OpenText Silk Central Reviews

Our primary use case is for running tests and reporting the results of those tests. We have a lot of customized tests, and download more than twenty thousand reports per year.

This solution adds value because we are able to get the right information at the right time, which helps us to make the right decisions. We have more than one hundred and sixty users each day, and we manage more than one hundred projects. This results in a large volume of data that we can collect in real time.

This enables us to determine the status and risk of critical items, and supply this information to management. From there, each point is considered and decisions are made with respect to how to proceed in production. For example, testing may be halted or restarted depending on results contained within the reports. It adds real value for project management.

Before using this tool, we had many different Excel templates and used email to keep track of defects. This was very chaotic. The impact of adopting this product was very large.

• GUI: HTML-based and no installation is required.
• Keyword driven testing: It lets our testers with no technical background easily create and maintain automated tests.
• Issue management: It lets us forward product defects with logs, screenshots and videos easily.
• Lab management: It is easy to configure automated test execution servers

We are in the process of wide spreading test automation skills to the teams of our organization. With the ease of use that Silk Central provides, our teams have a smooth learning curve in test automation.

Issues and Defect Management.

• Reporting
• Execution planning
• Requirement
• Dashboard

We manage more than 400 users and 120,000 test cases / year in our Test and Defect Management solution based on Silk Central, in an enterprise multi-company environment (postal, banking, insurance, telco, mobile, government, business), so for us the most valuable feature is flexibility.

With Silk Central we have many possibilities for customizing the utilization and we can also work easily at database level for custom reporting and to manage additional information and integration.

In addition we have great support from Micro Focus and real collaboration to drive future direction and new features.

The other valuable feature is the easy to use and immediate onboarding of manual testers and general users and test managers.

1) Directional reporting based on baseline (daily target of tests passed, set by test manager) with custom view of test results and defect resolution speed. Very good support for decision making.

2) Release management, cross projects, and directional reporting based on custom attributes set to any execution plans to join any current test activities (test, run, and defect) for platform/application, release (year/month) and test level (system-functional/system-integration/uat). Provides drill-down to single projects. This allows us to identify critical projects with impact on others and general release, at an early stage where you can drive decisions to reduce risks.

Of all of the features of this solution, I use execution planning the most. It helps with the automation of our tests and deployment to servers.

I also enjoy the solid integration flow starting from the requirements phase through design, validation, and report generation.

We've seen improvements to our organization in terms of the configurability and the stability of our product. With this solution, for example, configurability is no longer a risk factor for SCTM bugs.

Desktop & Browser support

We have automated 5000 test cases and reduced lot of manual effort which resulted in cost cutting of the project.

All the reports are very important for me, as is the integration with Caliber.

With SilkCentral, I can have a macro-view of all my tests. I can also have detailed reports about all projects.

It's really hard to say what the most valuable features are with this solution.

Adding the test cases and assigning them to particular testers can be improved. 

The testers who wrote the test cases and added it to the plan were the only ones able to see and execute it. Others, who weren't this involved, couldn't. 

And we weren't able to find the import function of test cases from Excel.