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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PractiTest
Score 8.3 out of 10
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PractiTest is presented as a cloud-based test management tool that provides its customers with an end-to-end system to meet testing and QA needs. It is described by the vendor as flexible but methodological, enabling organizations to ensure visibility and communication at all levels. The solution aims to help users and project development teams streamline and manage their testing processes, while providing management with a clear and simple view of their project status at all times.
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.
PractiTest works GREAT as a test case repository. It is very easy to gather metrics, filter, and sort based on custom fields. We were able to work with the API to pull our automation results in as well. The support team is always very quick with their responses and monitors the "in-app chat." They are very open to answering questions, providing best practice materials, and looking for additional feedback. If you already have a central location for all of your test cases and testing needs, then I guess you probably wouldn't need to add another. However, PractiTest has high capability and potential, so if it's set up properly you can easily save time managing your tests.
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 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.
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.
The chat button is available to anyone who logs into PractiTest. In my experience, the support has always been very quick, very friendly, and very thorough. They make sure that your question is answered in a way that you understand it. They also provide documentation of best practices so you are never left hanging on what to do next.
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.
I've used many different Test Case Repository tools, and while each of them has its perks, I like the capabilities of PractiTest best. When creating a test in qTest for example, you can only input information into the fields provided, and you have everything set up in a folder tree structure. With PractiTest, we are able to create custom fields and filter our tests based on those fields to provide more accurate information in a readily available format while quickly searching for the filter instead of through a folder tree. TestRail did not appear to meet our needs as a company. It just didn't have the potential that we found with PractiTest. Zephyr for example worked seamlessly with Jira, which is really nice since that is what we use for the most part. However since we cater to many different clients, we needed an external Test Case repository so we could use something that wasn't tied to 1 Jira instance.
