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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PTC Windchill RV&S
Score 8.2 out of 10
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PTC Windchill RV&S (formerly Integrity Lifecycle Manager of the Integrity suite) is an MBSE (model-based systems engineering) suite. The former Integrity suite contains an Asset Library which supports systems-of-systems approach to design (i.e. linking models into higher-level models that subsume them), a Process Director which is designed to articulate, manage and improve the design process, and a Modeler for visualizing and controlling the product design process. The Integrity suite is…
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.
PTC Integrity is an excellent source code management and version control tool, and I would suggest anyone to use it for that purpose. We can even define our workflows using individual forms for implementing Change Management, Defect Management and Access management requests. If properly used, this tool is great for managing our code for very long periods, considering my 4-5 years of usage. Though the UI could be better, and integration with some application servers could be better implemented, this tool is a good tool.
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.
It can be overwhelming with the number of tabs, functions and ways to achieve the same result. The average user may struggle with learning the tool.
The text editing in Integrity is weak and does not provide many options. Because of this, many user decide to use MS word instead, to document requirements.
I do not make decisions on what tool my company uses. I am just the user of the tool and such decisions are not handled by me. If I were to make such decisions, I would definitely renew MKS, considering the amount of data we have stored in MKS and the current number of users who are familiar with the system
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.
PTC Integrity comparatively could be considered a nice Source code management, Version controlling tool and could be compared with tools like StarTeam. If the integration to move/migrate code could be integrated into this tool, it would become an extremely powerful tool.
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.
PTC Integrity administration can be somewhat daunting. They have been able to help with every question that I have submitted. Their support website is very easy to understand and submit questions and their phone support is wonderful
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 think the reason that PTC Integrity was initially chosen is that it was the best product available in the mix at the time. This coupled with the PTC deal on multiple products was a no brainer based on the size and scope of potential users.
MKS Integrity has proved to be particularly useful in the software development process by increasing employee effieciency
MKS integrity has also made software development a very efficient process and makes feature releases and bug fixing a lot easier
In addition to the above, our organization has been able to support manufacturing easily by reverting to a previous software version in case of an emergency.
It has also led to faster time to market for new products.
