We performed a comparison between OpenText ALM Octane, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, 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.
"Backlog management is the most valuable feature. This was a capability that was missing or difficult to achieve in ALM Quality Center."
"The solution natively supports Agile-Waterfall hybrid software development at an enterprise scale. This is very important to us. Because even though the company wishes to go Agile, we still have projects which follow a Waterfall methodology. In order for us to accommodate both, we needed some sort of hybrid system. Because if we are using a fully Agile system, then the reporting might not be correctly extracted."
"The most important feature is the integration among all the different features in just one tool: Agile management system, requirements management system, test management, defects management, automatic test execution. Really, if you're looking at other tools, you will never find all that integrated into just one tool with all the traceability, with all the elements in just one place."
"A valuable feature is the pipeline, so that we can now connect to Jenkins and then have all the results from testing, from external, in the tool, so that we can see the whole approach from there. Also, We can work with labels so we have better filtering solutions than in ALM. And it's much smarter and leaner to use than ALM."
"It’s easy to set up."
"The platform's most valuable feature is pipeline integration or continuous integration services."
"The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features."
"Micro Focus' technical support is good."
"The setup is pretty straightforward."
"Being able to manage tests as this is something very difficult to find in other products."
"With test execution, you have an option to create custom fields. It is also really user-friendly. With other tools, we only have restricted fields and we cannot customize or add new columns or fields that users can make use of while testing. ALM is very flexible for creating new fields. It is easy for users to understand the application."
"We are able to use Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for test management, defect management, test process, test governance activities, and requirement management. We are able to achieve all of this, the solution is very useful."
"The execution module and the test planning module are definitely the most valuable features. The rest we use for traceability, but those are the two modules that I cannot live without."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It's not too hard to deploy."
"Cross project customization through template really helps to maintain standards with respect to fields, workflows throughout the available projects."
"The best thing is that you can see your current status in real time... To see real-time updates, you just log in to ALM and you can see exactly what the progress is. You can also see if the plan for the day is being executed properly, and it's all tracked. From the management side, I find those features very valuable."
"I was able to create epics for our budgeting concerns and it helped me link everything together."
"It has allowed the quality assurance team to keep all information in sync with the application requirements and user stories for our general development."
"If teams are tracking correctly and entering their information correctly, it's really easy to see where you're at, within your release, and whether you're on track or not."
"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 drives the conversation behind some of the pain points the teams have, based on the data that we're able to pull out of the system. As a result of that, we're able to make better decisions, to become better as a whole."
"What I like the most about Agile Central is that it is the only system I need to have full control and visibility of our entire body of work plus the activities and processes required to deliver it."
"We've actually used it for virtual PI planning. We have teams in different locations, and we actually virtually do PI planning, big-room planning, using the tools."
"The visibility it brings to the plan, the ability to capture tasks, and trace them all the way through the life cycle. Providing that visibility helps both me and the team, or teams, to be able to understand where we are in the development process."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The reporting needs to be improved and allow for customization. I want to build my own widgets, but I don't want to use the ones already in the system. I want to build mine from scratch."
"What could be improved in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its integration with Jira."
"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."
"The downside is that the Quality Center's only been available on Windows for years, but not on Mac."
"ALM Quality Center could be improved with more techniques to manage Agile processes."
"They should specify every protocol or process with labels or names."
"The support is not good and the documentation is not consistent."
"I'd like to be able to improve how our QA department uses the tool, by getting better educational resources, documentation to help with competencies for my testers."
"ALM only works on Internet Explorer. It doesn't work on any other browser. In my opinion, Internet Explorer is generally a bit slower. I would like to see it work on Chrome or on other browsers."
"There is room for improvement in the scalability and stability of the solution."
"I would like to be able to search easier, not just do SQL queries, being able to do free keyword searches on the data. That's valuable."
"I think there is a missing link with the development activity. Some developers are pushing in new versions of the code, but you cannot make the link from the user story to a specific application version."
"The stronger CA can get on dependency mapping the better. That's the biggest hiccup. As you're setting up your features, they should make it easier to flag the dependencies, either across features or across projects. Then you're more set up for success."
"In Rally Software, the connection with GitLab and GitHub needs improvement."
"It requires better scalability for the implementation of the whole suite. We do not use it in that fashion, and visibility is sometimes a problem."
"I think there needs to be some simplification. The team-level side can be challenging and complicated."
"One problem I see is that if there is a dependent user story - for example, if my team is working on one thing and there is a dependent user story from another team - we can have a dependency created but we don't know if there is a change of status from the other team. That is something which is very important for Agile Central to look into so that if the other team makes any changes we will be notified as well."
"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."
"We want Rally to generate OKRs, to allow teams to record the OKRs, and then the OKRs can be mapped to the epics and there is organizational alignment."
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