OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

• Reporting
• Dashboard
• Traceability
• Application Lifecycle Management

The tool has increased the collaboration between different teams.

Some improvement to the Requirements Management are needed.

I've used it for five years along with HP Quality Center Enterprise Edition v10.

No issues encountered.

No, it's a very stable product.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

8//10.

Technical Support:

7/10.

We switched because the previous solution was lacking features to manage a complete life-cycle.

Very simple setup.

We used a vendor who were 10/10.

11 months.

Varies.

For us this was the complete choice.

Use iy out of the box and utilize built in features.

Very robust API to interface with the tool and you can customize how its used. Maintains data integrity very well. Very customizable. Great for larger organizations.

Reporting is almost useless, but it does allow you to extract information directly from the database through a robust API and report with your favorite tool [excel, Crystal]. Not easy for lay people to administer.

You can do your development from start to finish: starting with the requirements, ending with defects, and testing in-between having everything in one tool and be able to validate everything up and down in the SDLC.

Over the years, we've used this tool extensively in quality assurance, so they can record the test cases. They do whatever they need to do to execute the test cases, then report on what they've done, and how many defects have appeared. If they've gone out of production, then they've actually been able to shorten the time for QA, shorten the time for development, and lessened the amount of defects that actually get out to production.

The downside is that the Quality Center's only been available on Windows for years, but not on Mac. There's not any solution to any platform or browser. That's been a problem and people have been going to other tools because of it.

I've been using this product for about 18 years.

To a certain extent. We've had some projects that have gotten very large, to the point where one of them has become unsustainable, and we had to split it up to upgrade it to the next version.

The install itself, a lot of the DLLs and a lot of the times we get some updates, like Microsoft updates, cause issues with the tool itself. I think it can be improved, but if it's going to be a Windows program, something different than .net or something that's going to be more futuristic or really more inline with the technology of today.

We have a SaaS solution right now. At one point, we were on-premise. When we were on-premise, we had premier support, which was phenomenal because we got immediate attention. The support that's not premier support, it is not so good.

People don't take advantage of a lot of the functionality that the tool has. I think overall it's a very good tool for what it does.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They know me, and I know them, so having a very good relationship and a very good rapport is very important. If I need help, I can go to certain people, and I can get help.

• Test Plan: Script storage and update.
• Test Lab: Execution planning and results storage.

Because of global test documentation, testing can be resourced most effectively each test cycle (including outsourcing).

Integration with test automation never worked properly. We were never able to run test automation on the SaaS platform. We ended up having to use QC 10 for test automation. We went through several "fixes", upgrades, etc., and were never able to fix the problem.

My guess would be 18 years at least.

Use of test automation with ALM is inherently unstable.

The parts that work seem to scale very well. But our use of test automation appears to have exceeded what this tool can do with that functionality.

Tech support is very, very poor. There is no coordination between product groups, you have to repeat the same information multiple times, features that are "fixed" end up breaking in the next release, and releases and upgrades do not fix problems as promised.

No.

We have installed multiple versions and upgrades over the years and it can be very cumbersome.

It can be expensive to own.

No.

Can be beneficial for large companies, but check out alternatives. Some of them might fit the bill for less money.

The test generation ability, coverage reporting, and risk prioritization. From a test and defect management perspective, there are few that can compare for delivery in a traditional/waterfall project).

For our clients it provides a centralized means of accessing data, monitoring progress, and creating a singular view on the test status within the business. A number have used it to perform comparative analysis to determine the resultant cost saving and benefits achieved as a result of using the application, and determining process improvement.

The product could do with more native integration for agile projects, a greatly reduced cost model and closer integration with products that are non-HP.

On and off for various customers for 10 years (i.e. going back to when it was Mercury Quality Center).

Not normally.

No. This is an enterprise application and scales accordingly.

Seven out of 10.

We use multiple solutions depending on the needs of our client at the time.

Straightforward.

HPE is constantly updating its licensing to be competitive, but as a whole the pricing for ALM is very high for the local market and, as such, we see a larger adoption overseas.

Yes.

Perform the recommended due diligence when adopting any new tool and ensure that the tool adoption correctly addresses the problem being experienced. This is a good tool and if correctly implemented will provide a solution to a number of delivery focused issues within a business.

Playback, test tracking, and defect management are the most valuable features.

Playback made it easy to create automated functional tests that could be reused.

Test tracking eliminated the need to track test executions on a separate application, such as Excel.

It provides ease of use, the reporting status and tracking of defects.

I no longer use the product as its price does not fit into my QA budget.

Its pricing does need to improve. As I recall, when I was working at my previous company, we paid over $100,000 a year plus maintenance. At that time, I could have purchased a RadView selection for that much and reduced the annual maintenance to around $15,000.

I have used this solution for about 10 years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Earlier, we used a home-grown, Lotus Notes-based system. Later on, I moved to a position where HPE QC was already being used.

The setup isn't too easy nor too difficult; I'd put it somewhere in the middle.

This is an excellent tool for larger companies. It has been my experience that it is not cost-effective in medium or small-scaled companies.

While at my previous employer, I evaluated other options and recommended moving to a more cost-effective tool. At that time, I recommended RadView.

Make sure it fits into your cost structure and consider the annual maintenance cost in your evaluation.

Definitely support of the agile methodology is the most valuable feature. We have received a lot of feedback from our agile teams that the ALM.NET is not supporting their work and it was really great to see that ALM Octane is fulfilling those needs. But our development and testing teams are looking for the new agile and DevOps deliveries.

We see a double benefit because part of our business is still very legacy-type. We are running the mainframes, and so on, the old kind of solutions, where we pretty much see that, at least for the next year to two to maybe even three years, we will continue using the ALM.NET, as such, maybe even for the functional testing and the UFT, as such. But another team is quickly adopting the agile methodology and there we have hardly seen any validity at all on the Octane for over a year now. We started to implement it the first real project in NND Center, and see good results from that.

The new solutions that are soon coming for ALM Octane, such as predictivity and requirements management, are very welcome. Those have been missing from the existing solution. So far, we have been able to manage with the other alternative solution and integrations, but I am also really looking forward to that.

So far, we are very happy with stability, even though knowing that there is quite a lot of new development, especially for the ALM Octane. But so far, so good. I have nothing bad to say.

We are at a very early stage in implementing this solution. But at the moment it looks promising. Although, it is difficult to say how far it goes. But at least, so far, we have started.

So far, technical support is very good because we have been using HPE products, or the earlier Mercury products, for a long time. We have a quite good collaboration with them. From that kind of background and knowing our kind of working environment and solutions, together with their technical support and help, we have been able to implement these tools in the right way the first time, without trying to invent the wheel on our side.

Setup was pretty straightforward. Obviously, we kind of had a bit of discussion internally, because we didn't take a traditional migration from the earlier product. We really started from scratch. That is still somewhat an issue for some of the deliveries, that they don’t want to use the agile method. But we have highly recommended this because they are two different worlds and that it would be better to plan it carefully and not just carry on all the crap from history.

Our development teams are using a lot of open source solutions and other tools, such as JIRA. But, for our business needs and the business purposes, we have seen that HPE solutions are still valid for our business. We need to have backwards traceability. We have to have the capability to show what has been done, what's been going on, and what. In some of the cases, there has been the discussions that, "Yes. We have all this information, but you have to go to the Jenkins, or this and that logs, and it's there." But that's not what the business wants to see. They want to have a high-level visibility on their business. That is why we are still keeping the HPE products, and probably also in the future we'll have them.

The defects section is the most valuable.

It has improved our testing designs and test reporting.

• Ability to export test plans (test cases and libraries) in other formats, such as in Excel.
• Test Lab functionality needs to be changed so you can set test attributes automatically with minimal effort.

I've used it for two years, although not in my current role.

My department doesn't do deployments, but I believe that the team doing it does have problems.

Customer Service:

We have a specific department that deals with customer service.

Technical Support:

We have a specific department that deals with technical support.