OpenText™ ALM/Quality Center, formerly from Micro Focus, serves as the single pane of glass for software quality management. It helps users to govern application lifecycle management activities and implement rigorous, auditable lifecycle processes.
Buzilla is easy to use and provides basic functionality to use as a bug tracking tool. If big size attachments are allowed it would have been great. Also with Bugzilla home->Test management area is improved by allowing multiple sections it would be awesome!
For an organisation that has completely adopted SAFe structure including naming terminology, it is less appropriate and apart from that. It can suit any organisation out there, and it can solve all your problems one way or another by customising it. It is a robust and highly scalable solution to support all the business needs. It improves a lot of productivity and visibility.
Open source! No license fee involved, no limit to the number of licenses.
Easy to install and maintain. Installation is very easy and hardly needs any maintenance efforts, except when migrating from one version to other. Each project can have its own group of users.
Includes all the core features/fields that are needed to log a software bug/issue.
Multiple attachments are possible, supports various formats.
Good for reporting. Filtering mechanism lets you query bugs by various parameters.
If you have a mix of automation & manual test suites, HPALM is the best tool to manage that. It definitely integrates very well with HP automation tools like HP Unified Functional Testing and HP LoadRunner. Automated Suites can be executed, reports can be maintained automatically. It also classifies which test suites are manual & which are automated & managers can see the progress happening in moving from manual to automated suites. In HPA ALM all the functional test suites, performance test suites, security suites can be defined, managed & tracked in one place.
It is a wonderful tool for test management. Whether you want to create test cases, or import it, from execution to snapshot capturing, it supports all activities very well. The linking of defects to test runs is excellent. Any changes in mandatory fields or status of the defect triggers an e-mail and sent automatically to the user that the defect is assigned to.
It also supports devops implementation by interacting with development tool sets such as Jenkins & GIT. It also bring in team collaboration by supporting collaboration tools like Slack and Hubot.
This tool can integrate to any environment, any source control management tool bringing in changes and creates that trace-ability and links between source control changes to requirements to tests across the sdlc life-cycle.
Cloud Based. I'd like to see bugzilla be cloud based. The company I currently work with made a final decision to change db's for this specific reason. Due to the frequency of travel in this company, they need access to bugzilla from differing national / international locations.
Larger File Attachments. I believe the limit of a bugzilla content upload is 4 megabytes. For many of our video'd issues, this file size is simply impractical without the additional effort exertion on video compressor applications.
The requirements module is not as user friendly as other applications, such as Blue Bird. Managing requirements is usually done in another tool. However, having the requirements in ALM is important to ensure traceability to tests and defects.
Reporting across multiple ALM repositories is not supported within the tool. Only graphs are included within ALM functionality. Due to size considerations, one or two projects is not a good solution. Alternatively, we have started leveraging the template functionality within ALM and are integrating with a third party reporting tool to work around this issue.
NET (not Octane) requires a package for deployment to machines without administrative rights. Every time there is a change, a new package must be created, which increases the time to deploy. It also forces us to wait until multiple patches have been provided before updating production.
For future projects I will look at something that is hosted in the cloud that I don't have to manage. I would also like something that has a more modern feel to allow my customers to use it as well as my employees.
This is a pretty straightforward system. You put in the bug details, a ticket is created, the team is notified. The user interface reflects this very simple and straightforward flow. It's certainly much easier than trying to track bugs with using Excel and email.
Because it lets me track the test cases with detailed scenarios and is clearly separated in folders. Also the defect filter helps me filter only the ones that have been assigned to a particular area of interest. The availability of reports lets me see the essentials fields which I might be missing the data on and helps me to work on these instead of having to go through everything.
Since it is open source, it doesn't have customer service. However, the amount of information on forums is vast. If you can wade through it, you'll get what you need
It is a great tool, however, it got this rating because there is a lot of learning that takes a lot longer than other tools. There are no mobile versions of ALM even with just a project summary view. I believe ALM is well capable of integration with other analytics tools that can help business solutions prediction based on current and past project data. This is Data held in ALM but with no other use apart from human reading and project progress. ALM looks like a steady platform that I believe can handle more dynamic functionality. You could add an internal communication platform that is not a third party. Limit that communication tool to specific project members.
Implementation was pretty simple. Particularly because the product cannot be customized so there is not much to do apart from getting it up and running.
We migrated away from the whole suite of Rational tools because of their massive complexity around administration and inflexibility regarding workflows. In addition, the suite was insanely expensive, and users hated the usability of the tools. We evaluated, and liked JIRA, but because the organization was looking for cost savings, we ended up going with Bugzilla and it's FOSS model so as to avoid ongoing costs.
We have other tools in our organization like Atlassian JIRA and Microsoft Team Foundation Server, which are very capable tools but very narrow in their approach and feature set and does not come even close to the some of the core capabilities of HP ALM. HP ALM is the "System of Record" in our organization. It gives visibility for an artifact throughout the delivery chain, which cut downs unnecessary bottlenecks and noise during releases.
It has made the SDLC process more efficient. Bugs were logged and tracked in emails or in Excel sheets leading to slow communication and at time version issues with multiple files. Being an online tool, Bugzilla solved those issues, improved communication, instant status updates and improved efficiency.
We have used Bugzilla with a lot of federal goverment agencies (DHS, CMS, SAMHSA, CDC, HHS etc). Project Directors adn Principle Investigators were at times given access to Bugzilla which provided a snapshot of open vs closed issues.
Some groups would resist using Bugzilla with the email reminders being the main reason. Turning off or reminding them of features where we can 'control' email notification helped a lot.
