OpenText Application Quality Management Reviews

I am using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for test script preparation and test script execution and defect management. This will enable the programme to capture and store tests for easy re-usability for future deployments.

Have not yet rolled it out in the organisation

The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is the alignment of the test to the execution and the linking of the defects to the two. It automatically links any defects you have to the re-test. The re-usability of tests for future deployments is also very good. In addition the ability of automation tools to bolt on and utilise the test scripts located in ALM.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center should improve the reports. Reporting on test  execution progress against the plan. However, they might have improved over two years since I have used the solution.

I have been using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for approximately 20 years. The solution was previously named Mercury Quality Centre and then Hewlett-Packard ALM.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is typically stable once it is set up.

The scalability of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is good.

The support of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is good.

Positive

The setup of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is not easy. It is time-consuming and complex. There is a lot of work that needs to be done on the backend. I have already spent seven hours of my time and I have not completed it yet. I have another seven hours or more of evaluation and checking before I roll it out.

We implemented the solution using a vendor team. They have been supportive in explaining the new configuration and values and how they have changed since I used it last.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is very expensive. The price is approximately £2,000 per person, they are too expensive to corner the market.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is high on maintenance to start with. I have been using the solution for over 20 years and I am very familiar with it and have gained a lot of knowledge using this tool. For me, it is very easy to use. However, it's very difficult to train out because of the new features that they rolled out in the last five years. The features make it a bit more difficult to train out, and you need a lot of support to help people use the tool until they get familiar with it.

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

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.

We are customers of Micro Focus and I'm a senior director of our company. 

The overall licensing and reporting has definitely improved. As a leader, I was able to get the reports I needed and the same applies to developers. Traceability really helps me and is a great feature. When I used to be a test manager, it was very useful. ALM is user-friendly. 

I'd like to see some readily available plugins where we could integrate other tools because we're in an open-source world now, and there are a lot of tools that I need to integrate. It requires a lot of effort to create the APIs to connect to ALM and run the scripts. The solution lacks Agile features. 

I've been using this solution for 15 years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The initial setup is relatively easy but we hired a third-party organization to assist. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

ALM is a well-known product and is one of the pioneers in providing test management facilities with a 360 degree view of requirements.

ALM has got really a good feature which captures screens, decodes them and puts them in a code format. It becomes so easy to capture your screens and run through various screens and prepare your test cases, rather than typing it in Excel or manually in ALM itself. I think that's a really handy tool to have and it's very intuitive to use.

Certain applications within this solution are not really compatible with certain applications like ERP. The problem is when we're trying to use these applications or devices, the solution itself doesn't scale. It has got a lot of problems scaling up and down with the resolution of the devices that you use, and hence we had to stop using ALM and go for something else that was more user-friendly.

The resolution is very clunky and its fields get hidden in the menu boxes. This is also a very expensive solution. 

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

This is a stable solution. 

The customer support team are good. They used remote access to my PC to resolve an issue.

Neutral

It was straightforward. There were no complications in setting it up at all.

We used a third party for the setup.

This is an expensive solution. 

ALM is a good product but you need to be mindful of how it scales on your devices that you use because we use smaller devices compared to what we used to use in the past. The laptop screens have reduced in size so you need to make sure that they scale to the resolution of the device.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

We use Quality Center to track functional testing and record automation testing scenarios results. There are around 1,000 users at my company. 

ALM Quality Center is a reliable, consolidated product. 

Quality Center's UI is outdated, and it's a little bit slow on the login part and different parts of the application. That's why we're switching solutions. I believe most companies are switching to Octane or something else. Micro Focus should enhance the interface and reports.

I've been using ALM Quality Center for seven years.

ALM Quality Center doesn't break down too much.

ALM Quality Center is scalable. There isn't much impact on performance when you add users.

Setting up ALM Quality Center is easy. It's not complicated to set up the on-premises solution.

I would rate ALM Quality Center six out of 10.

The primary use cases for this solution are testing, recording and auditing results, and creating test cases and test plans.  

The most valuable Quality Center feature, I find, is the solution's integration with some of our automation tools. For us, the ability to capture and record and the ease of use from a user perspective, are all key. Most of the users using ALM are on the business side. In other words, we've got end users that are in there, not IT personnel, which is why it is important that the solution is intuitive and easy to use.

There's room for improvement in the requirements traceability with Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. That could use an uplift. 

We have used ALM tools for probably the last 20 years. 

We have used ALM tools for about two decades and many of our business teams are familiar with them, which is why we ultimately chose this route. 

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center has always met our requirements, which is why any minor issues we've had with requirements traceability have never really been a big deal. But there really hasn't been a whole lot of change in those areas in several years. I'm sure that they are working on a roadmap, which I haven't gotten to see yet only because I haven't been pushing to see it, but I understand that there's much in the works. 

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

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.

We were using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for our test management for lots of products. I installed ALM myself, and we were using it for SAP deployment. We were using Requirement modules, Test Plan modules, Test Lab modules as well as the Defect modules in ALM. Not only for this product, but also for other companies like Cooper, Active, Delphi, Allegis and DLM for test management.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is a very good test management tool especially for writing test cases and uploading. You can even upload the test cycles from Excel. You get the defects and the reports, and also some automation using EFT which works with ALM. All these features are good.

In terms of places for improvement, Micro Focus is an expensive tool. We see nowadays that there are other products coming, and Micro Focus is more expensive and there are lots of license costs. Lots of companies are not taking it because of the cost.

It would be a good idea if they could deal with some user features and take a look at the cost. Because there is a lot of maintenance. People buy licenses and then every year they need to pay around 18% support charge, et cetera. It depends on the companies. Some rich companies buy it. Mid-level and smaller companies may have difficulties with this one.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is a very recent name. It really started back in 2000, almost 20 years before. This product belonged to Mercury Interactive. After that HP bought it. From HP, Micro Focus bought it. I have been working on this product for the last 20 years. Initially they called it TestDirector. After that it become Quality Center. Now it's ALM.

As far as performance is concerned, it is a very, very, very robust tool. It works. The only thing is the number of licenses. Because you buy licenses of 50, only 50 can concurrently use it. There could be 400 named users. 

It requires low maintenance, and the user creation is simple. If you want to quickly add any users, or if you want to quickly create a project, it is straightforward and easy.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is scalable in terms the database size and the repository. It has storage in two places; service level and at Windows level, the File System level. Lots of documents get stored in the Windows level, the File System level. So as long as you have good enough space, 100 GB or 150 GB is good enough. Only two limitation. One is licenses. The second is the server. So we usually recommend around 100 GB, 50 GB to 100 GB, which is enough.

We usually have 200 users using it. Usually, people buy a 50-user license but that could be used by 300 people, 300 users, because not everybody will be logging on at the same time. So scalability depends upon the license.

In terms of maintaining and deploying the updates, it does not take more than one person, probably not even that. I would say 1/4 person for this role. That person is a system admin. I used to do that, too. I was doing upgrades and configuring all myself. At the same time I was managing the actual deployment of the test phase.

This takes about one day a month.

Tech support handled most of the issues handled well, but not where there is a problem. Whenever we buy a product from Micro Focus we usually buy from Micro Focus directly. Or there are second sellers and we can buy from them, and they give you support. Whenever we have a problem, Micro Focus is very good at support. We log a ticket and they support it.

Initial setup is very easy. Usually there are two ways of doing it. We needed two servers; an app server and a database server. Usually Micro Focus, like other companies, installs it on their cloud or you can install it yourselves. It's not very difficult. I was doing that too.

When we have the ALM we can install it very quickly. It does not take much time, maybe three or four days. Once the system is ready we can pretty much install ALM and apply the license, which then deploys to users. Configuring is very easy. I was creating users and different groups, putting in lots of configuration.

Usually, whenever I work with the clients, I recommend ALM for the separate deployments and separate implementations because it's easy to use and good with those things. However, because of the cost there are some clients that cannot afford the high price, or can afford it but they don't want to pay that much.

As SAP Solution Managers, we try to use it. But people also use Jira. Jira has a very high level test management tool. So people who can't afford the price go with Jira.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is a good solution. On a scale of one to ten, I would give it a nine.