OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews and Pricing

it_user638460

Account Director at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 18, 2017

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The most valuable thing is that it handles requirements, tests, and defects in one tool

What is most valuable?

The most valuable thing about the solution is it handles requirements, tests, and defects in one tool.

How has it helped my organization?

Most departments and some of our third-party vendors have access, so HPE ALM can be the single source of truth for what we are doing and how things are going.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used this solution for two years.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were no issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no issues with scalability.

How are customer service and support?

The level of technical support is very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I’ve been around a while and designed a few test management and automation solutions while I was with Motorola. I think our solutions were better, but of course, we had to spend a lot of resources on their creation.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward, as I’m new to US Cellular and the tool/processes were in place when I got here. We are making some changes to drive improvement, but we are also analyzing how to go agile which isn’t easy.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I think HPE tools are too expensive, but dumping them for shareware tools, like JIRA, Selenium, etc., is also very dangerous and is not a silver bullet.

What other advice do I have?

It’s too expensive for most organizations compared to some other tools on the market. I’d look at QASymphony, Borland, and of course IBM, before committing to any of them.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user470478

Senior Quality Assurance Analyst at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 1, 2016

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For all of our applications that we test we build our test cases, load them into Quality Center, and then we track our defects.

What is most valuable?

It allows us to track test cases that we create, so for all of our applications that we test we build our test cases, load them into Quality Center, and then we also track our defects inside of Quality Center. It allows us to be able to gather metrics based on the applications that we test.

How has it helped my organization?

I would say specific to our business solutions department, we can absolutely take a look for individual applications that we are testing. We can make some decisions about applications being turned over. How defect prone they are. If unit testing is occurring beforehand it helps us at least talk to some "Hey, here is what we received, here is how many defects that we received." It's been helpful with that.

What needs improvement?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's been pretty stable for everything we've been doing.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would say that at this point I really cannot speak to that.

How are customer service and technical support?

We haven't used it. I know we are going to upgrade Quality Center this year, so say maybe there will be some more possibilities for us to interact with support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Quality Center was around well before I got to the company.

How was the initial setup?

It was very easy. LeanFT came with UFT 12.5 and greater. Just deploying the UFT package which we're very comfortable with, we were able to deploy LeanFT as well.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I know there are some other tools out there if you are looking to manage requirements such as JIRA and a couple of others. I know some are really gauged more towards agile development, but a lot of them are used for requirements and they do have the ability to store test cases but we as a organisation use Quality Center.

What other advice do I have?

It works for us in terms of being able to track our test cases, absolutely being able to store results if we want to put in defects and build metrics. It is a pretty decent tool.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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it_user360525

Senior Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jan 3, 2016

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When it records a test, it will produce analyses to do cross-project reporting. This becomes a large repository of data and information that's valuable for us to make necessary improvements.

Valuable Features

The most valuable feature for us is probably the full Oracle component of ALM. It allows our users to be connected to other products.

Improvements to My Organization

We're able to use it with UFT/QTP for defect management. When it records a test, ALM will produce analyses to do cross-project reporting. This becomes a large repository of data and information that's valuable for us to make necessary improvements.

Room for Improvement

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.

Use of Solution

ALM, as a group, has probably been in use for 10 years plus.

Deployment Issues

Once installed, no issues with deployment.

Stability Issues

The application itself tends to be very stable, but when switching to an open-source website, that's where the issues are. So it's not so much the core application having issues. For example, you may find that it would be an Oracle issue and not an ALM issue. But really there are very few occurrences, even after all these years, of a serious application fault.

Scalability Issues

Scalability is fine. We have in the region 15,000 registered users and up to 2,200 concurrent users of ALM. We don't really have any scalability issues.

Any issues would have to do with what a certain server application is up to. You just need to keep an eye on it.

Customer Service and Technical Support

We have the higher level, premium support. Technical support tends to be quick and reactive to issues and we don't have any major issues with it.

Initial Setup

As large as it is, it's pretty straightforward to put in and you can configure it in probably less than an hour.

Other Advice

My advice would be to research the full system requirements you need for the initial install. In corporate environments, once you've got it up and running, it's more difficult to get off of it. Also, plan to scale up based on projected CPU and space that you'll need to get.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user330399

Principle Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 19, 2015

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It's improved our test workflow for defect management, although linking between modules has room for improvement.

What is most valuable?

Workflow management is a feature we find valuable.

How has it helped my organization?

It provides us with common development and test workflow for defect management.

What needs improvement?

Linking between modules, with actual field values like those between defects and releases.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for over 10 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

The desktop deployment causes issues when the enterprise has locked down PC. The application itself is hosted by HP (SaaS).

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Very good, 99.9%

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It scales to our needs.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

7/10 - it could be better, but usually it's good.

Technical Support:

8/10 - the TAM and team are very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No previous solution was used.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward, the only issue is doing patch updates as they touch the desktop client which makes it painful to update.

What about the implementation team?

HP hosts the application with no issues, and a vendor does the desktop update. This desktop vendor is expensive and inflexible.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

The tool has been in use for more than 10 years, the evaluation was back then and not known now.

What other advice do I have?

Make sure your desktop team have the skills and expertise to handle Quality Center’s client components.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user326448

Technical Test Analyst and Automation Engineer at Unum

Oct 18, 2015

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It added structure to the test process and enabled the developers to better understand the QA process, though it should integrate with Agile Manager.

What is most valuable?

The overarching lifecycle view, from requirements gathering through to testing and defect resolution. Additionally the ability to customize the user permissions so they can only see and do what their job role permits.

How has it helped my organization?

It added structure to the test process and enabled the developers to better understand the QA process. This in turn led to an improvement in the code developed in-house.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

Around 14 years from when it was originally called Test Director.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

There are still some issues when deploying to a few end user machines but the install and upgrade process is very easy. Some of these issues will be resolved in later releases.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Very stable with no reported issues in years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There are options to increase the scale of use and extra modules that can be obtained with the full ALM license.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

On par with other big companies, sometimes you need to get past the front line support to get to the real answers.

Technical Support:

Good, quick turnaround with ideas and solutions to try.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

QA was driven by spreadsheets before the deployment of Test Director.

How was the initial setup?

The documentation is not always easy to follow but the answers can be found on the support forum and help desk.

What about the implementation team?

The initial deployment was with a vendor over 14 years ago, but all subsequent updates have been done in-house.

What was our ROI?

It's unknown, but I suspect it to be quite significant.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

More recently it was reevaluated against Microsoft Test Manager to see if it was still the best QA tool for our needs.

What other advice do I have?

It is still the best QA tool on the market that integrates with most of other tools we use. It allows everyone who wants to be able to see the current quality of the project and control the QA process.

Fully understand the different options out there and the license types. Other tools may offer similar and you will probably want to customize some of the options to get the best out of it. Have not tried the cloud option which would take away any implementation and upgrade issues.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user326448Technical Test Analyst and Automation Engineer at Unum

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Oct 27, 2015

Agree with you on the Workflow - the editor could be a lot better but I guess they are trying to get most people to use the built in functionality and not push the limits of what it can do.

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it_user280944

System Analyst at a mining and metals company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 30, 2015

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The Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA) feature can analyze objects on SAP transport requests to create a Test Set according to scenarios created.

What is most valuable?

All features have their own value, but the most valuable ones are--

Customizations
SAP Solution Manager integration
Test set building

How has it helped my organization?

Change Management integration - The ability to create change documents on Solution Manager linked to an event and to change its status according to ALM status or to customize it. This is new and I've only used it on one project so far.

Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA) - It can analyze objects on SAP transport requests to create a Test Set according to scenarios created. Also, because ALM is integrated with blueprints that generate requirements that are converted into a test scenario to validate the changes, it checks if those changes will cause an impact on the selected business process.

Manage Regression Testing and Integrated Test - It's the most important and most popular feature for all the projects I have worked on.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using it for five years, and currently use it alongside HP ALM v11.52.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We had problems with Solution Manager/SAP integration and use through customizing RFC calls.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not with the tool. Usually problems happens because of a network delay or instability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

An HP expertise team was put together for implementation if needed, but there was no need for them.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

10/10

Technical Support:

10/10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I had already used IBM Rational, which is good too, but the HP tool is more complete.

What about the implementation team?

It was done in-house. The team that works here has experience with HP Quality Center and ALM on other projects. The team expertise is high.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Depends on how much you pay for this product and the size of the project. For a big project, it's a great tool that will help a lot.

What other advice do I have?

Use all that his product can offer as there is no need to buy others that can do the same tasks that HP Quality Center does. It's a complete tool that you can customize according to business/IT/user needs.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user3891

Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 12, 2013

Decent support in resolving issues but steep learning curve

HP ALM 11.0
The ALM market is rapidly maturing as organizations recognize benefits of the holistic approach to managing requirement, builds, tests and releases, and vendors rush to satisfy the demand.

In addition to the numerous commercial offerings one might be able to assemble his own ALM stack with best-of-breed components. There are many tools that excel in specific are of ALM such as requirements management, or defect tracking (e.g. Atlassian Jira); then there are suites that integrate most of the capabilities (e.g. CollabNet, RallySoftware), and there are integrated stacks focused on specific technology (e.g. Microsoft TFS, even with a limited support for Java platform)…

But there are currently only two fully integrated enterprise class technology vendors - HP and IBM – that rule the ALM universe.

Most of the vendors offer the standard set of capabilities: requirements management, defect tracking, release management, IDE integration etc. The one component missing from the most ALM vendors is integrated Quality Assurance, and HP with its acquisition of Mercury Interactive in 2006 leapfrogged every other vendor (including IBM), and currently holds about 40% of the automated testing market with its Quality Center and Performance Center suites (QuickTest Pro, Sprinter, Service Test and LoadRunner) - all integrated into HP ALM 11.

HP ALM also takes top spots in Requirement Management and Integrated Software Quality Suites (Forrester Wave, Gartner's Magic Quadrant), with respectable showing in other areas. Ultimately, selection of the ALM suite would depend on number of criteria - strategic enterprise architecture, technology affinity, maturity of the enterprise, costs, to mention but a few.

In my case, after weighing a number of factors for my own organization, the decision was made in favor of HP ALM, strongly influenced by the suite's capabilities, QA integration, relatively low pricing (into seven figures), and ability to start right away with with preconfigured application (with SaaS deployments option).

What's included'

Project Planning and tracking
Release management
Requirements management (definition and management - including versioning support)
Quality Management (functional, performance, security)
Development management (defect tracking, IDE and source code control integration)

HP offers both on premises and SaaS options for its ALM suite. The latter option provides convenience of a fast deployment but you do cede some control; some of the features (e.g. LDAP integration) might present challenges and incur additional costs.

The HP ALM application is a JEE app, with its server portion running on variety of platform - Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and Windows.

The user access is either through a browser or a desktop client, and, unfortunately, it currently imposes severe limitations - while administration can be performed through any browser (Firefox, Chrome, IE), the main user functionality is IE only (an attempt to access ALM from any other browser would give you a message "Only Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 are supported." - leaving IE 9 and 10 out of equation, as well. Hopefully, this deficiency will be addressed soon. Since the desktop client is Windows only as well, this makes all client activity "Windows only" (same goes for the rest of the tools - QTP, Sprinter etc.)

There are several licensing models available, and selection should be made based upon both your current and future needs, as well as anticipated mode of operation (e.g. concurrent license vs named license vs floating license); it also affects the pricing.

The next big decision is selecting topology of the projects; HP provides a best practices white paper to help you select the most appropriate one for your organization. While the application allows for mix-and-match approach, some capabilities such as sharing artifacts across domains and projects might be affected.

Security considerations are standard for any JEE application: firewalls, DMZ, reverse proxy, security certificates etc. Most of these would be taken care of with SaaS option; it is DIY for on-premises one. The application itself provides robust role-based security, with configurable attributes and customization.

SaaS option comes with a number of benefits as well as drawbacks, and deserves a consideration of its own. Keep in mind that you do lose some control with it: for instance, you won’t be able to have “Site Admin” privilege, the highest one will be TDAdmin - plenty to administer domains, projects and users - but for everything else you’d have to go through “official channels”, namely your HP SaaS representative (like, configuring third party integration, or enabling/disabling Performance/Quality Centers integration); the LDAP integration also becomes a separate integration project instead of a built-in feature and so on. Make sure that you weigh all the options before you choose the deployment model.

Once the application is up and running it is pretty straightforward to administer through a browser of your choice; keep in mind that your users will still have to use IE 7/8 or a desktop client. It is recommended to use the desktop client - especially on newer machines where older versions of IE are hard to come by. In order to provide rich client functionality, both IE and the desktop client will install sizeable .Net libraries, and will require VC++ redistributable to be installed first; for HP Service Test WSE 2.0 SP3 Runtime and MS Access Database Engine 2007 will be installed - a minor inconvenience but something to keep in mind when planning rollout.

The HP provides a number of tutorials (PDF, movie files, online resources) on how to use the application, as well as a number of classes to familiarize yourself with the product. While the tutorials are of high quality, and will get you through the initial steps, the complexity of the suite is such that budgeting some classes - online/on site - is highly recommended. You’ll learn about many best practices, ways to organize your projects for maximum reuse through libraries and templates, configuring KPI and dashboards; consider it as an upfront investment to jumpstart your efforts.

The product is geared towards traditional SDLC but can accommodates various project management styles (e.g. an Agile Accelerator plug-in is provided at additional cost), and does not impose many constraints - for instance, one could decide to start cranking out requirements, and then associate them with release cycles, and another might spend some time honing her release management strategies. The application provides built-in versioning control (an option to be enabled once project is created); use it - if something is not under version control, it does not exist. This goes for requirement, source code, attached documents - everything!

Once created, requirements can be converted into manual tests with a built-in wizard, accessible from pop-up menu. It creates an editable test suite which traces back to original requirements, and could be run - either in Sprinter or through manual runner - almost right away; this might prove to be a significant time saver. One of the most important features to maintain control over your project is traceability matrix - ability to link requirements to tests to test results to source code to defects - would allow you to keep tabs on your project, and drill down to the root cause quicker than otherwise possible.

The application supports variety of reposting options - from configurable graphs (trend, pie, bar etc), to reports in PDF, Microsoft Word and Excel formats. Reports could be assigned public or private folders, and be combined into dashboards of the same visibility.

The HP Quality Center and Performance Center are tightly integrated with HP ALM suite. These are based on LoadRunner (load and stress testing) and QuickTest Pro which, together with Sprint and Service Testing, is known as UFT - Unified Functional Testing. Both QC and PC are integrated into administrative console, and are available to the users based upon assigned role.

The HP ALM suite integrates into Software Configuration Management environments you might have assembled in your organization, including support for SCM suites (e.g. AccuRev, IBM ClearCase) the most popular products in each category: development environments (Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio, InteliJ IDEA - no out-of-box integration with Oracle JDeveloper/NetBeans), source code version control (Git, SVN, Perforce, TFS), continuous integration build servers (Jenking/Hudson, TeamCity, Microsoft TFS), source code quality tools (JUnit, NUnit, TestNG), code coverage analysis tools (NCover, Cobertura), static code analysis (Coverity, Fortify). Some of the integration capabilities are fee add-ons, and some require third party software (for example, IBM ClearCase is integrated through OpsHub, and IBM Rational Team Concert/Jira, Rally or Collabnet - with TaskTop connectors)

To sum it up:
Pros:

Tight integration with quality assurance suite including functional testing, performance testing and security testing.
Costs (compared to other integrated ALM vendors)
Provides two deployment options - on premises, and SaaS, and for on-premises gives a choice of the platform - from Unix to Windows.
Enterprise class application supporting variety of project management styles, fully integrated stack with full traceability between requirements to tests to defects to source code to release cycles.
A number of integration options with developers’ tools, software configuration management suites, and third party tools (continuous integration, ALM and more).
Decent support in resolving issues.

Cons:

Complexity.
Costs (well into seven figures, depending on configuration options)
Steep learning curve.
Limited choice for the desktop clients (Windows only), including both QA and HP ALM proper. Occasional bug requiring user to submit ticket to HP.
Integration options are limited, some require third party software.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

agileninjaAgile Coach at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees

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Jun 25, 2018

Thanks for the information about integration - it really helped (I didn't know that 3rd party tools like www.opshub.com has these integrations)

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Anil Kulkarni

Senior Director/Practice Leader at Cirruslabs

Feb 2, 2023

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Great traceability feature with good reporting

Pros and Cons

"Produces good reports and has a great traceability feature."

"Lacks sufficient plug-ins."

What is our primary use case?

We are customers of Micro Focus and I'm a senior director of our company.

What is most valuable?

The overall licensing and reporting has definitely improved. As a leader, I was able to get the reports I needed and the same applies to developers. Traceability really helps me and is a great feature. When I used to be a test manager, it was very useful. ALM is user-friendly.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for 15 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is relatively easy but we hired a third-party organization to assist.

What other advice do I have?

I rate this solution 10 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.