We performed a comparison between Atlassian ALM, OpenText ALM Octane, and Rally Software based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian, Microsoft, Nutanix and others in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites."This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"The main power of this tool is the integration between the different products of the Atlassian suite. We have good integration with work management with Java. This is the major strength from this provider."
"Octane works well with the Jira portfolio to track the project with two methods: Agile and Waterfall. We can track all the testing in Waterfall or Agile and synchronize it with Agile tools."
"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."
"With an Octane project, we have our automation, our requirements, our tests, our pipeline into build-and-deploy, and the ability to identify problem areas. It makes things quicker because it's more along the lines of an automated process."
"I like the fact that you can use it on top of Jira."
"Its end-to-end traceability is one of the big advantages. Most of our agile projects work in a closed team structure. We are seeing what is the flow, where we are, and what is the project milestone. So, it provides end-to-end traceability and good visibility of project milestones."
"It's more streamlined because we have it all under one umbrella. And once the business requirements and rules have been created, we can do test cases and apply them to the business rules."
"People really how easy it is to customize. In some previous tools, that has been very limited, or you had to know how to write code to do some of the customizations, or it was very confusing. Going back to the user interface, they've made the customization of the tool, the workspace settings, very easy for people to figure out and use."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its ability to manage test scenarios, test results, and test automation, which are its primary functionalities."
"It helps me evaluate teams' historical performance using velocity charts."
"It has allowed the quality assurance team to keep all information in sync with the application requirements and user stories for our general development."
"The main ways that I used it when I was in it day to day was keeping up with the burn rate within the teams. Also, to track at the feature level too, as far as how we were doing with actually being able to deliver that feature."
"It allows us to work in a more dynamic fashion and track more of the development lifecycle."
"The configurable Portfolio Management and parent-child relationships."
"Helps me plan an estimate of how soon or how far out we'll be able to deliver something."
"Agile Central allows us to log one hundred percent of the work we do and it allows for no hidden work, so teams can't go under the radar with what they're working on."
"The Defect feature. In one view you can see all your defects and you can push them into the different releases."
"The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on."
"There is room for improvement in the high-level project management."
"The automation for scheduling software and doing software tests should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid."
"The limitation of Octane is that we can't do a release outside of the sprint. We can only plan the release in the sprint. With Agile and JIRA tools, we can plan the release outside the sprint and do a global release of all the projects from the sprint."
"Because JIRA is a leading tool for both development and requirements management - everybody is using JIRA - I'm pretty there will be a use case where people are trying to connect between ALM Octane and JIRA. The back-end configuration of the synchronization with JIRA could be simplified. The architecture is really complicated. We required a lot of machines to build the cluster and the configuration was not really clearly described within the documentation. This may have something to do with the fact that the software is pretty new."
"I would like to see the mobile testing improved so that we can simply select a mobile device, then specify what parameters we want, and the testing will be run based on that."
"Updating items, sorting, bulk updates—these things could have a bit more flexibility, but it's still possible to do them."
"The cluster architecture that we implemented was server to server communication: Octane application to Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch to another Elasticsearch service. Recently, we found this is a security gap. The Octane application is interacting with Elasticsearch server, but that was missing from the requirements and prerequisites in the setup. The Micro Focus team has not given advice on how to implement authentication-based communication between Octane to Elasticsearch, and we found it as a gap later, then our security team asked us to fix that gap. So, there was a lot of time spent on rework."
"There is an opportunity for them to do a little more with the dashboarding. We still feel that HPE Quality Center/HPE ALM reporting is very powerful. We talked with R&D, and there are some things on their roadmap, but at the same time, their strategy is to connect Octane with visualization tools such as Power BI."
"Also, while there is a Requirements Module in Octane, it is very plain. It's okay to have some requirements described there, but it's not really following the whole BDD approach. I would like to have more features for requirements in there."
"Currently, Micro Focus ALM Octane is considered an old-world tool in the industry and lacks the perception of being a new-age tool among its customers."
"We would like more meaningful, customizable dashboards."
"It could improve by being self-organizing: user stories, different hierarchies, and different perspectives. Not just as a single hierarchical structure, but something that can be multidimensional."
"The product needs to have more integration capabilities."
"It's a bit cumbersome to manage the Project Picker. As we sunset teams or projects close out - but we still have test cases tied to those teams or projects that are being used in other spaces - we have this monstrous list in the Project Picker that becomes really difficult to manage and find, and we can't clean that up ourselves. It would be nice if it was easier to do that and not lose your history."
"What I don't like about it is that it is really hard to find old work to reference information and use the reporting section of the application in terms of trying to analyze trends. If I am trying to find out which interfaces took this long and I want to compare and measure improvement from one quarter to another quarter, the reporting mechanism within Rally is very troublesome. They have an Excel plugin that you're supposed to use, but you literally have to pull the raw data out before you can do the analysis. You can't do it within Rally, and if you can, it is a secret, and I don't know how to do it. It should have better, easier, and user-friendly reporting without having to use the Excel add-in. It is very clunky. There is a lot of data in there, but it is not organized in such a way that makes it intuitive. You really have to kind of look for where do you put your documentation or dates. Some customization is available, but it is not plug-and-play like Jira. When I switched from TFS to Jira, I just went and started using Jira, whereas with Rally, you kind of have to really get in and figure out what you need to do before you set stuff up, or you're going to get yourself stuck. You can just start using Jira and be successful."
"I'd like to be able to color code timeboxes, so I have an easy visual way to track the success of sprints."
"I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help."
"CA Agile Central does not have a workflow tool included."
