OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

The Open Test Architecture (OTA) and development of the REST API. The OTA is a published set of functions that administrators and users can use to interact with HP ALM programmatically. The most common example HP ALM users would recognize is the Microsoft Excel upload template, which allows users to upload test scripts to HP ALM projects directly from an Excel worksheet.

The REST API sneaked into HP ALM with little fanfare. The REST API has no application overhead and is fast. HP extended the API through patches in v11.0. Please check your current version and patch level to see which functionality is now included in the REST API.

On a recent multi-year project, the average defect resolution time for all defects was over twenty-two days. My goal was to reduce this number by 20%. It was an easy goal to reach because no one realized that 80% of 22 days was still a number out of bounds for defect resolution. I used custom fields, defect workflow and custom reports to move defects through their lifecycle. Within thirty days the defect resolution time was reduced to 3.1 days and averaged 1.1 days over the next eighteen (18) months.

The graphical user interface has the most room for improvement. Not all screens within the integrated suite refresh the same, some screens or activities are self-refreshing and some are not.

I would also like to see the “Disable Quick Runs” added back as a site parameter or built as an internal function within a project.

I've used it for seventeen years (1998 to present). This product was initially developed by Mercury-Interactive and released as Test Director. My first enterprise installation and administration experience with Test Director 2.0 was in 1998.

Over a seventeen year period, yes. The key to maintaining a site today is in patch management. Keep the patches up to date.

When the patches lag too much, it may be safer to build a new site and port the data than to try and patch an existing site in place.

Customer support for this product is with the vendor, not necessarily HP. After a site has been up and running a few years and all the original implementers are gone, it can take some time to even determine the vendor. My satisfaction level with vendors range from acceptable to excellent.

My personal satisfaction level with HP service and support website is low. I get the majority of my technical information from colleagues or third party discussion forums.

In the Application Lifecycle Management space, HP ALM and IBM Rational are the two big players. I recently participated in an evaluation of the IBM Rational Jazz Platform. The client had been using IBM’s ClearCase and ClearQuest for many years. During the evaluation, an unrelated IBM audit detected a long dormant pack of five ClearCase licenses on an active server. The cost associated with this incident ended our evaluation of the IBM solution.

Historically, most people considered this to be a defect tracking only tool. In that domain, tools are plentiful. Over the years I’ve used VI editor on UNIX, Microsoft Excel worksheets Microsoft Access databases, Bugzilla and Notepad for defect management.

The installation and configuration of an HP ALM site is straightforward for those with enterprise software deployment experience. An installation requires at minimum, a dedicated server with an operating system and database connection. The most typical, physical or virtual, hardware configuration I encountered over the years was a single Microsoft Windows server running web, license and application software servers. Both Oracle and MS SQL Server databases respond adequately, and when given a choice now select a schema based on DBA agreeability.

The installation of an HP ALM site establishes a service endpoint for communicating with other applications via Web Services. I believe the configuration and management of these services is the most complex part of a site installation and requires substantial planning to map fields and permissions across multiple applications.

HP ALM resellers typically perform the initial set up and configuration of the HP ALM site and user projects. In some cases, larger testing firms are also resellers and provide the tool as part of the project. I fundamentally disagree with buying a tool from its eventual user.

I advise clients to do the upfront planning and limit users with access to the site administration console to three or less. The planning required for a successful implementation requires much more time and effort than the deployment itself. Deployments are typically scripted while planning requires humans. Access to the HP ALM site console is separate from project access. I have seen sites with twenty or more registered site administrators. I believe this occurs more as a symptom of long term neglect than an implementation issue.

I encourage clients to use the built in service accounts and APIs where practical.

You can plan ahead with all the requirements and the test lab set it up as a library, then go do multiple testing times, recording the default that's in the system. Later, go back to check the coverage you are missing, so you can plan ahead and maybe reuse the same set as next time. Sort of like creating templates and reusing them over and over.

We use the quality engineering testing tool plus the defect tracking to make our reports, projects, and quality better. Once we had the evidence to approve all the testing and all the coverage, the reporting went better. Usually, the products make it much easier to identify the issues we have.

It is nice, but it does have some weaknesses. It's a bit hard to go back and change the requirement tool after setup.

It's not flexible enough. The formatting is also an issue. For example, the project manager doesn't like the use it, even for requirements, because it's not easy for them to change it. If they make a mistake and go back, it is hard to change the formatting to make it good. So, they have to share or use another one that try to upload. But, after the upload, you cannot change it because the IDs are identified. It's hard for them to work somewhere in-between, adding something in there, then keep the rest of them record is still linked well.

It's difficult to change it. Let's say you set up the requirement, if you change the requirement, by adding any on bottom which won't cause an issue, but I want to add it in central somewhere, then you mess up all the linkage for the test plan and test lab.

This requirement piece is what I think is the biggest disadvantage for the Quality Center. I do know Micro Focus does have a bunch of the new tools, but that depends if a customer wants to change it, use a new tool or stay on an older tool.

Reporting is a bit complicated. They have a standard report, but if I don't want to use that, I have to use the Excel reporter.

I have used it for the start of the implementation at our organization using Quality Center versions: 8, 9, 10, and now, we're on 11.5.

We host it in-house, so basically we don't have any bad downtime. It runs mostly 24/7, so Quality Center is pretty good with stability.

So far, it hasn't been an issue.

I would give them a high score as they do a pretty good job.

In the Quality Center, there's a tool, which we started with, QuickTest Pro. From there, we started to use QuickTest Pro, later we introduced and evaluated it. It looked like the situation we needed.

However, we wanted tracking. We started with QuickTest Pro, but now we're doing this, which includes a lot of the different areas, like it handles the workflow and/or agile and involving many necessary departments.

I was involved in the initial setup. I installed configure, manager, and the patch providing user access, though now we have a team.

The setup is straightforward. It's not hard to set up. We even used the multi-complicated one because we didn't want have the database alone.

To someone looking at Quality Center, I would tell them: It's a good tool to use and the support is good. However, if you want a fancy and modernized tool with a fancy outlook, then Quality Center is not a good tool for you.

Most important criteria when choosing a vendor: personal style. I want to know who will be continually knowledgeable.

• They know what they are selling.
• They respond back quickly with accurate information.

If someone talks to me, and I try a few times, but I cannot get clear information from them, I may disqualify this vendor completely.

This is managed by Tieto, our managed service testing partner. We use ALM as a repository for our automated test scripts. This is only the very beginning of the of our testing and managed testing service journey. The reason we use ALM is it's ability to schedule tests and nightly runs. It creates reports and statistics.

We are only starting off now. I'm able to present the progress on our work with the test-information initiative. I can keep a close eye on what's going on to monitor the progress and to schedule the test runs.

I used Quality Center 5-10 years ago, and I had no issues with it. It is also the de facto industry standard of test management tools. I don’t have enough insight at this point in time. If you ask me in half a year's time, I'm sure I'll have loads more information.

We have had no stablity issues so far.

I know for a fact that it's possible to scale it up. We might add another test management tool in-house that's been there for a long time called Rec Test; a Swedish solution.

It’s a very simple test management and requirement tool. But in the long run, ALM will probably support us better, so that is on my radar to keep track of and see how we can implement them better. This will take a lot of training and convincing of end-users.

I have not used technical support myself, but Tieto is actually doing that in an effort to improve their own framework and initiate a closer relationship with HPE.

Setup was a very smoothly written, spot-on theater.

Not formally, but informally through my own experience. Our use with Rec Test, as well certainly requires more training. It requires a more structured way of working. You really need to set up a good structure, and make sure everyone is following that structure. Otherwise you'll have a mess in no time.

We use the solution for test management and gathering requirements and test cases.

Business process management is the most valuable feature of the solution.

Sometimes the product is slow. We do not know if it is an issue with Micro Focus or our internal network. The performance could be faster.

I have been using this solution for one year.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Three of our customers use the product. There are about 720 users in our customers’ organizations.

We do not have any plans to increase the numbers. It depends on our customers.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was taken care of by another team in our organization.

We need one engineer to deploy and maintain the product.

We have experienced business-related benefits from the tool.

We have to pay an annual license fee for the product. The licensing fee is a little expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

We had considered other products like qTest, TestRail, Xray, and Jira. We chose Micro Focus because our clients wanted it.

I will definitely recommend the solution to others. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It's a business process requirement and is being used for test cases, test executions, defect locks, metrics, dashboards, etc.

In implementation projects, things work in the waterfall methodology so it's the best tool to collect all the requirements in one place to tie up into the test cases and test executions, so this solution is extensively being used in the company for implementation projects, particularly in test management activities. 

I like all the features this solution provides. It is a good stand-alone test management tool.

Pricing could be improved as it's high-priced. I don't exactly know the pricing point, but previously, I know that it was really high so fewer people were able to use it for their projects. That's the only disadvantage I could think of.

One other thing: I'm not sure if Micro Focus ALM Quality Center has this feature, or other people could be using this feature currently, but if it can be connected to any automation tool then it can pass those automation test scripts, which internally it can reflect that requirement if it passed. If that feature is there, then it's good.

If that feature isn't available, what I would like to see right now is whether it can be done manually. You can say that manually, these test cases that are linked to the requirement have passed.

If this solution, on the other hand, can be connected to an automation tool, then it can update us automatically about the test script and whether there's a link between the test scripts and the requirement, then we can say: "Okay, this requirement ran automation test scripts and it passed, and that means coverage is good."

I don't know whether this feature is currently available. If it's there, good. If it isn't, then that would probably be one last item I would be looking for which I'd like to be integrated into the test management tool.

I'm currently using the Micro Focus ALM Quality Center.

About the stability of this solution, I noticed a glitch. Sometimes if I go into any of the test cases, it will show as if it doesn't have anything, but if you click the box, it'll show the content of the box e.g. company information, steps, or expected results in those test cases. Apart from that, I didn't see any other glitches.

I have no issues with scalability because if you want more projects, you can add more projects, and if you want more texture, spaces, or cycles, you can add them. I find it good.

Currently we don't have any technical concerns on the ALM side, so no improvement needed support-wise.

The setup was a one-time thing and I didn't find it difficult.

I was able to evaluate Jira, Confluence and Xray.

We don't have any technical concerns about the Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. Probably, it's on a different piece of Micro Focus solution called MF Connect which connects the ALM to the DevOps so that's a different one.

My advice to others looking to implement Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is that using it successfully depends on the person and the project. It may not be the same for other people, but installing it and using it offers less hassle, but I won't suggest it for everybody because analysis needs to be done when using this solution for particular projects. Users need to think about their requirements and if their requirements are not being met, then this tool may be obsolete, but as a test management stand-alone tool, it's a good tool.

I've been using this solution full-fledged and I don't see any improvements which I required in this project. I started to use this product when it was in Mercury, and Mercury then went into HP, then into Micro Focus, so I'm a longtime fan of this HPQC ALM thing. But these days, things are working differently in Agile. So Agile: It works on stories and so forth, but there is no repository of requirements or any kind of history of things. There, a project comes and it works in an Agile fashion. I don't know how good this tool is when used in an Agile perspective, but I'm sure that it is a good test management tool.

I'm rating ALM based on two points. One rating is for the product. The product is good, it's great, but when compared to other products with the latest methodologies, or when rating it as a software development tool, then I'll rate it a five out of ten because there's a lot of other great tools where you can interconnect them, use them, scale them, and leverage. It all depends on the cost.

As a stand-alone test management tool, I'm giving it a nine out of ten.

If I'm trying to scale and I'm spending more money, my rating will go down. If it's able to scale with less money like Jira, Confluence, or some other tool like Xray, then scaling may be done faster with less cost to the user.

Wherever you put five out of ten, I would say to upgrade that to seven out of ten.

It is underutilized at the moment because we use this solution for tracking the test scenarios, test results, and defects.

We are looking at integrating a tool that can provide integrations with the other DevOps tools.

At this time, we don't feel that this solution has any value. We are communicating with Micro Focus to address this commission where we feel that it has more value added to it.

The integration needs improvement. It is not integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. It's a stand-alone tool right now used for testing and defects. We are considering and testing Octane because it seems to have more integration with the DevOps ecosystem.

I started using this solution when it was Test Director. This was before it was upgraded to Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. 

I have been using it for the last 10 years.

We are not working with the latest version. Rather than upgrade to the latest version, we are considering moving to Octane.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is quite stable.

It is not a scalable solution. I am not satisfied with the scalability of this product.

We have less than 50 concurrent users.

This is a product acquired from HPE. Before this, we were not satisfied with technical support. Micro Focus seems to be trying to improve their support quality, but we haven't seen it yet.

It doesn't take a long time to install this solution.

It's a perpetual license.

We are reviewing other solutions and looking to upgrade to Octane. We are currently, in the testing phases with Octane.

I would rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center a four out of ten.

We have it deployed in our Data Center and it integrates with it to write a custom application on it. You have to use a sole technology, which is risky. It takes more advanced developers than someone who does JavaScript and makes web pages.

Micro Focus is selling two test management solutions, ALM/Quality Center and ALM Octane, TM, which are identical, except ones built on newer technology

The user interface is fully web-capable. It's a website, and it runs on a browser.

I like that it integrates with the Jira solutions. Similar to SmartBear TestComplete, and another solution, where they add test management into Jira. 

All of them use the same data model. You basically have a release, a cycle, and then you have requirements, you attach those to the cycle, then you have tests, and test sets made of tests. It's all the exact same thing. They got it right because everyone has copied it.

ALM is a dated application, and I am researching to see what other solutions are available.

We would like to upgrade to be more modern.

If you want to extend it, they use ActiveX which was put into a browser to go to the internet, but it never had security built into it. It is what Microsoft Office is based on.

It hasn't kept up, while others have and are adding new features and tools.

I would like to be able to use free keyword searches, where you're not just limited to SQL queries.

The software gets leapfrogged because you make a lot of investment in building something. You're selling it for five years, and meanwhile, all of the other tools are improving. Another vendor comes along to make the same thing that took you three years to build, he built it in six months.

It's all easier to make. It's always a cycle. I just look around to see where we are at in that cycle with test management software.

I would like to be able to search easier, not just do SQL queries, being able to do free keyword searches on the data. That's valuable.

I have been working with Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for a decade.

We are using the latest version.

The stability of this solution is good. We never experienced any issues with bugs, glitches, or any crashes.

We have not issues with the scalability of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. It is a scalable product.

In a given day, we have 50 persistent users, then another day you may have 75 to 100 people with 30 users who are testers.

We have a contractor who supports us. The company's technical support, and it all goes through them. They are the middleman to us. They are on our site, and they run it.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It was set up by other people.

When I look back to four or five years ago, it would have been rated a 10, but now I think that it has 's probably fallen back to a six or a seven out of ten. I would rate Micros Focus ALM Quality a six out of ten.

I think if you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant Reports, it pretty much indicates that as well.

I primarily use the models from Quality Center. The requirements, the plan, lab, and effects, et cetera. I use it to merge my entire cycle of debts.

One feature that is very nice that our team uses a lot is the Excel add-in. It's a tool with add-ins, extra models, that you can use to export and import data from Excel, Microsoft Excel. It's been extremely useful for us.

The solution overall is very good and very solid. It's robust.

The stability is very good.

In the world of agile, the solution needs to make testing better. They need to arrange their tests with a very high speed of tests. Quality Center is a little bit old in terms of approach. It needs to be modernized. I have to go through many cycles, et cetera, in order to register everything correctly. I need more flexibility to adapt to the new methodology of agile for Excel. That will require more speed. Currently, due to the relative slowness, takes a lot of time to use the tools very well. 

If the solution could create a lighter, more flexible tool with more adaptability to new methodologies such as agile, it would be great.

I was in contact with my support team here, and there is a new release of Quality Center for agile. That is called Quality Center Octane. However, my support team has not made it available to me yet. I was waiting to see the new version of Quality Center Octane, to see if it would have more flexibility in agile. 

I've been using the solution for about ten years now. It's been a decade. It's been a long time.

The stability is very good. It has very good capabilities. It is 99.99% stable. We haven't had issues with bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash and freeze. It's good.

The scalability of the solution is very good. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

We have about 1,000 users on the solution.

Technical support is a black box. It's not good. When I look into things on the site, it's very difficult to find the information and help I need. On a scale from one to ten, I'd say it is a five.

We tend to get support from offices based in America, and we are in Brazil. It's my understanding that there isn't a team here in Brazil. Central support may be in Honduras. I've only gotten through one time. 

They need to do better. We aren't satisfied with the level of service or the process that has to happen before we can get help.

I'm not sure how easy or difficult the initial setup is. I don't know due to the fact that the setup is done by a support team and I am on the side of the user. To set up and maintain the tools on the server is not my job. I also do not know how long it takes to deploy the product. Therefore, I wouldn't be able to comment on it effectively.

That said, to install a new station on the client-side, not the server side, is very quick.

My company is just an end-user and customer. We aren't a reseller or partner.

I'm using a variation of version 12. It may be version 12.3.

If you have a large enterprise like me (I work in a bank and there are 10,000 people who work here) and have a large setup, this solution is very solid. For a minor company that is a smaller startup of maybe 10 or 20 people, it's a good idea to use another tool that is more flexible. 

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.