OpenText Software Delivery Management Reviews

Octane is a relatively new solution for us. We needed better tooling than we previously had and Octane gave us extra flexibility. Our primary use case is for cross-project program reporting and dashboards. We are customers of Micro Focus and I'm a company director. 

The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features for us. From a development perspective, we use Jira and Zephyr. To stay agile, we need to ensure that our Jira data is feeding into our ALM projects. It's about the real-time integration between the two and bringing that information across accurately. 

I haven't been impressed with the reporting from a requirements matrix and a traceability perspective. ALM has always lacked in this area. They come at it more from a Waterfall testing perspective, and less from a Sprint-based perspective. It's in those areas that we use Jira with some of our development teams. We ran into roadblocks due to the sheer number of users, around 1,500 people using the tool, carrying out testing, and ensuring that people understand the requirements.

I think they need to look at ways of innovating and finding the wow factor with more flexibility and agility in development, but they've never really been good at handling that which is why we stick with Jira. There hasn't been much investment in the tool and there are definitely some areas that can be improved upon.

I've been using this solution for about six months. 

The stability is fine and they give you the capability that you need to run a good quality engineering program. It's what they've been providing more or less for at least 20 years; perhaps it's time for some innovation.  

There's no problem with scalability. 

We don't deal directly with Micro Focus but with one of their support teams through another vendor. We've never had an issue. 

ALM is a little pricier than Zephyr Enterprise. Because of our familiarity with ALM and the fact that we had all the integrations, it was easier to resume using it. 

We compared Zephyr Enterprise with ALM and decided to go with ALM because we have another provider that already had integration with ALM. If we'd gone with Zephyr, it would have required some technical integrations with their APIs and some of our testing tools. From a capability perspective, the two solutions are pretty on par with one another. If an organization is evaluating capabilities versus investment, then they might prefer Zephyr.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We are using it for test management. We are using its latest version.

It can simplify testing by structuring it after the application modules that you are defining yourself, and these are both tests and defects connected, which helps you control the quality in different areas of your solution that you deliver.

The filtering options are very good once you learn them. The document reports are also valuable. You can create reports in Word and PDF formats. That's very useful.

It is flexible. You can integrate it with a lot of other products that are available. If needed, there are APIs available. That's also very good. It's also pretty easy to adapt for the users.

Development of extensions or connections to GitHub actions could be better. Better integration with Azure DevOps would also help.

I have been using this solution for about four years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is just about adding more power and more Elasticsearch servers, and you should be fine.

We have about 500 different users daily.

We are happy with them. We have weekly meetings with the PAM.

We used HP ALM Quality Center. We switched to Octane because it's a more modern platform. It runs on full browsers and all OSes. So, it makes sense to use it. 

We installed it on the side of the existing one, and we migrated step by step or project by project. 

To start with, it was pretty complex because it was a pretty new solution when we installed it. We were probably one of the first bigger companies installing it. So, we were quite early adopters, but it is a lot easier today to install this. We haven't had any problems. There are very few errors in the solution.

It was done a long time ago, but we spent a lot of time because we had to explore enabling single sign-on, etc. That contributed to taking some time, but that had nothing to do with the product. It is probably a lot simpler today.

We are an IT company. We do it ourselves. We had just two people. We probably had a DBA too.

It is hard to say. We don't measure it, but we probably have seen an ROI.

If you compare the price with the functionality, it is pretty much the same as other solutions. If you compare it to Jira, for instance, it has a lot more functionality. You don't need any plug-ins, but it's also more expensive. Once you start adding your different plug-ins to Jira, you'll probably end up with the same amount or more.

There is also a yearly support cost, which is usually 25% of the initial cost of the license.

We already had ALM Quality Center. So, it was a natural move to Octane. It was easier for migration purposes, and the users knew some of the main functionalities. So, we did not evaluate other tools.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is pretty good.

ALM Octane is used to manage our software delivery. Currently, we are running the hybrid mode. We use traditional waterfall delivery as well as agile. 

• For waterfall delivery, it is managed completely. Then, we have our requirements and our test cases to cover those requirements as well as the defects. 
• For agile, we currently have only one team. So, all team activity happens in ALM Octane. Their backlog is broken down into user stories tasks, then covered by the test coverage.

We have installed it on a Windows Server on our systems.

ALM Octane natively supports waterfall, hybrid, and agile software development perfectly at an enterprise scale. 

1. If you look at the Requirement module, then we see all the defects and test cases related to waterfall. 
2. If we look at the Backlog module, we see what the agile team works on. 
3. If you want to see it at the component level, then imagine that we have a CRM system where a release project of waterfall makes a delivery and the agile team also makes a delivery on that component. 
4. We come to the Quality module, where if you select that component, then both streams would be represented there. 
5. If you select in the Quality module components, then we could see that, "Okay, this is linked to the defects from this source and that source. These are test cases covering that." 

This was one of the key aspects of why we took ALM Octane. 

With ALM Octane supporting agile, this reduces complexity and the need to manage multiple tools. We are still working on some automation that would further make us more efficient. So, we are building in-house tools to reduce the manual work.

Our user experience has been greatly improved.

In the current organizational structure, our development teams and testing teams are separate. With this transformation, I think the collaboration will increase, and we are on our way to put these teams closer.

We are very much moving towards DevOps in certain parts of the application. We are starting to develop these microservices and running a proof of concept where we want to integrate our Jenkins pipeline, which builds and deploys the application into Octane. For example, if there is a defect in the content, then what defects are being deployed through this pipeline? Octane really supports DevOps with the Pipeline module using the comment information in the items, along with integration from the IDEs. So, once our PoC is done, then we will utilize the DevOps features.

Currently, we have our hybrid delivery model, where waterfall still is a big part. So, if I look at ALM Octane from the module perspective, we are utilizing this requirement module. We took our day-to-day, grouping them by releases. Our requirements are stored in Confluence and ALM Octane. So, our project managers draw their requirements in Confluence, then we have a synchronization where requirements are brought into ALM Octane. Therefore, from the module perspective, the most valuable feature would be the Requirements module. 

We utilize dashboards for all their reporting capabilities to see where our software is from a quality point of view: test progress, defect trends, and so on. 

We are big fans of the Pipeline module, where we have our automated tests running on Jenkins and our pipeline is integrated into ALM Octane. 

Octane provides multiple plugins and integration with IDEs, so developers don't even need to log into ALM Octane, for certain scenarios. They only need to install the plugin into their development environment, i.e., Eclipse, Visual Studio, or IntelliJ. Then, they can sync their work items to this IDE where they can easily see what defects or user story is assigned to them. They can work directly from there by adding comments, changing the status, or even committing the code. This also applies to the pipeline for Jenkins. 

There are a lot of predefined reports. We can attach additional reports for users, like who worked on what defect and when, as well as what is the status of the release compared to the previous release. It is really endless. All the data is really linked together. Then, if all the data is linked together, there is an option to prepare reports out of it. We are very impressed with its reporting capabilities.

They provide all data integration. So if you have an edge use case, which you cannot do with what the tool provides, then you can set your data through all the protocols and even prepare it for the reports. I think they are very strong in this area.

On a team level, it is really good. We have received only positive feedback from our teams. It is visual, so there are different ways for teams to see their backlog. If they wish, it can be viewed like a list and a board, where you can look at the content per screen, release, or for the whole backlog.

The tool is very intuitive. However, it is still new, so you still need to learn and explore it, but that is a standard thing. Initially, we did receive some questions from teams, "How do I do this?" and, "How do I do that?" However, in very recent times, since it has been up and running, teams have enjoyed the fast, modern, new platform.

For the PoC, we have ALM Octane integrating with our CI server for continuous integration and delivery. We have it integrated with Jenkins. We haven't integrated our other server yet. We are still exploring the solution.

ALM Octane is working to soon provide comment information, so we would really be able to see what piece of code was committed for a user story or feature. We are really looking forward to this, because it's going to give us a bit more traceability and transparency.

They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add. 

There are small things, like hiding different columns when it comes to the board. Currently, whatever workflow items you have defined in the board, you can collapse them, but a collapse line still appears. These small things would make a difference.

In certain areas, ALM Octane has a limitation how many items can be displayed. So, if I group something, then I'm limited to the number of items which I can see. Also, if I want to export in Excel, there is a limitation onis lines. I know it's 5000. Maybe the number is quite high, but if they could improve on those limits, that would be good.

We did a migration around Midsummer. That was about six months ago.

It is very stable. With our current setup, we haven't seen any performance issues.

Very little maintenance is needed. No one does it full-time. We have five people who have the admin rights, then two people who act as a backup but don't really do anything.

It is scalable. We can add additional nodes without a lot of effort, if it is required. There is an option to scale from a license point of view. From a hardware point of view, we can also add multiple nodes to support additional loads.

We have about 1,000 users. 

We have an excellent guy who helped us with the whole migration project. We have already built a good relationship with him, so much that we don't always go through the official channels. He still takes our questions via email if we need the clarification on certain things. Additionally, the official OpenText support channels are also good. We raised a couple of incidents, which were addressed by the team. 

In the past, we had ALM Quality Center to manage our waterfall deliveries. Once the company took the decision to do the transformation to agile, we needed a tool that could support both waterfall and agile, but not compromise functionality. This was a key factor why we took on ALM Octane. We knew that the transition to agile would not happen overnight and that we might be in the hybrid model for a while, which is the exact reason why we took on ALM Octane.

It is very much integratable. This was a piece that was critical for us because ALM Quality Center was used by our company for more than 10 years, and it was very easy to integrate. Before we could migrate to ALM Octane, we needed the integration to be in place for a new tool. There are different ways to integrate, through the REST API, plugins, or the MF Connect tool, which also comes with ALM Octane.

Because we were coming from a very old Quality Center version, we have become more efficient because the work can be done faster.

The deployment was straightforward. The documentation clearly states the requirements regarding what hardware is required. Additionally, all the installation and deployment guides are good.

The deployment went through phases. First, we installed the system, which was pretty fast. After that, we migrated all the data from Quality Center, which was an additional task.

The upgrade was super fast. We were so impressed. We ran a test first, but after that, it took maybe 90 minutes altogether. That includes the backup of systems. Before the upgrade, we backed up our Elasticsearch because ALM Octane comes with Elasticsearch, and in our case, it runs on Unix machines. So, we backed up Elasticsearch, the data repository for all the attachments, etc., then took a snapshot of the database and the Windows machine, which was the longest part. Some of the snapshots, we did in advance, and some of the snapshots we did just prior to the upgrade. 

We did two upgrades at once because we missed the previous one. The upgrade to 15.1.20 took about 10 minutes, then we did some checks and everything was working fine. We then did the further upgrade to 15.1.40, which was another 10 minutes. 

One person with a bit of hardware knowledge can do the deployment. Because we did a migration project, we had a team of four from release management, but this wasn't our full-time task.

We also had support from OpenText.

The testing team has said that can work more efficiently and that the setup of the testing at the beginning of the release is faster.

We already had Jira in-house, but its testing capabilities were insufficient and not scalable enough for our needs.

Define the process which fits your organization best. Explore the features in the test management and test execution area, then define the process that is best for you because there are a lot of options. Also, when you do create your data, make sure that you connect it to the right items. Because once you put the correct data into the tool, then you can build strong reports. However, the reports are only as strong as the data behind them.

MF Connect, which is a separate tool from OpenText, provides additional data synchronization. With MF Connect, you can synchronize ALM Octane with Excel, Jira, and other tools. We use it for synchronization with Jira. Then, if this doesn't support your needs, there is also the REST API. We use that quite a lot as well. Through the REST API, we connect with things in different solutions.

While our manual testing time has been reduced, it is necessarily true because of ALM Octane. It is more due to a bigger initiative where we have automated our test cases. ALM Octane supports our automation initiative. With the pipelines, we can execute test cases through Jenkins, then the analytics in the pipelines give us a trend to see. For example, are certain test cases constantly failing? Or, do we have a problematic area where we need to strengthen the automated test focus?

ALM Octane would give us information on what exactly went into which release and what exactly needs to be rolled out. For all our test cases that need to be executed for the release, or on the release night, we would hold information within ALM Octane.

We are planning to increase usage in the future. Currently, our other agile teams use Jira. The goal is that if we do not migrate those teams to Jira, then we should at least integrate both those tools together. We would then manage all the agile work within ALM Octane. Also, our organization recently got acquired by another organization, so we are in the process of merging two companies. Therefore, there potentially will be a lot of additional users going forward.

I would rate it as a nine (out of 10).

The platform's most valuable feature is pipeline integration or continuous integration services. It can fetch insights about various deposit points after synchronizing with Jira, IBM, or other tools. It gives visualization through dashboards and reports updates quickly and easily.

The product's requirements management feature needs enhancement in terms of functionality. Also, the release management feature needs expansion.

We have been using OpenText ALM Octane for ten years.

I rate the platform's stability a ten out of ten.

I have worked with around 400 OpenText ALM Octane customers. It works well for synchronizing data.

We had a good experience working in the support team's R and D department. However, they could provide more technical resolutions.

Positive

We used HPE Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for a significant amount of time. From a competitive point of view, no comprehensive tools could cover ALM functionalities better than HPE and OpenText. Almost 80% of enterprise companies use OpenText as a well-integrated solution. It doesn't require the technical expertise required to work with open-source tools. Also, it provides good support services.

The initial setup process is straightforward. The platform has well-defined, out-of-the-box workspaces and projects incorporating good practice workflows.

The product is highly priced compared to other tools. However, it offers substantial value. There is a distinction between OEM pricing and the final pricing for customers. They could understand the delta between the two and work towards a favorable outcome.

I rate OpenText ALM Octane a ten out of ten. It is a great product considering ETL and DevOps methodologies. It integrates and synchronizes well with other tools as well. I advise others to understand the business requirements before making a purchase decision.

I like the fact that you can use it on top of Jira. 

Let's say for example, that if you have a DevOps team that is used to Jira, they can continue to use any of the Jira solutions and then have Octane layered on top of it from the business buyer's viewpoint to better use it more effectively.

There is no question that everything can improve.

I like their smart analytics; perhaps they should continue to expand and improve there because it's a fantastic start. And I enjoy the testing, especially the automated testing capabilities, so just keep improving on what they have.

I have been working with Micro Focus ALM Octane for one year.

I am reviewing the latest version.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is a stable solution.

Because of HPE's support, I would feel far more comfortable with Micro Focus.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is a scalable product.

We have approximately 500 clients who are using this solution.

They are large enterprises and digital transformation, IT engineers, more business-oriented than DevOps-oriented.

We have not contacted technical support.

We are working with the Hybrid version, but It even extends to on-premises. It is both the on-premises and cloud versions.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I believe it depends on the circumstance, getting it up and running seems to be rather simple. It appears to be suitable for standing up in a bigger setting.

If I compare it to Jira, for example, and you are in a complex environment, you have to ensure that everything is updated and all of the plugins, and everything works every time there is an update, but you don't have that problem with Micro Focus' Octane.

We received assistance from a third-party consultant.

Because I am making recommendations for a client, I lack firsthand deployment experience. I am merely talking to them and assisting them in making decisions.

My clients have seen a return on investment. I can't quantify it for you, but they believe that because it is cohesive and can be used across the enterprise in a simplified manner, it reduces the total cost of ownership, which might be translated into a return on investment.

In my opinion, it's good value for the price that you pay.

I have some experience with Jira and Micro Focus ALM Octane, but I am mostly reviewing them to give a recommendation for a client.

I would suggest reviewing it thoroughly to make sure that it is a good fit for your environment.

I believe it works well in a variety of settings, but like with any solution, some are more suited to some situations than others. I believe it is trustworthy, reputable, and scalable.

I would rate Micro Focus ALM Octane an eight out of ten.

We use Micro Focus ALM Octane for test management.

The feature I found most valuable in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its ability to integrate with the CI/CD stack.

Though Micro Focus ALM Octane doesn't have much of a bug, it lacks integration with some solutions. For example, my company has fairly new software, but it can't be integrated with Micro Focus ALM Octane, so integration with other software, particularly with less popular software, could be improved.

Micro Focus ALM Octane also requires a lot of resources during its setup, and I find this another area for improvement.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the ability to customize the interface, especially when doing a manual test.

My company just implemented Micro Focus ALM Octane, so my experience with it is less than a month. My team is still in the exploration phase with Micro Focus ALM Octane.

So far, Micro Focus ALM Octane has been pretty stable.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is a scalable solution.

Support for Micro Focus ALM Octane is pretty responsive, but in terms of resolving the problem, that takes time. Issue resolution usually takes more than a day and sometimes a week.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating Micro Focus ALM Octane support a three.

We only used Micro Focus ALM Octane.

The initial setup for Micro Focus ALM Octane was pretty straightforward, but its infrastructure requirement needs improvement because you need a lot of resources to set up Micro Focus ALM Octane.

It only took a day to complete the software installation, but for the infrastructure, that's my main obstacle because it's resource-heavy.

My team implemented Micro Focus ALM Octane.

I'm unable to share the licensing cost of Micro Focus ALM Octane because that's confidential information.

I have familiarity with Micro Focus ALM Octane because I'm currently using it. I'm using the latest version of the solution.

As it's only been a month since Micro Focus ALM Octane was implemented, only three people use it within my company, in particular, administrators and engineers.

For the deployment and maintenance of Micro Focus ALM Octane, one experienced person is sufficient.

My company has plans to expand Micro Focus ALM Octane usage.

I'm still not sure if I'd recommend Micro Focus ALM Octane to others because I'm still exploring it.

I'm rating Micro Focus ALM Octane as seven out of ten because other products have better integration with open-source solutions versus Micro Focus ALM Octane.

I'm a customer of Micro Focus ALM Octane.

It's for monitoring the application lifecycle for quality and testing in an agile methodology.

The enterprise view for application management has been great.

It’s easy to set up.

Generally, we’d like more adoption of the solution in our industry.

We’d like to see Platform One/Iron Bank compliant containers. These are certifications. Certification for Platform One and specifically for the product ALM Octane, Platform One/Iron Bank certification would be ideal. My understanding is it just so happens that that's the roadmap.

The clients have been working with it for 25 years.

The solution is very stable.

It's extremely scalable. It's an enterprise solution for lifecycle management.

As a rep, I’d always like to increase usage. In general, there's a total direction to increase exposure to ALM Octane.

I have experience with technical support. For secure clients in the US, domestic in-country support is outstanding.

If you're just doing the regular follow the sun, there could be issues with support availability. However, if you use premium in-country support, you won’t have issues.

The product management and the Go Octane support, which is the migration to Octane, which is not an in-country that is now going and leveraging the Go Octane team is also outstanding.

I'm working with them right now with my customers to migrate from their Al Octane. They're right on target, with a lot of cool exposure. Clients have been satisfied.

My clients were using ALM, the predecessor, and due to the cost-effective migration and technical capabilities to leverage an agile framework application solution, Octane was the right choice.

The initial setup is straightforward.

There's a migration SHIFT from ALM to Octane that is straightforward.

I don’t have any specific information about ROI.

There’s such a large investment in scripts built for these. To recreate that content in other products would be a disadvantage economically to pursue once you have the legacy products. It would be very expensive to get a system integrated to do so.

As a partner, we offer perpetual licensing as well as annual or monthly subscription licensing.

I’m not sure how it compares to other products.

There aren’t any additional costs that I am aware of. It may be different with different deployments. However, customers in the security community have their own secure cloud, and so they just install it there.

I've had my customers look at ServiceNow, DevOps AddOn as well as Jira, and Zephyr.

I don't want to limit our sales. However, my clients were ALM customers and they said the best choice coming from ALM was to migrate their projects to Octane instead of moving over to a new platform.

Micro Focus is an English company. We're a small US-based company that is a master reseller for all the Micro Focus products. I sell the product. I'm a vendor.

I’d rate the solution ten out of ten.

I mainly use ALM Octane for product teams and Agile teams.

The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale. The graphics could also be improved, and CSD could be added.

I've been using this solution for over a year.

ALM Octane is stable, but its performance isn't so good.

The scalability isn't good.

Micro Focus' technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup was difficult and took over three months.

We used an in-house team to implement.

ALM Octane is very expensive.

I compared Octane with Jira, which is better-priced and more user-friendly than Octane.

ALM Octane is complex and difficult to use, so you have to be willing to train the people who are going to be working with it. I would rate it five out of ten.