OpenText Application Quality Management Reviews

Being able to manage tests as this is something very difficult to find in other products. There are a few open source ones that handle test management, but right now HPE ALM is still the best solution to handle tests.

It helps us to keep track of everything happening. When you test the software you've got results. Results can be OK or not OK. If you just get the results in Excel or things like that, you cannot work as a team because just one person at a time will be able to access it. With ALM, we can have several people working on the same product at the same time. Then we use it a lot for trustability, so we can add trustability to the facts, to requirements. It's very useful for that to verify everything that happens.

As soon as it's available on-premises we want to move to ALM Octane as it's mainly web based, has the capability to work with major tests, and integrates with Jenkins for continuous integration. This is lacking in the standard ALM which was great a few years ago but it did not evolve enough, and that's why we are waiting for Octane.

We've used it more than 15 years, so it's very stable. There is a new version coming, ALM Octane. Octane is new so we don't use it yet.

We have plenty of projects with the current ALM, so it scales well. I'm not afraid of an issue with Octane and believe it will be the same.

I'm disappointed with the support as they're not reactive enough. They don't know the product very well, and to have things changed we need to access R&D directly and then things move. Otherwise, it's kind of difficult.

Beforehand we were using just paper and Excel, and things like that. As soon as ALM was tested at the time we began to use it and sensed it's presence in the company and now every tester is using it.

For ALM it was complex because it's not fully web based so you need to install a client on your desktop and with all the Windows security stuff you need to be an admin on your desktop so it's a very complex set up. On the service side it's kind of complex but we have tech experienced people to do that and to set up the database and everything, so it's OK. With Octane it should be really much simpler because for the user because it's just a web application so you've got nothing to do.

I'd rate the pricing as 3/10 as it's very expensive.

The first criteria we look at is functionality. We have plenty of different projects so we need a full spectrum of functionality. The problem we have today is the price. It's a very good solution but it's expense so we are challenged by our finals and everything but the price.

If you have the money then you can go with ALM, as it's a very good product. You won't have any surprises with it so that's good. Otherwise, there are some open source solutions that are a little bit less functional, but you can play with them and get them to work, products like Squash TM or things like that.

We use ALM with our QA Department and it provides a way for us to show our work as a repository for our test-cases. We're able to show what we do on a daily basis. It's very easy to use and it's worked well for us.

Over the past year, we've been able to decrease our defect reduction by executing and making sure we have test-base coverage in all the areas. I don't quite know the percentage exactly. We've been able to reduce the defects.

We've done our source code in another application for so long, to have developers come over to help QA integrate it would probably be an impossible effort.

It's been okay. I think the problem with us is, it can be used for the entire SDLC process, as far as requirements, development and that type of thing, but we only use it for QA.

What happens is, we're having to use multiple products to come to one goal. That's kind of frustrating for the teams. I think if we could get to the point where we could use it as one solution, it would be so much more beneficial.

We haven't scaled it yet, but we're looking to do that. We're working with a company now to look at some different solutions, or at least the ART tool. It's looks very impressive to us. We're in conversations about the ART tool, because we really need something like that for our analysts.

It's an educational tool, so you are able to link your education and link it with Rally. If you have a module that you want to teach, you can just teach them through that. It's a direct connection to HP ALM.

I've never used tech support. We have an individual that works closely with HP. Any technical issues that comes across the team, he tends to work directly with HP to handle those.

We use ALM for all of our applications and didn't use anything before. We're a maturing software company, so we're really getting into these distinct processes, like ALM. We're currently going through a transformation into Agile, so we're really just ramping up to get to that mature stage as a software company.

I was there, but I wasn't involved. I was an independent contributor.

I wouldn't rate it a 10 because it doesn't have the ability to do all the things the developers use today, like TFS. Overall I would recommend it, because of its ease of use. It doesn't take much to get up to date on it and to learn the process of using it for your test-case execution in ALM.

You don't have much time to spend on education. You don't have two weeks for them to learn an application. So, because it's easy to use, I would definitely recommend it for that reason.

It allows us to track test cases that we create, so for all of our applications that we test we build our test cases, load them into Quality Center, and then we also track our defects inside of Quality Center. It allows us to be able to gather metrics based on the applications that we test.

I would say specific to our business solutions department, we can absolutely take a look for individual applications that we are testing. We can make some decisions about applications being turned over. How defect prone they are. If unit testing is occurring beforehand it helps us at least talk to some "Hey, here is what we received, here is how many defects that we received." It's been helpful with that.

What I am hoping with the latest version of Quality Center is that I would like to see a better interface with being able to load Excel spreadsheets, so a lot of times the key way analysts rewrite our test cases in a spreadsheet, and then we load it up. I would like to see where the interface is better as it's not as user friendly in this release that we have, so I am hoping that it is improved with the latest version.

It's been pretty stable for everything we've been doing.

I would say that at this point I really cannot speak to that.

We haven't used it. I know we are going to upgrade Quality Center this year, so say maybe there will be some more possibilities for us to interact with support.

Quality Center was around well before I got to the company.

It was very easy. LeanFT came with UFT 12.5 and greater. Just deploying the UFT package which we're very comfortable with, we were able to deploy LeanFT as well.

I know there are some other tools out there if you are looking to manage requirements such as JIRA and a couple of others. I know some are really gauged more towards agile development, but a lot of them are used for requirements and they do have the ability to store test cases but we as a organisation use Quality Center.

It works for us in terms of being able to track our test cases, absolutely being able to store results if we want to put in defects and build metrics. It is a pretty decent tool.

With HP ALM, I think it's the fact that it's self-contained application so we can do everything inside the application. We only need to use this one tool.

The availability and the fact that HPE people want to help is something that I appreciate because they are with us, they try to help, they try to understand what we need and they act accordingly.

I think it sells because it's HP ALM. It's because it's a collaboration tool. It helps everybody collaborate within a project and because of that I think we save time and we have less difficulty making sure that everybody is aligned.

The tech support is sometimes not clear when you speak to them.

We had some issue before but now its been fixed. It's because we migrated from an old version and we went to a new one. That created a couple of issues but now it's solved. We need to go to another version so it will be another challenge, but we're working with HPE to understand the best way to do it.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

It's good but we need to manage exactly what we need from them. Sometimes on the business side it's not clear enough. When it's not clear we don't have the results we need. The next time we need to make sure to correctly define our needs and involve them in that way.

We didn't use any other solution previously.

It's not straightforward because for us it was because it was an upgrade of the infrastructure as well. So at the same time we changed the server, we also changed the infrastructure. It was not because of the product itself, it was more linked to what we needed to do at that time.

HP ALM helps us consolidate our efforts. All of our projects are in there. We are also in the life science domain so we have many more compliance requirements which we have to adhere to. It's pretty good so far.

As a user we see one version of the requirements for the application, we keep all our assets together, it gives us a huge traceable. It's all the classic benefits of using an application lifecycle management tool that are available.

We look at service packs, what bugs they have and fixes. From a end-user perspective when you have invested heavily in these tools for the last four, five, six years or more, organizations are there from when it was Mercury. We just want to keep pace with where the industry is going, where the shift is in terms of quality assurance and requirement management. HP is very strong on the testing side, but in the last few years with the agile methodology it has lagged behind. It's slowly catching up and eventually it will get there, but we love the eco-system we're in and will continue to move forward.

It's stable

It's very scalable, a very robust kind of solution and we recommend it to anyone who's looking for application lifecycle kind of tool.

We use an HPE partner for our support needs, but tickets do go to HPE eventually, level two, level three. We have never had an issue.

Our organization is very new in this area. We are a pretty young company. We didn't have any formal task-management kind of tool or testing tool per se. When we were looking at the solution one of our implementation partners for one of the projects recommended it and we looked at it and it's capability. Many of the folks who are on the team have used it in other companies. For the current organization it was a no-brainer not to pick this tool.

It's very straightforward.

Since we are in a regulated industry we have to use the workflow we use, what was built for this. For us it was a straight-forward choice. For large and small companies there are a lot of choices for task-management tools. IBM rational tools are there and then there's JIRA, there's also TFS. There are a lot of task-management tools. They can pick any one that they want to.

First of all, the product works. ALM is traditionally more of a waterfall application, but it does allow you to collect your requirements, your test cases, and you can even execute test cases automatically from ALM, which is great. Everyone's trying to do DevOps these days or Agile, so it's a good product.

It allows us to do things more efficiently. There's nothing like spending millions of dollars upgrading an application, and trying to manage your requirements, your test cases, your defects in a spreadsheet. Who has access to that? That's what that product gives you.

We need to move to Agile or DevOps. We have other products that do that, but I'm trying to standardize on a platform. I'm very interested in HP Agile Manager.

We've had no issues with the stability.

It's real easy to scale and add more licenses.

Not directly through HPE. We go through HPE's vendor partner, which is Checkpoint Technologies, and they provide excellent technical support.

When I took over Quality Assurance, we had Quality Center. ALM is the new Quality Center, and we upgraded to version 12 of ALM. 550 projects with no problems.

I came in and decided that we needed to upgrade to v12. We reached out to our vendor partner, Checkpoint Technologies, and they came in, assessed what it would take to upgrade it, and they did the upgrade for us.

It doesn't do Agile very well. We can make it do it, but it wasn't designed to do it either. That's not being fair to the product. It's a waterfall-based product. You should go straight to HPE Agile Manager.

The tool provides invaluable bi-directional traceability from requirement --> test case--> test execution --> defect.

The ability to have visibility of manual and automated test results within the one product certainly cuts down on the management overhead and eases the creation of project health reports.

The UI is becoming somewhat dated but that shouldn't be a deal breaker.

Out of the box, the tool is very flexible in what it allows the user to do. This can go against data integrity in a regulated world but the tool can be customised to improve data integrity. For example, you could customise the tool's workflow to ensure tests cannot be re-executed after a set of executed tests have been peer reviewed.

The Central Repository is key for us.

It has sped up our regression testing cycle almost three times what it is if we do it manually.

Tighter integration between ALM and UFT, especially from a reporting perspective, for automation reporting. We currently run into reporting issues.

We've been using it for around a year.

ALM's been pretty rock solid for us. Getting it to interact with UFT nicely has been a challenge for us sometimes. There's good integration in my opinion, but it just needs to be a little more rock solid.

It's been able to scale to our needs.

Good, sometimes a little slow, but overall pretty good.

We didn't have any other solution in place, and needed to have a much better solution than doing testing with Excel files.

It's straightforward.

HPE was one of the very few that we actually had on the list. We went with HPE because my boss was very familiar with the product, and felt it fit our organization's needs extremely well.

Give it a shot, if you take the time to invest in it, it works.

We are actually not utilizing the full capability of ALM as a full application lifecycle management solution, but we use it for quality insurance, depositories, and for our difference management. For that, it is pretty good.

If you have to run a manual test it's very helpful. It has the option to perform manual tests so we have resolves, defects, and linkages. We come from the QA perspective, put our own requirements in and it's like a one-stop shop. It's very easy for QA people to take out their metrics and share those metrics with the senior management.

The only thing I would add is that I was really looking forward towards the new generation filler that was coming. It seems that in order for us to get the full capability of the new generation filler, we have to purchase AGM, but we don't use AGM right now. It would have been really nice if the whole feature was embedded into ALM. Otherwise, everything would have go to licensing and then there's a cost associated to it, then you have to go through the cost benefit analysis with the management and share with them a projected ROI. It kind of adds a level of controversy, and right now all the folks are using JIRA . They will just say, "Oh, for your QA, just connect it to JIRA and let's go." That is where I feel like, if you have to use so many features within an ALM, if you have to use everything, you have to buy.

I think the stability has been fine.

Scalability is good. There's also scope for improvement here, so I would say it's pretty decent.

I don't use technical support because I have a tool administrator. He's the one who deals with the technical support. For him, I act as a user of an ALM, and if I have any issues, I go to him and he'll talk to technical support.

I've been at my current job for the last 11 years and we have been using it from its days as Test Director and QC days. So far, we haven't tried anything else and have stuck with it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

It was done by our tool administrator.

It was already in place when I started, but five years ago there was a process shift and we thought we could read results in ahead from other tools. I think we all just decided to stick with the readouts that we got and that because of the way we used the test capabilities, we didn't want to change. We were then able to convince our management that if they didn't want to use it to its full capabilities that the testing capabilities were worth it and they finally decided to keep it.

It's a big solution, I'm just using one part of it. For the other part of it, there are a lot of improvement that needs to happen, so just looking at my little piece isn't enough.

It all depends what your needs are. If you are very modernized, and have short cycles, you should evaluate other tools also. It all depends on your needs because each organization is very different. Maybe some organizations have lots of money and they want to go ahead and go for the big shop, and they can do that.

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.