Ideagen Quality Management (formerly Q-Pulse, Qualtrax and Qadex) integrates with an organization's existing processes and acts as the backbone of its processes, providing workflow automations and comprehensive document management, enabling teams to identify and rectify any issues before they arise. This solution is designed to elevate an organization's performance with digital quality management solution.
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OpenText ALM/Quality Center
Score 9.0 out of 10
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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.
Holds raw material and finished product data, and is easy to activate/deactivate specs as required. Useful for holding all supplier data on GFSI accreditation and alerts you when certification has expired and requests an update on your behalf. Allergens and nutrition in clear and easy to use format, for both raw materials and finished products.
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.
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.
The training module is basic. If your training program is more complicated than simple onboarding training, then the Q-Pulse training module will be a bit of a challenge. It's not impossible to use, but there are better programs out there. I understand though, that this is an area that is being improved on soon.
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.
Q-Pulse QMS is totally integrated into our organization now. It does the job nicely and to change it would cause unnecessary disruption to our operation.
Although the platform is not the most intuitive, I have recognized Ideagen's willingness to make improvements. As such, the site is now much easier to use and navigate. I also enjoy the ability to easily keep track of courses that have been completed and courses that are due for recertification.
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.
The support team for Q-Pulse QMS is fantastic. Ideagen has invested a lot in this area, opening offices all around the world. Q-Pulse QMS product managers are also very responsive to requests and improvement suggestions. Ideagen also hosts annual conferences, which bring their customers together where ideas can be shared and we can meet the people developing the program.
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.
I was not involved in solution selection, but this solution is fit for purpose for a number of different tools that we could be paying for as well. We are not purchasing an HR workflow tool because the workflows accommodate most of our needs and the one that it doesn't aren't necessarily appropriate anyway. Regulatory software validations are performed in Ideagen because the overhead of a software specific tool is more that what we require. The upside is that all of those records are in a consolidated location for an audit.
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.
