OpenText Application Quality Management Reviews and Pricing

it_user209856

Testing Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 22, 2015

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The defect triage and management needs improvement but the entire project test life-cycle can be managed in one place.

Pros and Cons

"If you want an end to end testing lifecycle product, I think HP is the winner."

"Overall the user experience of HP ALM is very good, there are some small improvements which can help those who are doing defect triage and management, and also the actual testers who use a test lab."

What is most valuable?

End to End traceability (requirements- test cases- defects)
Analytics (reporting, charts, dashboards, etc.)
Ease of defect management
Ease of email alerts, etc.

How has it helped my organization?

In my last organization we identified HP ALM as our strategic test management tool to standardize tool usage across the organization. Different business teams were using different tools like Bugzilla etc. but with the procurement of HP ALM everything was, eventually, standardized. By means of ALM we were able to deploy some testing standards and processes. Personally, I found ALM very handy for test managers and project managers as an entire project test life-cycle can be managed in one place and leadership get end-end visibility. I also like the reporting function in ALM, very useful.

What needs improvement?

Overall the user experience of HP ALM is very good, there are some small improvements which can help those who are doing defect triage and management, and also the actual testers who use a test lab. For instance, when I open the defect list using a report or dashboard drill down, I can’t update individual defect without actually opening it. However if I select a defect shortlisting criteria and get a list of matching defects from defect module (defect list view) I can very well update defect log without actually having to open the defect. This seems like a small thing but believe me, when you are dealing with multiple defects and have limited time on a defect triage call, this small functionality really makes your life easy. There a such few small enhancements which HP can probably do to make this wonderful tool even better.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for two years and three months.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Yes, some minor issues but these were not tool issues but more to do with lack of testing after deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No, ALM is pretty stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Only once but that was because we reached the maximum floating license capacity at a particular time due to many testers from multiple projects logged in at the same time.

How are customer service and support?

I have never had direct interaction with customer service.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I did not personally, but in my previous organization Bugzilla was used. ALM replaced it because it was a complete package, and also the company had bought other HP testing tools like UFT & PC to meet end to end testing needs.

How was the initial setup?

I wasn’t the admin for ALM so can’t really comment, but from an user standpoint I found it pretty simple.

What about the implementation team?

We had an in-house admin team.

What was our ROI?

I don’t know the ROI in monetary terms, but certainly ALM helped me get more people to follow testing standards and practices.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

In my current company we have multiple tools. I am currently exploring various options to standardize the tool set up. Some of these tools are JIRA, and Bugtracker, etc.

What other advice do I have?

If you want AN end to end testing lifecycle product, I think HP is the winner. It has test management (ALM), Automation (UFT) and Performance (PC) testing, and it all is in the bundled package from HP, so all end to end testing needs are managed. From a pure test management standpoint, ALM also stands tall as it provides a very good solution to manage requirements, test cases, defects, traceability and reports, and not just bug management.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user199773

Team Lead at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 27, 2015

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Test report generation is a valuable feature but can be improved.

Pros and Cons

"We previously used RTM, and we switched because ALM is better than IBM RTM tool."

What is most valuable?

Test Management
Test Report Generation

How has it helped my organization?

Option to trace bug directly from App.

What needs improvement?

Test Report Generation
Creating test iterations/projects

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for over two years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Did not use it, as it was enterprise provided.

Technical Support:

We have an internal technical team.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used RTM, and we switched because ALM is better than IBM RTM tool.

How was the initial setup?

Our internal technical team did it, but It was not tough though.

What about the implementation team?

In-house implementation.

What was our ROI?

Good.

What other advice do I have?

Good product.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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OpenText Application Quality Management

June 2026

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Learn what your peers think about OpenText Application Quality Management. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2026.

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it_user178239

Transition Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 5, 2015

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Nice tool for Product ownership and Scaled Agile

Pros and Cons

"Highly customizable GI, easy for designing product backlog, with a whole bunch of metrics on the dashboard page and built-in retrospective and continuous integration features."

"Licensing model is relatively expensive compared to alternate solutions."

What is most valuable?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What needs improvement?

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)

For how long have I used the solution?

2 years

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Excellent performance except few days in 2 years experience.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Good interaction from support people.

Technical Support:

Excellent. The integration with our LDAP went very smooth.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Jira

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

Very good and professional.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Jira GreenHopper

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user161829

Test Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 10, 2014

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The tool is user friendly

Pros and Cons

"Different modules (e.g. Requirements, Test Plan, Test Lab) provide traceability from requirements, test cases, and defects, along with project analysis in terms of progress via the dashboard reports."

What is most valuable?

Different modules (e.g. Requirements, Test Plan, Test Lab)
Trace-ability from requirements, test cases and defects
Project Analysis in terms of progress - Dashboard (Reports)

How has it helped my organization?

Had different releases and in QC we could group our test cases according to releases and we could know when each release starts and when it ends

For how long have I used the solution?

3+ years

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

What about the implementation team?

In-house

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Not certain

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user150219

Senior Engineer in QA at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 5, 2014

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Good test management tool

Pros and Cons

"It provides the entire test management suite, right from the initial phase of testing till the delivery."

What is most valuable?

Dashboard, Uploading test cases, test execution.

How has it helped my organization?

It provides the entire test management suite, right from the initial phase of testing till the delivery.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this tool for 1.5 years

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: 8 out of 10Technical Support: 8 out of 10

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We weren't previously using another solution.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user104988

Senior Performance Consultant at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Aug 25, 2014

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It's a good product and definitely can be considered in cases of large enterprise projects.

Pros and Cons

"Having HP ALM has helped in streamlining the Performance testing projects and now management has a better view of the projects and their status."

"Customer Service: Fair. It takes at least 2 days for support people to respond to ticket."

What is most valuable?

It has a good requirement management process, Test plan and Test Resource Management compare to other tools. It also has SLA Management which helps to decide the status of tests.

How has it helped my organization?

HP ALM integrates requirement management process, defect management process and it helps in smooth execution of Load testing process.

What needs improvement?

HP ALM UI needs some improvement. Sometimes changes are not saved correctly.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this product for close to 2 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

None

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

None

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: Fair. It takes at least 2 days for support people to respond to ticket.Technical Support: Fair. It takes at least 2 days for support people to respond to ticket.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No. We have other HP Products like LoadRunner, Quality Center etc. So we wanted to have ALM which integrates seamlessly with these products.

How was the initial setup?

Setup was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

Set up was implemented through a vendor team and the vendor team was very knowledgeable and helpful.

What was our ROI?

Having HP ALM has helped in streamlining the Performance testing projects and now management has a better view of the projects and their status. It also helped us in streamlining the work across various groups.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The infrastructure set up cost which included the server’s hardware, Agent Servers.

What other advice do I have?

It's a good product and definitely can be considered in cases of large enterprise projects.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Specialist Partner for HP Software and Authorized Services Management Partner - Software (ASMP-S).

it_user70752

IT Administrator at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Dec 11, 2013

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The full product is very complex plus the licensing left much to be improved

Pros and Cons

"As long as procedures are clear, then anyone can execute the tests."

"Full product is very complex plus the licensing left much to be improved."

Valuable Features:

I've been using Quality Center for 11 months.

Improvements to My Organization:

As long as procedures are clear, then anyone can execute the tests. It no longer has to be the person that initially discovered the issue.

Room for Improvement:

Full product is very complex plus the licensing left much to be improved.

Deployment Issues:

No - We were a smaller company than most.

Stability Issues:

No - We were a smaller company than most.

Scalability Issues:

No - We were a smaller company than most.

Customer Service:

No dealings with them or the technical support

Initial Setup:

Unknown as was not involved in initial setup

Implementation Team:

In-house team

Other Advice:

a. Check the licensing as we had to log off from the tool as the company could not afford a license for every person. This was bypassed eventually by having a client performing the login, get your data out and logoff.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user326448Technical Test Analyst and Automation Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

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Sep 6, 2016

Totally agree with you on the licencing costs and complexity. HPE do seem to use these as an easy cash cow but I always maintain you get what you pay for. I've yet to fully understand their way of doing things even after all these years.

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it_user8466

Head of QA at a analyst firm with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 11, 2013

Very strong product but I would like to see integration with an Agile Tool

Valuable Features:

I've used this product for 8 years. I find Managing Test Life Cycle and Reporting to be the most valuable components.

Improvements To Organization:

Test Management has become very easy. All the test cases are tracked and reports can be run on various factors to decide productivity, code status, defect density etc.

Room For Improvement:

Integration with an Agile Tool (e.g. RTC)

Deployment Issues:

Stability Issues:

Scalability Issues:

Customer Service:

Very Good

Technical Support:

Very Good

Initial Setup:

It's straightforward but sometimes it can interfere with other products because of lots of client components.

Other Advice:

It's a very strong product which comes up with lots of additional add-ins.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user205077Software Account Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

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Mar 9, 2015

I would like to comment about HP Agile Manager (Agile Project Management Tool). It is very well integrated with HP QC, it mean, this integration is out-of-the-box, bidirectional and free of charge. If you want you can try it without compromise.

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it_user3891

Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 12, 2013

Decent support in resolving issues but steep learning curve

HP ALM 11.0
The ALM market is rapidly maturing as organizations recognize benefits of the holistic approach to managing requirement, builds, tests and releases, and vendors rush to satisfy the demand.

In addition to the numerous commercial offerings one might be able to assemble his own ALM stack with best-of-breed components. There are many tools that excel in specific are of ALM such as requirements management, or defect tracking (e.g. Atlassian Jira); then there are suites that integrate most of the capabilities (e.g. CollabNet, RallySoftware), and there are integrated stacks focused on specific technology (e.g. Microsoft TFS, even with a limited support for Java platform)…

But there are currently only two fully integrated enterprise class technology vendors - HP and IBM – that rule the ALM universe.

Most of the vendors offer the standard set of capabilities: requirements management, defect tracking, release management, IDE integration etc. The one component missing from the most ALM vendors is integrated Quality Assurance, and HP with its acquisition of Mercury Interactive in 2006 leapfrogged every other vendor (including IBM), and currently holds about 40% of the automated testing market with its Quality Center and Performance Center suites (QuickTest Pro, Sprinter, Service Test and LoadRunner) - all integrated into HP ALM 11.

HP ALM also takes top spots in Requirement Management and Integrated Software Quality Suites (Forrester Wave, Gartner's Magic Quadrant), with respectable showing in other areas. Ultimately, selection of the ALM suite would depend on number of criteria - strategic enterprise architecture, technology affinity, maturity of the enterprise, costs, to mention but a few.

In my case, after weighing a number of factors for my own organization, the decision was made in favor of HP ALM, strongly influenced by the suite's capabilities, QA integration, relatively low pricing (into seven figures), and ability to start right away with with preconfigured application (with SaaS deployments option).

What's included'

Project Planning and tracking
Release management
Requirements management (definition and management - including versioning support)
Quality Management (functional, performance, security)
Development management (defect tracking, IDE and source code control integration)

HP offers both on premises and SaaS options for its ALM suite. The latter option provides convenience of a fast deployment but you do cede some control; some of the features (e.g. LDAP integration) might present challenges and incur additional costs.

The HP ALM application is a JEE app, with its server portion running on variety of platform - Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and Windows.

The user access is either through a browser or a desktop client, and, unfortunately, it currently imposes severe limitations - while administration can be performed through any browser (Firefox, Chrome, IE), the main user functionality is IE only (an attempt to access ALM from any other browser would give you a message "Only Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 are supported." - leaving IE 9 and 10 out of equation, as well. Hopefully, this deficiency will be addressed soon. Since the desktop client is Windows only as well, this makes all client activity "Windows only" (same goes for the rest of the tools - QTP, Sprinter etc.)

There are several licensing models available, and selection should be made based upon both your current and future needs, as well as anticipated mode of operation (e.g. concurrent license vs named license vs floating license); it also affects the pricing.

The next big decision is selecting topology of the projects; HP provides a best practices white paper to help you select the most appropriate one for your organization. While the application allows for mix-and-match approach, some capabilities such as sharing artifacts across domains and projects might be affected.

Security considerations are standard for any JEE application: firewalls, DMZ, reverse proxy, security certificates etc. Most of these would be taken care of with SaaS option; it is DIY for on-premises one. The application itself provides robust role-based security, with configurable attributes and customization.

SaaS option comes with a number of benefits as well as drawbacks, and deserves a consideration of its own. Keep in mind that you do lose some control with it: for instance, you won’t be able to have “Site Admin” privilege, the highest one will be TDAdmin - plenty to administer domains, projects and users - but for everything else you’d have to go through “official channels”, namely your HP SaaS representative (like, configuring third party integration, or enabling/disabling Performance/Quality Centers integration); the LDAP integration also becomes a separate integration project instead of a built-in feature and so on. Make sure that you weigh all the options before you choose the deployment model.

Once the application is up and running it is pretty straightforward to administer through a browser of your choice; keep in mind that your users will still have to use IE 7/8 or a desktop client. It is recommended to use the desktop client - especially on newer machines where older versions of IE are hard to come by. In order to provide rich client functionality, both IE and the desktop client will install sizeable .Net libraries, and will require VC++ redistributable to be installed first; for HP Service Test WSE 2.0 SP3 Runtime and MS Access Database Engine 2007 will be installed - a minor inconvenience but something to keep in mind when planning rollout.

The HP provides a number of tutorials (PDF, movie files, online resources) on how to use the application, as well as a number of classes to familiarize yourself with the product. While the tutorials are of high quality, and will get you through the initial steps, the complexity of the suite is such that budgeting some classes - online/on site - is highly recommended. You’ll learn about many best practices, ways to organize your projects for maximum reuse through libraries and templates, configuring KPI and dashboards; consider it as an upfront investment to jumpstart your efforts.

The product is geared towards traditional SDLC but can accommodates various project management styles (e.g. an Agile Accelerator plug-in is provided at additional cost), and does not impose many constraints - for instance, one could decide to start cranking out requirements, and then associate them with release cycles, and another might spend some time honing her release management strategies. The application provides built-in versioning control (an option to be enabled once project is created); use it - if something is not under version control, it does not exist. This goes for requirement, source code, attached documents - everything!

Once created, requirements can be converted into manual tests with a built-in wizard, accessible from pop-up menu. It creates an editable test suite which traces back to original requirements, and could be run - either in Sprinter or through manual runner - almost right away; this might prove to be a significant time saver. One of the most important features to maintain control over your project is traceability matrix - ability to link requirements to tests to test results to source code to defects - would allow you to keep tabs on your project, and drill down to the root cause quicker than otherwise possible.

The application supports variety of reposting options - from configurable graphs (trend, pie, bar etc), to reports in PDF, Microsoft Word and Excel formats. Reports could be assigned public or private folders, and be combined into dashboards of the same visibility.

The HP Quality Center and Performance Center are tightly integrated with HP ALM suite. These are based on LoadRunner (load and stress testing) and QuickTest Pro which, together with Sprint and Service Testing, is known as UFT - Unified Functional Testing. Both QC and PC are integrated into administrative console, and are available to the users based upon assigned role.

The HP ALM suite integrates into Software Configuration Management environments you might have assembled in your organization, including support for SCM suites (e.g. AccuRev, IBM ClearCase) the most popular products in each category: development environments (Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio, InteliJ IDEA - no out-of-box integration with Oracle JDeveloper/NetBeans), source code version control (Git, SVN, Perforce, TFS), continuous integration build servers (Jenking/Hudson, TeamCity, Microsoft TFS), source code quality tools (JUnit, NUnit, TestNG), code coverage analysis tools (NCover, Cobertura), static code analysis (Coverity, Fortify). Some of the integration capabilities are fee add-ons, and some require third party software (for example, IBM ClearCase is integrated through OpsHub, and IBM Rational Team Concert/Jira, Rally or Collabnet - with TaskTop connectors)

To sum it up:
Pros:

Tight integration with quality assurance suite including functional testing, performance testing and security testing.
Costs (compared to other integrated ALM vendors)
Provides two deployment options - on premises, and SaaS, and for on-premises gives a choice of the platform - from Unix to Windows.
Enterprise class application supporting variety of project management styles, fully integrated stack with full traceability between requirements to tests to defects to source code to release cycles.
A number of integration options with developers’ tools, software configuration management suites, and third party tools (continuous integration, ALM and more).
Decent support in resolving issues.

Cons:

Complexity.
Costs (well into seven figures, depending on configuration options)
Steep learning curve.
Limited choice for the desktop clients (Windows only), including both QA and HP ALM proper. Occasional bug requiring user to submit ticket to HP.
Integration options are limited, some require third party software.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user893064Agile Coach at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees

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Jun 25, 2018

Thanks for the information about integration - it really helped (I didn't know that 3rd party tools like www.opshub.com has these integrations)

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it_user4923

QA Manager at a media company with 51-200 employees

Mar 9, 2013

HPTC can be a beast if you let it get out of control and get too large a test plan, but has nice tools for testing against a certain release version

I've used HP-Test Center, Manits, and the more simpler Rally based test plan tool among a bunch of others. HPTC can be a beast if you let it get out of control and get too large a test plan, but has nice tools for testing against a certain release version and is a bit water-fally.

Mantis is good for a scrum based setup. But then again it depends on what your testing, size of the testing staff, and how long they (SMs, BMs, and PMs) give you in a testing cycle. In the more Agile shops, testing has to have a quicker turn around and is more feature-targeted so big systems like HPTC, while nicely thorough, tend to become big projects to maintain. The choice has to meet the type, organizational scope, and Agile-ness of testing project you have.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.