We performed a comparison between Micro Focus ALM Octane and Micro Focus ALM Quality Center based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Micro Focus ALM Octane ultimately won out in this comparison. According to reviews, Octane appears to be a more comprehensive and high performing solution.
"The way testing is closely tied into the product Backlog has made it more intuitive, or easier to manage the relationship between building out an application and testing it. In other tools, that is more segregated. The way it's designed in Octane, people have said it makes more sense to them, and that it's easier for them to understand their data and to maintain and test their solutions."
"Octane creates a gentle approach to Agile-based projects."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"It’s easy to set up."
"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 defect management gives us full-fledged capabilities for handling defects, including capturing the details of the defects and even screenshotting the defect cases. The defect management is comprehensive."
"Micro Focus' technical support is good."
"An improvement on previous versions because it comes as preconfigured as possible."
"The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is the alignment of the test to the execution and the linking of the defects to the two. It automatically links any issues you have to the test."
"I love linking/associating the requirements to a test case. That's where I get to know my requirement coverage, which helps a lot at a practical level. So, we use the traceability and visibility features a lot. This helps us to understand if there are any requirements not linked to any test case, thus not getting tested at all. That missing link is always very visible, which helps us to create our requirement traceability matrix and maintain it in a dynamic way. Even with changing requirements, we can keep on changing or updating the tool."
"I personally found the defect tracking feature very useful in my ongoing project."
"It is a tool, and it works. It has got good linkage and good traceability between the test cases and the defects. It has got lots of features for testing."
"The setup is pretty straightforward."
"Produces good reports and has a great traceability feature."
"Ability to customize modules, particularly Defect Tracking module on company specific needs"
"The most valuable feature is the ST Add-In. It's a Microsoft add-in that makes it much easier to upload test cases into Quality Center."
"There's a trend in our requests to have the ability to export data, en masse, out of Octane. There are capabilities within Octane to export data, but there are specifics around test suites and requirements and relations, as well as certain attributes, that we would like to be able to export easily out of Octane and into a database or Excel."
"The Requirements Module could be better, to build up a better requirements process. There's a huge improvement from ALM.NET to Octane, but it's still not really facilitating all the needs of the product owners, to set up their requirements in Octane."
"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."
"I like their smart analytics; perhaps they should continue to expand and improve there because it's a fantastic start."
"It would help us if ALM Octane got FedRAMP-certified, so our government departments could use the cloud solution. That way our external consultants could access it. We've created a URL to get to it, but if it were FedRAMP-certified and service and had support in the continental United States, that would be better."
"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."
"We have some requests to beef up the manual testing abilities and the ability to report on testing progress. All the basics are there, but there's an issue of maintainability. For example... once you plan a test and it creates a run, more particularly a suite run, you can't edit the suite run afterward... That that is not realistic with how people work. Mistakes are made and people are humans and we change our minds about things. So the tool needs to allow for a bit more flexibility in that testing area, as well as some better widgets to report on progress."
"Globally, I don't see many major points of improvement. It's mostly plenty of little things, and it's weird to me that they are not in the product yet. They are really details, but they're annoying details... Today, in the tool, we've got plenty of assets we can handle, like requirements, user storage, defects, tasks and so on. And to all of those elements, we can add comments. We can add comments to any asset in Octane but not to tasks. It's just impossible to understand why it's not available for the tasks because it's available everywhere else. Similarly, for attachments, you can attach files absolutely everywhere except on automated runs, which is, again, awkward. I don't understand why on this element, in particular, you cannot do it. It's little touches like that."
"The version of Micro Focus ALM that we use only works through Internet Explorer (IE). We have to communicate to everyone that they can only use IE with the solution. This is a big limitation. We should be free to use any type of browser or operating system. We have customers and partners who are unable to log into the system and enter their defects because they work on a different operating system."
"We have had a poor experience with customer service and support."
"There were multiple modules and stuff to the solution so maybe the requirements can map to test scripts. It can't map to test steps. If you've got a process that's set up and you've got multiple test scripts that are in it, each script has to be linked to the requirement and the whole set can't be. If we're doing process-driven testing, it's more difficult to do it at the script level, which is what we're finding from a traceability perspective."
"There is room for improvement in the scalability and stability of the solution."
"It's not intuitive in that way, which has always been a problem, especially with business users."
"If the solution could create a lighter, more flexible tool with more adaptability to new methodologies such as agile, it would be great."
"There's room for improvement in the requirements traceability with Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. That could use an uplift."
"We would like to have support for agile development."
More OpenText ALM / Quality Center Pricing and Cost Advice →
OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 5th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews while OpenText ALM / Quality Center is ranked 6th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 197 reviews. OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2, while OpenText ALM / Quality Center is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of OpenText ALM Octane writes "Reporting engine, widgets, and dashboards are a huge plus, and powerful REST interface means we can interact with other tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText ALM / Quality Center writes "Offers features for higher-end traceability and integration with different tools but lacks in scalability ". OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software, GitLab and Codebeamer, whereas OpenText ALM / Quality Center is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Tricentis qTest, Zephyr Enterprise and OpenText UFT One. See our OpenText ALM / Quality Center vs. OpenText ALM Octane report.
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We monitor all Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
