OpenText ALM / Quality Center Reviews

I'm the admin for our organization's Quality Center. I define the guidelines and projects for use. We use also use it for management requirement testing. Though, we are not doing automated tests or defect management right now. 

We can't use the Quality Center for everything because the login is only about the user ID and password. Because of this, we are not using the data in Quality Center for all projects.

It is quite complicated because I have about 200 projects, mostly SAP, and all of them have to work in the same way. I do a lot of reporting and everything has to be more or less the same.

I love to use this solution with single projects. It has helped our productivity. With the metrics that I receive, I can put them onto the management model so I can see them there. It has reduced our time for project management and controls by 20 percent.

We do a risk-based testing in some parts of tests, especially because the applications are very big so they can't test everything. The control of incidents is normally very good, as they don't want critical defects when we do this.

The requirements are the best thing.

The management feature is very important. I also use requirements, tests, and defects.

While I'm using a lot of the business reports, these are very complicated.

It is hard to find the traceability from a defect to a requirement. Sometimes, it is very hard to find the evidence in an executed test case. While it's possible, it could be easier. Only these two things have to be improved: the tracking from a defect to requirement and the evidence of testing.

Quality Center's ability to connect all the different projects to reflect status and progress is quite complicated. We may develop something because there are so many projects. Right now, I have to do something which Quality Center is really not designed for: over reporting. This is a very big problem right now. We may develop some controls, but it is problem at the moment. I love Quality Center for individual projects to work with it. However, if you have a lot of projects for Quality Manager to do cross reporting on many projects, then it's almost impossible. It takes a lot of time. 

I have used it for 10 years.

With my current company, I started to set up their solution two and a half years ago. It has taken that long to get the solution working because it is a big project.

The stability is okay.

All users have to report their projects in Quality Center. Previously, it was voluntary to use Quality Center. From September, everybody has to use it in the company.

We have 300 users currently utilizing the solution. This number should increase to 500 or 600 going forward.

I don't work with the support of the Quality Center.

I haven't had a lot of contact with Micro Focus to know what they are doing.

Previously, we had no application lifecycle management tool, so there was a lack of coordination about requirements and no traceability regarding which requirements had been tested. Sometimes, defects were being reported by email. Now, everything works well, which is a huge improvement for my company.

It is very intuitive and wasn't complex for me. I like to work with it, but there are a lot of new users, and it's very complex for them to understand using Quality Center in the beginning.

We jumped right in and didn't have an implementation strategy.

We had a lot of problems with the new installation.

The implementation team was all internal: two other people and myself.

I started with the testing. Then, after the launch, I was working with the requirements and defects. Therefore, the deployment was a step-by-step process for quite a long time.

Pricing is managed by our headquarters. I am able to get from them for very cheap. The market price is horribly expensive.

I have seen other applications, and I like this application more. We tried SHIELD, Xray, and Confluence. I have also looked at another solution which was more about integrity. However, I am more concerned about requirements management. Other solutions working with integrity and enterprise architect can be very complicated. Though, SHIELD, as a solution, is too simple.

Very quickly, you can work with the solution. Though, there are user in my company in which this solution seems very complex. I would recommend that users take the courses offered to them. In addition to getting the manual, reading, and learning it, users have to try the solution, e.g., I create a playground for them to try out the solution for a few hours. Here they can try out the requirements and play with it. 

If you think logically and practically when using the solution, it works fine.

From the start, visualize the application. The initial tree on how to start is very important.

We would like to implement Single Sign-On, but there is a problem with it in my company. All different solutions have to be signed on individually in our company. Right now, we are trying to work with Oktana, but Oktana won't go into production in our company if there isn't a possibility of another login.

In the last release, there was nothing really new nor useful.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

In our organization, the manual testing guys write manual test cases through Excel. Then they import them to ALM. They'll move in all the details. Based on that, the automation team will take care of developing the scripts through Micro Focus Unified Functional Testing and they'll add the script into the test plan.

Once the lead has approved the test plan he will move all the test cases into the test labs. If any defect is found in new releases, it is logged in the defects column.

There is a parallel running of automated and manual testing. Based on that, we are able to help the quality of the applications. At an earlier stage, to catch the defects, we introduced API calls and GUI-based. Both are used to catch defects. It helps the guys to understand, quite easily, what the issues are. It is pretty useful for our organization in following the cycle method.

It has reduced the time required for testing. It makes things easy. Everything is already set up, once you have done the requirement map, and it quickens the release cycle. After QA, once it is moved into the build, we'll run both automated and manual in parallel. The automated will be completed within one day and the functional team will generally take three days and they'll know in that time if anything is there or not. Based on that, the business will plan the release.

All the features are valuable. Initially, you can take the response to the requirements and then move into the test plans, test lab, and defect creation. All of these are valuable functions.

Every tab is useful for software testing, but based on some of the requirements for defect creation purposes, we have developed a few of our own tabs. For example, there is a severity/priority module. There we have developed a module or submodule that shows who the business owner is and who the developer is. We also developed tabs so that, when creating defects and root cause, we know to whom it should be reported, so that things are easy to identify.

It is easy for everybody to understand. We can create whatever notes are required. Based on roles we can also make it familiar for business people, so they see what they need to see. That is true for engineers and managers as well. That makes it easy for everyone and gives them access to what they need. It makes things easier.

ALM is user-friendly for everyone. Someone who doesn't know it can learn it quickly, within 20 minutes. At the admin level it might take a little bit more time, since experience is required, but at the user level not much experience is required. It speeds up the validations.

It's easy to create defects and easy to sync them up with a developer. Immediately, once created, it will trigger an email to the developer and we'll start a conversation with the developer regarding the requirements that have not been matched. And we can immediately stop upcoming releases if any vulnerability is found in the application.

One drawback is that ALM only launches with the IE browser. It is not supporting the latest in Chrome. With advanced IE settings, advanced security settings, only if everything is enabled will ALM open. ALM will not launch any of the latest browsers, including Chrome. I'm not sure if this is true for the latest versions of ALM. I'm talking about the older versions. We are not using the latest version in this organization.

It should be launched for all of the latest browsers. If we could test with mobile, it would be better. We need to launch all the browsers to run the UFT scripts. There is a significant UFT mechanism that requires syncing with ALM to run with multiple browsers. 

I would also like to see API calls and AI-based algorithms to run things in an easier manner.

We have also have a minor issue, sometimes, where we are unable to launch the site. There is a back-end server and the allocation space is over what it can handle. We request the server team to clear the server.

Also, sometimes we need to write a query for downloading the execution app. That can be a little bit tricky. It would be better if there were no need to write it and we could simply download it.

I have more than five years of experience using ALM Quality Center. I am an admin-level user in ALM.

It is scalable.

Previously we were using Excel. Then the organization moved the entire thing into the ALM. It is now the central point for whatever needs testing.

When we do a version upgrade, we first take a backup of whatever data is in ALM and move it to a Linux server. There is setup guidance for the installation process. Once we install it, then we'll move the existing data back. 

One good thing in ALM is that there is a predefined template when creating the projects. We just copy that template and everything comes together. Whatever the mandatory requirements are will be there with all the tabs. And, if required based on the business needs and the project, we will create new tabs with whatever fields are needed. That is good.

The licensing determines the number of users we can enable in a particular project. There is a full license and a defect license. Full licenses are used by a few of the guys at our level. We'll give a defect license to the development team only, to access whatever defects there are, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

We did not buy our ALM licenses directly from Micro Focus. We bought them from SAP, which is another solution we are using. We depend on SAP when it comes to whatever challenges come up. The source for us is SAP.

We do have a pricing concern. If we go directly to Micro Focus, they'll sell it at a higher price. If we go to some other vendor, they sell it at a lower price. My manager then says, "Okay, it's the same tool. Why do we need to buy it directly? Whatever problems come up, we can resolve them at our end." Of course, we don't know if we'll have one or two problems or not, and that is the reason to go for the higher price. But they went with SAP to buy the license.

ALM will help your business. It will save time. It makes it easy to validate everything in the latest build. It's easier to plan, cycle-wise. That is one advantage. It also makes it easy for the managers to analyze the results and the progress of the test cases. They are able to track things minute-to-minute. You can use the virtual controls to see the reason a particular test has been edited, using check-in and check-out. That is also a good feature.

Along with ALM the business is also moving to JIRA. I don't know exactly what the business strategy is there, but they're moving to JIRA as one of the sources for creating defects. They're also mapping all the requirements to JIRA.

We use it for defect management and for test cases. We synchronize it with JIRA for the requirements and the defects side of things.

We're also using it for our UFT script repositories, but that is more than likely going to change, in the next couple of months, as we go across to GitLab. It's just simpler to have all the artifacts for a particular iteration in one place.

Quality Center is cloud-based with a local client.

The way Quality Center improves our organization is with the traceability and through standardardization. It's about having the test cases all in one place. That's very important for us. It will be even more important once we revive the regression suite in the coming months. It's extremely important to have one source of truth.

It definitely helps in standardizing our testing process and, if utilized properly, it will streamline it because everyone is using the same standards and capabilities. It has helped with that in the past and will in the future as well.

Quality Center also assists with risk-based testing. You can put risk ratings on test cases as you go, and if you do that you know which ones need to be run, for sure. It doesn't have very much smarts around it though, it's just a field that we fill out. It doesn't utilize AI, which some of the tools in the market are purporting they can utilize to determine which test cases need to be run. But I think it's very early days for that yet and I'm exceptionally skeptical about it.

The automated scripts give us management control.

Defects are widely used within our organization. 

We've had a little bit of a hiatus on the test-case side of things, because we decentralized the testing team, but that's about to be re-centralized. The test-case repository and linkage through to regression requirements will absolutely be a key component for us. We haven't got it yet, but when we've got an enterprise regression suite, that will be a key deliverable for them. We will be able to have all of the regression suite in one place, linked to the right requirements.

Also, its traceability and visibility features are good when it comes to managing multiple projects, which is how we've got it set up. The reporting was a little bit clunky to start with, but we've built some reporting out of it now as well, to give us a cross-portfolio view of those projects that are using ALM. Each project can do its own thing, to a certain degree. There are some standard fields that we don't bend on, so that we can get the correct reporting out.

There's no problem at all with its ability to handle a large number of projects and users in an enterprise environment. We only ever have up to 60 concurrent users, but the number of users we've got in the database is in excess of 250. We manage it reasonably well, that way. Project-wise, we've got about 40 to 50 projects in there.

The security features are good. They will be better once we get the single sign-on capability with ADFS on ALM 15. We're very keen to get that capability up. We're looking at the implementation process for single sign-on right now. It should be okay. It makes things a lot more convenient for us, particularly as we have a number of contracts users come in. When they go, we've got to manually remove them from ALM at the moment, because it's got its own authentication. Because it's in the cloud, anyone can get to it directly from anywhere. They don't have to come through our network to get to it. That is good in some regards. But it does give me some concerns when people have departed, or when organizations that we've been working with have finished up with it, because we have a separate swipe that we've got to do to remove any users who are no longer working with us.

There's room for improvement on the reporting side of things and the scheduling, in general, is a bit clunky. 

They can also improve on its interoperability with other tools. All tool sets need to evolve in that regard. They need to understand that you don't buy all one color of tool sets these days and that some tools do a job better than others, depending on what it is. If I've got an industry-strength configuration management tool and repository, like GitLab, I'll pull my stuff out of ALM and I'll interface with GitLab from ALM. That interoperability with other tools sets, the standardizing of interfaces, is an area to work on. All of the tools in the industry are the same. You get a new version of JIRA and it no longer works with the likes of ALM, or you get a new version of IBM UrbanCode Deploy and it doesn't work properly and you've got to do a configuration with GitHub or Artifactory or even ALM, for that matter.

The other thing that ALM could do well with is to move away from Internet Explorer. I believe they're doing that with version 15.

I go back to Test Director days, Test Director 8. That was around 20 years ago.

The stability has been fine. If ever we do have problems we're straight on the phone to our customer success manager and he gets onto any issue that we've got, immediately. But it very rarely goes down.

We only use whatever our concurrent is. We run very lean at the bank, very lean. That goes with all of our tooling. We have a concurrent licensing model that is well under the maximum number of users. If we find that we haven't got enough licenses we adjust the time-out so that people are not holding onto licenses unduly.

With Quality Center, for user scalability all we do is get extra licenses. We've never hit any sort of limit on the size of the project.

We've got a number of admin users, a few site admin users; there's one per domain in our model at the moment. They are the super-users who look after everybody within their domain. Within projects, it's up to the different projects or squads to work out whether they need what we call TD admin users in there. There are also defect-owner users. We also have some analyst users and some tester users.

We'll be increasing usage because we've just kicked off our transformation program with a third-party. As a part of the agreement they are using it, so we'll be upping the number of users that we have. And by reestablishing the centralized testing thing, we'll also be ensuring that Quality Center or ALM is used as our tool of choice. We will reestablish the standards that somehow were dropped when we went to Agile.

They coordinate it for us but I do have direct access to the tech support guys. Typically, if there's an issue, I'll get on the phone and notify our customer success manager. Either we will already have raised a ticket or he'll raise one for us. Then we'll work through anything that we need to do to get things fixed so we're up and running as quickly as possible. 

There have been some issues around getting any major problem that we've had resolved, although we've had very few major issues. It's just a matter of keeping at it until it's fixed. Having that CSM in place allows that to happen.

Before Quality Center the only thing we were using was JIRA. We interface with JIRA. Some teams want to use it for defect tracking. We keep JIRA and ALM in sync using the synchronizer tool that comes standard with it.

JIRA and ALM have different strengths. JIRA and Confluence do Agile planning and management well, and ALM does defect management and test case management and reporting well.

The fact that we've got it in the cloud at the moment, as software as a service, enables us to keep up to date. If it's a back-end or a server-only change, it just gets done. That's the beauty of the arrangement we have with a SaaS or cloud-based version. 

We started using the cloud-based version about four years ago. The setup was very easy and very quick. I did the migration. We had to unload the databases on-premise and FTP them across to the cloud overnight. We did it project-by-project or by groups of projects. Each one of them had its own backup/transmit/reload. They then went through a series of validations and were up and running the next day.

I did it on a project-by-project basis because there was a lot of data that had to go across and be uploaded to the cloud. Once it was up there, I logged on, checked it, and then got the SMEs from the different projects to validate that everything they needed was there.

Having to package up and coordinate clients is, occasionally, difficult, but that's just a project management issue: scheduling things at the right time. Sometimes we have problems and we have to go in and individually blow away components for the product for the client. That's more because of our setup, our configuration on our network, than it is the tool set. We do that with most tools. Occasionally have to rebuild when we've had version upgrades, but not for everybody.

For maintenance there's only two of us, myself and one of the guys that works for me.

As an end-user, of course I'm going to say that it's too expensive and I want things cheaper, but don't we all?

Aside from the standard licensing fee there are no additional costs. It's set up with a good agreement that runs three-yearly.

Do your homework on it to really understand how it works. I've worked at a number of different organizations that have had Quality Center, Test Director, and ALM. They have all been set up differently. I'm also guilty of having gone in as an external contractor and setting it up the way that I want it to run too. But if the time is taken to set it up properly, you will get strong value from it.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Quality Center is that, when it's used well, it's an exceptionally powerful tool. When you use all the features of it, when you have things that are standardized and locked, it's a really handy tool in governance around testing and projects. But in an environment where you've got multiple external contractors or vendors coming in, where they all tend to bring their own way of doing things, it's good that it's flexible enough to accommodate that, but at the same time it leaves you with a bit of a mess to clean up afterwards.

It's really about making sure when you do implement it that you understand your process, you understand your workflows, you understand the standards that and the reporting that you want out of it, and you set it up accordingly. If somebody comes in and says, "Oh, I want to know what my defect aging is," you can say, "Well, here's the report that does that," if everything's filled out properly.

I've seen it set up really well in a couple of places, and it was really good to have it set up well because we could get the information out of it when we needed it and we could ensure that things were tested properly.

When it comes to connecting all related entities to reflect project status and progress, we have to do a little bit of tweaking, but we can customize it. We can always do better with the cross-project reporting. But the biggest issue we have is that we need to re-centralize testing to get the standards enforced. At the moment, since we've moved out and become very Agile, we've become very lax as well in being able to keep the likes of test cases — in particular regression suites — up to date. That is one of our reasons for reestablishing a centralized testing team. It's nothing to do with the product. It's just that everybody decided, "Hey, Agile's the way to go," and a lot of people with Agile thought, "Oh, we don't have the formality and the structure and standards around testing," which was not good.

At the moment we're in a bit of a state of flux because we've had the whole Agile movement start to hit us. Unfortunately, that meant that there was a decision to decentralized testing and put it out into the different Agile squads, which in turn meant that there was no standard way of doing things. Now that we're engaging in a transformation program, we need to re-establish that standard way of doing things, because we're working with third-party vendors. We're centralizing, ensuring that things are handed over in the format that we want, ensuring that the third-parties are utilizing ALM as the tool set for their test case repositories, and as the defect management tool as well. Being an industry-wide, and understood, standard tool, it's very easy for us to go to our partners and say, "You've got to use ALM because that's what we're using." We are still going to be Agile, but we'll be doing centralized testing.

I wouldn't say Quality Center has reduced the time required for testing. It's a tool. It supports our testing process. It gives the governance and standards around the testing that's done, but as a tool it doesn't reduce the time for testing. Something like automated testing will reduce the time for testing. However, by association, I suppose it might reduce testing time because it's where we execute our automated scripts from.

We haven't found that Micro Focus is still investing so much in Quality Center and releasing valuable features. They did do a big push to go towards Octane and we trialed that. Because we have multiple best-of-breed tools in the organization, Octane could plug-and-play with a lot of them, but then it became an overhead to be able to manage and maintain. 

With ALM in Australia at least, there's enough support and development going on. I know the APIs into ALM have improved, and they needed to because aspects were pretty clunky. Now that we've got a REST API that we can use, that's a lot better. So they're sort of keeping up.

I would rate Quality Center at about eight out of 10, but I have a testing background. I'm very stingy when it comes to rating things. I don't think I've ever rated anything to 10.

We are from a Vodafone department that manages testing and quality. We brought this tool in to assist us. We are constantly using it. 95 percent of projects are running on it.

We mostly use this solution on our laptop devices.

It is helping with our delivery, testing, and quality processing. It links all our test cases with defects. Users from across the globe can comment on a defect or add attach artifacts to the defect cycle. ALM adds control with its integration.

We use it for visibility on multiple projects. We categorize all our deliveries into different domains and projects. Recently, we had a call with the technical team and they suggested to split our project into multiple domains and projects since this account is not that big. We hardly have six to seven projects running in parallel so we manage with one domain and one project, and all other projects are archived. We decided the way forward would be to split one project into multiple domains. This way, if in future something goes wrong, other projects will not get impacted if there is a problem with a project.

The solution’s ability to connect all related entities to reflect project status and progress is good. Right now, individual users are logging in with Single Sign-On and uploading their test cases. Performance usability is fine.

We have never experienced any security issues.

We can get an entire project into a single repository where we can view all the data in detail. This is where we keep all our test cases where everyone can reference them. This provides everyone access to the test cases and artifacts via the cloud. There is no need to contact anyone. It is the same with defects. It uses a common forum for tracking the defects and centralizing discussions.

Test Lab: This is where we keep all the test cases and mapping of all the defects. It's also for storing of all the artifacts.

Defect management: This is a good feature and fulfills all our requirements. We use it for user and role management. Only the admins can see all the users' details.

We use the application's Single Sign-On feature. The usability is good. There are no access performance issues. It is easily understood, even for new users. 

It takes time because it has a 360 view of all the processes when talking about test case, design, and defects. There are so many things to track. Therefore, if I try to inject Micro Focus ALM into a small agile, delivery project, there is resistance. If there is resistance, is there flexibility for customization based on project scale? I don't know if this is possible.

Also, it adds time when I upload and execute all my test cases to Micro Focus ALM. For example, when I prepare test cases, I need to run them individually, then upload them to my sheet. After 10 days, I might have finished all my testing after tracking everything in Excel. Moving to ALM at this point adds time and overhead. It increases my testing timeline, e.g., if my testing takes eight days, when I add on time for ALM, the testing time is now 10 days.

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.

From 2011, we have been using Test Director, which became HP ALM, and finally Micro Focus ALM Quality Center.

We haven't seen any issues when working with multiple projects. Maybe once a year, we have an issue with stability.

When this solution was upgraded to version 12.55, we saw some performance issues. We raised this as an incident. The team has worked on this and provided us with results. We have seen performance issues which may not be related to ALM, such as latency in the data or remote working conditions. These are issues that we are raising to the Micro Focus team though.

We have experienced some scalability issues. I would rate the scalability as an eight to nine out of 10.

We have about 50 to 60 users logging into the solution.

I would rate our Qatar technical support as 10 out of 10. Our technical support person is always available to help us. We are very thankful for the service and support. The communication is excellent. However, when we have an issue, e.g., an application is not working, having error, or we are raising a ticket, it takes time to resolve. This should be improved.

When we were installing for the first time, it was not simple. We could not just go to the URL and install. There were some initial installations problems with IE where we have to add the URL and make it a trust site. This had to be done by an admin, which takes times. I would like to see this improved. 

After the installation, we didn't have any problems with deployment or integration into our environment.

We can open this solution by URL and access the application where it runs to the server. We do have a restriction when installing infrastructure applications. We have to ask our IT to have our admin install it.

Admins should not need to directly install objects into the application. This should be done directly into the server or cloud.

We don't do any maintenance. The solution is SaaS and managed by the Micro Focus team.

The solution has saved time with background activities and helped my delivery to move forward. However, this application is a support function into our delivery.

Compared to the market, the price is high.

We just renewed our licenses, which took time to do. I think we have 30 concurrent licenses. 

The world is changing to open source code and free applications. This may be an issue in the future.

In one of our agile projects that was going into a sprint, we recently started using Jira (about a year ago). This was for a small delivery project whose team felt more comfortable using it. For example, if a tester raises a defect in ALM, there are many fields, including those that we have customized. It takes time to raise a defect, then close it. Since it takes time, the project team decided Jira is quicker and also open source. On the other hand, they agree that Micro Focus ALM is better overall, e.g., in the way, it keeps information and provides reports. Because the team didn't need a lot of information as part of their delivery, they went with Jira.

We are happy. It is a good product. We have benefited from the tool and recommend it. We have received very good feedback regarding its use. From a user perspective, the ability to create test cases and manage defects is excellent.

We are planning to integrate automation with Micro Focus ALM. This is in development. 

We are doing risk-based testing using manual generation of the script, then uploading it.

To use the flexibility feature from a requirement to my test cases and get the benefit of traceability per the SDLC process, I would need to keep and map all my requirements. It is on the user whether they are using this feature or not. While I know this feature is there, we are currently not using it. We are manually managing traceability. We are preparing and keeping all our test cases in Excel. When the test cases have built up, we are manually mapping them based on our requirements.

We are not currently using mapping test cases. This is a feature of ALM that would allow us to map our requirements, solutions, and everything the test misses. We had a call with the Micro Focus technical team regarding this and about how we can use other features. 

To store all tests including manual and automated tests along with the results of tests after they were executed. Tracking defects, scheduling test sets for automated UFT tests to run unattended from the Test Lab, storing the test cases, and also storing the test requirements in the Requirements Module. 

The Application Lifecycle Management Process with ALM includes the following phases

• Release Specifications: Develop a release-cycle management plan to help you manage application releases and cycles efficiently.
• Requirement Specifications: Define requirements to meet your business and testing needs.
• Test Planning: Based on the project requirements, you can build test plans and design tests.
• Test Execution: Create a subset of the tests in your project designed to achieve specific test goals. Execute scheduled tests to diagnose and resolve problems.
• Defect Tracking: Submit defects and track their progress and status.

Multiple users can execute tests independently on their own computer because the UFT scripts are stored in ALM/Quality Center which is web based. All test cases are stored in one location (ALM) which makes it easier for users to access and maintain.

New users can quickly be added and set-up to have access to given projects in Quality Center in less than an hour.

The Defect Module can be customized to your department's needs. At a former company, we held regular meetings and used the Defect Module with a projector to go over the defects found during the previous week.

• Ability to execute automated UFT scripts from Quality Center and store the results
• Ability to customize modules, particularly Defect Tracking module on company specific needs
• The user can export a lengthy test case with a lot of steps from Excel directly into Quality Center, which saves a lot of time. Conversely, a user can export a test case with all steps from Quality Center to Excel.
• Users can save screen shots of defects and also perform manual testing by using Manual Runner that verifies whether each step passed or failed and save the results along with information such as the date/time executed and who the tester was that performed the manual test.

When a particular version of Quality Center has reached end of life, the customer is forced to upgrade to the newer version to be eligible to get technical support. The upgrade process can be time intensive and requires a lot of planning. Quality Center seems to originally designed for a Waterfall process. However, the newer versions of ALM are more adaptable to Agile testing methodology.

The BPT also known as Business Process Testing can sometimes be very time intensive and sometimes might not be very intuitive to someone who is not familiar with BPT. ALM/QC supports IE but does not support Chrome which a lot of users like/want to use.

History of Quality Center including other names and versions:

On September 1, 2017 the HPE testing tools officially became Micro Focus. It is too early to see how the transition to Micro Focus will change things. I am keeping an optimistic view that Micro Focus will continue to invest in R&D and place a priority on customer support. I believe a lot of long-time customers would like to see things run like they were back in the Mercury Interactive days, which was one of the most innovative software companies of its time. If Micro Focus develops the right strategy, they could become a dominant player in the software testing market.

It is beneficial for the reader to understand the history of Quality Center since it has gone through several name changes and versions, so I have listed the chronological events below:

1. Mercury Interactive originally came out with TestDirector that included versions 1.52 to 8.0.

2. Mercury renamed the product TestDirector to Quality Center in version 8.0.

3. HP acquired Mercury and rebranded all Mercury products to HP. Therefore, Mercury Quality Center became HP Quality Center.

4. HP released version 11.00 and renamed it to HP ALM (Application Lifecycle Management).

5. In June 2016, HP released ALM Octane.

So essentially, the tool at one time or another has had the names TestDirector, Quality Center, ALM, and ALM Octane. Essentially, with each version and name change there has been added functionality.

10 plus years.

Sometimes when ALM is open and there is another browser open, Quality Center will crash.

No issues encountered, in fact, it's very straightforward to add users.

Customer Service:

9/10.

Technical Support:

9/10.

I have worked at companies that used open source tools and ALM/Quality Center. I have also worked at a company that simultaneously used both Quality Center and Rally.  Rally is also a good tool and seems to be developed more for the Agile methodology. However, when using UFT we always used it with ALM/Quality Center because we could store all of the run results from automated tests.

The initial set-up required a lot of resources, such as the Oracle DBA, because Quality Center stores its information in tables in a database. You also have to plan and coordinate with System Analysts what servers will be used along with the architecture.

N/A

Giving an ROI on a software product is a complicated task. I like to use the Space Shuttle as an analogy. From an economist's point of view, he or she might say the Space Shuttle program cost billions of dollars and did not see nearly that amount in hard dollars generated from resources/time saved in return. I believe NASA did get paid to put satellites into orbit via the Shuttle for private companies but it was less than the whole costs. On the other hand, a scientist could say the Space Shuttle program made many significant discoveries and also put into orbit the Hubble Telescope which discovered and took pictures of the Universe that was not possible from Earth. The Economist would just use a formula to calculate a number stating it is a bad ROI. The Scientist would say the Shuttle definitely added value by making new discoveries that advanced science so far that it cannot be measured in dollars and say it is a good ROI. My point here is that "what is the ROI" is a common question at companies and it can vary greatly on how a person approaches and perceives it.

With all this in mind, my answer is that Quality Center definitely adds value to an organization and over the long run has a positive ROI that will keep increasing over time primarily by saving time for users the more they use the functionality of all the modules. For example, using Quality Center to schedule automated test suites to run unattended increases ROI.

For licensing, find out the number of users who will be using it concurrently, and use that number as a starting point for the number of licenses to purchase. Quality Center is pricey, but cheaper is not always less expensive.

No other options were evaluated.

Write out and document all the steps and resources beforehand, and make sure everything is in place before implementing. Make sure you read the minimum requirements listed in installation instructions needed for all hardware (i.e. servers, etc.) and double-check it to ensure it is met.

We primarily use the solution for test management.

The solution has dozens of excellent features. It's hard to pinpoint just one.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not too hard to deploy.

The pricing of the product could be improved.

The solution needs to offer support for Agile. Currently, ALM only supports Waterfall. Whereas ALM Octane is a product that Micro Focus has full for Agile projects. It's not really and apples to apples comparison between those two products, however, it shows that the company has an understanding of Agile and it would be nice if they could support it on both products.

I've been using the solution for over ten years. It's been quite a while since we actually started using it - about a decade. Therefore, I have quite a bit of experience with it.

We have multiple clients using the solution. The number of users for each entity varies.

I can't speak to if any have plans to scale or increase usage in the future.

The technical support aspect of the solution isn't the best. That said, I haven't met a vendor that has very good technical support.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward in general. A company shouldn't have any issues implementing it.

I can't speak to how long the deployment actually took. It varies from client to client. We've had clients that deployed in two to three weeks, and others that took months. It depends on many factors.

We are implementors. We help clients set up and deploy the solution.

The licensing costs vary from client to client. There are different prices for SaaS versus on-premises deployments, for example.

There are only Micro Focus and Tricentis that are playing in this space properly. Anything else really isn't competing.

I would advise maybe to look more at ALM Octane if a company is in an Agile and DevOps transformation program. This product wouldn't really be suitable if that was the case.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a three out of ten.

We planned on using the solution for defect testing but it was a low priority for us, we never got around to it.

So far in the way we use the product, it has slowed down our process.

I have not thought about it. Though, I think the tools might be effective if we could utilize them better.

The tools could be useful if we were utilizing them more effectively. There is not a standard way of using the tools and I think that if there was, we would benefit. The tools are also too complex.

If they could improve their BPT business components that would be good to include in the next release. The current one does not seem complete. It is not really user friendly and it is difficult to handle test speeds. Even though the product supports a range of configurations they are difficult to set up and we preferred a different configuration.

I have been using ALM Quality Center for 1 year.

I think the only issue we were getting was with the memory. Our database was getting bigger and bigger so we need to increase the memory for the database to alleviate the issue.

In regard to scalability, I think it is scalable. In our team, we have more than 100, as for the other teams, I am not sure.

The tools might be good but the way we were utilized them was not effective. People have different ways to use the tools and we did not have a standard or conventional way. It would have been more beneficial if everybody followed a set of standards. Making the tools less complex would be better.

I rate Micro Focus ALM Quality Center a five out of ten.

We provide support for customers, which require this kind of solution.

The setup is pretty straightforward.

The solution can scale.

I frankly don't recommend Micro Focus solutions. 

The support is not good and the documentation is not consistent. I even opened the issue to the partner. With the support not being great, we faced some stressful situations with the customer. That's why I'm looking for another partner.

I'd like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning features implemented in future releases.

I've been using the solution for almost a year.

I realized there are some bugs in the solution that were not occurring on the last solution. 

Micro Focus bought another company. Since then, my experience hasn't been that great. The quality has dropped. It's not as stable as it used to be. I was expecting it to be more stable.

For the Quality Center, the scalability is quite good. On Load Runner, as a comparison, I faced one issue related to scalability. We face quite a few problems in that area.

The companies that are using Quality Center are quite sizeable. We have around 20 users on that particular solution.

The technical support is not helpful. They aren't responsive or knowledgable and they don't take initiative to solve issues for clients. It can hurt the relationship we have with our clients. We're not satisfied with their level of service.

While the setup is straightforward in general, the configuration is not quite as user-friendly. To configure the solution, you need to have many years of experience with the solution. Those that are new to it may face issues.

In terms of deployment, it takes about three days for the Quality Center installation as a whole. In contrast, Load Runner takes about two days in our case. 

We're a Micro Focus partner.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we're using. We are configuring the company and we tend to use the latest version of labels.

We work with both cloud and on-premises deployment models.

I don't recommend Micro Focus tools. It's a very strong company nowadays, however, I'm trying to find another partner. For instance, I've researched solutions that are much better than Micro-Focus in SAP scenarios.

I'd advise users looking for a solution to pay attention to their requirements and make sure whichever solution they choose meets them. You'll need to do a lot of research and balance the pros and cons of each option before choosing anything.

Overall, I would rate the solution six out of ten.