OpenText Functional Testing Reviews

The most valuable feature for me is that it works on multiple platforms and technologies. I need that because we have an application based on Oracle Forms and Oracle DB, and I'm not aware of any other tool that would provide the same level of functionality.

Since I started, we invested in UFT and automation and we have significantly reduced our release cycle time. That has freed up the people who were doing manual regression testing to do more valuable work. The net result is that our cycle time has gone down by a factor of hundreds of percent. And year-on-year, over the three years our error detection rate, by the same people who are now doing good manual testing, has increased by over 300%.

One thing that confused me, and now just mildly irritates me, is that we migrated from QuickTest Pro to HP UFT, Unified Functional Test. After we did the migration, it turned out that we didn't really have Unified Functional Test at all. We only had the functional test piece of Unified Functional Test. Which, from a marketing or an understanding point of view, was a little bit questionable. So then I needed to go and spend a significant sum of money to get the "Unified" aspect of the Unified Functional Test.

It’s awfully stable. Not even something I consider, to be honest, in regards to UFT. It's always worked for the last ten years. It just works.

We have not really had to scale it much. It is something that we're looking at, which is why I spoke to some representatives at a recent conference. One thing that's unclear to me at the moment is the benefits, or otherwise, of integrating the UFT product with the architecture that we're going towards; more open source and continuous development, continuous integration type tools. I know HPE does integrate, but I'm not sure how and where it integrates and what the benefits are.

I have used technical support and it was okay. What I was doing, in fairness, was fairly non-standard. I was transferring licenses between different locations, different countries, different currencies, different regions; it was all part of the takeover process. It was a little bit complex and drawn-out, but we got there in the end.

UFT was already installed upon my arrival to the organisation. However, having said that, it is the solution I would have gone for. UFT really doesn’t have a comparable competitor in that space. They used to have competition, but I don't think they really have competition anymore.

The UFT is a simple product. With the exception of the licence server, a six-year-old can do it.

The licensing and pricing model is confusing.

There's actually two parts to this, because we use UFT for two different functions. For one of those functions, there really were no other vendors on a shortlist. For the other technology stack, we were looking at SmartBear. We were looking at Selenium, which we still use some. We were also looking at various open source tools. The reason we went for UFT specifically was because you could integrate API testing with client-server type testing, which was important to us.

When looking at a vendor, I look for stability first, but that's almost a prerequisite anyway. What is really important to me, and will be increasingly important to me, and I'm guessing, the majority of our customers or potential customers, is HPE's and their product’s ability to integrate with an ever diverging technology landscape. That's the difficult part.

I would tell those looking for a solution to go back to good old-fashioned tool selection based on analysis criteria. Do the homework properly and have an appropriate set of expectations. Get vendors in and have them demo against your application or specification as opposed to generically. Do the CBA appropriately and be wary of open-source tools from the point of view of maintenance and support. But, at the same time, don’t pass over on those, but embrace them. Look for a solution that would allow them to exist in a sometimes chaotic and potentially ever-changing landscape from a technology point of view or architecture point of view. Do not to overthink it.

The solution is in the top list for automatic functional testing. It enables you to test a lot of infrastructure, a lot of applications: web, not web, with the different protocols, and so on.

HP UFT can do GUI testing (Graphical User Interface testing) and also can test directly web services using different protocols.
In the first case, the tool interact directly with the graphical interface, recognizing the objects inside (buttons, links, titles, etc.) and interacting with them (clicking, compiling forms, etc.); so the test is done like a human tester do, but automatically.
In the second case, the tool use the web services of the back-end of the application under test, that can be of different protocols (SOAP, REST, database queries, etc.).

At this moment, we are using version 12. Version 14 will be released soon.

It is very flexible. There are a lot of features. We can do a lot of things with it.

We use it to automate our integration testing. This lowers our total cost because tests are done automatically rather than manually by people. This saves time. With automatic tests, we can run different types of tests simultaneously. This is the most valuable thing.

There a lot of things that can be improved:

• Support for other environments and other infrastructures.
• I hoped that it would also be useful for the internet of things and big data. At this moment, it is not useful at all for big data. I don’t really know for the internet of things, but I think that it's not very substantial; but I hope that it will be in the future.
• For automatic functional testing, it works fine and covers a lot of statistics, but there is always something that doesn't work. It could be little or not.

I have been using this product for six years. When it totally changes in a new version, the stability is not very good. For example, when we changed from version 11 to 12, from my point of view it was a mess. It was totally not ready to go into production in companies. Now it very much seems to work for some things. It is not stable, of course; but remember that we are working on different environments. It could be that something doesn't work.

The scalability is good. They add a lot of features with every new release. I just learned about the two things that are being added now that are valuable for my organization.

It works fine at this moment. We had some problems before with the product. They understood that we were in trouble, and now they are giving us support. Normally, if a company is not having any particular problems, technical support is a little bit slow; but, in the end, if you wait, they either solve the problem or promise to fix it in the next version.

I did this kind of work for some years, so when I did the setup in the organization where I am now, I knew how to set up the product. It was a little bit simple. From that point of view, it is a normal installation; so it's okay.

It wasn’t involved in the decision to buy this product, but I would say the top vendors: IBM, CA, or Oracle.

I saw some products that are very simple. Ease of use is one of the best things and most important about HPE products.

Other products, for example, are less easy to use, but they work fine.

HP products sometimes have a lot of bugs to fix. You get in trouble sometimes because you want to adhere to some timelines, but then you find that the solution doesn't work. This is a mess for you. The issues of reliability and licensing are also very important, of course, when choosing a vendor.

If you want something that covers a lot of testing topologies, use UFT because it has a lot of features. If you are looking for something simpler, and don’t need a lot of automatic functional testing topologies, then maybe I could suggest something else.

• Object recognition
• Bulk-object capture: automatically builds data tables in order
• VBScript & C# & Java
• Industry- and market-leading functional test tool

It has reduced time-to-market regression from 160+ hours to 12 hours.

I’d like to see them improve the number of objects recognized without customization, similar to TestComplete by SmartBear. Simply put: It would save test development time, which would reduce time-to-market.

I have used it for eight years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues when it was properly integrated with remote execution controls.

I rate customer service 9/10.

I rate technical support 9/10.

We previously used WinRunner and switched due to ease of implementation.

Setup was easy and straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

Have a look at the HP UFT pricing model; it’s changed.

We also evaluated Smart Bear’s TestComplete.

It is a great alternative, and has outstanding object recognition & functionality.

License cost, ease of implementation, expandability, extensibility, reusability, availability of useful code and knowledge are some of the reasons to consider switching.

The integration with the third party products. Whether it's the mobile products or others, it is really helpful. Additionally, the HPE mobile solution integration that it provides is really helpful. Open source tools like Selenium and APM don't have easy integration into other mobile solutions.

A key benefit, obviously, is in terms of effort savings that we have achieved using UFT. We have used it for different projects across different business units within the enterprise. That's really the key for UFT.

It needs to be able to be used on Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers on Macs and not just Safari. That's a very key requirement for my organization.

I's pretty stable but obviously it has many issues that come up, especially during test automation for which you don't have a direct or easy solution. Then you have to go back to the product team or to forums and analyze it. I think HPE should look into these areas.

UFT is pretty much scalable in terms of Windows desktop and mobile platforms; but when it comes to Mac, it only supports Safari. I want it to support Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers on Mac. If UFT can't provide that, then at least LeanFT should provide that support. I believe it's in the roadmap but it will take a lot of time.

6-7/10 as there have been at least a couple of examples where it took a lot of time because we have to go back and forward with the product team and then to other teams within HPE. By the time we resolve the issue, it usually takes a lot of time. That was the observation, at least for a couple of key examples. Then we also had to put a lot of effort in. We finally got it resolved but I think if they could speed up the process.

We have been using it for a long time, since it was called QTP.

The complexity was pretty much okay, it's acceptable, so that was good. Once you implement the infrastructure within the organization, the complexity is pretty much similar to any other automation tool.

Definitely use UFT because it's a proven solution. You can at least use it for Windows desktop, or if you have mobile solutions whether it's HPE or any other mobile solutions which UFT integrates with that, it's a beautiful solution, although it has inherent problems, but you can work with that along with the HPE team.

I would say the most valuable is that we can get people started off really quickly on solutions because we've been partners with HPE for a long time and it helps us tailor the product to ours needs. When we have issues with something we can get support directly from HPE since we paid for it.

The fact that it works with a vast number of technologies works for us because our internal customers use the tool for testing a lot of different applications. That's probably the best feature that it has for us.

There's a lot of centralized testing from some perspectives and our main goal is to provide for a bunch of different groups at a lower cost so we centralize licensing and distribute it to various people. The biggest benefit of that is that it allows us to empower the people that need the solutions instead of manually having them develop the solutions on their own.

In the past three years it's become a lot more stable. Prior to that, we saw a lot of issues with stability and a lot of patching and concern from our internal customers that they couldn't rely on the tool to always be there when they needed it.

We don't scale it out on as large of a basis as ALM.

Our biggest issue was in the switch over from HP Inc. to HPE. I think we had some trouble getting in touch with higher level support so we spent a lot of time going through basic support where the people that work with the tools have a lot of experience with the tools. We think that it would be better if we could bypass the lowest levels of support on some issues. I can understand the process that we usually have to go through but more recently our reps have been helpful in getting us to the people that we need quicker so we can get a resolution.

Over the years, it's really gotten a lot better. The patches come out a lot more frequently now. It supports the technologies we need. HPE is currently working with us to expand the support in an area that it doesn't currently have. I guess I wouldn't go any higher than that because it's been a long time coming for it to get to that point.

- Built in object repository and storing elements.

- Less coding experience.

- Reporting dashboards.

- Supports desktop, web and mobile product automation.

- Continuous integration is possible with QC and Jenkins.

- Good customer support.

- Various formats of reporting support should be possible.

Right now UFT supports exporting reports in either HTML or PDF in short or detailed format. If exporting reports could be extended to Excel, csv, XML, XSLT, mht formats that would be greatly appreciated.

- They should improve performance and consistency during execution.

There will be performance degradation on the test environment due to long continuous executions of automation scripts which leads to inconsistency of results, a better way to resolve this problem should be addressed at some point.

It 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 has helped us automate our testing. We have also integrated it with our other tools such as JIRA and TFS. It's pretty good so far.

We look at service packs, what bugs they have and fixes. 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 a testing automation 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.

It's very straightforward.

UFT is a very mature product, but again, changes. This is a highly fast-paced, fast rolling field, and you have to keep up the pace with them. There are a lot of open source testers, and they do the job. UFT is a very capable tool compared to Selenium or other test tools available on the market. It can do the job is it cost effective? Investment is definitely on the higher side initially in terms of licensing cost.

UFT provides us with solid automation for our test cases.

Its ease of use means we've been able to ramp up non-technical users and have them understand how to do general debugging very easily.

Tighter integration between ALM and UFT, especially from a reporting perspective, for automation reporting. There's good integration in my opinion, but it just needs to be a little more rock solid.

We've been using it for around three and a half years.

For the most part UFT has been pretty good. Getting it to interact with ALM nicely has been a challenge for us sometimes.

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 vendors that we actually had on the list. We went with HPE because my boss actually was very familiar with the product, and felt it fits our organizations needs extremely well.

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

The ease of record and playback as well as descriptive programming are the most valuable features of UFT (QTP). Also the feature for automating both Windows and web applications form a single console is not bad.

My previous organization used UFT extensively for automation more than 500 complex end to end regression tests with considerable savings in time and effort. We were able to achieve that with high degree of reusability.

The product should evolve to be flexible so one can use any programming language such as Java and C#, and not just VB script. Also, the dependency of browser windows to be opened on screen in order for the tool to recognize objects is a big deal breaker since most organizations mandate screen locking when leaving the systems unattended. If we can’t leave a test to run attended, the point of automation in itself becomes a question-mark.

I've been using it for more than 10 years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We did have a few instances of browser crashing as well as the product crashing. While the product crashing was resolved with 4 GB of memory, the issue with browser crashing still happened with IE 11 and 12 browsers and no resolution was found.

UFT is pretty late to support latest versions of IE. Also I have seen a marked decrease in execution speed while the scripts grow.

I have not interacted directly with HP on the product support.

UFT setup is pretty straightforward.

We did it in-house.

It took about five years to break even. UFT is costly.

No other options were looked as we went straight ahead into UFT.

Go for the cheaper option of Selenium if your requirement is purely browser based testing. If not, go for UFT.

It allows me to perform all in one place--

• Regression tests (tests which check that the existing functionality of an application still works as it should after other parts of the application have been modified),
• Functional tests (to verify a specific action or function of code), and
• Service testing (automated testing protocol)

I was able to reduce regression and functional test times by 80%.

It could be improved with greater browser compatibility and more frequent updates.

Also, running a simple test is straightforward, but creating a framework that can be reused across other tests is complex and time consuming.

I've used it for three to four years.

I didn't encounter any issues with deployment.

When debugging code in UFT, it would crash, freeze and hang a lot.

We had no issues with scalability.

6/10

8/10

We previously used Selenium Webdriver.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

HP UFT cost a lot and there are other free tools that can do the same and much more.

I joined the company after the decision was made to use HP UFT.

If cost is not an issue, then UFT can be considered. There are other tools on the market that can do the same for less.