Polarion ALM Reviews

I use the solution in my company for STLC. We use the tool for testing processes, from test management to dashboard creation.

The solution's most valuable feature is that it is a strong tool. Jira is too open, and too many people can do what they want and have flexible control over it.

Some parts related to the dashboard need improvement. Nowadays, the dashboard is too complex to be created.

I have been using Polarion ALM for six months. I am an end user of the solution.

The software is stable. However, the tool's stability can be too slow at times. I don't know why dashboard creation takes so long.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability- I don't know now about the tool's scalability because I am not the admin or on any projects with the tool. I am just using the product since it is a compatible tool.

Around 100 people use the tool in my company.

I use the product every day. Mostly, I am connected to Polarion ALM because it is used for product testing and to make dashboards. With Polarion ALM, I can start off with Excel and do some of the classic management stuff. I am a test manager who is the main user of the tool.

I have experience with Jira. My company moved from Jira to Polarion ALM based on our CTO's decision.

The product's initial setup phase can be described as a medium-level process.

My company doesn't get involved in the tool's deployment process. We do functional testing.

The tool helps because our company gets more visibility in a very rigid manner, so people can just not reject a bug if we don't approve it, and we can control everything. All the tests needed to be provided can be executed. I can review all the tests. Reviewing the tests can be done before my team executes them, and then we have a strict connection with all the other staff about the product to figure out if we are able to meet the requirements and get good metrics with proper visibility.

I just use the product according to what my boss says he wants to use it for, but I don't know how much of it can be modified for our work. My company has some partnerships with the vendor, so sometimes we have a call with them.

I am just the tool's user, so I don't have to do any integrations. I just use it to identify any impact of the configurations.

I recommend the tool to others. It is a good tool for me.

I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

I work in an industry where I mainly look after the requirements, for which I use Polarion ALM.

The features of the solution are most valuable when it comes to its use in our company's development-related area.

Based on the requirements of my company, I can say that the tool helps collect information from different people with the help of a component in the tool known as epics. The tool offers our company the capabilities and features for use cases. The tool mainly helps our company in the area of planning, especially on the agile side we work on presently, which we recently integrated with DevOps. The planning phase is worked out based on the aforementioned details.

At the moment, I haven't looked in-depth into what needs improvement in the product. Based on my understanding, the tool's integration capabilities with multiple tools is an area of concern that Polarion needs to focus on more. Polarion ALM's features should be communicated easily with other tools as well. My company developed and built up some areas in Polarion ALM, because of which we are able to communicate its features with the other tools we use, but in general, everywhere, it is quite difficult to do it, mainly on the side of Azure DevOps. If you just look at Azure DevOps, it is completely on CI/CD pipeline, and the development process for certain things happens in such a tool when revolving around areas, like Sprint, Scrum, and Kanban, that fall under agile methodologies and not there in ALM, making it an area Polarion needs to build. Otherwise, Polarion ALM should be able to integrate with multiple tools and make the overall functioning feel much better.

I have been using Polarion ALM for four months.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Around 12 to 13 people in my company use the solution.

Our company doesn't have any requirements, but in the future, we might increase the usage of the solution.

I rate the technical support a nine to ten out of ten.

Positive

I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven to eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process since the process was not too easy for me.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud.

I may not have the complete information on how much time the tool takes to be deployed because our company uses it for planning purposes, but we haven't used it yet for the deployment side.

It is an expensive product. After using other tools, Polarion ALM seems to be very expensive.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. My requirements from the tool are not fulfilled with Polarion ALM, so I have to use multiple tools for that. Integration and scalability are possible with the solution, but I think Polarion has to be developed in a way that supports the software development area at a very low level, in the case of which the price should not be too high so that it becomes easy for people to use it.

Compared to Azure DevOps and other development tools available in the market, Polarion ALM is a bit costlier.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

We're an automotive company. Polarion ALM captures our customers' requirements and validates against those requirements.  We have our environment within our mother company, so only our people can see our data. I think it's called a project environment, but we have multiple projects. We work on the customer requirements and translate them into products designed here in our headquarters. Those are produced in factories across the globe.

Only the engineers and the test engineers in the headquarters will have access to Polarion. However, it is within the system of our mother company, so they have an automotive and medical project. We'll be in the automotive project, but we still coordinate with the guy managing the system. We want to make sure we're the only ones who can see our data. That is also a requirement of our audit. 

Polarion ALM helps us better structure our customer requirements, and we can also validate the specs of our products against those. If anything changes on our side, we see the impact, and we can see the effect If a customer changes requirements. 

We use PTC Windchill, and Polarion ALM doesn't have native integration, so we had to purchase the connector to integrate it with Polarion ALM. We still haven't implemented it.

We just started using Polarion ALM.

I think Polarion ALM is stable. I don't have too much experience, but I trust Siemens products. I've worked with it in training, and it looked highly stable.

I don't think it will be difficult to expand Polarion ALM to more users.

Our parent company has a group of IT guys in the United States working with support in India. They have the expertise to manage the system, but they also get consulting services from Siemens on certain topics when they need help. Our in-house support is doing all the technical support, like upgrades and providing access.

Before Polarion ALM, we used Excel.

Our mother company has deployed Polarion ALM extensively. They have this ASPICE method, but we don't need to follow that for our products. We did a basic setup to start with. We might change it later, but it's okay for now. From a strategy perspective, we started with a small team. The plan was to set something up, evaluate what we did and build on that. 

We worked with a small core team of six people to decide how it would work and what we wanted to do. We'll start with a pilot team for the first customer with 14 people when we launch.

We initially did everything together with Siemens and prepared some things in a sandbox with the team. Afterward, we started configuring some stuff and selected what we wanted then moved to a test environment. We will move to a production environment in the next few weeks.

Polarion ALM helps us deliver what our customers expect.

Polarion is average for the market. It's about the same as Integrity, but the price wasn't our primary concern. It was more about functionality. Our parent company already had a contract with Siemens, so we use the licenses through them. We get a cross charge, but I'm not sure how it adds up. 

We were also looking at PTC Integrity, which was a good solution, but our mother company was already using Polarion, so it made more sense to go that route. 

We've been working on this project for two years. There were a lot of political discussions going on in the company. In the end, we decided to go for Polarion, but the business people all needed to be involved. They were busy, so they decided to postpone. Now we're back at it again. 

We need integration with Windchill, and if our mother company didn't use Polarion, we would've gone with PTC Integrity because it is from the same vendor. We did a functional comparison between the two systems, and there wasn't much difference. They're both good systems, but we opted for Polarion with a Windchill connector.

I rate Polarion ALM nine out of 10. 

We do requirement management and task management using this tool.

We're generally happy with the solution. 

It is stable and reliable. It offers good performance.

The pricing is fine. 

The planning and task management aspects of the solution were not that easy.

It is a bit complex to set up.

I've been using the solution for one and a half to two years. 

The performance is pretty good. It has been stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

I'm familiar with Jir and find that it has better planning and task management features than this product. 

The product is complex to deploy. There is a lot of customization needed in order to use it effectively. It works for us now. It's not too difficult. 

We did have help from a third party that we have used for a long time. They gave us some good, sound advice. 

The solution offers a good balance between price and performance. 

We have been looking into other options. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using at this time. 

If you do a good job at customization, it will help with consistency and assist with the traceability of the products. 

I wouldn't recommend the product to people who need a task management or planning tool. That's not this product as well.

As an ALM tool, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

The primary use case of the solution is writing test cases, mapping those test cases to the requirements, and creating and executing test runs.

The features I find the most valuable are requirement tracking and schematics. 

The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly, and a server-based application rather than client based. I find it difficult to update the test cases in the test run and would like a more simplistic process. As an example, If I create version one of the test case. And in a test run, I add that version one of the test cases in the test run and I go to that test case and update it to version two, I can update that fine, but in the test run, it is not automatically updated to version two.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution appears to be stable.

The solution is scalable.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

There are six users in the organization using the solution and three of them use it daily.

This solution is used when we have projects based on web applications.

I suggest anyone thinking about using the solution familiarize themselves with the tool first by using a quick start guide.

There are similar solutions out there such as Jira and Confluence, but they are not as good.

Polarion is an all in one tool that we use from conception to validation testing. Our product team uses it for their requirements, our developers use it for their stories and tasks, and our quality team uses it for testing. 

It integrates with SVN and GitLab.

It's all in one place, where every department can utilize the same tool. It meets with everybody's needs without having to grab plugins. For example, Jira is nothing but a bunch of plugins.

What is most valuable is that this is an all-inclusive tool.

This is an area that has already been corrected, but the Navigation areas of the document and being able to have subdocuments was an area that needed improvement.

Technical support needs some improvement.

The pricing could be reduced. If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch.

I have been using this solution for six years.

This is a stable tool as long as our environment is stable.

For us, it has been quite stable so far.

This solution is scalable and it's highly configurable. Most of it can be done through the GUI and you can get into the backend, the XML, and make changes as well.

Technical support varies, it's 50/50. You can get a knowledgeable person and you get great support. If on the other hand, you can't get someone knowledgeable then you get a runaround.

I wasn't a part of the initial setup.

It is a clustered environment where we have three nodes that our users hit to gather the data, then we have a shared database.

It's been the only ALM tool that I have used. 

As far as capabilities and learning the system, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We mainly use Polarion ALM for requirements engineering as well as task planning and task execution, but we mainly use it as a documentation and traceability tool.

I work in the medical device development field. Even though Polarion is quite expensive, it's quite a good solution for medical device development in general, especially for software development.

Within our previous company, not that many people used Polarion as it was only used within our department relating to medical device development. I'd say around 20 to 30 people were using it. It's hard to say as we had around six licenses with some floating licenses.

I like that there is, more or less, a single solution for everything. In regards to Polarion, if you're not experienced, it can be quite complicated, so you may need weeks or even months to familiarize yourself with the tools and how it operates. Once you understand how it works it becomes a very useful tool; we mainly use it for requirements engineering, so for us, the traceability is a really important feature. I also like all of the possibilities for different reports and the option to have a "what you see is what you get" editor for all documents and especially, for the release of documents. 

The amount of document control, combined with review and release probabilities and signatures is really useful. For example, Confluence does not have these capabilities. You would have to install Comala, with its plug-in that is used for document control, and even then, it would not be comparable. Polarion's document control is one of the best that I have used. In terms of development itself, having the work items and requirements altogether in one place and being able to control them by Staples, is really helpful.

The ease-of-use could be improved a little, but at the same time, it's a complex tool so that has to be expected; such a complex tool cannot be completely straightforward. 

The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises.

Also, the beginner's tutorials are quite outdated — working on versions from 2010 or 2012. More up-to-date tutorials with different use cases would be a nice adjustment.

It's always possible to improve such tools by adding more features and improving automatization. For example, we never tried the connection to build service. I believe it's possible to do that, to automatically link it to the software build process. We only used it more or less manually. It's possible that, that feature could be improved because I believe there was a reason why we didn't do it, but I can't explain in more detail as I was not really involved in the process.

In general, I would like to see improvements on the information and materials.

My current company has been using Polarion ALM for quite a long time, since approximately 2012. I personally started working with Polarion ALM four years ago.

I don't remember any real bugs. We always had some (more or less) minor questions relating to different issues. I don't completely remember, but we had direct contact to our vendor here in Austria, so in most cases, problems could be solved in a more or less direct way. So no really big problems. 

We had a nice experience with technical support. Contacting them was like gaining secret knowledge because so much information is not published, like macros and snippets of code and so on. If you just ask, they will give you different pieces of code for different purposes — for reports for example. You couldn't find that hidden code on your own but if you ask, Siemens will, more or less, give it to you for free. As it's clear that they don't want to publish everything on their website, just ask if they have a solution that is yet to be published, and maybe they can help you out.

I was not involved in the initial setup. Still, when you're working with Microsoft, creating your own code within the system, you have to be the admin. Also, when updating to a newer version, problems can occur leading to the loss of older, developed pieces of code. It's a small issue but you need to be aware of it in order to handle it properly. Other than that, the setup is quite straightforward. 

Maintenance was distributed between several people. We had one main administrator. We were quite a large company with 1,300 people in total, but there were only around 60 of us working in the medical device domain. We had one central IP infrastructure, but they only provided us with computers to the hardware. We managed the tool within the departments on our own. We had one administrator, who was the master administrator, who did the updates, and so on. We also had several tool administrators. In other words, we were two units within the department and for each unit, we had one administrator.

The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises.

If you're a beginner to Life Cycle Requirements Engineering in general, I'd recommend that you familiarize yourself with the basics of requirement engineering in order to gain independence of the tool itself. Eventually, when you start using Polarion, start from the very beginning. Even though the tutorials are out-of-date, they are still helpful. 

We also used our vendors as our trainers and teachers. We booked them for three or four days to get a proper introduction to Polarion. Starting off with an expert is a really good idea, it will cost you, but it will save you so much time. One expert instructor can teach more than 20 workers at once, saving you hours or even weeks.

I would rate Polarion really quite high. We were happy with it, and nowadays, without this type of tool, it's not possible to develop medical devices independently of software or hardware. I would give Polarion a rating of nine out of 10.

The best feature of Polarion ALM to me is its traceability link.

As Polarion ALM is a development-oriented tool, easy support or easy access is provided by default, but if I want to use detailed features, I need to write the script, particularly the VM script, and this is its area for improvement. I want Polarion ALM to have a graphical user interface that doesn't need scripting.

In the next release of the tool, I'd like for it to not require scripting and programming because needing to run script language is time-consuming.

The first time I used Polarion ALM was two years ago, then I stopped using it, then two months ago, I started using the solution again.

Polarion ALM is a stable tool. I have not seen it breaking down or having issues.

I'm not sure how scalable Polarion ALM is because I only have one server and one computer for it.

The technical support for Polarion ALM is very good. I quickly get a response from the team. The support team is knowledgeable, and I would rate technical support for the tool the best score which is five out of five.

I used the classic DOORS and when you compare it to Polarion ALM, DOORS has an old interface. Polarion ALM has a newer interface and newer, more updated features than DOORS.

Whether Polarion ALM is easy or complex to set up depends on the installation scenario. If it's load balancing, setting the tool up is difficult, but if it's just a standalone installation on one server, the process is relatively easy. On a scale of one to five, with one being difficult and five being easy, I would rate the setup in the middle, so three out of five.

I don't have information on the price of Polarion ALM because it was the customer who purchased it.

I've evaluated IBM Rational ALM, Terralogic, Serena ALM, and the classic DOORS.

I'm a consultant for customers. I'm using Polarion ALM for my customer. In particular, I provide the service to my customer using Polarion ALM.

In terms of how Polarion ALM is deployed, for Japanese customers, it's on-premises because of confidentiality and sensitive information. Many Japanese do not believe in the security of cloud deployment.

My rating for Polarion ALM is eight out of ten.