OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

When I use it, it is mostly for test management. The instances I've used are mostly on-prem.

It is a tool, and it works. It has got good linkage and good traceability between the test cases and the defects. It has got lots of features for testing.

It can be quite clunky, and it can easily be configured badly, which I've seen in a couple of places. If it is configured badly, it can be very hard to use. It is not so easy to integrate with other products. I've not used Micro Focus in a proper CI/CD pipeline, and I haven't managed to get that working because that has not been my focus. So, I find it hard. I've often lost the information because it had committed badly. It doesn't commit very well sometimes, but that might have to do with the sites that I was working at and the way they had configured it.  

The feature that I would have liked to see is more integration into CI/CD pipeline and agile pipeline. It should have integration with third-party tools such as Jira, DevOps, and the cross-platform type of thing. The versions I've used are older, so these features may have already been included in the new versions.

I have been using this solution for 10 to 12 years.

I've had many cases where I've lost data. I had bugs where I couldn't record, and the records got lost or locked, but rather than the actual product, it had more to do with the way it was set up at the sites I was working at.

It is scalable. I've seen big organizations using it.

I've not had to deal with technical support.

I also use Microsoft Azure DevOps. I don't really have a preference. It is horses for courses, and it depends on the type of application you're running. For older style waterfall projects, you can probably go with Micro Focus, barring pricing and others things. For agile or particularly a Microsoft Azure-based product, I would go with DevOps because of the better pipeline and the whole end-to-end integration.

I never had to set it up from scratch.

I've never been in the procurement process for it. I don't think it is cheap. Some of the features can be quite expensive.

Generally, it is pretty good for what it does. As a standalone tool for managing testing, it is good.

I would give Micro Focus ALM Quality Center an eight out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for test management.

The solution has dozens of excellent features. It's hard to pinpoint just one.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not too hard to deploy.

The pricing of the product could be improved.

The solution needs to offer support for Agile. Currently, ALM only supports Waterfall. Whereas ALM Octane is a product that Micro Focus has full for Agile projects. It's not really and apples to apples comparison between those two products, however, it shows that the company has an understanding of Agile and it would be nice if they could support it on both products.

I've been using the solution for over ten years. It's been quite a while since we actually started using it - about a decade. Therefore, I have quite a bit of experience with it.

We have multiple clients using the solution. The number of users for each entity varies.

I can't speak to if any have plans to scale or increase usage in the future.

The technical support aspect of the solution isn't the best. That said, I haven't met a vendor that has very good technical support.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward in general. A company shouldn't have any issues implementing it.

I can't speak to how long the deployment actually took. It varies from client to client. We've had clients that deployed in two to three weeks, and others that took months. It depends on many factors.

We are implementors. We help clients set up and deploy the solution.

The licensing costs vary from client to client. There are different prices for SaaS versus on-premises deployments, for example.

There are only Micro Focus and Tricentis that are playing in this space properly. Anything else really isn't competing.

I would advise maybe to look more at ALM Octane if a company is in an Agile and DevOps transformation program. This product wouldn't really be suitable if that was the case.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a three out of ten.

We use this solution for model testing and as a central location for the test case responses and some test automation.

Central test locations are a benefit. The ability to integrate this solution with other applications is helpful. If there is automation, it comes with improved quality and speed.

This solution is open and very easy to integrate. The interface is good too.

There needs to be improvement in the requirement samples. At the moment, they are very basic.

They could also improve the usability.

I find the system very stable. There is very little downtime.

This solution is scalable. There is the ability to draw on the different platforms, especially with ALM Octane. However, I am more interested in the new hard platforms, so more of a container platform or solution. This is on their roadmap in the next three years, so at least there is a plan for it.

It is very good. We are located in Germany, and they have a service partner here. The fix given to us depends on the complexity of the problem, but usually we get answers within a day.

If someone is researching solutions, they should know that this solution is stable, centralized, and scalable. If they need integration, then this is the tool to use.

When selecting a vendor, some important criteria are availability, knowledge, price, and the site where they are getting the product. For example, if we have people doing a project as a team, then it is best if the solution can work in different languages, like German and English.

ALM helps us keep track of all the functional testing that we do for projects before deployment and even after it goes live. We also use it for tracking future enhancements, and all the functional defects. Test requirements are maintained in ALM.

It saves time, and definitely mitigates risks in having products which are not very well built, to having a product which will perform well and function well once it goes live.

I work in a bio-pharmaceutical company, so we have lot of validated applications, and when we do functional testing for these validation applications, tracking the e-signatures is very important.

I know there are plugins to track the e-signatures, but the problem is that it's very hard to get them implemented. There's no out-of-the-box way, as far as I know, to implement track changes continuously, that comes with add-ons, and those add-ons operated by third parties as well. They are not very mature and there is a huge learning cycle in adopting them. Due to these reasons, the effectiveness of ALM for an industry like ours is less than what we would see in LoadRunner.

It has been challenging in the past, specifically when a new version is released and we have to upgrade. We haven't been upgrading that often, and because of that, it may mask some other issues which we would encounter because by the time we upgrade the new version we would have gone through some of the new patch fixes and so on. We wait for a couple of years and then apply the fixes. By that time, most of the big bugs are fixed.

It scales for our requirements but we have been finding it more and more expensive for LoadRunner. They're introducing new protocols, but they are quite scalable.

We haven't used technical support directly from HPE. We go through Avnet for all the technical support. They're a value added reseller partner of HPE.

We acquired HPE products a long time ago before I was around.

We have been using ALM and LoadRunner throughout. I can't recall having used any other solution before that. But one thing I have noticed is that there's less and less emphasis on load, scalability or performance testing, and the emphasis seems to be shifting away completely. This is feedback based on the fact that there's less emphasis on performance and load testing in these seminars as opposed to the last few years.

It supports the full test management life cycle. We have other test management tools in place, such as JIRA and a couple others, but ALM provides the broadest coverage from project creation to death.

We have developers, project managers, stakeholders, everybody referring to one single point-of-truth for everything that is related to a project, from requirements, test cases, coverage, defect tracking, and reporting.

The client installation is sometimes quite painful. You need to register some components on the client that need administration rights, which is really tough on the organization. For each upgrade of the software, every minor upgrade, you need to reinstall the client, which means basically somebody needs to travel around and do the upgrades on each client. Basically, what we really would like to see would be a proper web client that has good coverage. There is a web client, but it only covers a very small part of the product, so you can't use it for the full life-cycle, and so we decided not to use the web client.

It deploys without issue.

For us, it's stable. We're happy with the stability.

We have no issues with scalability.

We have had a bit of trouble at times and, in all fairness, sometimes we felt quite left alone. We've approached technical support with real problems and either they referred us to "well, check it on some of the Internet based forums", or "look at the FAQ", or something like that. Also, we sometimes feel left alone. In the end, it turned out that we were better off sorting ourselves on some forum instead of contacting support and opening a ticket. We're in a quite agile environment and if a support call is stuck for 6 or 8 weeks, it doesn't help us.

We were using JIRA before and still are using JIRA. But that is only a section of coverage, so we needed something that has a broader coverage of the process, and the ALM was the choice.

ALM setup was pretty straightforward. We had standard problems like connecting to the active directory and making sure that the missions are set correctly and so on.

Make sure you have full acceptance of all involved or possibly involved groups. Make sure that your management supports it and everybody is happy to use the tool and happy to share a good level of information in the development life cycle. This is where, for us, the most benefit came out of it. If you have a defect, you can easily with a mouse click get the full information.

We are using SaaS mode, connected with our internal LDAP

• Highly customizable GI, easy for designing product backlog
• Whole bunch of metrics on Dashboard page
• Available in French language (Paris based company)
• Built-in Retrospective
• Continuous integration features

• Transition to Agile for new projects is made eaier
• Tool helps people to get accustomed with Agile Scrum and Kanban concepts, specially for Product owners

• Lack of communication while unveiling new functionalities on Saas
• Licensing model is relatively expensive compared to alternate solutions
• License management could be more flexible (like floating licenses)

2 years

No

Excellent performance except few days in 2 years experience.

Easily scalable - we have 400 users using the same instance.

Good interaction from support people.

Excellent. The integration with our LDAP went very smooth.

Jira

Initial set-up in early 2013 was difficult as the product was new. PS did a good job in presenting the solution.

Very good and professional.

We had 2 months free trial and support from HP PS people.

Jira GreenHopper

My prior organization used the test execution and defect modules for QC. As a manager, I was able to set up reports that allowed me to finds areas of improvement for my team. We used the import functionality to import test cases for reusability and execution.

Prior to using Quality Center, my organization used spreadsheets and emails to track testing efforts. Therefore, QC helped my team become more efficient by tracking all testing activities with the tool.

I like the customizable report functionality. I was able to set up reports that allowed me to accurately give a real-time status all of all testing projects that were in process.

• I would love to see QC update and use metric dashboards at the individual and project level. 
• The UI also needs some updating with a fresh new look and feel.

The most valuable feature is definitely its scalability. It covers the life cycle end-to-end, from requirements to test execution and defect management. There are some features we haven't yet explored, such as project planning and libraries, but these also add to the end-to-end view of the life cycle.

It provides our team with a well-defined structure for the way each person should work, giving us a standardized process. For example, with defect management, we can find a particular issue and know exactly who's working on it and where exactly they are in the work flow. Previously, people tended to work on their own thing without coordinating with others.

We found some difficulty in working with it, as we're a large organization. Once we got to 10,000 users, the idea of an individual user lost its value and there wasn't the ability to create teams within ALM. We weren't able to assign particular work to a team, but there's no function for that. This is something that should be built into ALM.

We have no issues deploying ALM.

The stability is very good, especially when compared with some of the other products from large software vendors.

Scalability has been excellent, going from a user base of several hundred to around 10,000.

I've not personally used technical support, but other in my company have. Some of the queries are responded to very quickly.

I wasn't involved in the overall decision, just on which version to select.

We have a lot of internal processes which elongates the process, but as far as the actual installation and configuration is concerned, it was reasonably straightforward.

We considered other options.