OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

• Templates: Allows us to standardize fields, workflows throughout hundreds of HPE ALM projects.
• Customizable Events drive workflow: Saves a few seconds of time when we set default values, customizable dependent lists. When we translate this to hundreds of projects and hundreds of concurrent users, the productivity gains are immeasurable.
• Traceability: Traceability from Requirement -> Test Plan -> Test Lab -> Test Runs -> Defects.
• Rich sets of permission settings for different roles.
• Business Views: It is easier to pull reports for novice users.
• OTA, REST API: Utility for adding users and massaging data.

It has improved collaboration between our test teams.

• 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?
• 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.

We have been using the service for 18 years.

The solution is very stable, if you have the right person to manage it.

The solution is very scalable, if you have the right person to manage it.

The technical support has been deteriorating since the Mercury days. I would give technical support a rating of six out of 10.

We were looking at other solutions, such as JIRA, due to all the issues I have raised.

The setup was straightforward.

HPE ALM has been sold to Micro-Focus. I am not sure if Micro-Focus will be flexible.

If no flexibility is provided, you can easily move out in weeks, if you have the right resources.

We evaluated Zephyr, QASymphony, XQual, Perforce, and Rational Quality Manager.

For integration purposes, we evaluated Tasktop, Orasi, HP Synchronizer, and ConnectALL.

For automation purposes, we evaluated UFT, Selenium, and Robot.

Below is a checklist for others considering a test management solution:

• CIO sponsorship
• Number of projects
• Number of concurrent users
• Standardization needs
• Ease of control and management
• Access rights for individual roles
• Event driven workflow customization
• Extending beyond test management to TDD, BDD, test data management, test environment, and CI/CD tools.
• Focus on where you want to solve each problem and identify relevant tools for each of these.
• Availability of skilled resources
• Hiring the right resources to manage: There are easily millions of test management users, but it is not easy to find a true-bred expert.
• Keep in touch with what’s happening in the industry. You need to be focused and not swayed easily.
• Know your stuff.
• Support all your users and make life easier for them.
• Integration with automation tools, performance tools, security tools, and Jenkins/Bamboo/Team City.
• Define the test process that ties in with your test management too.l
• Form a training team to constantly train users.
• Open API for customization
• Export of info to MS Excel.
• Ease of migration.

We are actually not utilizing the full capability of ALM as a full application lifecycle management solution, but we use it for quality insurance, depositories, and for our difference management. For that, it is pretty good.

If you have to run a manual test it's very helpful. It has the option to perform manual tests so we have resolves, defects, and linkages. We come from the QA perspective, put our own requirements in and it's like a one-stop shop. It's very easy for QA people to take out their metrics and share those metrics with the senior management.

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.

I think the stability has been fine.

Scalability is good. There's also scope for improvement here, so I would say it's pretty decent.

I don't use technical support because I have a tool administrator. He's the one who deals with the technical support. For him, I act as a user of an ALM, and if I have any issues, I go to him and he'll talk to technical support.

I've been at my current job for the last 11 years and we have been using it from its days as Test Director and QC days. So far, we haven't tried anything else and have stuck with it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

It was done by our tool administrator.

It was already in place when I started, but five years ago there was a process shift and we thought we could read results in ahead from other tools. I think we all just decided to stick with the readouts that we got and that because of the way we used the test capabilities, we didn't want to change. We were then able to convince our management that if they didn't want to use it to its full capabilities that the testing capabilities were worth it and they finally decided to keep it.

It's a big solution, I'm just using one part of it. For the other part of it, there are a lot of improvement that needs to happen, so just looking at my little piece isn't enough.

It all depends what your needs are. If you are very modernized, and have short cycles, you should evaluate other tools also. It all depends on your needs because each organization is very different. Maybe some organizations have lots of money and they want to go ahead and go for the big shop, and they can do that.

We have been involved in a lot of IT projects which need test management and for the test execution process, we are using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center.

We are able to use Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for test management, defect management, test process, test governance activities, and requirement management. We are able to achieve all of this, the solution is very useful.

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.

I have been using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for approximately eight years.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is a stable solution.

I have found Micro Focus ALM Quality Center to be scalable.

The technical support from Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is good, they are responsive.

I rate the technical support from Micro Focus ALM Quality Center a four out of five.

The initial setup is straightforward, it was not any more difficult than other setups.

The enterprise pricing and licensing are reasonable.

I would recommend Micro Focus ALM Quality Center to others.

I rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center an eight out of ten.

We are using it for test management. We have distributed teams in three locations with one location in Portland, which is the newest, and also in India. We have a team of around 150 people (developers plus three testers). We are implementing an order migration legacy system to a new system based on AngularJS 5.0. We also have test automation being implemented on this account using Micro Focus UFT. 

Automation is triggered through ALM. We have the test scripts stored in ALM that are triggered through the execution dashboard. Also, the reports are available on the dashboard. 

We do defect management through ALM, which is the typical use case. The defects are raised in our different locations, then the collaboration between the development leads and testers happen through ALM.

We use the Test Plan module where we have test cases related to all our different releases up until now with a few current releases as well. We use the Test Lab tab to pull test cases from Test Plan and do executions accordingly. We have also created some smoke and sanity testing suites where we pull test cases, then execute them when required during the project phases.

Any user who accesses a project gets to know what is the latest status on a test case, from a test case writing or test design perspective as well as test execution perspective. Collaboration is very strong. The communication that the tool sends out along with the log which is maintained is locked in the history. This is for any change at the test case level or within any of the components of ALM. The history helps us to understand what went wrong or when has somebody made a change. Therefore, the history log is a very important feature.

From a collaboration perspective, I can send out emails directly from ALM that, at times, get triggered automatically. If you raise a defect, then it automatically triggers to a particular email ID that the defect has been logged in ALM. This helps to get immediate visibility or attention of the development team from a testing team's perspective.

Initially, we used to lose a lot of time in collaboration. If we do this in a very crude way through Microsoft Excel, then there would be a lot of issues related to version control. Like somebody might say, "I've fixed the defect," and the other guy would say, "It is still open." Now, across the team, we have one single source of truth because ALM helps the whole team to understand the exact status.

Ease of use is definitely one of the strongest points for ALM. It's a very user-friendly tool and the maturity of processes within ALM are amazing compared to other tools. Their in-built reporting does help with getting ready-made reports from the tool. 

The Test Plan and Test Lab setup helps us a lot when pulling test cases repeatedly from a different perspective. If I want to make a sanity pack, then I can pull test cases from that same library of test cases. I don't have to create them again or copy and paste them. 

I love linking/associating the requirements to a test case. That's where I get to know my requirement coverage, which helps a lot at a practical level. So, we use the traceability and visibility features a lot. This helps us to understand if there are any requirements not linked to any test case, thus not getting tested at all. That missing link is always very visible, which helps us to create our requirement traceability matrix and maintain it in a dynamic way. Even with changing requirements, we can keep on changing or updating the tool.

We use the dashboard and have created our own reports. The typical dashboard also helps us a lot to understand test execution progress and the percentage of open defects from a defect perspective. We use the defect aging reports a lot. This saves us lot of time and gives us the right input from the perspective of which defects are aging. Those need to be looked at again and possibly discussed in further detail in the defect triage call about what's the blocker to get them fixed and how we can work in a better way to avoid the defect aging in these manners. 

The vendor is still investing in the product and releasing valuable features. For example, there has been improvements in the overall folder structure. Initially, we just used to have Test Plans and Test Lab. Now, we have the Task Board.

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.

About four years.

It's very stable. We haven't had issues with any sort of stability issues, e.g., no downtime.

We have around 4,000 test cases in ALM, so I don't think scalability is an issue.

We have around 150 users. The hierarchy of ALM users is:

• The admin
• Process leads, who are using it.
• At the lowest level, there are data developers and data testers who access ALM.

70% of our people use ALM and the other 30% don't need to be on ALM.

The technical support is nice. At times, we have needed to wait. However, this is understandable for a few of the issues as they sometimes can be tricky. I would rate the support function as above average. 

The turnaround time varies with the issue, but they're decent enough. The average time is two days. They provide us local support.

I have always used different versions of ALM. I did not previously use a different solution before using ALM.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The process was just about our customization, which we do from our end and is admin guided. This took us around a couple of weeks and wasn't cumbersome at all. ALM is a mature product. We could set up how we wanted to upload our test cases, then structure the different parameters or columns the way we wanted them. The process was quite streamlined.

We did have some internal help, but we didn't have a full-time consultant. We didn't have any external help. We used a team of three people (part-time consultants).

We definitely feel that it has given us a huge advantage from a collaboration and time savings perspective.

It can reduce the wastage that happens in collaboration activities. The effort has definitely gone down. Effort and collaboration have been reduced by 60 percent.

It all comes down to how many people are going to access the tool. When teams go above 20, I think ALM is a better tool to use from a collaboration and streamlining perspective.

At a process level, the maturity within ALM is at the highest level. Now, if I have run the same test case five times within Test Plan, it will gives me a status of that test case based on the last run, whether it passed, failed, or its situation. If I want to know right now from a functionality perspective what functionalities are working for me and which are not, then based on the immediate last run done directly through Test Plan, I can understand that. That's one of its strengths. This is not available in other tools, like TestLink and Jira (we are using both).

Jira has an advantage from agile perspective. For an agile project, it helps to have the dashboard in the way Jira is structured.That's where Jira is pretty useful. We also have three of the defect calls running different ways using Jira. There are a few things from a visual perspective where Jira poses some advantages over in ALM.

TestLink is pretty similar to ALM. It is not really drastically different. It's open source and doesn't have the kind of maturity which ALM has, like the BI page, the history log, or other functions that are present in ALM. It doesn't have that type of strength. However, since it's open source, at times a couple of our clients use it, but I use it very rarely within our projects.

Security is driven by the different user login credentials that are created by the admin. This is pretty typical. In this aspect, all their tools are good.

For risk-based testing, I used to have a different version of ALM that gave me a confidence level. Currently, I don't think our company has bought the version where you implement risk-based testing. However, it does help me to get the required inputs from the tool. Then, I have my own way of going about risk based testing.

I have seen the Single Sign-On. It's nice, but we don't use it in our current project due to a few constraints and a few user experience related issues. Sometimes, people don't want to change and just want to do it the old way. That is why we stopped using it.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10) to keep pushing them to include more features.

I'm the admin for our organization's Quality Center. I define the guidelines and projects for use. We use also use it for management requirement testing. Though, we are not doing automated tests or defect management right now. 

We can't use the Quality Center for everything because the login is only about the user ID and password. Because of this, we are not using the data in Quality Center for all projects.

It is quite complicated because I have about 200 projects, mostly SAP, and all of them have to work in the same way. I do a lot of reporting and everything has to be more or less the same.

I love to use this solution with single projects. It has helped our productivity. With the metrics that I receive, I can put them onto the management model so I can see them there. It has reduced our time for project management and controls by 20 percent.

We do a risk-based testing in some parts of tests, especially because the applications are very big so they can't test everything. The control of incidents is normally very good, as they don't want critical defects when we do this.

The requirements are the best thing.

The management feature is very important. I also use requirements, tests, and defects.

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. 

I have used it for 10 years.

With my current company, I started to set up their solution two and a half years ago. It has taken that long to get the solution working because it is a big project.

The stability is okay.

All users have to report their projects in Quality Center. Previously, it was voluntary to use Quality Center. From September, everybody has to use it in the company.

We have 300 users currently utilizing the solution. This number should increase to 500 or 600 going forward.

I don't work with the support of the Quality Center.

I haven't had a lot of contact with Micro Focus to know what they are doing.

Previously, we had no application lifecycle management tool, so there was a lack of coordination about requirements and no traceability regarding which requirements had been tested. Sometimes, defects were being reported by email. Now, everything works well, which is a huge improvement for my company.

It is very intuitive and wasn't complex for me. I like to work with it, but there are a lot of new users, and it's very complex for them to understand using Quality Center in the beginning.

We jumped right in and didn't have an implementation strategy.

We had a lot of problems with the new installation.

The implementation team was all internal: two other people and myself.

I started with the testing. Then, after the launch, I was working with the requirements and defects. Therefore, the deployment was a step-by-step process for quite a long time.

Pricing is managed by our headquarters. I am able to get from them for very cheap. The market price is horribly expensive.

I have seen other applications, and I like this application more. We tried SHIELD, Xray, and Confluence. I have also looked at another solution which was more about integrity. However, I am more concerned about requirements management. Other solutions working with integrity and enterprise architect can be very complicated. Though, SHIELD, as a solution, is too simple.

Very quickly, you can work with the solution. Though, there are user in my company in which this solution seems very complex. I would recommend that users take the courses offered to them. In addition to getting the manual, reading, and learning it, users have to try the solution, e.g., I create a playground for them to try out the solution for a few hours. Here they can try out the requirements and play with it. 

If you think logically and practically when using the solution, it works fine.

From the start, visualize the application. The initial tree on how to start is very important.

We would like to implement Single Sign-On, but there is a problem with it in my company. All different solutions have to be signed on individually in our company. Right now, we are trying to work with Oktana, but Oktana won't go into production in our company if there isn't a possibility of another login.

In the last release, there was nothing really new nor useful.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We use Quality Center to track functional testing and record automation testing scenarios results. There are around 1,000 users at my company. 

ALM Quality Center is a reliable, consolidated product. 

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.

I've been using ALM Quality Center for seven years.

ALM Quality Center doesn't break down too much.

ALM Quality Center is scalable. There isn't much impact on performance when you add users.

Setting up ALM Quality Center is easy. It's not complicated to set up the on-premises solution.

I would rate ALM Quality Center six out of 10.

We used it for multiple platforms in our organization. The IT platform was divided into groups, into towers, and each tower was using it. I used it for multiple towers together. I was managing it for my individual tower. But if there was a roll-out of the regression plan and we needed to see how many would be impacted, we were pulling out the ALM regression part from each and every tower and building it into one.

It's an effective test management tool. When you have to map all the requirements, and need requirement traceability, it reduces test management time. Compared to managing testing in Excel, it reduces it by 50 percent.

Reporting was the main thing because, at my level, I was looking for a picture of exactly what the coverage was, which areas were tested, and where the gaps were. The reporting also allowed me to see test planning and test cases across the landscape.

I was managing multiple landscapes. We were adding requirements in ALM itself and then mapping those requirements across the landscape. If one requirement was distributed across a project, it was mapped with ALM so that we could trace this particular requirement and see what projects were impacted and what test cases were tested regarding it. ALM provided complete traceability.

In terms of the solution's security features and compliance, I didn't come across any concerns. I checked the ALM SaaS version for the project I'm working on in my current organization as well, and I haven't felt there are any security concerns regarding ALM.

I used ALM Quality Center in roles from test manager to test director and it was the best tool in each role. It was easy to handle, and we could map everything, starting from requirements, and see everything with the test reports. It's a tool for everyone, and one which is very easy for everyone to adopt. Creating test plans, doing test setup, and set up of folders was very easy. The tool was quite flexible. It might take a maximum of one day to set up a whole project. 

I never faced any issues in integrating this test management tool with other tools for test automation. I worked with UFT and another in-house tool as well. We were able to manage and we were able to connect the applications very easily. The auto-run options were pretty good.

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.

I have used Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for seven to eight years.

The stability is quite good. Their upgrades are quite good. There are formal updates. I was happy with that.

It was utilized, effectively, across the landscape, across our technologies, and across projects. It was widely used.

My previous company was a pretty big organization and had 200 to 300 users of the solution. It was purely for the technical teams, for people like architects, testers, project managers, and test managers. We distributed it with the access required by each. The defect managers and architects only had traceability. The testing teams had full access. Test manager had planning and reporting access.

When you have to ramp up your licenses and you have to scale it up, it's quite a costly product. You have to keep an eye on how many people are using it. You can't just give access to users who are only there to take on excess work and who are not using it. It is not a very economical solution.

At that time, I was also looking at JIRA, participating in a comparison between ALM and JIRA. What I was looking at was how effective JIRA is for test management versus ALM.

In our organization, the manual testing guys write manual test cases through Excel. Then they import them to ALM. They'll move in all the details. Based on that, the automation team will take care of developing the scripts through Micro Focus Unified Functional Testing and they'll add the script into the test plan.

Once the lead has approved the test plan he will move all the test cases into the test labs. If any defect is found in new releases, it is logged in the defects column.

There is a parallel running of automated and manual testing. Based on that, we are able to help the quality of the applications. At an earlier stage, to catch the defects, we introduced API calls and GUI-based. Both are used to catch defects. It helps the guys to understand, quite easily, what the issues are. It is pretty useful for our organization in following the cycle method.

It has reduced the time required for testing. It makes things easy. Everything is already set up, once you have done the requirement map, and it quickens the release cycle. After QA, once it is moved into the build, we'll run both automated and manual in parallel. The automated will be completed within one day and the functional team will generally take three days and they'll know in that time if anything is there or not. Based on that, the business will plan the release.

All the features are valuable. Initially, you can take the response to the requirements and then move into the test plans, test lab, and defect creation. All of these are valuable functions.

Every tab is useful for software testing, but based on some of the requirements for defect creation purposes, we have developed a few of our own tabs. For example, there is a severity/priority module. There we have developed a module or submodule that shows who the business owner is and who the developer is. We also developed tabs so that, when creating defects and root cause, we know to whom it should be reported, so that things are easy to identify.

It is easy for everybody to understand. We can create whatever notes are required. Based on roles we can also make it familiar for business people, so they see what they need to see. That is true for engineers and managers as well. That makes it easy for everyone and gives them access to what they need. It makes things easier.

ALM is user-friendly for everyone. Someone who doesn't know it can learn it quickly, within 20 minutes. At the admin level it might take a little bit more time, since experience is required, but at the user level not much experience is required. It speeds up the validations.

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. And we can immediately stop upcoming releases if any vulnerability is found in the application.

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.

I have more than five years of experience using ALM Quality Center. I am an admin-level user in ALM.

It is scalable.

Previously we were using Excel. Then the organization moved the entire thing into the ALM. It is now the central point for whatever needs testing.

When we do a version upgrade, we first take a backup of whatever data is in ALM and move it to a Linux server. There is setup guidance for the installation process. Once we install it, then we'll move the existing data back. 

One good thing in ALM is that there is a predefined template when creating the projects. We just copy that template and everything comes together. Whatever the mandatory requirements are will be there with all the tabs. And, if required based on the business needs and the project, we will create new tabs with whatever fields are needed. That is good.

The licensing determines the number of users we can enable in a particular project. There is a full license and a defect license. Full licenses are used by a few of the guys at our level. We'll give a defect license to the development team only, to access whatever defects there are, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

We did not buy our ALM licenses directly from Micro Focus. We bought them from SAP, which is another solution we are using. We depend on SAP when it comes to whatever challenges come up. The source for us is SAP.

We do have a pricing concern. If we go directly to Micro Focus, they'll sell it at a higher price. If we go to some other vendor, they sell it at a lower price. My manager then says, "Okay, it's the same tool. Why do we need to buy it directly? Whatever problems come up, we can resolve them at our end." Of course, we don't know if we'll have one or two problems or not, and that is the reason to go for the higher price. But they went with SAP to buy the license.

ALM will help your business. It will save time. It makes it easy to validate everything in the latest build. It's easier to plan, cycle-wise. That is one advantage. It also makes it easy for the managers to analyze the results and the progress of the test cases. They are able to track things minute-to-minute. You can use the virtual controls to see the reason a particular test has been edited, using check-in and check-out. That is also a good feature.

Along with ALM the business is also moving to JIRA. I don't know exactly what the business strategy is there, but they're moving to JIRA as one of the sources for creating defects. They're also mapping all the requirements to JIRA.