OpenText Software Delivery Management Reviews

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.

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 use Micro Focus ALM Octane for test management.

The feature I found most valuable in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its ability to integrate with the CI/CD stack.

Though Micro Focus ALM Octane doesn't have much of a bug, it lacks integration with some solutions. For example, my company has fairly new software, but it can't be integrated with Micro Focus ALM Octane, so integration with other software, particularly with less popular software, could be improved.

Micro Focus ALM Octane also requires a lot of resources during its setup, and I find this another area for improvement.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the ability to customize the interface, especially when doing a manual test.

My company just implemented Micro Focus ALM Octane, so my experience with it is less than a month. My team is still in the exploration phase with Micro Focus ALM Octane.

So far, Micro Focus ALM Octane has been pretty stable.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is a scalable solution.

Support for Micro Focus ALM Octane is pretty responsive, but in terms of resolving the problem, that takes time. Issue resolution usually takes more than a day and sometimes a week.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating Micro Focus ALM Octane support a three.

We only used Micro Focus ALM Octane.

The initial setup for Micro Focus ALM Octane was pretty straightforward, but its infrastructure requirement needs improvement because you need a lot of resources to set up Micro Focus ALM Octane.

It only took a day to complete the software installation, but for the infrastructure, that's my main obstacle because it's resource-heavy.

My team implemented Micro Focus ALM Octane.

I'm unable to share the licensing cost of Micro Focus ALM Octane because that's confidential information.

I have familiarity with Micro Focus ALM Octane because I'm currently using it. I'm using the latest version of the solution.

As it's only been a month since Micro Focus ALM Octane was implemented, only three people use it within my company, in particular, administrators and engineers.

For the deployment and maintenance of Micro Focus ALM Octane, one experienced person is sufficient.

My company has plans to expand Micro Focus ALM Octane usage.

I'm still not sure if I'd recommend Micro Focus ALM Octane to others because I'm still exploring it.

I'm rating Micro Focus ALM Octane as seven out of ten because other products have better integration with open-source solutions versus Micro Focus ALM Octane.

I'm a customer of Micro Focus ALM Octane.

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 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 mainly use ALM Octane for product teams and Agile teams.

The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale. The graphics could also be improved, and CSD could be added.

I've been using this solution for over a year.

ALM Octane is stable, but its performance isn't so good.

The scalability isn't good.

Micro Focus' technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup was difficult and took over three months.

We used an in-house team to implement.

ALM Octane is very expensive.

I compared Octane with Jira, which is better-priced and more user-friendly than Octane.

ALM Octane is complex and difficult to use, so you have to be willing to train the people who are going to be working with it. I would rate it five out of ten. 

We use Micro Focus ALM Octane for testing. We don't use the entire portfolio, but we use it for testing, documenting test cases, executing test cases, and tracking defects. The platform is critical to us, because we're using it for compliance purposes.

We like Micro Focus ALM Octane because its performance is okay, and its stability is okay, so we use it a lot. The platform is easy to use.

From my personal point of view, what could be improved in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its integration with Jira. The latest version of the platform could have that integration by now, but at least our version doesn't have that integration with Jira.

We're using Jira for our user storage and the whole agile part of a software development lifecycle. We don't have that Jira integration, so the testing and the definition of user storage are separate. We're moving more and more towards the agile software development lifecycle, and we chose to stick to Jira, so what I'd like to see in the next release of Micro Focus ALM Octane is Jira integration.

I've been using Micro Focus ALM Octane for years.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is a stable platform.

I'm not sure what other tools we used before using Micro Focus ALM Octane, because we've been using it for a long, long time.

The initial setup for Micro Focus ALM Octane is very straightforward.

I'm not sure which version of Micro Focus ALM Octane we're using, but I know it's not the latest version. We have 3,000 users of Micro Focus ALM Octane, and we have plans to increase usage for it.

I would recommend the platform to others who are looking into using it.

I would rate Micro Focus ALM Octane a nine. It's not perfect, but it could also be because we're not using the latest version. We use it a lot, and it really adds value.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is hosted on a separate environment, that's a hosted environment for us, it's not on-premises because Data Consultancy Services is supporting the outsourcing to that company. If you compare Micro Focus ALM Octane with Jira, we have an on-premise deployment for Jira, that's the difference.

The most useful feature of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the dashboards, they are easy to use. 

I'm using Micro Focus ALM Octane as a manager, and it is two times easier for us than other solutions. The look and feel are good and we can customize the reports and dashboard. From a management perspective, it's quite a good solution. The features are robust, ironclad, easy to configure and use. 

When it comes to CI/CD for the developers, I did not find any major differences with other solutions except that some things are saved in the files rather than being visible in the window. It is not available in the graphical user interface(GUI), but it is in Jira.

The solution is frequently updated with new features.

I have yet to experience the CI/CD part of Micro Focus ALM Octane but as demonstrated by the team who is providing the services, I see that the CI/CD could improve. When we check in the code, for the code snippet that has been checked in by a particular user, you need to open a separate file. When comparing Micro Focus ALM Octane to Jira, they have a separate window in which you can click on the ID and the code is visible in the snippet. It's a two-step process in Micro Focus ALM Octane and it's a single-step process in Jira. It's essential for the developers to think about this difference.

I have been using Micro Focus ALM Octane for approximately two years.

Micro Focus ALM Octane is stable.

I have found Micro Focus ALM Octane scalable.

We have approximately 250 projects using Micro Focus ALM Octane. We are a  small team of 10 to 20 people that varies at times. Our performance-driven teams and we have been releasing month on month. We are finding it very easy and comfortable with Micro Focus ALM Octane. 

Since the ALM Octane is outsourced for us and another MNC provides support, regarding scalability, we as customers to them have observed it's highly scalable - addition of servers to handle thousands of requests/reposne from end users - agile/scrum teams/project managers/ stakeholders to manage backlog is easily met. There is no lag in response time, never did the pages hang. I never waited for Dashboards to collect data and show up, it's just in a fraction of seconds. 

Also, latest in DevOps technology like Azure DevOps for CI/CD is easily implemented. 

The support we receive is fast. When we had Jira, we had our internal team who had been given the training to support us. With Micro Focus ALM Octane we have outsourced the support to a separate company called Data Consultancy Services, and the response time is great.

We have used Jira previously.

The senior management of my company handles the purchases of the solution. However, the price per developer was a major reason we switched from Jira. Apart from the complexity and the support, the price was a major reason that a team of 20 people unanimously decided that we would prefer to go with Micro Focus ALM Octane rather than Jira. The senior management had seen some benefit in it and they preferred it over Jira because the per developer cost was less and the support was superior.

Micro Focus ALM Octane has been exemplary, and as a project manager, since the day I've started using it, it has been wonderful. We are very comfortable with the processes and the tool. We have zero worries since we have been using the solution. It has been very positive from our side.

It is early to rate Micro Focus ALM Octane because we currently are using only the dashboard features, solution backlog, and requirement backlog. The CI/CD has yet to be implemented. Addiotanlly, the orchestration is pending, but as for the current usage for these features, the solution backlog management, prioritizing the task, creating the task, creating the defects, creating the manual test fields, and automated test fields, are very good. 

We have experienced CI/CD in orchestration in Jira, but not in Micro Focus ALM Octane and, in a month's time we will have a better understanding.

I rate Micro Focus ALM Octane a ten out of ten.

I give the high rating because of the support, look and feel, reports, and the dashboards

My primary use case is as a test management tool.

Octane has allowed us to trace data when it goes into test management, so everything is linked together and cannot be lost, and we can see the progress data is making through the system. Another benefit is that you can automate data being brought into Octane.

The most valuable feature is the product's integration with existing tools.

An area that needs improvement is the dashboard - particularly the lack of ability to compare data on a single graph. This means that you need to switch to another product instead of being able to do everything within a single tool. Performance and filtering could also be improved.

I've been using this solution for two years.

The current version of the solution is fairly stable - we're not seeing many problems.

This solution is scalable, but additional servers may be necessary depending on how many users you add.

Technical support can be slow to deal with if you need more than basic support.

Initial setup can be a bit difficult, particularly for people who are unfamiliar with all the components. For us, setup took about six months.

There is a conversion fee for changing licenses to Octane, even if the current license is from the same company.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten.

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.

Our use cases are test management, defect management, and release management. We also do quality management and we have started to put our Agile journey on it. That is something we started at the end of last year. We're putting more and more on it. We're doing Agile delivery and Waterfall delivery with it.

It provides us with a single platform for automated testing. We've integrated our automation testing with Jenkins to the pipeline module—parts of it, at least—and the other part is connected through the API. It makes the test you're executing very visible. It also enables you to centralize. When we report on a project basis, we're able to do it in one click for a given project. The graphs are standard for all the projects. You just click and you always have the same set of reports, tailored to that project. It fetches the data from that project. I don't need to click five times to find my report. I just click to the next project and my report is there with all the needed information in one view. 

That's what my release manager also loves about it. He doesn't have to click 10 links or 10 drop-downs to get a report. It really has it all together in one view. If we have a release we report it on a project basis, and we can also report on an overall release basis. The overall reports are also done with one click.

In addition, we use the solution’s Backlog and Team Backlog capabilities and the team is very much working together there, from the developers to the testers to the product managers. They're all working together in one space or one Backlog to deliver the functionalities or the features. This is a good thing.

Octane has also reduced manual testing time. We integrated a big part of the regression sets into the pipeline. There's room for much more. We've only scratched the surface.

And using it, we have been able to streamline a lot on the business side. We have business testing or acceptance testing, and for them it's less complicated and there is less effort needed to get their stuff done. It has reduced the cycle times which, in the end, reduces cost.

On the user side, what I like a lot is the reporting capabilities. There's no tool, to my knowledge, that gets anywhere close to Octane at the moment when it comes to the reporting capabilities. I can do everything with the reporting. There's nothing missing. I have all the options. I can create graphs, including graphs of several types and looks.

Octane provides out-of-the-box integrations to proprietary, third-party, and open source tools. The integrations are of high quality because we were easily able to integrate Jira with an additional tool. That connector tool is out-of-the-box and it's very easy to handle. We also integrated one of our in-house developed applications that has a rollout tool. The person responsible did it in one or two days with API connections. It was very easy for him. In addition, we integrated Confluence with Octane, using a self-developed script that is also based on the APIs. For people who know APIs it's very easy. 

Octane's Agile support at the team level is pretty good because it's very visible. The sorting and filtering are very advanced, which is something I miss on Jira.

There aren't major things that need improvement. It's more detailed things, minor tweaks and improvements. For example, updating items, sorting, bulk updates—these things could have a bit more flexibility, but it's still possible to do them. 

Also, for training, the proposed graphs in the dashboards could have some more explanation about what they're doing because not everyone is using the same metrics. This is more a training or knowledge thing, not a lack in the tool, and I already addressed it with my OpenText contact.

They improved some of the things I had on my list in the newest version. I haven't dug through the newest version fully yet.

We started to evaluate OpenText ALM Octane at the end of 2019. We did the kickoff in January of 2020 to plan all the migrations to it. We came from ALM QC.

It's very stable. We had one issue that was due to a faulty, outdated script that overloaded the system somehow. Apart from that, Octane is as stable as it gets. We haven't had any downtime apart from that outdated script.

The technical support is very good. Depending on the severity of your ticket, the feedback is almost immediate. And we can collaborate with them, show screens and share logs, and they come back with a solution. It has been a positive experience.

Our previous solution, ALM QC, was outdated. Our company started our Agile journey and we needed to be able to support that journey and the Waterfall journey as well. Octane offered this hybrid model which was the clear selling point for it.

The native support for Waterfall and Agile software development was very important in our decision to go with the solution because we knew that Waterfall and Agile will co-exist for quite some time, and the tool had to be able to manage both in parallel. Also, for the future, it will still support what we want. If the shift goes more to Agile and less to Waterfall, the tool still has to support both of the methodologies.

Because we came from ALM QC, and that tool was in use for quite some time, there were a lot of user-defined things and customization. Initially what we had to do was a cleanup on the QC side: what we wanted to take over and what we didn't want to take over. We really cleaned out stuff that wasn't needed anymore. That took one or two months. 

The actual installation of Octane was very quick and straightforward. The customization and configuration of Octane took about two months. That was because we were very new to the application. If I set up a workspace now, it's much faster.

We have 1,100 users and their roles are really across the company. We have project managers, developers, testers, release managers, and test managers. We also have business users and product managers on the Agile side. Any role you could think of is using it, apart from the C-level.

What I like a lot about Octane is that it's very easy to handle from an admin point of view. The maintenance is very low compared with ALM QC where it took several hours or days, even, to set it up and upgrade it. Those processes are very easy with Octane.

I compare it, still, with ALM QC, and there's definitely a return on investment on it. I see this leveraging more in the future.

The comparison is always with Jira, so the pricing of Octane is a bit on the higher side. But if you look at what you have to add to Jira, on the plug-in side, to have the same abilities you have with Octane, you're more or less even, or even ahead with Octane.

We only looked at Jira. We had some concerns about its reporting capabilities and its task management capabilities, as well as managing Waterfall and Agile in parallel.

You definitely need to prepare well, if you're going to implement it. Do a proper analysis of where you're coming from and what is still needed and what is not needed, and really kick out stuff that isn't needed anymore. It will make the whole migration to Octane easier when you have less historical data in it.

I see that our users like to add things and try new things because it's built in an open manner. When you add Python scripts and use the API connection, you have a lot of flexibility for doing certain things. I see some developers who like it and who like to experiment with how to work better on their side.

We have started a PoC on integrating the solution with our CI server for continuous integration and delivery. The CI/CD is working and we're fine-tuning it now. I hope it will give us a one-click approach where we can even execute the pipeline from the GUI, which will make it easy to use. My vision is that we have all the pipelines integrated in Octane and that we can trigger them from there to speed things up and have them visible for developers and for testers. This would also be a way they could collaborate more. We're not there yet. 

It has the potential to reduce integration costs by building a streamlined application delivery pipeline that is connected to all IDE, CI, and SCCM tools.

Octane can also provide a single, global ALM platform that supports all our Agile and Waterfall needs. We don't have all our Agile in yet, but it can. That's the vision: that we have them all in one tool. We're not there yet, but I see glimpses of hope. It has the potential to improve the quality and the speed. The potential is there.

It still has upside coming. Things are being developed. We are in the preferred partner program, so we see also the new features that are coming, which will facilitate daily work.