OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

We mostly use the Defect module and then Test Plan, Test Lab. But if you ask about the most valuable feature it is the customization of any action in the ALM client. We can customize any action, window, or workflow of not only the Defect workflow but also any other entity. There is no other tool that can do it in such a way.

The testing methodology we use means we do not need any other tool for requirements, testing and so on.

• Dashboard complexity
• Quick generation (for many entities the reports are very slow)
• Test Lab is very complex, it should be simpler

We used it for more than 10 years (from version 8 as Test Director from Mercury).

The clients, of course, are not stable, but it is acceptable.

Scalability is not a problem at this time because the hardware is better than the software needs.

Technical support is good.

Yes, we used Rational ClearQuest. It was very customizable too but it was old and tough and we need a better and more elegant solution.

Initial setup is very simple, but the upgrade on Linux is impossible so we moved to Windows.

Pricing is very big, so it's good is to negotiate with its vendors. The solution is not so important and should not cost so much.

Yes, we evaluated three other options but it was about 10 years ago and it is not relevant now to specify them here. The other options also have very good solutions.

Do the simple implementation, do not customize it because you will have more problems.

LeanFT:

LeanFT is a new solution, but in general, it's opened us up to a wider audience such as the developers, so they can actually do their unit testing. We couldn’t do that with HPE UFT. This is the big advantage of this tool.

The second thing is you can use more technologies than with UFT, including using different languages like Java.

The third part is that we can use the Cucumber test framework, which is something that you can use easily with LeanFT.

Quality Center:

Quality Center is our testing management tool. When you're running a global team with more than 120 QA staff around the world, you need one repository to write, run, monitor, and share your test cases between teams.

This is the most valuable feature of this solution and you can do it very easily. The UI is very user-friendly. With one click, you can see the status of each project that you're executing. Quality Center is the Rolls Royce of solutions and I would give it the highest rating.

LeanFT:

LeanFT should include more technologies. For example, I would like it to include the Scala programming language. That is one of the main language that we use.

Quality Center:

There is a new product, HPE ALM Octane, which might be the solution for the gaps. I would like to see more connection to more products and processes, and including the DevOps into Quality Center.

Stability for both is okay.

Scalability is becoming more complex. Scaling involves more experienced people because it’s not easy to scale.

LeanFT:

Because this is a new product, we're not at a stage to scale something. I don't know how it's going to scale. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it should be okay.

Quality Center:

Since Quality Center is a web application, it's easy to add more users and products.

Technical support is good. We are located in Israel, with an Israeli team, so it's easy to contact them. We have the right phone numbers and from that standpoint, it's great.

There's always room for improvement and additional customization that would be nice. In general, both solutions are quite easy to install.

LeanFT:

There is a debate between this solution and Selenium, and we use both of them. Your choice of tool depends on the technology and the gaps in each of them. We are not an “all-HPE shop”.

Quality Center:

We looked at IBM’s RTC for an ALM solution. We use it now for implementing SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), which is designed for feature tasks, user stories, and program board elements.

We chose HPE because I had good experience with them when I was Test Director. In term of overall experience, HPE provides a good experience for the users and a lot of benefits which you cannot find with other vendors.

We have a pretty strong emphasis on quality, so ALM is our gold source repository for quality. That's where we store everything, from requirements, test cases, defects, and all of the artifacts around certifying that quality is evident in every release, in every STLC product we produce.

The UI is terrible in the sense that we actually use automation scripts to avoid being in the UI, which is just fascinating, and then the data model.

I would say it's stable in the fact that it's up and it works. We have challenges with the data architecture. We're excited about Octane. It has some interesting capabilities, but it's our standard. We're used to using it, so I guess it's the things you want to enhance in it, we're just working through that process from that standpoint, but relatively it works.

We're already at enterprise scale, so it's used across the enterprise. I would say that we're at that point.

We invest very heavily on having strong domain and subject matter expertise, so we use support less. One of the things I would love to have is a pay-per-ticket model or a pay-per-patch model. I think that when we call support, it's either a defect or enhancement. It's not just, "Hey, I need customer support," because we're not novice users. We're on the high end of maturity so we're pushing the products in the spaces that I have very much through limits and it's really getting on their solutions and enhancements team.

From that standpoint we get good interaction. There's a really long cycle time though. That's my only disappointing thing around the support is that tickets tend to age, because they're enhancements. Enhancements have a longer cycle, you have to develop it, get it in a backlog, etc.

I have an entire team, so I'm a director and I have an entire tools team that does that. I did get involved in the planning and the strategy of how we're going to do it. My team said that first installation is relatively easy. When we go to upgrade and migrate, that's where there's pain.

Almost every customer will say the upgrades and migrations are very painful. They could be way easier. A lot of it has to do with having to upgrade the data, the in-place database or stand up in entirety, it's just cumbersome. It's very cumbersome and it takes a long time, longer than it probably should. That's a pain point that I think everyone has. Fortunately in our case, we've never had to call professional services to do it. I have a lot of customers say they couldn't get through the upgrade without it. Now, on the support side, it was really helpful, they were on the phone our first major migration for 72 hours.

It was great to literally be in that, "Hey, we're going through it," they were there the whole time, which was really awesome. We didn't have to involve professional services, but that was a good story to say, "Hey, they're on the phone with us. They're grinding it." So the whole 72-hour period we had someone from support cycle in. They did the hand-offs and all that stuff while our team was grinding off. So that was a good story there.

I think it's a great platform. It does a lot for us, but the fact that our users don't want to be in the application is weird. They'd rather work in a spreadsheet and then upload their results to the actual server. Now it could just be their behaviour pattern, but I think if it was a little easier for them to kind of work in, they would have an easier time with it.

Although on the plus side, the fact that it's open like that and you can just connect, maybe that's a positive too. So it's kind of a plus/minus. The UI they said, "Hey, I don't really like UI," but the fact that you can just upload your stuff from your work space, which could be a spreadsheet, it could be Eclipse, it could be a script that you're working in and it just directly uploads, they love that.

When you talk about easy use from an integration standpoint, definitely high marks there, but the UI is just something they really do not like. I personally, as the person who has to get all the data and metrics out of it, the data model is horrible. It's a constant complaint that I have. The new Octane platform kind of solves that. I just wish they had put some of that into ALM because the product marketing strategy is you have to have both.

Have a well-defined process, have a strong reporting structure, meaning in your process you want a lot of measurability. If you define your output, the reports and the questions you need to answer from what you're doing, which your process should be managing for you. In our company, we are very specific about what our executives and stakeholders want.

We have a very well-defined set of measurements that we have to take. We then put a process designed to ensure those measurements are always taken. That then allows you to deal with your outputs and your reporting structure, which then allows you to properly architect your tooling. The technology is very flexible. You have to decide as a client area how you really want to use it and that's going to start with what your business needs are the values that you're trying to get out of it.

That's the biggest advice that I have, it's not even on the technology. The technology will do great things for you if you have a plan and a structure and you know what you want it to do for you. Half the time they don't know, they want the tool to do it for them and it's the other way around. So that's what I advise people to do.

Think about it, have a vision, have a plan, tie that to outcomes, and measure those outcomes. If you're answering the right questions and asking the right questions, your technology will really enable you. You've got to look at it from that standpoint.

We use ALM with our QA Department and it provides a way for us to show our work as a repository for our test-cases. We're able to show what we do on a daily basis. It's very easy to use and it's worked well for us.

Over the past year, we've been able to decrease our defect reduction by executing and making sure we have test-base coverage in all the areas. I don't quite know the percentage exactly. We've been able to reduce the defects.

We've done our source code in another application for so long, to have developers come over to help QA integrate it would probably be an impossible effort.

It's been okay. I think the problem with us is, it can be used for the entire SDLC process, as far as requirements, development and that type of thing, but we only use it for QA.

What happens is, we're having to use multiple products to come to one goal. That's kind of frustrating for the teams. I think if we could get to the point where we could use it as one solution, it would be so much more beneficial.

We haven't scaled it yet, but we're looking to do that. We're working with a company now to look at some different solutions, or at least the ART tool. It's looks very impressive to us. We're in conversations about the ART tool, because we really need something like that for our analysts.

It's an educational tool, so you are able to link your education and link it with Rally. If you have a module that you want to teach, you can just teach them through that. It's a direct connection to HP ALM.

I've never used tech support. We have an individual that works closely with HP. Any technical issues that comes across the team, he tends to work directly with HP to handle those.

We use ALM for all of our applications and didn't use anything before. We're a maturing software company, so we're really getting into these distinct processes, like ALM. We're currently going through a transformation into Agile, so we're really just ramping up to get to that mature stage as a software company.

I was there, but I wasn't involved. I was an independent contributor.

I wouldn't rate it a 10 because it doesn't have the ability to do all the things the developers use today, like TFS. Overall I would recommend it, because of its ease of use. It doesn't take much to get up to date on it and to learn the process of using it for your test-case execution in ALM.

You don't have much time to spend on education. You don't have two weeks for them to learn an application. So, because it's easy to use, I would definitely recommend it for that reason.

First of all, the product works. ALM is traditionally more of a waterfall application, but it does allow you to collect your requirements, your test cases, and you can even execute test cases automatically from ALM, which is great. Everyone's trying to do DevOps these days or Agile, so it's a good product.

It allows us to do things more efficiently. There's nothing like spending millions of dollars upgrading an application, and trying to manage your requirements, your test cases, your defects in a spreadsheet. Who has access to that? That's what that product gives you.

We need to move to Agile or DevOps. We have other products that do that, but I'm trying to standardize on a platform. I'm very interested in HP Agile Manager.

We've had no issues with the stability.

It's real easy to scale and add more licenses.

Not directly through HPE. We go through HPE's vendor partner, which is Checkpoint Technologies, and they provide excellent technical support.

When I took over Quality Assurance, we had Quality Center. ALM is the new Quality Center, and we upgraded to version 12 of ALM. 550 projects with no problems.

I came in and decided that we needed to upgrade to v12. We reached out to our vendor partner, Checkpoint Technologies, and they came in, assessed what it would take to upgrade it, and they did the upgrade for us.

It doesn't do Agile very well. We can make it do it, but it wasn't designed to do it either. That's not being fair to the product. It's a waterfall-based product. You should go straight to HPE Agile Manager.

We're primarily using the solution as a testing tool where we're recording our testing data. Our use cases vary, however. Right now, for example, we're merging two companies together. When we are doing that, we have various test cycles and we have gone through three test cycles so far. aNow we're heading into UAT. So we're testing all aspects of the business, including HR, operations, gas, and electric generation. We're doing pretty much our stand-alone tests, or unit testing. Then we will then go into our end-to-end testing where all of the systems are working together. After that is done, we'll be heading into more of our business testing, our UAT.

The ability to really deeply analyze everything down to individual users has been very useful for the organization as a whole.

Most of the features that I like the best are more on the analytics side. We are generating our analytics from the execution module. After your tests are executed, we're able to generate all of our analysis for our presentations and to present findings to leadership. There are a lot of different views that you have access to. You can show your pass rate, your fail rate, etc. You can pretty much drill it down all the way to what each tester is doing. That's one of the really good features that they have at ALM.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The solution is very easy to use, even right out of the box. You don't need to do a lot of configurations.

You can create roles and assign various rights to each of the roles per project. You can really customize the product.

The uploading of test scripts can get a little cumbersome and that is a very sensitive task. They could improve on that a lot. It's really important that this gets better as I'm loading close to a thousand test scripts per cycle.

I've been using the solution for about three years at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is extremely stable. We really have not had any issues even after upgrading and taking the whole system down. It's very user-friendly right out of the box. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale well. If we need to add different modules to it, it has the ability to expand. You do need licensing for that. However, the out-of-the-box features included in the solution are great.

We haven't really scaled it just yet. We have about 250-300 users right now. They are largely tester, developers, admin and project managers.

Technical support so far has been great. I've found that we can tell them about an issue, and they're usually back to us within the same day with a solution. We're quite satisfied with the level of service provided. I'd rate them ten out of ten.

This is the only solution I have ever used. I don't know if the company worked with something else previously.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It's easy. We didn't face any difficulties at all. I wouldn't describe the process as complex.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with ALM.

If you want a good tool that is robust and is very user-friendly and capable of supporting a program with multiple streams or multiple workstreams, ALM would be the perfect tool. It can basically track all of your testing. It also allows you to collaborate with all of your testers, stakeholders, etc. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten due to the fact that it's user-friendly, and it has the ability to track various projects or various workstreams of a program. Also, the test scripts are reusable. For example, let's say if we are going to utilize those same test scripts for another project, a couple of years down the line, they are available, and you can do real-time updates within ALM. That's really helpful.

It's a centralized test management solution. The fact that you have a place where you can go and find all the stuff that you need to find, and keep track of all of the results long term. That is extremely valuable.

In terms of functionality, it really provides all of the stuff that you need for managing test cases and test execution and keeping track of all of these different items. Now, in terms of keeping up with the trends, there's obviously a lot of challenges.

The new offering, Octane, has all of the essential features that we need in order to move forward to the next mode of operation. I tried to use it and, unfortunately, we had all sorts of trouble down to some limitations as to what kind of URL you can use. That was a pretty sad issue that we ran into. Had that not been the case, I would right now be planning to move on to Octane.

The key pieces of functionality are in place. The reason why I wouldn't rate it higher than seven out of 10 is because you're still using really obsolete technology like ActiveX. You have to physically install the product on your desktop. That's a big no-no. Other than that, it is not far away from being much better than what it is.

17 years.

It is very stable. It has some issues here and there but not significant.

We have struggled to grow with the tool, because the original model was to have just a handful of ALM projects, whereas, we have more than 150 projects. Whenever you pass some threshold, it becomes a challenge.

Even upgrading, it's a massive effort. I'd say at least a six month effort for us just to upgrade it.

The tech support is not so great so far. At least as far as the HPE tech support is concerned. Before, when it was Mercury, it was the best tech support of all time. Right now it's okay. It's doable. It could be better though.

When looking at a company to work with, it's as simple as knowing that the products are mature. We know that if there are going to be issues, we're going to be able to find solutions or some work around for them. It's as simple as that. There's a lot of competition out there. Especially in the open source space, but for you to get support on open source, that's probably a whole different ball game.

Cross project customization through template really helps to maintain standards with respect to fields, workflows throughout the available projects.

Traceability feature really allows you to maintain linkage between all the test artifacts, starting from Releases>Requirements>Test Coverage>Test Execution>Defects. ALM allows you to maintain complete end-to-end process.

Business Views has really come in handy for all users, as different kinds of reports can be created very easily and published to all the stakeholders.

Synchronizer add-in has allowed us to integrate Microfocus ALM to other third-party tools like JIRA, ClearCase and ClearQuest, and helps to eliminate the isolation between these tools.

ALM has brought great collaboration among the team members.

Helps to maintain all the test artifacts in one place as a central repository where all teams can contribute and collaborate with each other.

Dashboard

• Defect ageing reports need to be included as built-in
• Availability of built-in report related to Defect Removal efficiency
• Availability of built-in report for calculating Defect Density
• Availability of built-in report for end-to-end traceability
• Availability of reports specific to Automation projects.

Management- Libraries

• Ability to include Test Set data in Libraries so that Test Set execution can be transferred to other projects using Library functionality

Test Lab

• Ability to upload Test Execution results from Excel to HPE ALM

Test Plan

• Ability to maintain Manual and Automation projects in single HPE ALM project
• Composite execution of manual and automated scripts would be helpful

Defects

• SLA-related ability for defect module where ALM would send automail to stakeholders for the defects which have not been updated in a long time

I have been using the solution for 10 years now.

ALM is quite a stable application. We had some issues during the initial setup but it's been stable since, due to right level of competency/expertise we have in the organization to maintain the ALM setup.

No scalability issues.

Technical support is not that great. We really need to push to get HPE support to provide a resolution for technical issues. Tech support needs to improved now, as it has deteriorated badly.

HPE ALM was our first choice.

Initial setup was not that complex.

HPE has always been flexible in terms of pricing and licensing, but we are a bit concerned with the fact that it is now in the hands of Micro Focus and things may change.

No.

Think about the below before you start implementing this product:

• What’s the total user base you are expecting to on-board?
• How many projects/countries/entities are going to be on-boarded to the platform, and then design the hardware configurations accordingly.
• Do you have any other tools which need to be integrated with this product? Is there any ready-to-use integration already available or do you need to build it from scratch?
• Note that this product does provide the ability to control user access and provides security.
• Talk to your network security team and check if anything specific needs to implemented along with this product, like dual factor user provisioning, reverse proxy, TLS 1.1, TLS 1.2. Does this product support all these?
• Check the organization plan in terms of roll-out of latest Operating Systems, Browsers. Does this product support those latest OSs, browsers, versions, etc?
• Hire a HP ALM administrator expert who can guide you to implement the product in the right manner.