OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

• Requirements module
• Test Plan/Case module
• Defect module
• Reporting modules
• API

• Real-time snapshot of project vitals
• Reusability of requirements
• Tests
• Flexibility in assigning multiple testers to a project, rather than assigning each tester to a test case
• Seamless on the fly reorganise test projects due to corporate emergencies and shifting priorities

• Traceability and version control management
• Not able to group project deliverables by builds

I've used it for six years.

When we were installing v10, the installation became corrupted. So when we upgraded to v11, it was very expensive, and at our own cost, to do. This was regardless of our maintenance contract with HP.

No issues encountered.

Our vendor is 10/10, but HP is 7/10.

Our vendor is 10/10, but HP is 8/10.

No previous solution was used.

The installation tools are not the best, even for experienced IT/admin, it self-corrupts, and there is no good tech support to help with install issues unless you pay them to fly in a team.

We did it in-house.

It's 300%.

It depends on your vendor. SkyIt was the best, as they were able to get the initial cost low enough so a small startup could afford it.

• IBM
• JIRA/Test Link

For small companies where audits/lawsuits etc. are not a factor, it's not worth the investment. You should use open source or lower cost alternatives (JIRA project/defect tracking, Test Link open source QC like Test Tool). However, for any company that wants a mature, highly developed platform that is constantly improving, need to survive audits, etc., you must consider HP ALM solutions such as HP Quality Center.

We use this solution primarily for doing test cases and running UFT cases.

The integration with UFT is nice.

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.

I first started using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center in 2011.

We are using version 12. It has a new name, it's called HPE application Lifecycle Management.

The stability of the hardware is okay. It's just the tool itself is not easy to use at all.

The scalability is not great at all, especially with the licensing model.

I have never had to use them because we have an in-house group that manages many of our issues. I don't know what their interactions have been with Micro Focus, but I have personally had never reached out to them.

My experience with it, in general, is that the initial setup is not easy and that upgrades are dreaded. Companies tend to not go through the upgrade process because it causes many different types of issues, especially on the database side. This seems to be a longstanding bug with the management of permissions that goes all the way back to quality center days that have never been addressed. 

I would say that the initial setup is not easy at all.

The licensing model is an area that can be improved.

The cost of licensing depends on the number of VMs that you are running test cases on and it is not cheap. To the best of my recollection, it is several thousand dollars per license.

We are having a lot of problems with this product and we're now looking at other options.

This is a product that I do not recommend but if someone were in a situation where they were intent on using it, my advice is definitely to plan it out ahead of time. Don't try to wing it and learn it on the fly. Have someone who knows the tool and can set up the proper authorization because otherwise, it will be like ours, which is a mess.

I would rate this solution a three out of ten.

I use 80 to 90 percent of the product's features. 

• It has a good response time.
• The AI and functionality interface are useful. 
• The task management reporting has a lot of out-of-the box uses.

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. 

ALM can scale and is very impressive. It can support thousands of users with a very low amount of resources. It can easily manage very big projects within thousands of people at a time. It allows and disables scale, supporting front-end operations and task management at different levels. 

The initial setup is quite easy, if you know what you are doing. 

It allows us to keep our costs low. I do not want to pay beyond a certain point for this solution.

REST API. It lets me do what I need to do, instead of what HPE Quality Center does on its own.

By using the REST API, I have automated QA Reporting, and integrated QA information into the development build process.

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.

10 years (including earlier versions).

Yes. While most of it is introduced by our poor local setup, that is a direct outcome of my complaint mentioned in the need for improvement.

Yes, but again this mostly do with how we implemented it locally. Again, it is an outcome of the issue that the local site administrators set it up to be used in very unproductive ways.

On the lower end.

I have a lot of trouble getting to useful information – on the HP site, and with their technical support. Though I’m far removed from interacting with HP support directly now (at one point I was on the local support team for HPE QC, but now I’m just a user within my company).

Yes – HPE QC is much better than anything else I have seen.

Extremely complex, and unnecessarily so. Main reason was HPE QC doesn’t do a good job of explaining how you can keep it simple and still get the same job done. The tool is ready to do a great job, its how it gets implemented that is the real problem.

I understand that it’s still extremely expensive.

Yes – PVCS Tracker, Compuware’s Track Record, SmartBear, and JIRA. Some groups use JIRA for defect management (in addition to its development usage), but local JIRA usage is just as messed up in its setup that it just recreated the problems which we have with HPE QC instead of solving them.

Same advice as for any Test Resources Management product: KISS – "Keep it simple, stupid."

ALM makes functional testing much easier for our customers. We tell them that if they use ALM, they will have a productivity gain of at least 40% compared to using traditional spreadsheets, Word documents, and so on. They also need it because their departments are getting larger and larger. They're not sitting in the same place, so they need a tool to combine their teams’ efforts. This is difficult if you are using Excel spreadsheets because you need to send them by email and make sure they have the latest version.

We see the advantage of ALM over Quality Center. You can have templates instead of having specific templates for each product. Once we define the workflow for customer X and the setup for that customer, we include all of that in the template. If we want to make a change, we change it in the template. We'll then do an escalation down through all of the various products so that each and every one gets updated. So it means that things are administratively much easier with ALM compared to QC.

With Octane, HPE is finally trying to combine the agile world together with the functional testing world. It also has an integrated ALI, which means that with Octane you have one point of view of your whole testing process. I see that this as very valuable because we're also competing with JIRA and so on, which has the facilities that we are trying to accomplish with Agile Manager.

JIRA is fancied by developers; so if a war starts between developers and testers, usually what we see - in Denmark, at least, - is that the testers are on the losing side. But if we can get Agile Manager on our side, then we can start competing with products like JIRA.

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.

ALM is a very stable product. The latest version we install at customer sites is 12.5.3. It's a very stable platform. We have no complaints whatsoever.

Our customers do not generally use HPE support very often; and therefore it's a bit awkward for them to get started with it. They find it pretty difficult. That's not the worst part. The worst part is really when you finally get to someone to talk to, and then they're not qualified. So we instruct our customers, if that happens to you, you should say immediately that I want to escalate this to a duty manager, who can then take charge. It's not as bad as the time we tried to move all of our support functions to India. That was terrible. Thank God we got it back; but I don't think we are there yet. We need more qualified people to take first-line support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We are the experts in Denmark. That means it's a bit easier for us because we know exactly what to do. Various customers use our services to do that for them because it can be very complex if you only do it on a rare occasion. If there is a customer who needs to upgrade from 11.5.2, for example, and they haven’t touched the administrator module for a couple of years, it is easier for us to do the upgrade because we do it all the time.

HPE has failed desperately to offer a competitive enterprise for new customers in this market. If I have a new customer, three years ago I could sell them ALM site licenses. Now I need to sell them ALM global licenses, which is a hard sell because it is double the price. That just doesn't appeal for new customers. So I understand why they take JIRA or stick to Excel spreadsheets because HPE has priced themselves out of that market.

With Octane, you get more functionality; but it's like having Microsoft Word. How much of that functionality do you use? You probably use 20% out of the 80%. So I don't think that adding more functionality solves the problem. HPE desperately needs to get a low enterprise for new customers.

I believe that my largest competitor is our customers who are using Excel, followed by those who use JIRA.

Test Planning and Test Lab modules are the most valuable to capture test cases and track execution. Defect module for tracking defects in testing and to capture production incidents.

The primary HP QC modules, requirements, test plan, test lab, and defect management have become, over time, foundation stones in our project teams development methodology. In each area, the modules provide the fundamental processes to record scope, capture test cases, track execution for each phase of testing (functional unit, string/business process, integration, user acceptance, etc.) and our project management team are all HP QC "savvy" from a standpoint of using the tools to manage the project team, the component releases and change requests, that flow through our team.

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.

We have used HP ALM/Quality Center going back to its days as a Mercury Software product, 2006-2007 and have evolved up thru 12.01 at present.

At Verizon we are 'clients' on a supported application base. Application project teams are supported with domains and projects within a central installation. We didn't deploy the application, per se.

As a client, no, we have not have any major issues with stability. The application is pretty much available during business hours with the exception of routinely scheduled maintenance windows.

No issues to date. We're just a client (one of many project teams supported thru a central HP ALM/QC test tools support team) but the number of project teams that are supported via our central team would seem to imply that the application can scale to support large organizations split amongst multiple project teams.

As a customer/client of a central VZ QA/ALM installation, the few times we have needed to be in direct contact with HP, they have been responsive. We had a better relationship, overall, with Mercury Software before their acquisition by HP, but that was several years ago now.

Most of our technical support questions are fielded by our own in-house QC ALM support team. I can't directly speak as to their relationship with HP regarding direct technical support questions. Where we've had issues with specific installations, etc., they have been quickly resolved, so the assumption, always dangerous, would be that technical support is responsive with the primary vendor.

We have used this application for a number of years now. There have been explorations of a variety of open source, "DevOps-inspired" applications, as a potential replacement. To date, there has been no determination to move away from this application as our standard.

From a project team standpoint, the setup was very straightforward. All the tools are accessible and installable via browser.

We have an in-house one team who are supporting several portfolios within our IT organization. I would say their level of expertise is good to excellent.

I hate to say we haven't taken an independent project level analysis of ROI -- at this point, it's more an integral part of our application support model and a focal point for project level activities. Overall, even if informally measured, it's very high, if by no other measure than how deeply ingrained it has become in our project methodology and project tracking metrics.

Licenses are a major factor -- they are not inexpensive but with concurrent licensing our global IT groups are able to share licenses around the clock.

At the time we first utilized Mercury Quality Center, they were pretty well established as the industry leader in this space. When HP acquired them (2009?) they were the 800-pound gorilla in the test tools field.

For most large companies/installations, you will need to establish a core testing tools support group. This group can handle the care and maintenance of the application itself, the plug-in tools, user management, and deployment to various project teams. I would think taking this one within an isolated project team would be asking for headaches. Many organizations have turbulent histories with centralized testing -- it seems to typically depend on what is business critical -- not only externally, but internally (HR Payroll, for instance -- most companies can't tolerate issues with defects around payroll..

• End-to-End traceability - Request>Test>Result>Defect
• Versioning
• Reporting (since v11 when it uses Word templates)

• Added electronic signature functionality (in-house dev)
• Controlled changes to data allow for validated processes in a regulated environment (record workflow)

• Reporting
• Drill-up, drill-down works sort-of OK
• Multi-project reporting
• User-friendliness, it requires some time to get used to

I've been using it since 2004, when it was known as Mercury Test Director.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

7/10.

8/10.

No previous solution used.

It's simple, but customization adopting for a regulated environment is complex as it requires 15,000 lines of code.

It was done in-house.

Review if the all-to-be licensed functionality is needed as certain modules are not used as they introduce needless complexity. You should aim for concurrent licensing if global us is needed as slack periods in one time-zone can be picked up by another.

No other options were evaluated, we just upgraded from Test Director>Quality Center>ALM, and we are planning to upgrade from v11 to v12.

ALM/Quality Center is expensive, but it has its value and, in certain cases, the Enterprise edition is way too much, but it is very stable and reliable. You should review v12 Webclient solution for requirements management.

I'm using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for testing purposes.

What's most valuable in Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is that it's useful for these activities: test designing, test planning, and test execution.

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.

I've been using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for six months now.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is a stable product.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center should be scalable, but I don't know what's behind the infrastructure, so I'm unsure of its scalability.

I don't deal directly with external support. I'm dealing with internal support, so I can't rank the technical support for Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. I don't deal with their support directly.

My organization previously used HP Quality Center, but I don't remember the differences between that solution and Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. I also don't make decisions on whether to move from one solution to another solution.

I wasn't part of the team who set up Micro Focus ALM Quality Center, so I don't have information on whether the process was straightforward or complex.

I'm not aware of the pricing or licensing cost for Micro Focus ALM Quality Center.

At least sixty people who are part of different departments are using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center in the organization I'm working for now.

There are people who use the solution once a day, while there are people who use it twice a week, etc. It depends on their positions.

I'm rating Micro Focus ALM Quality Center six out of ten. What would make it an eight or a nine for me is improving the dashboard and adding a management tool that would be useful for management reviews.