to fix. Now in recent releases, UFT always takes us back to the main Script, far from that code area that needed immediate attention.
View full review »Sometimes the product is slow. We do not know if it is an issue with Micro Focus or our internal network. The performance could be faster.
View full review »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. I don't experience issues when writing and uploading new cases on the sheet. Still, whenever I update some test cases, I'm unsuccessful because there is overlapping data or some cases are missing from the sheet. Micro Focus needs to improve on that aspect.
What I'd like to see in the next Micro Focus ALM Quality Center release is more report formats, for example, a graphical reporting format. Right now, you'll find just one or two formats available in the tool for reporting.
Report preparation and generation should also be easier because I have to put in each parameter, and if I miss one parameter, the report will look weird. Pulling in parameters should be simplified and quicker, and it should be easier to generate reports on Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. Reporting in the tool should be more user-friendly. At least for day-to-day or regular weekly reporting.
At the end of the project, if you want a more sophisticated report, the tool should have a reporting option that looks more high-level and similar to what data warehouse and BI solutions provide. You can integrate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center with BI or data warehouse tools to get that kind of reporting, but it would be great if you could do it on the tool itself without needing to integrate it with other tools.
I want Micro Focus ALM Quality Center to have a report that shows data analytics, how many test cases I executed for a specific period, the percentage of tests that passed or failed, etc. There should be data available for extraction from year to year, from an overall project perspective, rather than just day-to-day or week-to-week.
View full review »MB
Mohan Bondili
Global Lead at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
We are looking for tools that offer quick automation for using a low-code, no-code, model testing, et cetera, which can reach more non-legacy technologies.
We are looking for more automation capabilities.
We would like end-to-end agile delivery, which is coming up. I can't comment on if it will properly suit us or offer the integration with other technologies, such as Service Now or Azure Boards, et cetera. I've seen a few integration issues. It's my understanding that we have to go for third-party add-ons.
We are still evaluating. I don't have many answers yet however, it does look like we have to rely on third-party add-ons to get this integration done. We'd like to have more built-in capabilities.
If they can bring in inbuilt APIs to connect to this, at least the standard technologies, like Service Now, Azure Boards, JTOC conference, et cetera, that'll be great.
As we are behind a few versions, I don't know whether anything available is in the latest version in regards to business process testing, where you can sequence the steps and having a collaboration by notifications et cetera, that would be ideal.
We are working to get to the latest version to see what else may have been added or adjusted.
Certain applications within this solution are not really compatible with certain applications like ERP. The problem is when we're trying to use these applications or devices, the solution itself doesn't scale. It has got a lot of problems scaling up and down with the resolution of the devices that you use, and hence we had to stop using ALM and go for something else that was more user-friendly.
The resolution is very clunky and its fields get hidden in the menu boxes. This is also a very expensive solution.
There's room for improvement in the requirements traceability with Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. That could use an uplift.
View full review »VC
VenkatChinta
Camera Software Engineer at L Soft Corp
In terms of places for improvement, Micro Focus is an expensive tool. We see nowadays that there are other products coming, and Micro Focus is more expensive and there are lots of license costs. Lots of companies are not taking it because of the cost.
It would be a good idea if they could deal with some user features and take a look at the cost. Because there is a lot of maintenance. People buy licenses and then every year they need to pay around 18% support charge, et cetera. It depends on the companies. Some rich companies buy it. Mid-level and smaller companies may have difficulties with this one.
View full review »When a particular version of Quality Center has reached end of life, the customer is forced to upgrade to the newer version to be eligible to get technical support. The upgrade process can be time intensive and requires a lot of planning. Quality Center seems to originally designed for a Waterfall process. However, the newer versions of ALM are more adaptable to Agile testing methodology.
The BPT also known as Business Process Testing can sometimes be very time intensive and sometimes might not be very intuitive to someone who is not familiar with BPT. ALM/QC supports IE but does not support Chrome which a lot of users like/want to use.
History of Quality Center including other names and versions:
On September 1, 2017 the HPE testing tools officially became Micro Focus. It is too early to see how the transition to Micro Focus will change things. I am keeping an optimistic view that Micro Focus will continue to invest in R&D and place a priority on customer support. I believe a lot of long-time customers would like to see things run like they were back in the Mercury Interactive days, which was one of the most innovative software companies of its time. If Micro Focus develops the right strategy, they could become a dominant player in the software testing market.
It is beneficial for the reader to understand the history of Quality Center since it has gone through several name changes and versions, so I have listed the chronological events below:
Mercury Interactive originally came out with TestDirector that included versions 1.52 to 8.0.
Mercury renamed the product TestDirector to Quality Center in version 8.0.
HP acquired Mercury and rebranded all Mercury products to HP. Therefore, Mercury Quality Center became HP Quality Center.
HP released version 11.00 and renamed it to HP ALM (Application Lifecycle Management).
In June 2016, HP released ALM Octane.
So essentially, the tool at one time or another has had the names TestDirector, Quality Center, ALM, and ALM Octane. Essentially, with each version and name change there has been added functionality.
The web client doesn't match the quality of the rest of the features of this solution. HP needs to improve it.
View full review »- Client-side ActiveX with patch upgrades
- Support TDD/BDD
- Adding features like Kanban, project plans, resource utilization, and JIRA’s big picture.
- Traceability reporting: If HPE can generate a traceability matrix - Traceability from requirement -> Test Plan -> Test Lab -> Test Runs -> Defects.
- Defects aging report: A look at how long each defect is from the time it is created and how long it has remained at a particular status.
- Reports to build information: Currently, HPE ALM does not support the copy and paste of test instances.
-
How can we duplicate a test set within a project? - How do we copy a test set from one project to another, and also copy the associated test plan along with it?
-
- Reports on automation:
- How do we capture the number of automation test cases as some automation test cases have multiple test cases in each automated test?
How do we calculate the ROI of automation?
How do we determine which test cases should be automated, because sometimes the effort of automation does not have a good ROI?
How do we calculate the ROI of HPE Sprinter if (1) Automated Script generation is used? (2) Mirroring is used?
How do we know which testcase is created using Sprinter?
- How do we capture the number of automation test cases as some automation test cases have multiple test cases in each automated test?
- Requirements coverage reports.
- Cumulative trending reports for test execution and defects outstanding.
- Auto-generation of test summary report.
- Inbuild best practices for fields, such as root cause category.
- Copy of test sets in the test lab.
- Upload of test execution results.
- Offline test defects to third parties and sync upon checking in.
The only thing I would add is that I was really looking forward towards the new generation filler that was coming. It seems that in order for us to get the full capability of the new generation filler, we have to purchase AGM, but we don't use AGM right now. It would have been really nice if the whole feature was embedded into ALM. Otherwise, everything would have go to licensing and then there's a cost associated to it, then you have to go through the cost benefit analysis with the management and share with them a projected ROI. It kind of adds a level of controversy, and right now all the folks are using JIRA . They will just say, "Oh, for your QA, just connect it to JIRA and let's go." That is where I feel like, if you have to use so many features within an ALM, if you have to use everything, you have to buy.
View full review »AS
ANGAD SHUKLA
Data Insights & Analytics Solution Architect at BT - British Telecom
Micro Focus ALM Quality Center could improve how the automation process works. Addiotnlally, the parallel execution needs to be optimized. For example, if multiple users, which are two or more users, are doing an execution, while we execute the cases, I have seen some issues in the progress.
Most enterprise solutions are moving into the cloud and this solution could work on its cloud compatibility. For example, if I have an Amazon or a Google cloud, I would like to know how would it best fit into their cloud environment.
View full review »AY
Ashish Yelkar
Managing Partner at Verve Square Technologies
Sometimes I do run my queries from the admin login. However, if I want to reassess all my test cases, then I am still doing this in a manual manner. I write SQL queries, then fire them off. Therefore, a library of those SQL queries would help. If we could have a typical SQL query to change the parameters within test cases, then this is one aspect I can still think that could be included in ALM. Though they would need to be analyzed and used in a very knowledgeable way.
View full review »IM
Ira Mayer
Senior SW Quality Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
While I'm using a lot of the business reports, these are very complicated.
It is hard to find the traceability from a defect to a requirement. Sometimes, it is very hard to find the evidence in an executed test case. While it's possible, it could be easier. Only these two things have to be improved: the tracking from a defect to requirement and the evidence of testing.
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.
View full review »Quality Center's UI is outdated, and it's a little bit slow on the login part and different parts of the application. That's why we're switching solutions. I believe most companies are switching to Octane or something else. Micro Focus should enhance the interface and reports.
View full review »PD
reviewer1119750
Test Manager at a construction company with 10,001+ employees
When it came to JIRA and Agile adoption, that was not really easy to do with ALM. I tried, but I was not able to do much on that. So for Agile, I've never used it and I'm not sure how good it is. There is room for improvement in the way it connects to and handles Agile projects. When I was trying to manage both Agile and projects with ALM, I had to pick up my defects and reinsert them in ALM. There was no integration that I was able to find for that, although that was about a year ago.
View full review »VR
Vishwa-Reddy
Team Lead at Accenture
One drawback is that ALM only launches with the IE browser. It is not supporting the latest in Chrome. With advanced IE settings, advanced security settings, only if everything is enabled will ALM open. ALM will not launch any of the latest browsers, including Chrome. I'm not sure if this is true for the latest versions of ALM. I'm talking about the older versions. We are not using the latest version in this organization.
It should be launched for all of the latest browsers. If we could test with mobile, it would be better. We need to launch all the browsers to run the UFT scripts. There is a significant UFT mechanism that requires syncing with ALM to run with multiple browsers.
I would also like to see API calls and AI-based algorithms to run things in an easier manner.
We have also have a minor issue, sometimes, where we are unable to launch the site. There is a back-end server and the allocation space is over what it can handle. We request the server team to clear the server.
Also, sometimes we need to write a query for downloading the execution app. That can be a little bit tricky. It would be better if there were no need to write it and we could simply download it.
View full review »I'd like to see some readily available plugins where we could integrate other tools because we're in an open-source world now, and there are a lot of tools that I need to integrate. It requires a lot of effort to create the APIs to connect to ALM and run the scripts. The solution lacks Agile features.
SR
Sanjeev Ranjan
Tools Architect at S2 Integrators
I'm looking at more towards something more from a DevOps perspective. For example, how to pull the DevOps ecosystem into the Micro Focus ALM. You have other different tools in the market which have more towards DevOps capabilities, like integration with pipelines, et cetera. I need more of that within Micro Focus ALM basically.
We could have higher quality technical support.
View full review »WJ
WilsonJose
Test Advisory, Management & Implementation at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees
Pricing could be improved as it's high-priced. I don't exactly know the pricing point, but previously, I know that it was really high so fewer people were able to use it for their projects. That's the only disadvantage I could think of.
One other thing: I'm not sure if Micro Focus ALM Quality Center has this feature, or other people could be using this feature currently, but if it can be connected to any automation tool then it can pass those automation test scripts, which internally it can reflect that requirement if it passed. If that feature is there, then it's good.
If that feature isn't available, what I would like to see right now is whether it can be done manually. You can say that manually, these test cases that are linked to the requirement have passed.
If this solution, on the other hand, can be connected to an automation tool, then it can update us automatically about the test script and whether there's a link between the test scripts and the requirement, then we can say: "Okay, this requirement ran automation test scripts and it passed, and that means coverage is good."
I don't know whether this feature is currently available. If it's there, good. If it isn't, then that would probably be one last item I would be looking for which I'd like to be integrated into the test management tool.
View full review »MC
Mark Chase
Test Management Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I'm not familiar with all the changes, but they definitely have to be more DevOps friendly. They have to certainly be more open source friendly. That's the world we live in, where we can cut costs away from large-scale vendor contracts and service contracts. The ability to seamlessly integrate and provide more capability for those, managing those infrastructures and solutions, is going to be critical historically.
A lot of the vendor products - not just HPE or, in this case, Micro Focus, or whomever that I've dealt with over the years - were much more proprietary, much more exclusive. And what we're finding now is that the world doesn't work like that. Particularly as you move left and shift towards DevOps, application teams now don't consume from a central resource, they consume based upon decisions made internally to that application team.
Ultimately, what they need is flexibility. So any vendor product needs to have that intrinsic in its fiber, to be able to adopt open source, and integrate basically into almost anything, to expand out the choices available to an application; to make the decisions that need to be made independently at the time that they need to make them.
Not having looked at the latest, ALM Octane, just coming from the old world, at the time that it was necessary to implement a test management system to gather more information, metrics across different teams, different platforms, it served the purpose.
Things change constantly these days. There's a lot more going on. There are a lot more integrations available. I think if we're looking at the legacy owned product, I think its kind of come and gone as far as its ability to do what you need to do in a DevOps world. Any solutions in the future - I know ALM Octane is the heir apparent to the old infrastructure - it's going to have to be more DevOps friendly. It will need to be able to enable the consumers, the application's users who ultimately become the developers, to see the value in a more organized test management practice, versus more of a kind of hidden, under the sheets unit testing.
It's actually a whole trajectory of different solutions, different tests, that need to follow the pipeline for those folks. Anything that's not DevOps friendly, that's not DevOps easily consumable, to make the case for a more formal test management practice, is really going to end up by the wayside at the end of the day.
View full review »I'd like to see an easier way to upgrade and install. I'd like to see it less required to have a client. I know that Octane doesn't require a client, but Octane is not mature enough for our organization. I'd like to see some of the good points from that integrated into it.
I would rate it a 10 if it had the template functionality on the web side, had better interfaces between other applications, so that we didn't have dual data entry or have to set up our own migrations.
View full review »BW
Belgin Wolard
Sr. Test Automation Engineer with 201-500 employees
I would like to see better Reporting functionality especially more sophisticated graphs, for example Actual vs. Planned or high level progress graphs using indicators like traffic lights. I would like to see more sophisticated or flexible Dashboard views, such as editing and resizing. I use scorecards and pull them into the Project Reports using customized templates. Scorecards can only be refreshed from the Site Admin, which then test leads has to depend on the ALM Admin to refresh the reports if needed after the scheduled auto run. There should be ability to refresh scorecards (execute KPIs) from the project itself or give more frequent auto refresh option like even every 5 min. This is a really burden on the team.
I would like to see Requirements mapped to test steps so we can combine multiple requirements validation in to one test case but map the verification steps to the associated requirements, so if the step fails only fails one requirement not all. When we are operating in an Agile world we do not have time to write test cases to capture one-to-one coverage. I know ALM allows many-to-many mapping but we cannot get true requirement pass/fail status if we use many-to-many option. Test configuration option kind of on the right path, but can only be use for data driven test cases, I cannot add design steps. If we can add design steps to a subset of a main test using Test Configuration option, I think we may be able to differentiate individual requirement that was failed without failing all the requirements mapped to the main test case.
View full review »It's like the overall software framework, and Performance Center is just leveraging that framework for storing things such as tests, scripts and test results. ALM works together with LoadRunner and Performance Center as one big system. As newer protocols are developed and newer technologies come along, it's nice to see HPE be ahead of that as much as possible so that by the time that it's really needed, they're already ahead of the curve and they've got most of their performance issues resolved as far as how the software's going to run.
View full review »There were few issues I faced while using Quality Center, but I’m sure they have been fixed in the new ALM version. One issue I have faced was that while I was importing test cases from Excel to Quality Center, it was not asking to check out the test cases but instead it would overwrite the default test cases and create a new version for it. This was not a consistent issue but it did happen a few times.
View full review »FK
reviewer1644000
Executive Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
At this time, we don't feel that this solution has any value. We are communicating with Micro Focus to address this commission where we feel that it has more value added to it.
The integration needs improvement. It is not integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. It's a stand-alone tool right now used for testing and defects. We are considering and testing Octane because it seems to have more integration with the DevOps ecosystem.
View full review »ST
Shinu Thulaseedharan
IT Quality and Architecture Senior Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
ALM only works on Internet Explorer. It doesn't work on any other browser. In my opinion, Internet Explorer is generally a bit slower. I would like to see it work on Chrome or on other browsers. We have other applications that work perfectly fine with Chrome. It is not a major problem, but browser compatibility is an issue. And if you're using a Mac, it doesn't work.
We have a digital platform and we have done a lot of automation using Selenium there. Those tools have the ability to work in Chrome. But I am not able to integrate ALM completely, end-to-end. For example, using the automation tools we have to initiate test execution from ALM and then take all the results and upload them back. So I'm not able to work end-to-end because of the browser compatibility issues.
The majority of our guys are working on Windows and they have IE. For manual execution, I've never seen a problem. But when it comes to automation, I have an issue.
View full review »The Active-X technology requires client-side installations that are difficult to manage in environments where the tester's PCs are locked down to prevent installs. Test management is too rigidly dedicated to older ways of testing with scripted test cases. More support for newer approaches, such as exploratory testing or behavior driven testing would make QC more relevant to the way testing is done in many current contexts.
ALM requires that you install client side components. If your organization does not allow admin rights on your local machine, this means you will need someone to run the installation for you with admin rights. This client side install is also limited to Internet Explorer and does not support any other browsers.
As far as the test structure goes, you are limited to to a step-by-step test case with description, expected result, and actual result for each step by default. This makes it difficult to support an exploratory testing approach with ALM. Of course, much of this part of the tool can be customized, but it still pales in comparison to something like the Test and Feedback tool that Microsoft provides for exploratory testing.
My understanding is that the newer Agile Manager product is more friendly to exploratory approaches, but I have not used this product yet.
View full review »Our biggest problem with ALM is the version upgrade and especially the migration.
We have 1400 projects which are active. With the next version upgrade, we expect more than 3000 projects that have to be migrated.
The migration itself takes months. Here is something that can be improved. It is very important for us, otherwise each migration would kill us.
I used Quality Center 5-10 years ago, and I had no issues with it. It is also the de facto industry standard of test management tools. I don’t have enough insight at this point in time. If you ask me in half a year's time, I'm sure I'll have loads more information.
View full review »As soon as it's available on-premises we want to move to ALM Octane as it's mainly web based, has the capability to work with major tests, and integrates with Jenkins for continuous integration. This is lacking in the standard ALM which was great a few years ago but it did not evolve enough, and that's why we are waiting for Octane.
View full review »PA
reviewer1949529
Head of Testing - Warehouse Solutions at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
I rate this solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but the response from customer service and support could be improved.
View full review »What could be improved in Micro Focus ALM Quality Center are the dashboard and the management tools particularly used for management reviews. Currently, what's missing in the solution is the ability for users to see the ongoing scenarios and the status of those scenarios versus the requirements. As for the management tools, they also need to be improved so users can have a better idea of what's going on in just one look, so they can manage testing activities better.
An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is having management visibility on the dashboard. For example, it would be so much easier if there's global information that users could work with.
View full review »VR
Vyshali Reddy
Quality Assurance Director at Charter Communications, Inc.
It is nice, but it does have some weaknesses. It's a bit hard to go back and change the requirement tool after setup.
It's not flexible enough. The formatting is also an issue. For example, the project manager doesn't like the use it, even for requirements, because it's not easy for them to change it. If they make a mistake and go back, it is hard to change the formatting to make it good. So, they have to share or use another one that try to upload. But, after the upload, you cannot change it because the IDs are identified. It's hard for them to work somewhere in-between, adding something in there, then keep the rest of them record is still linked well.
It's difficult to change it. Let's say you set up the requirement, if you change the requirement, by adding any on bottom which won't cause an issue, but I want to add it in central somewhere, then you mess up all the linkage for the test plan and test lab.
This requirement piece is what I think is the biggest disadvantage for the Quality Center. I do know Micro Focus does have a bunch of the new tools, but that depends if a customer wants to change it, use a new tool or stay on an older tool.
Reporting is a bit complicated. They have a standard report, but if I don't want to use that, I have to use the Excel reporter.
View full review »How they organize content could be improved greatly in an out-of-box way, at least as a possibility for the users. The simplistic folder capability for reqs/tests doesn’t lead the users to a very productive method of test management.
It would be better to have suggested methods such as storing by subject/feature/functional area and to lead users into organizing this way. Then you wouldn’t run into the need to move things around in folders when release schedules/versions change.
Also, the style by which you document your regression tests is more automatic since you stop copying tests to a new folder for each release.
View full review »New development methodologies, such as continuous integration and kanban boards, are being implemented by Microsoft and others to try to get their tools into the testing profession. ALM's got to push back and think more about the overall end-to-end development process. It's very much still a testing tool. We have a few awkward links rather than being a full solution.HPE ALM lacks a few of these features, but for a testing focus tool, helping to ensure quality, I think it's really good. It's good at its core necessities.
View full review »DG
David Gorecki
Senior Specialist - Quality Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
We are having a lot of problems with this solution. One example is that users are able to run test cases, but the permissions are managed by another group.
I don't have the ability to create test sets.
A lot of the testing steps are ad-hoc in nature where they have a lot of prerequisites, but they don't specify what the prerequisites are.
The organization that I am at is not very good in the sense that even finding test cases that need to be run is very difficult.
The UFT tests don't work very well and it seems to depend on things as simple as the screen resolution on a machine that I've moved to. Specifically, if I move to a screen with a different resolution then it throws things off.
View full review »SF
reviewer1444647
Sr. Manager - SAP Authorization & Complaince at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
DP
reviewer960990
Tool Administrator at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees
Only Internet Explorer is supported. That is a big problem. They don't support Chrome and Firefox and so on.
The browser limitation is the biggest problem — nobody wants to use IE in this world.
The browser issue is a big deal because it doesn't work on Mac. That's a game-changer, but now, I assume they have come up with a giant tool, ALM Octane.
It would be great if they brought the waterfall model with ALM Octane, or created a new interface as such.
View full review »Certain features are lousy. Those features can drag the whole server down. There are times that the complex SQL queries are not easy to do within this solution.
Micro Focus ALM needs to bring the features of this ALM into the newer version of Octane.
View full review »We do have some suggestions on reporting. Most of the time we need to download data and then we create reports ourselves. If there was a little bit better reporting available that would be great. The reporting is the one thing that we definitely want them to do more on.
View full review »The previous version of ALM had a greater functionality regarding test cases. Not automatic, BBT and so on, but now in ALM Octane we have only manual testing and integration with other tools.
I think we need to increase functionality to help us to run testing. When we run the ALM project so I think I can give it a better score after we assess our experience.
View full review »We're starting to move more into a microservices enablement world. Using other products and being able to integrate with Docker etc. is going to be key for us. That's one of the reasons why I attended this conference, is to learn a little bit more about how HPE can help us with the integration of those tools.
View full review »- GUI colours not that great
- On the defect site, when one adds a comment, anybody who has access to the same defect can change the initial comment. It would be great if the defect comments would not be editable.
Between versions 12 or 13 and the upgrade to 15, it took a very long time. We had a lot of difficulties with support and didn't understand why we had so many upgrade issues.
We operate in Sweden, and there are not so many Swedish people that know the product.
It might be end of life in some ways.
The pricing can be a bit expensive.
View full review »JR
reviewer1625010
Software Engineer
ALM is a dated application, and I am researching to see what other solutions are available.
We would like to upgrade to be more modern.
If you want to extend it, they use ActiveX which was put into a browser to go to the internet, but it never had security built into it. It is what Microsoft Office is based on.
It hasn't kept up, while others have and are adding new features and tools.
I would like to be able to use free keyword searches, where you're not just limited to SQL queries.
The software gets leapfrogged because you make a lot of investment in building something. You're selling it for five years, and meanwhile, all of the other tools are improving. Another vendor comes along to make the same thing that took you three years to build, he built it in six months.
It's all easier to make. It's always a cycle. I just look around to see where we are at in that cycle with test management software.
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.
View full review »CG
Caroline Gitonga
Presales Consultant at Oracle
The project tracking is a bit complex. It takes some time to maneuver around it. It would also help if you could export some of the reports generated from it e.g. the Master Plan.
View full review »The canned report site could be improved. You can get your report but you have to do some stuff. If the project doesn't have a good, strong user, they don't get these reports. If we have more canned reports from the ALM site, this will solve some issues.
View full review »Sprinter, I think, is a good part of this ALM tool, but it has some limitations for us. Based on the type of software we use - we have some web based applications and also some power built applications - not able to capture all the objects, or the way that we develop our software. We're not able to use it as much as we would like to. So Sprinter would be something I would like to see better integrated with the different types of technologies used by the software companies.
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, to make sure they understand how to use the tool. Do they really understand how they're using it? Why they're using it. So, for me, that would useful.
View full review »I would like to see a bit of improvement in its look and feel.
View full review »Its performance is horrible, and it's unnecessarily complex, which means the local site administrators set it up to be used in very unproductive ways.
View full review »The main barriers of entry are cost and implementation, especially if an enterprise implementation is the best solution
View full review »We've seen a lot of new things in Octane and other things that we have wished for. One of the hardest things that we're noticing is it might be hard to migrate from ALM to Octane, which has the features we need. What we really like is the ability to track different types of tests to our requirement. If you want to play with Selenium Test or LeanFT, UFT tests or any other framework you can think of. Being able to capture those results in a common area is the biggest thing we would be looking for because we have so many different groups that some of them have their own solutions for testing but ALM is sort of the central repository for our results so that would be a huge benefit for us.
View full review »I work in a bio-pharmaceutical company, so we have lot of validated applications, and when we do functional testing for these validation applications, tracking the e-signatures is very important.
I know there are plugins to track the e-signatures, but the problem is that it's very hard to get them implemented. There's no out-of-the-box way, as far as I know, to implement track changes continuously, that comes with add-ons, and those add-ons operated by third parties as well. They are not very mature and there is a huge learning cycle in adopting them. Due to these reasons, the effectiveness of ALM for an industry like ours is less than what we would see in LoadRunner.
View full review »What I am hoping with the latest version of Quality Center is that I would like to see a better interface with being able to load Excel spreadsheets, so a lot of times the key way analysts rewrite our test cases in a spreadsheet, and then we load it up. I would like to see where the interface is better as it's not as user friendly in this release that we have, so I am hoping that it is improved with the latest version.
View full review »We look at service packs, what bugs they have and fixes. From a end-user perspective when you have invested heavily in these tools for the last four, five, six years or more, organizations are there from when it was Mercury. We just want to keep pace with where the industry is going, where the shift is in terms of quality assurance and requirement management. HP is very strong on the testing side, but in the last few years with the agile methodology it has lagged behind. It's slowly catching up and eventually it will get there, but we love the eco-system we're in and will continue to move forward.
View full review »I'd like to see them move away from a desktop-type client and towards a web-based client, although we've also had ActiveX issues with web clients.
View full review »- Reporting
- Drill-up, drill-down works sort-of OK
- Multi-project reporting
- User-friendliness, it requires some time to get used to
AD
Avantika Dayama
Project Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
- Easy integration with open source tools.
- It has several limitations in adapting its agility easily.
JG
Jordan Gottlieb
Principal consultant qa architect at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
I'd like to see the idea of users being flushed out more, so not just, "This defect is now assigned to a particular person," or "This person is assigned to execute a test."
I want to see the users expanded out to teams where you have five users and the sixth user is the manager, so the manager can roll the idea of somebody being responsible and accountable. The idea of things being assigned to a team of users and users belonging to that team. There are ways of getting around this in the tool because it's very customizable, but I'd like to see that separate from the idea of using security groups, which is one way of getting around that.
I'd like to see the concept of teams put into it.
View full review »VS
Varun Srinivasa Murthy
IT Solutions Analyst at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Certainly on the UI part, it has to be improved to make it user-friendly and more presentable.
View full review »JO
John ONeill
Principle consultant at Active Data Consulting Services Pty Ltd
None that I can think of from my experience, MicroFocus COBOL does everything we need it to do.
View full review »Integration with other tools would be good, for example, with open-source tools. In the meantime, we do something with JIRA, with Selenium, and so on, and it's good; but we can increase this connectivity with other tools.
View full review »The tech support is sometimes not clear when you speak to them.
View full review »I think the biggest challenge with ALM is getting useful data in one place. They're scattered in different parts of the solution right now.
It should also allow us to get quicker access to data from the things we're working on.
The overall usability of it could be improved as some things are a bit slow to get used to.
View full review »As a standalone QA tool it meets the needs adequately, but it really needs combining with other solutions, such as Agile Manager, to get the best full lifecycle solution.
View full review »It has a very large footprint, and takes an inordinate amount of time to load the components and seems to need to do this quite frequently. Also, with many of these tools, there is always room for improvement with the UI in terms of intuitiveness and functionality.
View full review »KA
reviewer2084166
Application Development Manager at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
It's not a very user-friendly product.
View full review »HPE ALM’s out-of-the-box reporting can be perceived as rigid and limited, to an extent. Knowledge of HPE ALM’s data model is important when setting up certain reports, and can be challenging depending on reporting requirements. Even so, these reports may not translate into appropriate insights that will provide value to a project or management team. The performance of the product may also be a concern, depending on the amount of active connections and data processing that it has to conduct at any given moment.
View full review »- Dashboard complexity
- Quick generation (for many entities the reports are very slow)
- Test Lab is very complex, it should be simpler
LeanFT:
LeanFT should include more technologies. For example, I would like it to include the Scala programming language. That is one of the main language that we use.
Quality Center:
There is a new product, HPE ALM Octane, which might be the solution for the gaps. I would like to see more connection to more products and processes, and including the DevOps into Quality Center.
View full review »The UI is terrible in the sense that we actually use automation scripts to avoid being in the UI, which is just fascinating, and then the data model.
View full review »We've done our source code in another application for so long, to have developers come over to help QA integrate it would probably be an impossible effort.
View full review »We need to move to Agile or DevOps. We have other products that do that, but I'm trying to standardize on a platform. I'm very interested in HP Agile Manager.
View full review »KG
KimberlyGoodman
Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
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.
The new offering, Octane, has all of the essential features that we need in order to move forward to the next mode of operation. I tried to use it and, unfortunately, we had all sorts of trouble down to some limitations as to what kind of URL you can use. That was a pretty sad issue that we ran into. Had that not been the case, I would right now be planning to move on to Octane.
The key pieces of functionality are in place. The reason why I wouldn't rate it higher than seven out of 10 is because you're still using really obsolete technology like ActiveX. You have to physically install the product on your desktop. That's a big no-no. Other than that, it is not far away from being much better than what it is.
View full review »Dashboard
- Defect ageing reports need to be included as built-in
- Availability of built-in report related to Defect Removal efficiency
- Availability of built-in report for calculating Defect Density
- Availability of built-in report for end-to-end traceability
- Availability of reports specific to Automation projects.
Management- Libraries
- Ability to include Test Set data in Libraries so that Test Set execution can be transferred to other projects using Library functionality
Test Lab
- Ability to upload Test Execution results from Excel to HPE ALM
Test Plan
- Ability to maintain Manual and Automation projects in single HPE ALM project
- Composite execution of manual and automated scripts would be helpful
Defects
- SLA-related ability for defect module where ALM would send automail to stakeholders for the defects which have not been updated in a long time
We’ve seen a couple demos for Octane and Agile Manager. I think the direction it’s going will deliver what we want. At this time, it delivers what we need, but the direction that Octane is going is what I would like to go towards.
View full review »Sometimes there are small customizations that we'd like that are not always available. If I need to contact technical support about an small issues, sometimes it takes some time before I can get resolution. And if there's a feature that's not available, we need to wait for another release because we can't just simply add the feature we need.
View full review »- License costs are still staggeringly high.
- Implementation is a bit tedious as far as backend installation and configuration. Perhaps with 12.x it has become easier but there need to be more troubleshooting "tools" in order to do upgrades and better insightful dialog/windows/prompts for new installs. If I compare the feature set of the Requirements module to COTS tools such as Jama, it has room to improve in many areas.
- Also, with tools this large, the integration to automation can be bloated. There need to be a long term, sustainable solution to run much leaner.
The product continues to evolve and improve and we are now on v12.01. The defect module, while fundamental and more or less consistent over numerous versions, is an area we would like to see improved regarding how response time is measured in the standard application. Reporting is another area that could stand improvement - many times the data is simply exported out to Excel for analysis.
View full review »I think there are still some changes to help integrate with agile processes better without having to use a separate product. I think that since Quality Center has had functionality added over such a long period of time, that certain modules and other HP tools could be better integrated.
View full review »The graphical user interface has the most room for improvement. Not all screens within the integrated suite refresh the same, some screens or activities are self-refreshing and some are not.
I would also like to see the “Disable Quick Runs” added back as a site parameter or built as an internal function within a project.
View full review »
HP ALM UI needs some improvement. Sometimes changes are not saved correctly.
View full review »
1> High licensing cost.
2> QC lacks a "watch" feature thus disallowing independent actors, such as
managers / leads, to track the progress of issues. For example, for each defect, only the assigner and the assigned receive any updates / notifications. Everybody else has to employ external means e.g., e-mail to get these updates / notifications, thus introducing humans in the loop.
View full review »
CJ
reviewer1662489
National Solutions Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
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.
The feature that I would have liked to see is more integration into CI/CD pipeline and agile pipeline. It should have integration with third-party tools such as Jira, DevOps, and the cross-platform type of thing. The versions I've used are older, so these features may have already been included in the new versions.
View full review »PG
reviewer1357974
Performance and Automation Testing Squad Lead at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
There's room for improvement on the reporting side of things and the scheduling, in general, is a bit clunky.
They can also improve on its interoperability with other tools. All tool sets need to evolve in that regard. They need to understand that you don't buy all one color of tool sets these days and that some tools do a job better than others, depending on what it is. If I've got an industry-strength configuration management tool and repository, like GitLab, I'll pull my stuff out of ALM and I'll interface with GitLab from ALM. That interoperability with other tools sets, the standardizing of interfaces, is an area to work on. All of the tools in the industry are the same. You get a new version of JIRA and it no longer works with the likes of ALM, or you get a new version of IBM UrbanCode Deploy and it doesn't work properly and you've got to do a configuration with GitHub or Artifactory or even ALM, for that matter.
The other thing that ALM could do well with is to move away from Internet Explorer. I believe they're doing that with version 15.
View full review »AG
reviewer1043550
Senior Vice President at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Licensing model is awful.
View full review »JD
JewettaDobson
Quality Assurance Manager at Reliance Standard Life Insurance
- I would love to see QC update and use metric dashboards at the individual and project level.
- The UI also needs some updating with a fresh new look and feel.
Reporting.
View full review »Licensing model: HPE has one of the most rigid, inflexible, and super expensive license models. It is an extremely heavy system application. 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! I am guessing they are doing this to maintain the same look and feel so that they do not have to get their customers familiar with a new UI. When you compare this system's heavy UI with JIRA or TFS, the difference is evident!
View full review »- Cross project reporting is limited to similar database schemas
- Requirements are not managed as well as in other applications
We should consider not being a testing tool as such. I know that with ALI, we integrated the customer's EDI - the Eclipse, SAP and Visual Studio - but we'll need to do that more. We need to get moving in that direction as well.
View full review »The reporting features could be improved.
View full review »ND
reviewer1261053
Consultor de tecnologia - QA at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
We are waiting to migrate from ALM to Octane. It's the same family of softwares, but ALM is designed for cascade systems. The new version of ALM called Octane is for Agile projects. There is more integration with Agile tools like JIRA and other things. I think that will be an improvement of ALM.
The integration could be improved because with Agile technology you are working more quickly than with a top-down methodology.
View full review »MR
reviewer1137345
Sr. Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It is pricey.
View full review »AB
reviewer1074789
Test Specialist at a consultancy with self employed
Managing multiple projects is possible when you have the full ALM license. However, we have the Quality Center license, which can be managed poorly. This is because you cannot look or report across projects.
We don't use Single Sign-On because this is available from version. Therefore, we do not use it right now. Also, it needs to be tested and we haven't tested it yet. With test automation. If you have Single Sign-On and want to make use of another user, that can be challenging. It is good for normal users to use Single Sign-On. However, it's not really a must at the moment, though it is good that the solution finally supports SSO.
Making Quality Center available to connect to external tools is doable, but it takes some work. With our current version, it is not fit for external entities. Connecting to external entities is easier to work with and report in using the newer versions. However, if you really want to use other tools, I would suggest giving ALM Octane a try.
The defect management module has room for improvement. E.g., for Jira tickets in defect management, they could have a direct link with Jira. However, with Micro Focus Connect, you can set up a link between Jira and Quality Center.
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.
I want to see Atlassian as part of the ALM solution. ALM Quality Center is more from a waterfall approach where Atlassian has already evolved into more of the DevOps and agile part.
View full review »SK
Sarah Kemle
IT Business Analyst at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
There needs to be improvement in the requirement samples. At the moment, they are very basic.
They could also improve the usability.
View full review »TM
ITManage0264
IT Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Definitely ease the complexity of the tool: the upgrading part of the tool. It needs to be easier.
Also, it needs easier integrations. I know one of the big reasons we did upgrades to the ALM upgrade license was because you could use Octane, which Tasktop is giving free for a year. That helps integrate with some of our other tools. I think as our organization, one of our biggest challenges is, we have all of these different tools, and getting them to talk to each other. To really have a whole encompassing pipeline, that is our challenge.
View full review »- This is a great test management tool, but it is very expensive. The price needs to be affordable as it's high priced when compared to other test management tools with similar functions.
- SpiraTest and QMetry can be used on iPhone, iPad, etc., but I am not sure whether Quality Center also works on iOS platforms or Android devises.
- Use a SCRUM board extension to make it more usable for Agile.
- It needs to integrate better with other vendor software, e.g. JIRA, Selenium IDE, and SoapUI.
- It should be easier to use like SpiraTest or QMetry.
Overall the user experience of HP ALM is very good, there are some small improvements which can help those who are doing defect triage and management, and also the actual testers who use a test lab. For instance, when I open the defect list using a report or dashboard drill down, I can’t update individual defect without actually opening it. However if I select a defect shortlisting criteria and get a list of matching defects from defect module (defect list view) I can very well update defect log without actually having to open the defect. This seems like a small thing but believe me, when you are dealing with multiple defects and have limited time on a defect triage call, this small functionality really makes your life easy. There a such few small enhancements which HP can probably do to make this wonderful tool even better.
View full review »- Lack of communication while unveiling new functionalities on Saas
- Licensing model is relatively expensive compared to alternate solutions
- License management could be more flexible (like floating licenses)
Reporting is almost useless, but it does allow you to extract information directly from the database through a robust API and report with your favorite tool [excel, Crystal].
Not easy for lay people to administer.
View full review »
The new solutions that are soon coming for ALM Octane, such as predictivity and requirements management, are very welcome. Those have been missing from the existing solution. So far, we have been able to manage with the other alternative solution and integrations, but I am also really looking forward to that.
The client installation is sometimes quite painful. You need to register some components on the client that need administration rights, which is really tough on the organization. For each upgrade of the software, every minor upgrade, you need to reinstall the client, which means basically somebody needs to travel around and do the upgrades on each client. Basically, what we really would like to see would be a proper web client that has good coverage. There is a web client, but it only covers a very small part of the product, so you can't use it for the full life-cycle, and so we decided not to use the web client.
View full review »Linking between modules, with actual field values like those between defects and releases.
View full review »PT
Pankaj Thakur
System Engineer at Tata Consultancy
ALM Quality Center could be improved with more techniques to manage Agile processes. In the next release, I would like a time management feature to be included.
View full review »SD
reviewer1258191
Head of SAP/ SAP Solution Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
I frankly don't recommend Micro Focus solutions.
The support is not good and the documentation is not consistent. I even opened the issue to the partner. With the support not being great, we faced some stressful situations with the customer. That's why I'm looking for another partner.
I'd like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning features implemented in future releases.
View full review »DK
reviewer1422234
Talent Acquisition Specialist at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
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.
SK
Sai Kiran
Sr. Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We cannot rearrange the Grid in the Test Lab. It is in alphabetical order right now. But sometimes a user will want to see, for example, the X column next to the B column. If they came out with that it would be useful for us. They are working on that, as we have raised that request with Micro Focus. They have not given any definite dates, as there are multiple requests from different companies, but they are working on it. We have 14 or 15 of our own columns. So every time they want to validate details of, say, SAP security or something along those lines, they need to drag to the right. They wouldn't need to do that if there were an option to reshuffle and save the view.
I would also like to see them provide a better reporting structure. They have a Business Views Microsoft Excel Add-in that appears as an additional tab in MS Excel. If they could improve that a little more, integrating it better with Excel, it would be very useful for all the stakeholders, helping them see the reports.
They can improve, of course on the deployment side, now whether that will be ALM or Octane I don't know. ALM-Octane with its lower footprint is of course easier to roll out and with the old Java client. I don't know if I could take to a roll out point of view. HP is probably stuck with a bit of a beast. We haven't got many areas where we think it can improve now, if we use it in combination with other tools.
A particular problem area for us is really to improve support for requirements. We come from an environment where everything had procedures for requirements from a business analyst point of view. Having to switch to ALM is a bit of a disappointment. You lose lots of functionality, for example VOV in comparison, baseline reporting. So far being able actually to write the requirements from a granular way. There are system constraints, very old times in ALM which make it an outdated tool for requirements to be frank.
View full review »We found some difficulty in working with it, as we're a large organization. Once we got to 10,000 users, the idea of an individual user lost its value and there wasn't the ability to create teams within ALM. We weren't able to assign particular work to a team, but there's no function for that. This is something that should be built into ALM.
View full review »More flexible reporting would be good.
View full review »
Expensive Maintenance & Support (M&S), Annual fee.
View full review »
MG
Mihai Grigorescu
Principal Consultant at Inspired Testing
The pricing of the product could be improved.
The solution needs to offer support for Agile. Currently, ALM only supports Waterfall. Whereas ALM Octane is a product that Micro Focus has full for Agile projects. It's not really and apples to apples comparison between those two products, however, it shows that the company has an understanding of Agile and it would be nice if they could support it on both products.
View full review »The product could do with more native integration for agile projects, a greatly reduced cost model and closer integration with products that are non-HP.
View full review »Graphs can be further improved to manage more requirements at a time.
View full review »Tighter integration between ALM and UFT, especially from a reporting perspective, for automation reporting. We currently run into reporting issues.
View full review »We're doing a lot of agile work and using a number of different agile tools. Agile integration, as right now it does integrate with version 1.0, but I'm not sure about its integration with some of the other agile tools.
View full review »Agile, Devops.
View full review »- Integration with other open source test automation tools such as Selenium WebDriver.
- Dashboard reporting including test plan versus test execution progress (overall and module-wise), forecasting test planning or test execution progress based on the past progress run rate.
- More options to slice and dice/analyze defect trends, e.g. open defects count/numbers component wise, open defects count/numbers linked to Test Case IDs, defects linked or converted to change requests (CRs), etc.
- For Agile SDLC support, option to define sprints or iterations, effort estimation, release planning and sprint planning and tracking.
- Ease of reuse of Test Automation scripts for performance testing with HPE LoadRunner integration.
- Mobile Testing support with option to assign/mark test cases for mobile testing with mobile device specification of OS, make, screen size, integration of mobile testing on Cloud e.g. Perfecto Mobile.
IB
Ivana Buljan
Product Development Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
ALM uses a waterfall approach. We have some hybrid approaches in the company and need a more agile approach. We have also installed ALM Octane and are trying to see if it fills the approach that we are looking for our company.
View full review »I have to say I'm not a huge fan of ALM. I think it's the best out of some of the not-so wonderful tools out there. The example that I usually give people is, if you're an IT person and you use a tool, you know that right click always does similar things. You know that there's functions that from one application to another mean the same thing or has the same features and functionalities. ALM doesn't work that way. I don't think it's a difficult tool to use, but it does need someone to be first trained on it, and then you have to use it a few times before it kind of sticks.
If you use it once, but then you go away and you come back, let's say a few months later, you have to get a refresher course. So it's like a computer application, there are certain functions which are: F1 is Help. Control is something else, and so on.
It's not intuitive in that way, which has always been a problem, especially with business users.
The product could be more user-friendly. It's pretty easy when you know what to do, but it's not intuitive learning that all the features are available. For example, it’s not obvious that you can update a set of test cases with multi-select cut/paste. This was not available in its previous versions.
A lot of people also think all you get is what you see out-of-the-box. A lot of inexperienced users don’t know almost everything is configurable.
The Web UI and the Administration Page need to improve. These are not issues, but areas to improve.
Web UI: In some version (I don’t remember exactly the version number, unfortunately), Web UI was introduced with limited functionalities but it was cool in my opinion. Web UI has a lot of advantages and the main advantage is that the customer doesn’t have to install a big thick client on his machine. Web UI is faster, lightweight and easy to configure compared to the on-premise installation. But for some reason, this functionality (all Web UI) was removed in the next release.
Administration Page: It doesn’t have any issues. The main idea here is that it was written using old technologies and it would be great to improve/rewrite it using modern technologies. It doesn’t have an impact on the customer, it is more for developers who should support this area.
View full review »I am not an end user so I can't really say. But, I would like to see improvement in the price.
View full review »I supervise the team using and providing support for the product, and there are a couple of things my team feels that could be improved upon.
1) We need to move test cases manually from Test Case module to Test Execution module. This consumes more manual interaction. If this could happen with any in-built functionality, that would reduce the manual work and time involved.
2) Email notification list. Emails are not triggering to any member of the email notification group if just any one of the email addresses is incorrect. So, if one email address is wrong in a group of ten email addresses, no one receives the email notification that they're all supposed to receive.
View full review »- Ability to export test plans (test cases and libraries) in other formats, such as in Excel.
- Test Lab functionality needs to be changed so you can set test attributes automatically with minimal effort.
- Traceability and version control management
- Not able to group project deliverables by builds
It could be better by incorporating more spell checking and word processing functionalities in steps. Also, it could be more user friendly to "call" other scripts.
View full review »Almost all of the areas are very advanced, but one module which needs improvement is report extraction, and billing module is missing.
View full review »In future releases I'd like to see better reporting, a more simplified UI, and improved metrics. It would also good if they removed some features to simplify the solution. It only supports internet explorer right now, so it would be good if it could support other browsers. Browser costs are also fairly high.
View full review »ND
reviewer1261053
Consultor de tecnologia - QA at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
In the world of agile, the solution needs to make testing better. They need to arrange their tests with a very high speed of tests. Quality Center is a little bit old in terms of approach. It needs to be modernized. I have to go through many cycles, et cetera, in order to register everything correctly. I need more flexibility to adapt to the new methodology of agile for Excel. That will require more speed. Currently, due to the relative slowness, takes a lot of time to use the tools very well.
If the solution could create a lighter, more flexible tool with more adaptability to new methodologies such as agile, it would be great.
I was in contact with my support team here, and there is a new release of Quality Center for agile. That is called Quality Center Octane. However, my support team has not made it available to me yet. I was waiting to see the new version of Quality Center Octane, to see if it would have more flexibility in agile.
View full review »The downside is that the Quality Center's only been available on Windows for years, but not on Mac. There's not any solution to any platform or browser. That's been a problem and people have been going to other tools because of it.
View full review »- Reporting.
- Project setup and maintenance.
- The user interface is dated and not terribly intuitive.
The UI is becoming somewhat dated but that shouldn't be a deal breaker.
Out of the box, the tool is very flexible in what it allows the user to do. This can go against data integrity in a regulated world but the tool can be customised to improve data integrity. For example, you could customise the tool's workflow to ensure tests cannot be re-executed after a set of executed tests have been peer reviewed.
View full review »Integration with test automation never worked properly. We were never able to run test automation on the SaaS platform. We ended up having to use QC 10 for test automation. We went through several "fixes", upgrades, etc., and were never able to fix the problem.
View full review »The user interface is still dated. Writing test scripts in HPE ALM is generally avoided as the interface is too awkward to use. At the software development company where I worked, the test scripts were routinely created in Excel and uploaded into Quality Center. This process was seen as much more productive than using the HPE QC interface.
At the bank where I worked, I was responsible for training and supporting the end user testers. I constantly found myself defending the way HPE ALM worked. When executing tests, the users would get themselves lost, would expect an action to have taken place when it had not, had lots of problems logging defects, had problems getting screenshots into a defect, and understanding and using favourites.
The interface they have developed is quite good at the top level, i.e., grouping into Requirements, Test Cases, Test Execution, and Defect Management. However, once you get into each area, the complexity of the application kicks in. There is no 'flow' of the basic functionality. For example, in Requirements, the basic function is to create requirements and link them. There should be a wizard that guides the user through that process, which includes suggestions about grouping and structuring, etc. Instead, you are just left dangling.
Another example: Test cases are to be written or modified, linked, selected for execution, and executed. Test execution in particular is a prime candidate for 'wizard-like' guidance for the tester. A much-clearer indication of where the test execution is up to by test set and test case as well the test steps would be most helpful.
What do I mean by 'flow'? Based on my own application development experience, the basic function(s) of the application should be obvious to the user and the easiest to perform. Extra functionality steps are seen as and executed as digressions from the standard flow. I realize that this is not easy in a product as complex as HPE ALM that has been hacked together by several companies and many developers over the years, which I guess is the reason it is the way it is.
We imported a large number of tests and requirements and found a few 'gotchas' on the way, but generally it filled our needs at the bank that I was working at the time.
View full review »ALM is quite heavy to use because of the process. Everybody needs to do the same process at the same time, and that’s quite heavy. We get a lot of complaints from customers that they're forced to use a process that is so heavy.
View full review »The performance needs work, as over the past couple years, where I have worked with large companies, I noticed slower response times.
View full review »EZ
reviewer1262124
Test Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The tools could be useful if we were utilizing them more effectively. There is not a standard way of using the tools and I think that if there was, we would benefit. The tools are also too complex.
If they could improve their BPT business components that would be good to include in the next release. The current one does not seem complete. It is not really user friendly and it is difficult to handle test speeds. Even though the product supports a range of configurations they are difficult to set up and we preferred a different configuration.
View full review »The reporting could be a little more robust.
View full review »We actually use Performance Center, too. Where what we need is: When we run any test to the Performance Center, the results are stored in ALM, too. But what happens instead, the results show a summary report in HTML or a .zip file. But if there was a way in the test lab for ALM, after running any Performance Center test, that the the results could be published in the test lab itself instead of going and opening the particular result (if it shows all the response time and whatever transactional data that we have) in the ALM lab itself, that would be beneficial for us.
Also, on and off, we have had some issues with the operation itself where the operation is not able to run the test or something. We have to go back and forth with the vendor and HPE (now Micro Focus) to get this resolved.
View full review »Its pricing does need to improve. As I recall, when I was working at my previous company, we paid over $100,000 a year plus maintenance. At that time, I could have purchased a RadView selection for that much and reduced the annual maintenance to around $15,000.
View full review »As an administrator, the ability to add users to their appropriate user groups from inside of the Site Administrator tool instead of having to log into the ALM project itself to make that user group assignment would be HUGE!
View full review »ALM bridges our development gap, but it's not quite full-scale yet. We'd like to see more functionalities so that we can use it to seamlessly helps us bring applications from development into production.
View full review »Backup strategy is lacking in QC. Once the QC server crashes, all your automation artifacts are unrecoverable. Though we can create QC project files to create a backup, there is size limitation when you restore the backup.
View full review »The performance of this product is really poor, and there is no dashboard (reports) for the groups or users on the home page. Also, instead of one database, there are separate ones for each project.
View full review »Accessibility! The reason I gave it a 9 not 10, is that I doesn’t support Apple machines or any browsers other than IE, and even then, later than IE 10! This is a big problem if the development team who should be working on defects are using Apple machines, which is very common. This is also a big problem for us if higher management wants to take a look on defects for one reason or the other. They are usually on the run and can’t access it using their iPads, for example.
This is a problem that JIRA solved, and it's now practically accessible from any browser on any type of operating system, and can be opened on a cellphone/tablet browser or through mobile applications. It’s perfect when it comes to accessibility and this is what Quality Center desperately needs.
View full review »Release management and integration with other tools.
View full review »Import Library - Synchronization problems are often because the ALM interconnection with HP Solution Manager is too fragile.
View full review »RS
Ravi Suvvari
Performance and Fault-tolerance Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees
- Include project planning and tracking
- Include defect sharing
- There are a lot of features in ALM which should be implemented into Quality Center, especially as ALM and Quality Center are integrated.
A little slow
Agile model support not very good
View full review »
NS
Nimmagadda Sudhir
Team Lead at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
It needs a feature for scheduling of automation scripts to run automatically. This feature would be very useful.
View full review »Some improvement to the Requirements Management are needed.
View full review »We would like to have support for agile development. As we do not have this capability, we are now investigating the use of Octane.
View full review »To add test cases from the test plan in test lab, the filtering function is not very user-friendly. Comparing the functionality with the querying/filtering functionality from TFS, which is much more user-friendly, it is clearer and the default screen is almost full-sized,
View full review »OO
Oluseye Oyede
Software Quality Assurance & Testing Specialist, MTN Nigeria Ltd at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The product creates a database per project and this results in poor disk space management, as well as frequent backup and restore. This should be improved upon.
View full review »From a tool point of view, I would like see some integration into release management. That is the biggest pain point at this moment.
View full review »- Test Report Generation
- Creating test iterations/projects
Full product is very complex plus the licensing left much to be improved.
View full review »
Report generation needs to be simplified.
View full review »I like all the features and can't think of anything that needs improving.
View full review »- The UI is primitive
- The tool is hard to learn
- The help files are minimal, even the videos
- The massive configuration options are too broad, meaning there is little in common across deployments
- Pure-FTPd WebUI
- Single sign-on
DS
Domingo Saavedra
QA Analyst at Tsoft
The QA needs improvement.
The technical support from the vendor is weak, as I believe the back end script support for the tool is not easy to access and modify by the customer.
View full review »SC
Srinivasa Chamarty
Project Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Auto-generation of automation scripts. Integration into the UTF (earlier QTP) has little more scope to improve.
View full review »The dashboard was not working at first. Later on, it was difficult to customize it.
View full review »It's doing what it should do, but it's a little bit costly. I would like to see some kind of testing analytics.
View full review »It should have the option to integrate open-source and third-party tools. I'd also like more collaboration options. They could make it more lightweight and improve its performance.
View full review »At the time, the dashboard never really worked.
View full review »Probably more fields to customize.
View full review »I've faced a couple of bugs in the product whereby we were not able to open attachments on a particular ticket.
The session timeout time also needs to be longer in my opinion.
View full review »
* High licensing cost.
* The Version Control feature is still quite primitive.
View full review »
It needs compatibility with browsers other than IE.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
OpenText ALM / Quality Center
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about OpenText ALM / Quality Center. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.