OpenText Software Delivery Management Reviews

It's for monitoring the application lifecycle for quality and testing in an agile methodology.

The enterprise view for application management has been great.

It’s easy to set up.

Generally, we’d like more adoption of the solution in our industry.

We’d like to see Platform One/Iron Bank compliant containers. These are certifications. Certification for Platform One and specifically for the product ALM Octane, Platform One/Iron Bank certification would be ideal. My understanding is it just so happens that that's the roadmap.

The clients have been working with it for 25 years.

The solution is very stable.

It's extremely scalable. It's an enterprise solution for lifecycle management.

As a rep, I’d always like to increase usage. In general, there's a total direction to increase exposure to ALM Octane.

I have experience with technical support. For secure clients in the US, domestic in-country support is outstanding.

If you're just doing the regular follow the sun, there could be issues with support availability. However, if you use premium in-country support, you won’t have issues.

The product management and the Go Octane support, which is the migration to Octane, which is not an in-country that is now going and leveraging the Go Octane team is also outstanding.

I'm working with them right now with my customers to migrate from their Al Octane. They're right on target, with a lot of cool exposure. Clients have been satisfied.

My clients were using ALM, the predecessor, and due to the cost-effective migration and technical capabilities to leverage an agile framework application solution, Octane was the right choice.

The initial setup is straightforward.

There's a migration SHIFT from ALM to Octane that is straightforward.

I don’t have any specific information about ROI.

There’s such a large investment in scripts built for these. To recreate that content in other products would be a disadvantage economically to pursue once you have the legacy products. It would be very expensive to get a system integrated to do so.

As a partner, we offer perpetual licensing as well as annual or monthly subscription licensing.

I’m not sure how it compares to other products.

There aren’t any additional costs that I am aware of. It may be different with different deployments. However, customers in the security community have their own secure cloud, and so they just install it there.

I've had my customers look at ServiceNow, DevOps AddOn as well as Jira, and Zephyr.

I don't want to limit our sales. However, my clients were ALM customers and they said the best choice coming from ALM was to migrate their projects to Octane instead of moving over to a new platform.

Micro Focus is an English company. We're a small US-based company that is a master reseller for all the Micro Focus products. I sell the product. I'm a vendor.

I’d rate the solution ten out of ten.

We are using Micro Focus ALM Octane for agile purposes and integration with ALM.

The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the reports. We are able to do customization.

The solution should improve by adding scrum board-like functionality.

I have been using Micro Focus ALM Octane for more than one year.

I rate the stability of Micro Focus ALM Octane an eight out of ten.

We have 14 people using the solution in my company. We might increase our usage of the solution depending on the project we have.

I rate the scalability of Micro Focus ALM Octane a nine out of ten.

I rate the support from Micro Focus ALM Octane a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have used Jira previously.

The deployment of the solution can take approximately four hours. However, it depends on the environment. The solution can be integrated with GitHub.

I rate the initial setup of Micro Focus ALM Octane a seven out of ten.

We used an integrator for the deployment. We have three people involved in the deployment.

The price of Micro Focus ALM Octane is too high compared to other solutions.

I recommend using the free version before purchasing. 

I rate Micro Focus ALM Octane an eight out of ten.

We are using ALM Octane for electronic component testing and validation. We have a few departments where they are developing their software and using JIRA projects and exchanging results with Octane. 

About 80 percent of the users are not in software development itself, but are in software testing. The software is developed by external companies and we are just doing the integration testing. We are putting the components together from five different suppliers, and then doing the integration testing. Is the software working in real life, together, from the different control units of different vendors? It is a staged process. We check if things are working in the different parts of the system, like the engine components, drive train, navigation, and infotainment systems. If things are working in those different areas, we put everything together and test it in a complete car.

As a result, we have lots of test cases. We have automated tests and a test automation tool that is controlling complete car-wrecks and the like. So it's not only a mouse pointer on a screen. It's controlling robots opening and closing doors, for example. 

Our main focus is efficient planning of tests. We cannot run all the tests we have every single week, because lots of the stuff has different variants for Europe and the U.S. and China. So we have to have very sophisticated test planning. A lot of attributes are needed for this and for all the runs, whether manual or automated. We have what we call a very large problem management process to work on the defects with the 100-plus suppliers that are delivering different control units and, therefore, software packages.

We use Octane's Backlog and Team Backlog capabilities a lot. For example, we use them for errors that occur in software that we are not developing ourselves, where we are just doing the integration testing. In such cases we are using user stories to order teams to test a certain number of test suites or test cases. We can use it straight away, out-of-the-box, without breaking or adding something to the tool. Using Team Backlogs means our teams can use all the features that come with Octane, for our benefit, without doing anything else. In the past, if you compare it to the old ALM solution, lots of teams had to store their tests and results in ALM.Net and use JIRA as a parallel system. They were manually copying and pasting links into both tools to control their workloads. Users were used to working with user stories as a work order, and that is now integrated in one tool, which is a huge benefit.

It has also reduced our testing costs. I don't have the numbers, but we're speeding up a lot. Just the waiting time we had with the old ALM when logging in was about one minute. If you multiply this by 5,000 users who are logging in on a single day you can calculate very large savings, very fast.

The key feature is the usability. It is fast to learn and easy to use. It's very intuitive to work with. Most of the important functions are available via a few clicks, compared to other tools where I have to open a sub-menu and then a sub-menu and another sub-menu, and then press a button.

The native support for Waterfall, Hybrid, and Agile software development at enterprise scale was one of the reasons why we changed to Octane. In the development process we're creating the requirement specifications which are then handed out to a supplier, including Bosch, Continental, Alpine, etc. They then develop control units with software and we have to link our tests against those requirements to check if everything is implemented. This is a very important task. It's required by law. For example, for autonomous driving, we have to prove that the car is not, by default, running into trees. We are proving that by test cases that are passed. While that is still Waterfall, it's not Agile, we are using the Agile methodologies more and more to control our workload. For example, we are using a user story in test management to order teams to test a certain number of test cases.

In terms of integrations to proprietary, third-party, and open-source tools out-of-the-box, it has a very powerful REST interface. We can interact with other tools. OpenText also offers synchronization tools, OpenText Connect Core, which has out-of-the-box interfaces to industry standards tools. For everything else, you can use the powerful REST interface, which is both good and bad. It's good for creating an interface but sometimes our engineers use the REST interface to do things they should not do. But that's because engineers are always doing fancy stuff.

The elements in filtering need to be improved, meaning the number of filters I can use in widgets or in the grid views in parallel. There's a limitation which bothers a lot of our users. Filtering in text, or having a complex filter is limited. In a given field, for example, I can use a filter only once. I cannot say, "Include the values 1, 2, and 3, and exclude value 17." This is not possible but we have requested it often.

And in general, widgets should be more flexible and more sophisticated, with the ability to layer two different widgets. There is also room for improvement in the amount of test cases which are available for certain filter conditions and a given widget, versus what was worked off already.

Also, when it comes to getting reports out of it, and maybe this is a little bit specific to the automotive industry, there are certain requirements by law where we have to export the test results for the final software delivery and create PDF reports which are stored for 15 or 20 years. Creating reports in PDF, or PowerPoint which then become PDF at the end of the day, is something which could be improved a lot. We're working on it with OpenText in every single release as new features are added.

We have been using ALM Octane on a production scale since the middle of 2018. We started digging into the different tools about one and a half years prior. At that point our idea was to change from ALM to whatever other tool. We decided to go with Octane in early or mid 2017.

We are trying to use the latest and greatest version. We are now updating to 15.0.60, the so-called "Beatles" release, because of one technical issue that we solved together with OpenText. But in two to three months we will be on the latest and greatest "Depeche Mode" version which will be 15.1.40.

It's stable, out-of-the-box, with very few errors. And if we get an error message, very often it's because of the complex rules we have implemented, ourselves, in Octane. But in general, the usage of Octane is very good, the quality is very high, with very few errors and bugs, and with high reliability even on a large scale. We are close to being the largest Octane instance for OpenText.

The scalability is pretty good. We did some load tests in advance, before making the decision, pro or con, on Octane. With Octane we are in a very good position. We expected to have some 5,000 users by the end of 2019/beginning of 2020 working on Octane. I believe it can go up to 2,000 users working in parallel. We hope to be powerful enough, with the architecture and everything else we set up, to meet users' expectations of performance.

We are involved in further step-by-step expansion of our use of Octane. For this year, we are planning to extend the native Octane usage of test automation, the DevOps module. We are introducing it and maybe we will be able to replace some home-grown and other tools and to integrate them into Octane to have the benefit of Octane. It would be helpful to have everything in one place for the monitoring and reporting possibilities. Our processes and needs are changing from time to time, and this is always reflected in the test management tool.

I'm very proud of the opportunity that OpenText offered to our team, to be something of a design partner. We have a very strong relationship with R&D and are able to discuss user wishes and our needs directly with them. They listen very carefully and try to deliver solutions for our problems and enhancement requests. It is amazing to see how fast and how stably things come together, even if some users are complaining because their single feature request has been open for two years. But that's because we have more important ones. It's an awesome relationship.

You also have to take into consideration that Octane has become an industry standard. Lots of different companies are using it. From that point of view, you get to know how complex the work is for OpenText, and how valuable a good relationship is. I'm very thankful for being part of this kind of working together and improving the tool.

And it has often turned out that our requests and wishes have had a huge benefit for other customers.

The benefit of this design partnership, which is unique, is a plus for us. We are able to influence the tool and get features, especially within the timeline that we need them. That's one of the biggest advantages.

We knew we needed to go with Octane for a couple of reasons. From the business side, there were some requests which ALM could not cover, in terms of data storage, etc. Since we have so many test cases, and given how versioning and base-lining work in ALM, it would require so much storage that we were not using the versioning in ALM. This was one of the biggest pain points from an ISO perspective in terms of testing. Also, operation maintenance was hard. We were running the biggest ALM.NET instance in the world, according to OpenText. We had the most users, the most data, and the most complex VBA workflow code in a single instance of ALM. This needed to be migrated smoothly to Octane.

In addition, Internet Explorer, which is not the finest tool, was removed from our company's IT at the beginning of 2020. There were a lot of smaller reasons which lead to the need to change to a different tool, to a more flexible tool, to a more powerful tool. For example, the Autonomous Driving guys were going to be adding tons of test cases and automated tests, which would cause ALM, in the configuration we were in, to crash in the future. That was clear, and it was clear to our management as well. We only had a small time window to change to a different system.

For us, it was a very complex setup. It was not only setting up a server, installing Octane, and doing configurations. Our plan was to have a shared Workspace concept with six or seven Workspaces. We did have a major challenge in doing all the configuration stuff, defining methods and processes. We also had to connect at least ten major tools or databases, which are synchronizing information into Octane, or which are used for the special methods of test planning and test automation; pulling information from Octane and running them on our test benches in semi-automated cars.

That was a very complex process.  There were some small problems and some bigger problems but we found solutions for all of them.

Because we have some 70 to 80 suppliers that are part of an automated defects exchange, our development, our testers, are reporting defects and those defects are exchanged with those 70 to 80 suppliers. So it's a very complex situation we are in.

Of course, users have to learn different things compared to ALM.Net, the old version of the tool. But we're getting good feedback from the users that as soon as they are used to the idea that they have to use a different tool, they are learning how to use it very fast.  There are fewer obstacles in the tool, in this regard, compared to others. Even if you're a JIRA user, you have to overcome that, "I have to use a different tool" issue. There are people who are doing this very easily and with a smile, while some are just trying to stick to the known tools. But that's the change process.

For deployment and maintenance of the tool, there was a major team of experienced IT guys and process guys from our side, about 25 people, supported by about 60 other people just for the special processes of the different development departments. We call them "key users." They are collecting information and reporting it to the core team. For maintenance, it's a team of six people who are implementing changes requested by the core team. Depending on the workload, on average, maintenance is done by three people. There were numerous software developers working on the interface tools, perhaps some 30 IT guys working on the different tools we needed to launch with Octane.

I was not part of the cost negotiations. But the purchasing guys confirmed that OpenText offered the best pricing to us.

We started analyzing which tool we should use for the future a few years ago, and we started digging into Octane very early. 

Options we considered included JIRA, which is used by a lot of small teams. There is a standard toolchain around but with the amount of data and information we need to run, JIRA was very easy to strike from the list. We dug into IBM and PTC Integrity. We looked into ALM Octane vs codeBeamer ALM from Intland. We did some comparisons but ended up with Octane.

With JIRA and the toolchain, you cannot run a business like ours, doing car development, using a lot of plugins to get the needed functionality in one tool. You have so many small companies providing those plugins. What if the company providing one of the tools or plugins you're using collapses or doesn't support a new JIRA version? So this was not an option.

PTC is also using different tools to support the full functionality of requirements, test cases, team management, the backlogs, tests and defects, and so on.

codeBeamer was on the short-list and was the biggest competitor to Octane. But from our perspective, Octane did much better in performance. Octane is not able to do as many relations between the data objects as codeBeamer, but performance was the key factor for us. When you compare Octane to codeBeamer ALM, the UX concept is very good. What's also very important is to have good capabilities for getting reports about the system out of Octane in real time. The reporting engine, the widgets, and the dashboards are a huge plus.

This is still an area where we have lots of feature requests at OpenText to enhance things even further. We would like it to be more flexible for the users. We have lots of user-defined fields and lists so users are requesting more capabilities for enhancing this area or would like the possibility of filtering their work items.

We were setting the foundation for the next eight to ten years. We had to have that in mind, as well as the increase in data, the increase in users, the increase in data objects and rules, and the complexity of development which is divided into different pieces. To cover all this in one single tool led us to Octane. Cost and license fees were also a big issue. The two solutions, codeBeamer and Octane, weren't that far apart but, here as well, Octane was first.

Do a quick scan of tools in the market and dig into your needs. Especially for a project with a lot of users with different styles of working together, Octane is the best tool because of the shared space/Workspace concept. Management is able to get a total overview of all the projects or workspaces and the teams are able to operate in their particular styles. That would be my advice.

For small teams, there might be different solutions that are cheaper, JIRA for example, and tools that are more flexible. But if you need to run bigger businesses, Octane is the best because it's replacing a whole toolchain.

The solution can provide a single platform for all automated testing but it's a little different for us because of our strong dependency on hardware, like robots, for automation. We need to have a robot that presses a button, for example, for real end-to-end testing. It depends on the types of errors you're working with. ALM Octane is integrated and fully supporting every task. But on some levels, because of our special needs, we have to work with third-party tools and we then use Octane as a single point of truth for all the results.

Integration of ALM Octane with your CI server is possible and we are working on that so that we can use the features of Octane and connect it to our different departments and solutions. The idea is to try to streamline things and make Octane the central tool for those use cases. Although it's possible already to do this, we have to use some workarounds because of our tools and the way we use the solution. It takes time until the central tools are supporting various processes and, in the meantime, people develop their own processes and their own little tools and they want to stick to their working solution and not start all over again. This is going on in different departments and different areas of the company. So if you then try to integrate all this in a single tool, at the end of the day, you are taking away their "toys" and their "babies" that they invented. So it's a work in progress. But it's possible and it is on our agenda for this year.

The solution hasn't reduced manual testing time in our organization yet, since we are just starting with the integration of our test automation and Octane to create a workflow and process where everything is integrated. This is something we are working on. The first step was to replace the old ALM for a certain number of user groups. We now have more than 7,200 users working in Octane, and we have more than 1,000 concurrent users working in it. It takes time to develop this. But the goal for this year is to integrate it and to use it more and more efficiently. And then it will definitely reduce automated and manual work.

I like the fact that you can use it on top of Jira. 

Let's say for example, that if you have a DevOps team that is used to Jira, they can continue to use any of the Jira solutions and then have Octane layered on top of it from the business buyer's viewpoint to better use it more effectively.

There is no question that everything can improve.

I like their smart analytics; perhaps they should continue to expand and improve there because it's a fantastic start. And I enjoy the testing, especially the automated testing capabilities, so just keep improving on what they have.

I have been working with Micro Focus ALM Octane for one year.

I am reviewing the latest version.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is a stable solution.

Because of HPE's support, I would feel far more comfortable with Micro Focus.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is a scalable product.

We have approximately 500 clients who are using this solution.

They are large enterprises and digital transformation, IT engineers, more business-oriented than DevOps-oriented.

We have not contacted technical support.

We are working with the Hybrid version, but It even extends to on-premises. It is both the on-premises and cloud versions.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I believe it depends on the circumstance, getting it up and running seems to be rather simple. It appears to be suitable for standing up in a bigger setting.

If I compare it to Jira, for example, and you are in a complex environment, you have to ensure that everything is updated and all of the plugins, and everything works every time there is an update, but you don't have that problem with Micro Focus' Octane.

We received assistance from a third-party consultant.

Because I am making recommendations for a client, I lack firsthand deployment experience. I am merely talking to them and assisting them in making decisions.

My clients have seen a return on investment. I can't quantify it for you, but they believe that because it is cohesive and can be used across the enterprise in a simplified manner, it reduces the total cost of ownership, which might be translated into a return on investment.

In my opinion, it's good value for the price that you pay.

I have some experience with Jira and Micro Focus ALM Octane, but I am mostly reviewing them to give a recommendation for a client.

I would suggest reviewing it thoroughly to make sure that it is a good fit for your environment.

I believe it works well in a variety of settings, but like with any solution, some are more suited to some situations than others. I believe it is trustworthy, reputable, and scalable.

I would rate Micro Focus ALM Octane an eight out of ten.

Octane is a relatively new solution for us. We needed better tooling than we previously had and Octane gave us extra flexibility. Our primary use case is for cross-project program reporting and dashboards. We are customers of Micro Focus and I'm a company director. 

The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features for us. From a development perspective, we use Jira and Zephyr. To stay agile, we need to ensure that our Jira data is feeding into our ALM projects. It's about the real-time integration between the two and bringing that information across accurately. 

I haven't been impressed with the reporting from a requirements matrix and a traceability perspective. ALM has always lacked in this area. They come at it more from a Waterfall testing perspective, and less from a Sprint-based perspective. It's in those areas that we use Jira with some of our development teams. We ran into roadblocks due to the sheer number of users, around 1,500 people using the tool, carrying out testing, and ensuring that people understand the requirements.

I think they need to look at ways of innovating and finding the wow factor with more flexibility and agility in development, but they've never really been good at handling that which is why we stick with Jira. There hasn't been much investment in the tool and there are definitely some areas that can be improved upon.

I've been using this solution for about six months. 

The stability is fine and they give you the capability that you need to run a good quality engineering program. It's what they've been providing more or less for at least 20 years; perhaps it's time for some innovation.  

There's no problem with scalability. 

We don't deal directly with Micro Focus but with one of their support teams through another vendor. We've never had an issue. 

ALM is a little pricier than Zephyr Enterprise. Because of our familiarity with ALM and the fact that we had all the integrations, it was easier to resume using it. 

We compared Zephyr Enterprise with ALM and decided to go with ALM because we have another provider that already had integration with ALM. If we'd gone with Zephyr, it would have required some technical integrations with their APIs and some of our testing tools. From a capability perspective, the two solutions are pretty on par with one another. If an organization is evaluating capabilities versus investment, then they might prefer Zephyr.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We are using it for test management. We are using its latest version.

It can simplify testing by structuring it after the application modules that you are defining yourself, and these are both tests and defects connected, which helps you control the quality in different areas of your solution that you deliver.

The filtering options are very good once you learn them. The document reports are also valuable. You can create reports in Word and PDF formats. That's very useful.

It is flexible. You can integrate it with a lot of other products that are available. If needed, there are APIs available. That's also very good. It's also pretty easy to adapt for the users.

Development of extensions or connections to GitHub actions could be better. Better integration with Azure DevOps would also help.

I have been using this solution for about four years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is just about adding more power and more Elasticsearch servers, and you should be fine.

We have about 500 different users daily.

We are happy with them. We have weekly meetings with the PAM.

We used HP ALM Quality Center. We switched to Octane because it's a more modern platform. It runs on full browsers and all OSes. So, it makes sense to use it. 

We installed it on the side of the existing one, and we migrated step by step or project by project. 

To start with, it was pretty complex because it was a pretty new solution when we installed it. We were probably one of the first bigger companies installing it. So, we were quite early adopters, but it is a lot easier today to install this. We haven't had any problems. There are very few errors in the solution.

It was done a long time ago, but we spent a lot of time because we had to explore enabling single sign-on, etc. That contributed to taking some time, but that had nothing to do with the product. It is probably a lot simpler today.

We are an IT company. We do it ourselves. We had just two people. We probably had a DBA too.

It is hard to say. We don't measure it, but we probably have seen an ROI.

If you compare the price with the functionality, it is pretty much the same as other solutions. If you compare it to Jira, for instance, it has a lot more functionality. You don't need any plug-ins, but it's also more expensive. Once you start adding your different plug-ins to Jira, you'll probably end up with the same amount or more.

There is also a yearly support cost, which is usually 25% of the initial cost of the license.

We already had ALM Quality Center. So, it was a natural move to Octane. It was easier for migration purposes, and the users knew some of the main functionalities. So, we did not evaluate other tools.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is pretty good.

I work for a state government in the United States. So our business constituents have departments that use it. And we have analysts who build business cases in the ALM Octane for specific tasks or specific projects that we're working on. We create business rules for each project in ALM Octane. Then, when the developers finish coding and we're getting ready to test, we use ALM Octane again to test against the business rules we created. So that way, we know we're meeting our business objectives, our customer's requests, and what they want to be changed in our system.

It's more streamlined because we have it all under one umbrella. And once the business requirements and rules have been created, we can do test cases and apply them to the business rules. So we're able to make sure that the developers' code is tested thoroughly to meet the needs of the business.

It would help us if ALM Octane got FedRAMP-certified, so our government departments could use the cloud solution. That way our external consultants could access it. We've created a URL to get to it, but if it were FedRAMP-certified and service and had support in the continental United States, that would be better. In the government space, we need organizations or companies to be FedRAMP-certified, and the system must reside in the continental United States. The Micro Focus help desk and their environment are not located in the continental United States, so they do not meet the state's criteria for us to be on the cloud. I understand that the company is working on some FedRAMP certifications and is looking to do that because they cannot put all of their government customers in their cloud environment. It's not a technology issue. It's a security issue.

So we've been using Micro Focus for almost four years now, but we just recently migrated to Octane back in July of this year.

ALM Octane is very scalable. We have a great server team that we use to increase its space or size. We handle it internally, but it works great. 

We have worked with Micro Focus support, and they're very good. I'd say 9 or 10 out of 10. They're always available. And if they don't know how to fix an issue, they know to talk to. It may not be the person you're talking to or the person they've referred them to, but they know somebody who could help. So they know how to escalate within their organization.

So before July, we were using IBM DOORS Next Generation for business requirements.  Then we decided to consolidate the business requirements, testing, and defect management into one system, and Octane provided that solution for us. So we were able to decommission IBM DOORS Next Generation for business requirements after our July implementation to ALM Octane.

We looked at Micro Focus ALM minus the Octane solution about two years before they decided to go with DOORS Next Generation. And they selected DOORS Next Generation, but IBM's integration with Micro Focus wasn't very mature. So it required a lot of manual tinkering to get the two systems to talk together. Finally, after some analysis about how much time was being spent, staffing resources, etc., we just went with ALM Octane.

Setting up ALM Octane is straightforward because we were already using Micro Focus ALM for testing. We were implementing it in the business requirements area. That was four years ago, so I can't remember exactly how long it took, but it was a few months. I'd say maybe two to three months. We did it on our own with Micro Focus guiding us. And Micro Focus had a statewide user base at the time. Other departments were using it, so we were able to share what everyone was doing. I have two FTEs. One is in charge of the business requirements module, and the other oversees the test testing and defect management.

I think the cost of ALM Octane is comparable to other solutions. It's actually a little less than DOORS Next Generation, but I don't have the numbers in front of me.

I rate MicroFocus ALM Octane eight out of 10. It's a great product. If you want to integrate your business requirements with your testing and defect-management tracking, it works beautifully.

ALM Octane is used to manage our software delivery. Currently, we are running the hybrid mode. We use traditional waterfall delivery as well as agile. 

• For waterfall delivery, it is managed completely. Then, we have our requirements and our test cases to cover those requirements as well as the defects. 
• For agile, we currently have only one team. So, all team activity happens in ALM Octane. Their backlog is broken down into user stories tasks, then covered by the test coverage.

We have installed it on a Windows Server on our systems.

ALM Octane natively supports waterfall, hybrid, and agile software development perfectly at an enterprise scale. 

1. If you look at the Requirement module, then we see all the defects and test cases related to waterfall. 
2. If we look at the Backlog module, we see what the agile team works on. 
3. If you want to see it at the component level, then imagine that we have a CRM system where a release project of waterfall makes a delivery and the agile team also makes a delivery on that component. 
4. We come to the Quality module, where if you select that component, then both streams would be represented there. 
5. If you select in the Quality module components, then we could see that, "Okay, this is linked to the defects from this source and that source. These are test cases covering that." 

This was one of the key aspects of why we took ALM Octane. 

With ALM Octane supporting agile, this reduces complexity and the need to manage multiple tools. We are still working on some automation that would further make us more efficient. So, we are building in-house tools to reduce the manual work.

Our user experience has been greatly improved.

In the current organizational structure, our development teams and testing teams are separate. With this transformation, I think the collaboration will increase, and we are on our way to put these teams closer.

We are very much moving towards DevOps in certain parts of the application. We are starting to develop these microservices and running a proof of concept where we want to integrate our Jenkins pipeline, which builds and deploys the application into Octane. For example, if there is a defect in the content, then what defects are being deployed through this pipeline? Octane really supports DevOps with the Pipeline module using the comment information in the items, along with integration from the IDEs. So, once our PoC is done, then we will utilize the DevOps features.

Currently, we have our hybrid delivery model, where waterfall still is a big part. So, if I look at ALM Octane from the module perspective, we are utilizing this requirement module. We took our day-to-day, grouping them by releases. Our requirements are stored in Confluence and ALM Octane. So, our project managers draw their requirements in Confluence, then we have a synchronization where requirements are brought into ALM Octane. Therefore, from the module perspective, the most valuable feature would be the Requirements module. 

We utilize dashboards for all their reporting capabilities to see where our software is from a quality point of view: test progress, defect trends, and so on. 

We are big fans of the Pipeline module, where we have our automated tests running on Jenkins and our pipeline is integrated into ALM Octane. 

Octane provides multiple plugins and integration with IDEs, so developers don't even need to log into ALM Octane, for certain scenarios. They only need to install the plugin into their development environment, i.e., Eclipse, Visual Studio, or IntelliJ. Then, they can sync their work items to this IDE where they can easily see what defects or user story is assigned to them. They can work directly from there by adding comments, changing the status, or even committing the code. This also applies to the pipeline for Jenkins. 

There are a lot of predefined reports. We can attach additional reports for users, like who worked on what defect and when, as well as what is the status of the release compared to the previous release. It is really endless. All the data is really linked together. Then, if all the data is linked together, there is an option to prepare reports out of it. We are very impressed with its reporting capabilities.

They provide all data integration. So if you have an edge use case, which you cannot do with what the tool provides, then you can set your data through all the protocols and even prepare it for the reports. I think they are very strong in this area.

On a team level, it is really good. We have received only positive feedback from our teams. It is visual, so there are different ways for teams to see their backlog. If they wish, it can be viewed like a list and a board, where you can look at the content per screen, release, or for the whole backlog.

The tool is very intuitive. However, it is still new, so you still need to learn and explore it, but that is a standard thing. Initially, we did receive some questions from teams, "How do I do this?" and, "How do I do that?" However, in very recent times, since it has been up and running, teams have enjoyed the fast, modern, new platform.

For the PoC, we have ALM Octane integrating with our CI server for continuous integration and delivery. We have it integrated with Jenkins. We haven't integrated our other server yet. We are still exploring the solution.

ALM Octane is working to soon provide comment information, so we would really be able to see what piece of code was committed for a user story or feature. We are really looking forward to this, because it's going to give us a bit more traceability and transparency.

They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add. 

There are small things, like hiding different columns when it comes to the board. Currently, whatever workflow items you have defined in the board, you can collapse them, but a collapse line still appears. These small things would make a difference.

In certain areas, ALM Octane has a limitation how many items can be displayed. So, if I group something, then I'm limited to the number of items which I can see. Also, if I want to export in Excel, there is a limitation onis lines. I know it's 5000. Maybe the number is quite high, but if they could improve on those limits, that would be good.

We did a migration around Midsummer. That was about six months ago.

It is very stable. With our current setup, we haven't seen any performance issues.

Very little maintenance is needed. No one does it full-time. We have five people who have the admin rights, then two people who act as a backup but don't really do anything.

It is scalable. We can add additional nodes without a lot of effort, if it is required. There is an option to scale from a license point of view. From a hardware point of view, we can also add multiple nodes to support additional loads.

We have about 1,000 users. 

We have an excellent guy who helped us with the whole migration project. We have already built a good relationship with him, so much that we don't always go through the official channels. He still takes our questions via email if we need the clarification on certain things. Additionally, the official OpenText support channels are also good. We raised a couple of incidents, which were addressed by the team. 

In the past, we had ALM Quality Center to manage our waterfall deliveries. Once the company took the decision to do the transformation to agile, we needed a tool that could support both waterfall and agile, but not compromise functionality. This was a key factor why we took on ALM Octane. We knew that the transition to agile would not happen overnight and that we might be in the hybrid model for a while, which is the exact reason why we took on ALM Octane.

It is very much integratable. This was a piece that was critical for us because ALM Quality Center was used by our company for more than 10 years, and it was very easy to integrate. Before we could migrate to ALM Octane, we needed the integration to be in place for a new tool. There are different ways to integrate, through the REST API, plugins, or the MF Connect tool, which also comes with ALM Octane.

Because we were coming from a very old Quality Center version, we have become more efficient because the work can be done faster.

The deployment was straightforward. The documentation clearly states the requirements regarding what hardware is required. Additionally, all the installation and deployment guides are good.

The deployment went through phases. First, we installed the system, which was pretty fast. After that, we migrated all the data from Quality Center, which was an additional task.

The upgrade was super fast. We were so impressed. We ran a test first, but after that, it took maybe 90 minutes altogether. That includes the backup of systems. Before the upgrade, we backed up our Elasticsearch because ALM Octane comes with Elasticsearch, and in our case, it runs on Unix machines. So, we backed up Elasticsearch, the data repository for all the attachments, etc., then took a snapshot of the database and the Windows machine, which was the longest part. Some of the snapshots, we did in advance, and some of the snapshots we did just prior to the upgrade. 

We did two upgrades at once because we missed the previous one. The upgrade to 15.1.20 took about 10 minutes, then we did some checks and everything was working fine. We then did the further upgrade to 15.1.40, which was another 10 minutes. 

One person with a bit of hardware knowledge can do the deployment. Because we did a migration project, we had a team of four from release management, but this wasn't our full-time task.

We also had support from OpenText.

The testing team has said that can work more efficiently and that the setup of the testing at the beginning of the release is faster.

We already had Jira in-house, but its testing capabilities were insufficient and not scalable enough for our needs.

Define the process which fits your organization best. Explore the features in the test management and test execution area, then define the process that is best for you because there are a lot of options. Also, when you do create your data, make sure that you connect it to the right items. Because once you put the correct data into the tool, then you can build strong reports. However, the reports are only as strong as the data behind them.

MF Connect, which is a separate tool from OpenText, provides additional data synchronization. With MF Connect, you can synchronize ALM Octane with Excel, Jira, and other tools. We use it for synchronization with Jira. Then, if this doesn't support your needs, there is also the REST API. We use that quite a lot as well. Through the REST API, we connect with things in different solutions.

While our manual testing time has been reduced, it is necessarily true because of ALM Octane. It is more due to a bigger initiative where we have automated our test cases. ALM Octane supports our automation initiative. With the pipelines, we can execute test cases through Jenkins, then the analytics in the pipelines give us a trend to see. For example, are certain test cases constantly failing? Or, do we have a problematic area where we need to strengthen the automated test focus?

ALM Octane would give us information on what exactly went into which release and what exactly needs to be rolled out. For all our test cases that need to be executed for the release, or on the release night, we would hold information within ALM Octane.

We are planning to increase usage in the future. Currently, our other agile teams use Jira. The goal is that if we do not migrate those teams to Jira, then we should at least integrate both those tools together. We would then manage all the agile work within ALM Octane. Also, our organization recently got acquired by another organization, so we are in the process of merging two companies. Therefore, there potentially will be a lot of additional users going forward.

I would rate it as a nine (out of 10).