Broadcom Agile Requirements Designer Reviews

This tool improves our speed and automates our processes.

We can deliver software better and faster.

Most of our requests have been met, but I would like to see connection with RSS or maybe with Confluence.

It is pretty new, so together with CA, we improved it over the first half of the year. It was a partner deal, mostly to help them out.

The scalability is okay.

We worked with technical support in the development process. It has worked out very well.

Previous to this solution, we just used manual processes.

I was involved in the installation, which wasn’t so complex. Educating people is more of the problem. The education process is complex.

We were looking at HPE and we looked at homemade products. None came near to this solution. In this case, we didn't have any other alternatives. There was no other vendor which had these solutions, so there was no option to compare.

I would suggest buying this solution.

One of the best features is that you can actually develop some of the business designs in the application and transfer that into scenarios if you don't go out of the detail level. And you can see the coverage. You can get your test cases automatically done for you.

I believe the best thing is that you can automatically generate your test cases.

Because of the way it is designed, all the boxes are displayed no matter how many there are. So, the more boxes you create the smaller and smaller they are displayed and you cannot even read it. So it's impossible to design your requirements. If you cannot read the boxes, what's the point?

Then, they need to make it more user-friendly, so that you can navigate from one section to another. Also, being able to automatically create stories. Some of the feedback I received from my team is that you cannot go out of the detail level. For example, if you want to create test cases from this level, it actually stays at a really high level unless you add a hundred steps. And then you have a huge process diagram that you have to maintain after that.

I haven't actually installed it, so I can’t give you much information about that. But, I've seen that its not able to do some things. For example, you cannot create user stories inside Agile Requirements Designer. We just saw another product where you could drill down to BBD and TDD. And you can actually transform that and create your user stories to be able to do that and this product is lacking that.

We haven't actually used technical support yet.

Well right now we use multiple systems. For example, if you want to build your business diagram, you have to use Visio. You can’t export the diagram into a format useable by Agile Requirements Designer. You need to go directly to an application lifecycle management system and build your steps, but you need follow the business diagram you created in Visio to be able to create those steps for those test cases.

So you have to upload all your requirements into an ALM system to be able to identify your metrics. But with this tool, I see the benefit that you can actually do it automatically. To be able to identify all scenarios, you need to test.

We just saw another product called Blueprint that is very similar to this. It was very user friendly and it has a lot of capabilities for where we're heading, which is agile. It’s very user friendly, the navigation is really good, and you can read the boxes.

Because of the amount of time that you have to invest to maintain it and because its not simple, not user friendly, I would rate CA Agile Requirements Designer a 5/10.

The most valuable features of this solution are the ease for creating test cases and the automation of the test cases from the user workflows.

It will enhance and make the automation part for the testers a lot easier.

It should allow the teams to create automated test cases a lot faster. They can do their testing within a two week sprint and then get the products released into production a lot sooner.

Since we're just beginning to use this application requirements tool, I'm not sure what exactly is missing in it.

The biggest thing for us is the effort required to create the workflows. There's a lot of initial work that goes in and if we could streamline that a bit more, it would be better.

The product is stable and reliable.

It is very scalable. I know that it's used for both small and large projects.

We have still not used technical support.

We decided to use this solution to bring in automation and a tool to help the testers.

It's easy to setup and get the license. Applying it to the different organizations that is the challenging part.

Make sure that you have the right staff with at least some skill sets, if you are looking to purchase a similar solution.

We had already done several POCs in different parts of the organization. Since they were using this tool and we needed to a carry out similar efforts, we just brought it in. Once they select a vendor, other groups just follow since the POC has already been done.

This tool is new for us and it is just that we are still not taking full advantage of it yet.

There are tons of really valuable features. First of all, it's a model-based testing tool and the market of model-based testing is pretty narrow, and there are few offerings. I did extensive research in this area and at the moment CA Agile Requirements Designer is probably one of the best tools in the market. It allows you to utilize the full power of model-based testing using a simple method to build a workflow, which is more familiar to most software and test engineers than to business analysts or product managers.

It has a native engine that allows you to configure test coverage for your application model, and you can analyze this coverage by applying different optimizations. This really helps to make informed decisions when you're choosing the right amount of testing you need to apply. How not to over-test your application from one point of view, and from other point of view, how to guarantee 100% functional coverage in your testing. This is really crucial. Another great feature is that it can be integrated with test automation tools. This tool is agnostic can be integrated with a number of different products.

Another useful feature is the ability to integrate with a test data manager. For example, in my array, I don't have large databases from which I can get enough data for my testing. But other companies do have large data sets and they can integrate their testing tools with the databases to do sub-setting and masking. CA can also build synthetic data for testing. These are very powerful features that you can't find in other products. In this way, CA is in a unique position, because they offer these unique products with unique feature sets.

We have a number of challenges and one of the methods we use to solve these is model-based testing. That's what we're researching right now. We're doing a proof of concept with Agile Requirements Designer, which is pretty feature rich. ARD was a startup and CA bought it a little bit more than a year ago. Since then, the quality has greatly improved.

I don't know what improvements to make since we are not yet using this in production. We are still in the preliminary stages of testing. I plan to do more research on it. They're already doing the right thing. They're improving the integration with automation and that’s really important. However, the documentation is not clear regarding best practices, so that could be improved. Since it’s not likely that every automation framework can be easily integrated with CA ARD, it would be nice to have recommendations regarding what changes to make to the automation framework in order to successfully achieve that.

I’ve used CA for approximately for two months.

I haven’t used it for a very long time. The first version I tried had a lot of bugs. The version I tried in June or July was much more stable.

I think that it is scalable.

We worked with several people from CA and they did a really great job helping us familiarize ourselves with the tool. At the conference, I spoke with maybe five or six representatives; technical guys, sales guys, even feature developers, people with strong technical backgrounds and I got a lot of new information. It's cool. They're doing awesome stuff.

We hadn't used model-based testing tools before.

I am not the person who approves the budgeting, but I am the person who'll do the research and present the results to the decision makers.

We didn’t evaluate any other alternatives for model-based testing.

I think that this product is going to be very good, because of the team who develops it. They are trying to identify the important features the market wants and to implement them. They are also researching the best approaches to apply to particular cases.

If you're looking for model-based testing, I would advice to first to take a look at CA ARD. It's not a very complicated solution, so your learning curve will not be too steep. You’ll be able to quickly identify the core functionality. First, limit yourself to just model-based testing, then you can dive deeper and research different integration capabilities, such as how to integrate with automation and data management.