OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

• Being a large SAP shop, having the ability to track individual issues to a defined release is a key function.
• We also use the tool for our performance testing and automation efforts, including the test library repository. These functions within the tool are easy to use and allow our internal user community simplicity in the needed access to these.
• Scalability is a must with our business and this tool has it.

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.

I've used it for five years.

Just the amount of time to install as well as the reinstall frequency.

No issues encountered.

No. Scalability is another key reason for using this tool as mentioned above.

As with any big company, HP support is good but costly.

I have not had to deal with them.

We really started using ALM about five years ago when our testing automation efforts kicked into high gear. Up until then, we were tracking testing using various other smaller tools.

Setup was straightforward once the needed hardware was defined and in place.

It was done in-house.

We have other tools with HP, so it's bundled in with these and hard to measure ROI specifically for one tool.

You need to negotiate with HP.

It's a great tool for a company looking to establish a scalable solution that will give you flexibility as you grow, BUT I would highly suggest you have individual(s) with the expertise to care for and feed it.

We primarily use the solution for test management.

The dashboard reporting is great.

It offers very good defect management, test planning, and execution. 

It's been stable so far. 

The product can scale. 

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.

I've been using the solution for 15 years. 

We haven't had any issues with stability. It's reliable. The performance is good. There aren't any bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We have found the product to be scalable. 

We have between 7,000 and 8,000 users right now. 

The technical support is average. We aren't unhappy with them. However, we don't find them to be exceptional. The quality of the response could be better. It's the first level of response that's the issue. They don't dig deep. They might read your something or ask questions unrelated to the underlying issues. They need people with good product knowledge even at level one support.

We've only ever used this solution. We did not use anything else previously. 

We have four admins that can maintain the product.

The initial setup is complex in terms of understanding everything and building up the infrastructure required for deploying it. Setting up all the infrastructure from the servers to the database, to load balancers can be difficult. Many things are there. It takes a good amount of knowledge actually to deploy it correctly.

Initially, the implementation was done by Micro Focus. After that, the four admins take of upgrading, et cetera. The initial implementation was done many years ago by Micro Focus, and thereafter it's all the admins who take care of everything else.

I don't handle any aspect of the pricing. 

I'm both a consultant and a user. I'm a Micro Focus partner.

It's all about what you need. If you really want to deploy a good test management tool, which gives benefits and helps you manage everything, and you're really serious about test management and application management, then go for it. If you just want a tool that takes care of something from testing an ALM, you're not as serious and likely don't need this. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Consolidate the testing process, centralised reporting, ease of analytics on metrics, easier bug management, consistent flow of requirements, flow of test cases, reusable test cases, testing history, bugs.

It has improved our organization as a result of several factors: All test assets are in one central location; Easier to track progress of QA activities; Easier reporting; Easier to assess quality

Requirements Management, Test Plan, Test Lab, Defect Management, Sprinter, Access control, Versioning and audit.

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.

More than five years.

No

Can be used for really large organisations, multiple test projects

Customer Service:

Very responsive, though we haven't needed a lot of support.

Technical Support:

Technical Support has been helpful.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Vendor. The team was very qualified, both technically and from a user perspective.

We haven't yet computed the ROI.

Original cost was $158,000. Our day-to-day cost is difficult to compute, but it’s very low.

Yes, IBM - CLM.

It’s a great product for managing an end-to-end lifecycle process. It’s easy to use once you get the hang of it. One of the biggest pluses is having all your test assets in one place – requirements, models, test cases, test results, bugs, reporting, tracking (it’s unbeatable in my opinion).

It's also great that HP has now lowered the Saas cost for ALM - it was too high in my view.

Definitely the testing. My app test case organization, being able to organize it, and standardize a quality program.

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.

Five years.

We don't really have downtime, but we do have where it crashes here and there. So, stability is not great, but okay.

It does not meet our needs. The product is very geared towards waterfall. Very stable, standard things, and as an organization, we want to be innovative. We want to try new things, and it just doesn't seem to do that easily.

It's okay. We've had to escalate things a few times to get answers, but they have provided them in the end.

Setup and upgrades are complex.

Probably one of my biggest issues with the product is that it's so complex and hard to do. We even paid $30,000 for a consultant to come in. One year in, then we wanted this upgrade again, and they wanted to have a consultant come in again. I'm like, "We just did!"

So, we decided, "We're going to try it without it," and so far it's going well, but the complexity of it seems to be daunting to engineers, not like other tools that they implement and upgrade.

The biggest benefit is it’s a seamless way for demonstrating the validity of the testing effort from requirement: test planning, execution, and ultimately, reporting.

When I first arrived, everything was manual, no single process, etc. At this point, I set up a standard testing practice utilizing this tool for all testing. It allows for test management to be seen by senior leadership.

Reporting.

Over 15 years.

No.

No.

A seven out of 10.

Not relevant.

It could be complex depending on the setup. However, I have done this for a number of years and do not have any issues with it.

It is expensive.

Yes. Micro Focus, IBM Rational, and Spectra.

It is the standard upon which all products are gauged.

Defect Management: This feature allows us to track the defect status for our project, send the notification to the user via email and all the details about the defects can be maintained for the future reference as knowledge center.

Graphs and Dashboard: This is one of the top features, by which we can track the status of the project with ease to keep track of project management and executive reporting.

The live graphs can be exported via public URL's and can be integrated with SharePoint and others as required.

More collaborative, ease of work, and better documentation of all project activities.

Certainly on the UI part, it has to be improved to make it user-friendly and more presentable.

More than three years.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Technical Support is great and always responsive to solve the issues.

Nope, the architecture is simple to implement and scale.

The price is a bit high.

Go ahead with this tool. It is for the project management and test execution.

Do consult a few of the other folks using this tool to understand the tricks.

Being able to quickly and easily compile executables on multiple platforms.

Just over 10 years ago, our organization joined the Australian Bill payment scheme, part of the technical requirements involve having to build a COBOL interface to their rules validation program. So we needed to source a COBOL development environment which would allow us to quickly develop and deploy a COBOL interface.

None that I can think of from my experience, MicroFocus COBOL does everything we need it to do.

More than 10 years

No, we found the support staff at MicroFocus in Australia to be highly knowledgeable and very much of assistance in helping us get our products setup and deployed.

None, the product has been absolutely rock-solid.

No, the solution has coped with tens of millions of dollars worth of transactions over the years.

Very high.

Extremely good.

No.

Yes, setup was fairly straightforward. It needed a little help with regards to the license server on the development platform, but once that was sorted out everything was smooth sailing.

We developed our solution in-house.

Substantial, the payment platform is an essential customer service.

We found the pricing to be very reasonable.

We did, however MicroFocus stood out with their excellent technical support.

It's a very good tool to use for referencing all testing components in the lifecycle of the application end to end. For example, you can include a requirement test case, feasibility of execution, and dashboard reporting for web or mobile applications.

The benefit is to track coverage of functionality, and to have a stronger application without bugs in production.

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.

For the past month, the solution has been more stable than it has been over the past 10 years. For our mobile center, for example, we started using it this year; but it's not very stable for the moment. ALM, however, is stable.

For the moment, we use it for our projects; but our testing centre is only in one location, and not for offshore. We haven’t had to scale it much.

Technical support depends; frequently, it's not very responsive in resolving our problem, but engineers handle it too late.

In the past, we used a Compuware Solution and an open source solution. We switched to ALM because tracking all activities is better when all your monitoring is on products from the same vendor.

The initial setup was okay.

The IBM solution is very hard to set up and to use. The Silk solution, which is now Micro Focus, is very strong.

With ALM, it’s simple.

Use ALM because it's simple; it has all information you need to communicate with all people involved in a project, whether they are in IT or not IT. This is the aim of the testing lifecycle.

The most important thing when choosing a vendor is that the product is user friendly and can integrate with all your old modules. It helps to have one application rather than multiple applications to connect with all the different companies.