OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

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.

The tool provides invaluable bi-directional traceability from requirement --> test case--> test execution --> defect.

The ability to have visibility of manual and automated test results within the one product certainly cuts down on the management overhead and eases the creation of project health reports.

The UI is becoming somewhat dated but that shouldn't be a deal breaker.

Out of the box, the tool is very flexible in what it allows the user to do. This can go against data integrity in a regulated world but the tool can be customised to improve data integrity. For example, you could customise the tool's workflow to ensure tests cannot be re-executed after a set of executed tests have been peer reviewed.

The Central Repository is key for us.

It has sped up our regression testing cycle almost three times what it is if we do it manually.

Tighter integration between ALM and UFT, especially from a reporting perspective, for automation reporting. We currently run into reporting issues.

We've been using it for around a year.

ALM's been pretty rock solid for us. Getting it to interact with UFT nicely has been a challenge for us sometimes. There's good integration in my opinion, but it just needs to be a little more rock solid.

It's been able to scale to our needs.

Good, sometimes a little slow, but overall pretty good.

We didn't have any other solution in place, and needed to have a much better solution than doing testing with Excel files.

It's straightforward.

HPE was one of the very few that we actually had on the list. We went with HPE because my boss was very familiar with the product, and felt it fit our organization's needs extremely well.

Give it a shot, if you take the time to invest in it, it works.

We are actually not utilizing the full capability of ALM as a full application lifecycle management solution, but we use it for quality insurance, depositories, and for our difference management. For that, it is pretty good.

If you have to run a manual test it's very helpful. It has the option to perform manual tests so we have resolves, defects, and linkages. We come from the QA perspective, put our own requirements in and it's like a one-stop shop. It's very easy for QA people to take out their metrics and share those metrics with the senior management.

The only thing I would add is that I was really looking forward towards the new generation filler that was coming. It seems that in order for us to get the full capability of the new generation filler, we have to purchase AGM, but we don't use AGM right now. It would have been really nice if the whole feature was embedded into ALM. Otherwise, everything would have go to licensing and then there's a cost associated to it, then you have to go through the cost benefit analysis with the management and share with them a projected ROI. It kind of adds a level of controversy, and right now all the folks are using JIRA . They will just say, "Oh, for your QA, just connect it to JIRA and let's go." That is where I feel like, if you have to use so many features within an ALM, if you have to use everything, you have to buy.

I think the stability has been fine.

Scalability is good. There's also scope for improvement here, so I would say it's pretty decent.

I don't use technical support because I have a tool administrator. He's the one who deals with the technical support. For him, I act as a user of an ALM, and if I have any issues, I go to him and he'll talk to technical support.

I've been at my current job for the last 11 years and we have been using it from its days as Test Director and QC days. So far, we haven't tried anything else and have stuck with it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

It was done by our tool administrator.

It was already in place when I started, but five years ago there was a process shift and we thought we could read results in ahead from other tools. I think we all just decided to stick with the readouts that we got and that because of the way we used the test capabilities, we didn't want to change. We were then able to convince our management that if they didn't want to use it to its full capabilities that the testing capabilities were worth it and they finally decided to keep it.

It's a big solution, I'm just using one part of it. For the other part of it, there are a lot of improvement that needs to happen, so just looking at my little piece isn't enough.

It all depends what your needs are. If you are very modernized, and have short cycles, you should evaluate other tools also. It all depends on your needs because each organization is very different. Maybe some organizations have lots of money and they want to go ahead and go for the big shop, and they can do that.

The most valuable feature is definitely its scalability. It covers the life cycle end-to-end, from requirements to test execution and defect management. There are some features we haven't yet explored, such as project planning and libraries, but these also add to the end-to-end view of the life cycle.

It provides our team with a well-defined structure for the way each person should work, giving us a standardized process. For example, with defect management, we can find a particular issue and know exactly who's working on it and where exactly they are in the work flow. Previously, people tended to work on their own thing without coordinating with others.

We found some difficulty in working with it, as we're a large organization. Once we got to 10,000 users, the idea of an individual user lost its value and there wasn't the ability to create teams within ALM. We weren't able to assign particular work to a team, but there's no function for that. This is something that should be built into ALM.

We have no issues deploying ALM.

The stability is very good, especially when compared with some of the other products from large software vendors.

Scalability has been excellent, going from a user base of several hundred to around 10,000.

I've not personally used technical support, but other in my company have. Some of the queries are responded to very quickly.

I wasn't involved in the overall decision, just on which version to select.

We have a lot of internal processes which elongates the process, but as far as the actual installation and configuration is concerned, it was reasonably straightforward.

We considered other options.

For us, the most valuable features are the task management function and the requirements gallery that's true to test execution. It's a good mapping tool and a good sensor repository for all prior testing. We can keep all that data in one centralized place.

I think the best improvement it's made to our organization is that because it's so stable, we haven't needed to change. We're able to continue with our business because it's a solution that stands still.

Sometimes there are small customizations that we'd like that are not always available. If I need to contact technical support about an small issues, sometimes it takes some time before I can get resolution. And if there's a feature that's not available, we need to wait for another release because we can't just simply add the feature we need.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It has enterprise-grade stability. We never have any issues with it.

It's definitely scalable.

Absolutely fine. We have contacts where if you just send them an e-mail they will ring you in 15 minutes. It's been a good relationship with the guys. Really helpful.

It's very straightforward and the pre-sales guys are really good.

They come in and set it up.

The most valuable features are ALM's flexibility and performance. We're also able to customize it to do what we want it to do.

Using it properly is our biggest challenge, as some people use it on the most basic level and others rely on other tools.

I think the biggest challenge with ALM is getting useful data in one place. They're scattered in different parts of the solution right now.

It should also allow us to get quicker access to data from the things we're working on.

The overall usability of it could be improved as some things are a bit slow to get used to.

It has deployed just fine for us without issues.

It's close to being perfectly stable. We have no problem with instability.

It has scaled easily for us and our needs.

Customer service is generally pretty good.

Technical support has been pretty good so far. They tend to be fairly quick to respond to us.

We're using JIRA alongside ALM, but there wasn't a prior solution to ALM.

Setting it up is not too difficult.

We implemented it ourselves.

We constantly keep an eye on competitors, but there's not been anything that we've considered moving to.

It's our main hub for everything around testing, especially when it comes to defect and department management.

It gives us a uniform way of working and reporting on defects as a project progresses. We've been using it for so long, it's become a standard part of our working protocols.

ALM bridges our development gap, but it's not quite full-scale yet. We'd like to see more functionalities so that we can use it to seamlessly helps us bring applications from development into production.

We never have issues with deployment.

I'd say it's stable 100% of the time. We never have outages.

I don't know if we're really a large scale user. We have around 230 users, and scalability has never been an issue. I think it's because we've been using it for so long that when we have an issue, we can solve it ourselves.

It depends on the case, but most of the time first-line support is okay, but in most cases we have to go to second-line support.

We work with many partners and contractors, and they always come in and say "we would like to use another tool." I always challenge them and say, "If you can give me clear advantages on paper of going with another tool, then I'll go." So far, no one's been able to convince me.