Likelihood to Recommend It's pretty good at creating an extract of a whole table, but not the best at grabbing all related tables in my experience. Pretty intuitive on setting up your test data categories. I also really like that it can either run via ISPF or via Topaz which was included with our purchase.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Extract/load data from one DB or table to another masking the data for testing. Compare extracts against each other to ensure good baselines. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons I find it more obtuse to use than IBM Optim. Related tables are difficult to incorporate. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I like the ease to use and its reliable.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating Support has been amazing compared to
Optim . Further, new features are very regular with File-AID - I can't remember the last time
Optim had a significant update. File-AID support is very receptive to feature requests and reported bugs, including sending out hotfixes quickly.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Optim is more user friendly in how it operates, in my opinion. It's less obtuse to figure out how to extract and mask the data required compared to File-AID. Further,
Optim is easier to gather related tables, by far. I do prefer using File-AID via the Topaz GUI much more than using
Optim via its GUI. Finally, I personally believe that File-AID is significantly faster to run than
Optim - this could be a configuration issue.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Saves time creating production like data for testing. Keeps that data safe from developers and need-to-know only. Read full review ALM/QC has allowed for quick, traceable turnaround on relatively simple tasks ALM/QC allows us to achieve our business objective of always being able to refer to a documented ticket for work being done. ALM/QC navigation is not the easiest, so this aspect of the product has caused great frustration among new users. Read full review ScreenShots