IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) Reviews

We use IBM Rational ALM as part of our overall application suite for our manufacturing company. It is used by our engineering team to capture requirements, perform testing, and manage defects. Specifically, my test team uses this tool to capture test cases, raise defects, and map requirements to test cases.

IBM Rational ALM has made it much better for business teams to track everything in relation to requirements. It saves time and provides management with a central view on the overall status and dashboard. It also has reporting capabilities.

We have three modules. The DOORS module is for requirements. RTC is for storage planning and workflow planning. We also use the module for quality. We use IBM Rational ALM as the main tool to plan development.

The solution is customizable. It is quite strong in compliance and auditing. The audit trail is quite good. We can link everything together.

The team of 15 to 20 software engineers uses IBM Rational ALM and Jira for testing. They coupled different online packages together because the Duration Enterprise was impossible to use.

IBM Rational ALM did not help the organization and we ended up moving to another solution.

I use IBM Rational ALM to provide solutions to various customers for their end-to-end development, like requirement gathering. The solution's RM tool is used for live traceability.

We have something called the GC (global configuration), which is a unique feature compared to any other competitor we have in the ALM space.

We used the complete suite of IBM Rational ALM for development and work with the infrastructure to put the application right. I'm in charge of the team, that is working with the tools, and this solution is one of them. I work with the team and approve or not to go to live with the application and modifications to the application.

One of the key advantages of IBM Rational ALM is its workflow capabilities, which enable seamless collaboration between development and production teams and ensure that all stakeholders are aware of the progress and readiness of the solution. Additionally, the solution is good for integration.

We suggest to the clients that we do the R&D from our side. So if we feel that it's a stable version, and after monitoring multiple things, then only because it's the best version for the customer, along with the fix-panel, if any is required.

For most of the customers, we recommend the latest version. Because in the latest version, it will be day by day, it will keep on giving updates. And we'll see the performance increase. That's why we do the initial R&D, and then if we feel it's really stable, we only recommend it to the customer.

Maybe there should be more integration—the possibility with the third-party tools.

Looking for more integrations specifically with third-party tools that customers can easily access to perform automation without affecting the system. 

Additionally, some improvements to the user interface (UI) would be helpful, such as exposing more services to make it easier to customize to the needs of each customer.

In the next releases, I would like to see the ability to customize reporting without having to rely on a separate tool. So currently, for any customization with respect to reporting from the tool, we still depend on the reporting tool called the publishing engine. So, instead of depending on the publishing engine, we must have a capability that should be available in the next coming version.

We use IBM Rational ALM for processing. We are following a real process. As part of that, we can configure features and the stories and schedule release plans. If there is a backlog of stories, we can configure it properly. 

IBM Rational ALM is a very good tool. I like the management and traceability features and the test management tool. The latter is not linked with the stories and fixed management. It is really useful, and we can create test plans. We can also test some metrics related to QA.