OpenText Application Quality Management Reviews

We've primarily used most of the solution. Our requirements included test cases and defect handling in the past. We are using it for regression testing and maintenance of test cases to do regression testing when we are upgrading the system.

The solution acts as a repository of all of our test cases, which is very useful. We don't normally check the history as the environment has changed since the last time we ran a test. We know that we've executed the test and therefore don't need to repeat it. We understand what kinds of issues have occurred for future reference. 

It is stable and reliable.

The solution can scale.

Between versions 12 or 13 and the upgrade to 15, it took a very long time. We had a lot of difficulties with support and didn't understand why we had so many upgrade issues. 

We operate in Sweden, and there are not so many Swedish people that know the product. 

It might be end of life in some ways. 

The pricing can be a bit expensive. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. We haven't had any issues aside from the upgrade problems we've run into. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We have not had a problem adding users to help perform testing. In that sense, it is scalable. We haven't done too much development around test cases, however.

Right now, we have 20 to 25 people using the solution. Years ago, 30 or 40 people were using it. We've actually lowered usage. 

Support wasn't too helpful when we had to do an upgrade. The website is complex, and it's difficult to get answers. You can look online, and that ends up being more efficient than actually trying to find answers is Micros Focus. 

We had issues finding support.

Neutral

It's not a big deal to upgrade the version we have. We've had issues in the past, however. We've had problems with user handling and would like to incorporate it with Windows Director or SSO functionality. That's available in later versions, and we haven't upgraded to that yet.

We started with an empty ALM originally and filled it with content. It's been a long, historic journey from implementation to upgrades. 

I am not aware of the exact pricing of the solution. Many years ago, it was quite expensive, and my understanding is it is still not a low price. There are free tools on the market now as well, and therefore the price may be an issue. 

We are an end-user.

I might be using version 15 at this time. We've done a test installation of version 17.

When we started the test automization, it was not like today. It's gotten better over time. Now, it's much easier to automate testing. While I could recommend the solution, it's not necessarily state-of-the-art, however. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Although it is not state-of-the-art, it is still a good tool. 

We use all the major modules in ALM Quality Center. From the releases and management portion, we use the requirements, and we create our releases. We create requirements. We link our test spaces to these requirements and we schedule the execution in the test lab. Then we capture our results in Quality Center and we follow the management process that is not only for manual testing. 

We also have quite extensive automated testing in our environment with some of the other Micro Focus products. They are all integrated into Quality Center, like the UFT, we use service virtualization, we have RPA and we also use Mobile Center. Quality Center plays a major role in our test artifacts, our execution, and our order tracking, both in manual and automated.

Quality Center has improved my organization from a traceability and test coverage point of view. We have multiple vendors providing development to my company, Pick n Pay. If we use automation or Sprinter, the tool documents the steps for us as we follow it to the point that we've got a defect, so it's easy to send that information on to third parties so that they can duplicate the defect on their side and then provide us with a fix. 

The other thing is from a regression point of view, with everything documented in Quality Center, it's easy to go back and execute the same test every time with automation.

Quality Center's ability to connect all related entities to reflect project status and progress is great. This is the tool that we share with all our project managers so that they can see the progress on their projects, even if it's a project across multiple applications or what it is within our environment. We set it up so they can have an overall view of that specific project. It is a great tool to use in that sense.

The test center is our way of working. It's fully integrated, we have a test strategy that supports the use of ALM Quality Center. That's the only way that we track progress on projects. We don't use Excel or anything like that for creating test cases or anything. We also have an environment where we follow a more agile approach and we've integrated Quality Center into JIRA for user stories and defect tracking. If it's not in Quality Center, it's not happening. If it's not documented in Quality Center, we don't believe it.

I wouldn't necessarily say that in the beginning it reduced the time required for testing but if you start on an application and you had the four-quarter full version of that, reusability is automatically built into the tool. Then if you've documented the test case, you've got it. You can reuse that test case in multiple instances of releases at execution. You don't have to go and rewrite it if you plan correctly. If there's a change to something with the way you've structured in Quality Center it will filter through. So it brings our maintenance down by a lot less. Even on the automation side, it brings the maintenance down a lot less with the way we've structured our modules within Quality Center.

It has reduced it by around 15%. That's without automation, it's straight Quality Center. If you add the automation, in some of our areas like the digital area, it brought it down by about 45%. In some of the other areas by around 50%.

Quality Center enables us to conduct risk-based testing. Testing is always a measured approach in our environment. Depending on when development is finished and when we go live, we will do a risk-based approach to say that if we have a look at the critical requirements or test cases, this is how long it will take us. We then get sign-off from the systems analyst, the project manager, and even the business to say, based on the time we have, we're only going to execute critical test cases, for instance.

I'm not 100% sure if Micro Focus is still investing in the product. If I have a look at the features, not 15.01 because we still have to install that, but previously from Quality Center 11 up to where we are now, there are a few things that have been outstanding for a while that I believe will add value. And they're not really getting to that. So I'm not sure what their road map is. Unfortunately this year, the Micro Focus Universe was canceled in the Netherlands, because I'm sure there they would have shared some of the road maps with us, but I don't think the communication on their road map is clear enough to their customers.

The execution module and the test planning module are definitely the most valuable features. We use REST for traceability, but those are the two modules that I cannot live without.

From a test execution point of view or the test lab, from an audit requirement, we have internal and external auditors of the major projects that will do an audit on the project to make sure that we follow the right processes and procedures within the TCOE and within our STLC in Pick n Pay. It's easy to give auditors access to Quality Center as a viewer only and they can view everything we've done from test execution and test planning, as Quality Center keeps the audit trail for us.

In terms of its ability to handle a large number of projects and users in our enterprise environment, we have 17 dedicated testers and automation specialists in the test centers and plus or minus another 35 to 45 business users/developers or systems analysts that access the product. From a scalability point of view, we run multiple projects over multiple domains at any given time with everyone that's got access. Quality Center's ability to send out emails when you log defects makes it possible for someone that works over multiple projects to know exactly where to find the defect if they just follow the emails that go out.

We use Quality Center for all of our reporting purposes. We have dashboards that we've created across domains and projects. With all the information already available in Quality Center, it's quite easy to set up all of our reporting. Work management doesn't necessarily want to go into the details of the projects. It's easy for them to just access the dashboards that we create from information in Quality Center, with direct integration to see that. From a traceability point of view, it is a great product.

In terms of the security features, we don't do the LDEF or the active directory integration. We have a stand-alone solution. We can obviously set our own password. We don't enforce password rules at this stage, but going forward with security becoming more important in the company's life, we are going to follow and going to do the active directory integration. We have single sign-on to Quality Center, as it can handle that integration portion into the rest of the Pick n Pay landscape. We don't use SSO.

Browser support needs improvement. Currently, it can only run on IE, Internet Explorer. It doesn't work on Firefox, doesn't work on Chrome, doesn't work on a Mac. Those are the new technologies where most companies move towards. That's been outstanding for quite a while before it even became Micro Focus tools, when it was still HP. Even before HP, that's always been an issue.

Other smaller things need improvement. If you log a defect, you have the ability to upload attachments, but it will only allow you to add one attachment at a time. If you have ten screenshots, for instance, you have to do it one at a time. You can't go and highlight all ten and upload.

Finally, the biggest problem in our environment, and it's the reason we're not necessarily upgrading our solution every time, is when we do an upgrade or even install a patch, there are always changes to the UI. What it means is that we need to have local admin rights on our machine. The next time we log on, we unload all those components to our machine. Now in an environment like Pick n Pay, where not everyone can have local admin rights, it's quite a mission if we upgrade to go around and get to the 60 to 70 PCs or laptops that are impacted to get the users to log on or get IT support to log in with local admin rights to install the browser portion after an upgrade. There are a few .net downloads that need to happen on the browser side in IE and that takes some time.

I started using this product when it was still called Mercury Interactive, from 1997.

It's on-prem, hosted in a partner that is doing all our hosting. It's on-prem and we do our own administration.

The stability is great. I can't think of any time in the last three years where we had an issue with the product. 

Scalability is great. It doesn't matter what the size of your organization is. If your testing area is 5 users or 500 users, this product can definitely scale. Before I joined Pick n Pay, I worked for a company in Kazakhstan and Russia. We used Quality Center across different countries to roll out a big project and at the end, we had a 400-user license to have everyone following the same process when it came to testing.

We have 17 permanent users in Quality Center. They are testers. We have a test manager role. We have automation engineers. We have test analysts, we have senior testers and we have junior testers. We also have systems analysts that we log defects and assign it to them so that they can access the defects module to validate and update the side of the defect. We also integrate Quality Center with JIRA. We have our third-party development happening, where they use JIRA and we use Quality Center, where we can log the defects in Quality Center then via the integration then send it to JIRA. When they update, we get information back on our side so that we are on the same page. For us, Quality Center is the single tool in our environment. Whatever the status of the defect is in Quality Center, that's the status. Whatever the status is of execution of test cases, that's what it is.

In terms of the required maintenance, I have one system administrator for all the products and they're responsible for Quality Center. They make sure when we plan upgrades to do the upgrades, user management, project creation, and integration with the other Micro Focus tools we use. 

Our adoption rate is about 85-90%. There will always be room to grow.

We don't have plans to increase usage. We have plans to increase other things around Quality Center like test coverage, automation, and all of those things, but not necessarily new licenses or additional licenses. We have a base of licenses in our environment. As we get major projects with more resources, we do a rental on additional licenses for a three or six-month period.

I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten. 

Their support is quite good. There will always be room for improvement. I also know the local Micro Focus support in South Africa so it's easy for us to pick up the phone and phone the local support or the engineers in South Africa. The only room for improvement will be if you log a call and it's in a different time zone, sometimes there's a delay over three or four hours, but that's literally the only negative about it.

Even within Pick n Pay it is straightforward to do an upgrade. First, uninstall then install the new product or the new version, and if you keep to the same database server, it will pick up all your information and all the projects and everything you have. I've also been involved in areas where we run it via the load balancer and if you follow the documentation, it's quite easy to set up.

An upgrade does not take more than two hours. The initial setup might be a bit longer, about four hours, depending on if you have access to the right database server, if you have all the correct admin rights on the database server, and things like that. If you follow the steps in the installation guide before you start with the install, and you get that right, or get your users set up correctly on the DBA side, it's not a problem. It can take three to four hours.

We do the installation ourselves. I have a product administrator for all of the Micro Focus products in our environment who is doing all the administrative duties for us on all the Micro Focus products.

Regarding our implementation strategy, it becomes quite complex if you use other Micro Focus products as well. It's not as straightforward as just upgrading Quality Center. We use service virtualization and we use Mobile Center. For us, it's important that we follow the process to make sure that we're on the most recent releases of all products that can integrate. The integration portion of the Micro Focus documentation is quite important to us.

We've seen ROI plainly. We can do more projects. It's easier to do the maintenance. It might not be rands or dollars savings, but time-saving is definitely there.

From a pricing point of view, I believe it is an enterprise tool. If you are an enterprise organization and you're using SAP or Oracle for your ERP systems, for example, the cost around Quality Center is not that expensive. From a licensing and planning point of view, you should have a hybrid between licenses you own and depending on how busy you are at certain stages within projects, do additional rentals just for those periods if need be. That's what we do in our environment, we have a base of 15 licenses. If we have any major projects coming in where we know there are additional developers, we do a rental for licenses for the period of that project. We charge that project for the licenses for that rental.

We do have additional costs apart from standard licensing from our side. Pick n Pay outsources their hardware, so obviously we have costs for the hardware and backup for our hardware partners that do our hosting. We see this as a tier-one application in our environment. We have full disaster recovery capability. There some costs involved from that side.

Depending on your environment, the strong point for me with all of the Micro Focus tools is that it supports multiple applications and multiple development languages. It's easy to use one for everything in your environment. If you have a look at automation, if you have SAP and you have mobile, you can use the same tools. It's the same with Quality Center. It doesn't matter what you want to test, you can use the same tool to support that testing. 

Make sure that you plan the detail correctly and plan it to the sense that you know where you want to end up. Otherwise, maintenance becomes a nightmare on your dispatchers.

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

We use the solution for test management and gathering requirements and test cases.

Business process management is the most valuable feature of the solution.

Sometimes the product is slow. We do not know if it is an issue with Micro Focus or our internal network. The performance could be faster.

I have been using this solution for one year.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Three of our customers use the product. There are about 720 users in our customers’ organizations.

We do not have any plans to increase the numbers. It depends on our customers.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was taken care of by another team in our organization.

We need one engineer to deploy and maintain the product.

We have experienced business-related benefits from the tool.

We have to pay an annual license fee for the product. The licensing fee is a little expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

We had considered other products like qTest, TestRail, Xray, and Jira. We chose Micro Focus because our clients wanted it.

I will definitely recommend the solution to others. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We are customers of Micro Focus and I'm a senior director of our company. 

The overall licensing and reporting has definitely improved. As a leader, I was able to get the reports I needed and the same applies to developers. Traceability really helps me and is a great feature. When I used to be a test manager, it was very useful. ALM is user-friendly. 

I'd like to see some readily available plugins where we could integrate other tools because we're in an open-source world now, and there are a lot of tools that I need to integrate. It requires a lot of effort to create the APIs to connect to ALM and run the scripts. The solution lacks Agile features. 

I've been using this solution for 15 years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The initial setup is relatively easy but we hired a third-party organization to assist. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

ALM is a well-known product and is one of the pioneers in providing test management facilities with a 360 degree view of requirements.

ALM has got really a good feature which captures screens, decodes them and puts them in a code format. It becomes so easy to capture your screens and run through various screens and prepare your test cases, rather than typing it in Excel or manually in ALM itself. I think that's a really handy tool to have and it's very intuitive to use.

Certain applications within this solution are not really compatible with certain applications like ERP. The problem is when we're trying to use these applications or devices, the solution itself doesn't scale. It has got a lot of problems scaling up and down with the resolution of the devices that you use, and hence we had to stop using ALM and go for something else that was more user-friendly.

The resolution is very clunky and its fields get hidden in the menu boxes. This is also a very expensive solution. 

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

This is a stable solution. 

The customer support team are good. They used remote access to my PC to resolve an issue.

Neutral

It was straightforward. There were no complications in setting it up at all.

We used a third party for the setup.

This is an expensive solution. 

ALM is a good product but you need to be mindful of how it scales on your devices that you use because we use smaller devices compared to what we used to use in the past. The laptop screens have reduced in size so you need to make sure that they scale to the resolution of the device.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

I am using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for test script preparation and test script execution and defect management. This will enable the programme to capture and store tests for easy re-usability for future deployments.

Have not yet rolled it out in the organisation

The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is the alignment of the test to the execution and the linking of the defects to the two. It automatically links any defects you have to the re-test. The re-usability of tests for future deployments is also very good. In addition the ability of automation tools to bolt on and utilise the test scripts located in ALM.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center should improve the reports. Reporting on test  execution progress against the plan. However, they might have improved over two years since I have used the solution.

I have been using Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for approximately 20 years. The solution was previously named Mercury Quality Centre and then Hewlett-Packard ALM.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is typically stable once it is set up.

The scalability of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is good.

The support of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is good.

Positive

The setup of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is not easy. It is time-consuming and complex. There is a lot of work that needs to be done on the backend. I have already spent seven hours of my time and I have not completed it yet. I have another seven hours or more of evaluation and checking before I roll it out.

We implemented the solution using a vendor team. They have been supportive in explaining the new configuration and values and how they have changed since I used it last.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is very expensive. The price is approximately £2,000 per person, they are too expensive to corner the market.

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is high on maintenance to start with. I have been using the solution for over 20 years and I am very familiar with it and have gained a lot of knowledge using this tool. For me, it is very easy to use. However, it's very difficult to train out because of the new features that they rolled out in the last five years. The features make it a bit more difficult to train out, and you need a lot of support to help people use the tool until they get familiar with it.

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

We use Quality Center to track functional testing and record automation testing scenarios results. There are around 1,000 users at my company. 

ALM Quality Center is a reliable, consolidated product. 

Quality Center's UI is outdated, and it's a little bit slow on the login part and different parts of the application. That's why we're switching solutions. I believe most companies are switching to Octane or something else. Micro Focus should enhance the interface and reports.

I've been using ALM Quality Center for seven years.

ALM Quality Center doesn't break down too much.

ALM Quality Center is scalable. There isn't much impact on performance when you add users.

Setting up ALM Quality Center is easy. It's not complicated to set up the on-premises solution.

I would rate ALM Quality Center six out of 10.

The primary use cases for this solution are testing, recording and auditing results, and creating test cases and test plans.  

The most valuable Quality Center feature, I find, is the solution's integration with some of our automation tools. For us, the ability to capture and record and the ease of use from a user perspective, are all key. Most of the users using ALM are on the business side. In other words, we've got end users that are in there, not IT personnel, which is why it is important that the solution is intuitive and easy to use.

There's room for improvement in the requirements traceability with Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. That could use an uplift. 

We have used ALM tools for probably the last 20 years. 

We have used ALM tools for about two decades and many of our business teams are familiar with them, which is why we ultimately chose this route. 

Micro Focus ALM Quality Center has always met our requirements, which is why any minor issues we've had with requirements traceability have never really been a big deal. But there really hasn't been a whole lot of change in those areas in several years. I'm sure that they are working on a roadmap, which I haven't gotten to see yet only because I haven't been pushing to see it, but I understand that there's much in the works. 

I would give Micro Focus ALM Quality Center an eight out of ten overall.