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.
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Qualio
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Qualio is an all-in-one quality management platform helping companies maintain compliance, managed documents, audits, suppliers and complaints in one place.
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.
This is one of the most user-friendly QMS programs I have used because it does not require lengthy training to navigate the system. We are able to bring on a new employee and have them start their own initial onboard training in Qualio with only a simple introductory message that shares a few key instructions. The available training in Qualio Help has proved very effective when needed. An individual can pick whatever training is appropriate at that moment and there will be instructions on demand on any topic related to Qualio operations. Qualio is relatively new software and is maturing with a responsive staff that releases new updates on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It has grown incapability in the two years I have used it and it continues to evolve through customer inputs and looking at other state-of-the-art products. The staff listen and respond quickly compared to my past experiences with other QMS software. There is an opportunity for them to provide more and better features, but the gap is closing and the Qualio engineers have been very collaborative to work with, providing us opportunities to participate in their directions for growth.
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.
Is flexible enough to customize for use for different types of medical devices, enabling us to integrate it into our processes and support our quality automation initiatives.
Supports a distributed/remote workforce by enabling electronic record-keeping and signatures.
Generally supportive of the quality system regulations we are subject to.
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.
I would appreciate if similar documents are grouped together. For instance if engineering documents are put in one category and management document in a different category
Qualio has links to external documents but it would be helpful if it linked the user to sections within the document also
I would prefer that users be able to purchase licences directly without contacting a representative
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.
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.
Two great things Qualio has for customer support. 1. They are available online and on the phone, if needed, 24/7 with very friendly and knowledgeable people. Usually, the wait is no more than 10 or 15 min, and while you wait, you can search their online help library. I used to call first, but now I've found that their online help library usually has he answers already and the instructions are clear. Usually, I learn more than I needed. So I now go there first and only call if I don't find anything in the online help library.
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.
Much better suited to a small start-up environment than Green Light Guru. Less suited in terms of usability compared to Q Pulse which has more bespoke configuration options, is easier to configure, and has more modules that interact with each other. Have tried Q Pulse and Green Light Guru.
