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OpenText ALM/Quality Center

OpenText ALM/Quality Center
Formerly Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center

Overview

What is OpenText ALM/Quality Center?

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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Recent Reviews

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HP ALM, previously known as Quality Center, is a widely-used ALM solution that caters to the needs of R&D teams across organizations. With …
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HP ALM

7 out of 10
November 30, 2017
Incentivized
HP ALM is being used by the various teams in IT department. It's mainly used for Test Management and Defect Management.
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What is OpenText ALM/Quality Center?

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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  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is Jira Software?

JIRA Software is an application lifecycle management solution for software development teams. It allows users to create, prioritize and track the progress of tasks across multiple team members, and offers a wide range of integrations. It is offered via the cloud and local servers.

What is Planview AgilePlace?

AgilePlace is a project management solution built around flexibility, data-driven analytics, and workflow automation. The software was acquired by Planview in December 2017 to expand that company's capabilities.

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Product Details

What is OpenText ALM/Quality Center?

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.

OpenText ALM/Quality Center Features

  • Supported: Application lifecycle management
  • Supported: Release and cycle management, with KPI and Scorecard
  • Supported: Requirements management (Business Process Models, Baselining, and Version Control)
  • Supported: Risk-based test planning and management
  • Supported: E-Signature solution
  • Supported: Application Lifecycle Intelligence
  • Supported: Automatic execution and result collection of UFT tests (UFT One, UFT Mobile and UFT Developer) and BPT tests
  • Supported: Automatic execution and result collection of other automated tests such as Selenium, through the Micro Focus Application Automation Tools (a Jenkins plugin)
  • Supported: Micro Focus Sprinter-integrated manual testing
  • Supported: WebRunner—Web-based client with manual and automated test execution, defect management and dashboard view capabilities
  • Supported: Client Launcher—Full-function Windows desktop client, installable without administrator privilege
  • Supported: Business Process Testing
  • Supported: Quality of Things—Offline/online test execution client on mobile devices
  • Supported: Quality Analytics (Reports and dashboards, cross-project reporting
  • Supported: Defect management
  • Supported: LDAP user authentication and SAML-based single sign-on (SSO)
  • Supported: AutoPass License Server (APLS) integration
  • Supported: Archiving wizard able to archive large amount of data for single or multiple projects
  • Supported: Team collaboration using Microsoft Skype for Business

OpenText ALM/Quality Center Competitors

OpenText ALM/Quality Center Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Jira Software and Bitbucket are common alternatives for OpenText ALM/Quality Center.

The most common users of OpenText ALM/Quality Center are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(105)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

HP ALM, previously known as Quality Center, is a widely-used ALM solution that caters to the needs of R&D teams across organizations. With its comprehensive features, it offers a complete ALM solution for collecting requirements, managing releases, executing test plans, and handling defect management. Users have the flexibility to write their own code using VBScript to meet their specific business requirements. The tool's scalability and support for clustering make it a robust solution for large-scale projects.

One of the key use cases of HP ALM is its effectiveness in managing projects following a waterfall methodology. It serves as a centralized repository for storing requirements, estimates, test scenarios, and tracking project status. The tool also allows for traceability between requirements, tests, and defects, providing transparency and facilitating informed decision-making for higher management.

Another common use case of HP ALM is within agile teams that use Jira for tasking and requirement management. In this scenario, HP ALM is leveraged for test management, enabling teams to create test cases and execute them while keeping their requirements and tasks in Jira. This integration ensures seamless collaboration between different teams and streamlines the overall testing process.

HP ALM also prominently features as a bug lifecycle management tool that integrates with other HP testing tools for automated testing. It helps QA teams maintain full traceability of requirements, tests, and bugs. Developers can easily update raised bugs and follow test steps for issue investigation. Additionally, reports generated from HP ALM can be shared with the project team to aid in decision-making.

Overall, HP ALM serves as a comprehensive solution for managing testing activities from start to finish. Its core capabilities like release planning, requirement management, test execution, and defect tracking make it valuable across various departments and industries. Whether it's managing defects in regression testing or monitoring and controlling workflow processes, HP ALM proves to be an essential tool for many organizations aiming to ensure code quality and project success.

Efficient Test Suite Management: Users consistently praise HPALM for its ability to manage a mix of automation and manual test suites. They appreciate the seamless integration with HP automation tools like HP Unified Functional Testing and HP LoadRunner, which allows for streamlined execution of automated test suites and automatic maintenance of reports. The classification of test suites as manual or automated in HPALM is also highly valued, enabling managers to track progress in moving from manual to automated suites.

Comprehensive Test Management: Many users find HPALM an excellent tool for overall test management. They highlight its support for defining, managing, and tracking functional, performance, and security test suites in one centralized location. Reviewers appreciate that HPALM covers all aspects of test management activities, including creating and importing test cases, as well as snapshot capturing. The linking of defects to test runs is also highly regarded by users.

Integration with Development Tools: Several reviewers have found the integration capabilities of HPALM impressive. They mention that it supports devops implementation through interactions with development tools such as Jenkins and GIT. Furthermore, users appreciate that HPALM promotes team collaboration by integrating with collaboration tools like Slack and Hubot. The ability to integrate with any environment and source control management tool is particularly useful for testers who value traceability and links between source control changes, requirements, and tests. Additionally, the option to create defects directly from test cases in HPALM provides convenience for testers when reporting issues to developers.

Difficult User Interface: Several users have found the user interface to be confusing and unintuitive, which has made it difficult for them to navigate and complete tasks efficiently. They have expressed frustration with the placement of certain features and have struggled to understand how to use them effectively.

Lack of User-Friendliness: Many reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction with the product's overall lack of user-friendliness. They believe that the interface is not intuitive enough and lacks clear instructions or guidance on how to perform various tasks. This has resulted in a steep learning curve for new users and has hindered their ability to fully utilize the product's capabilities.

Negative Experience with Customer Support: A significant number of customers have reported negative experiences with the customer support provided by the company. They feel that their issues were not adequately addressed or resolved in a timely manner, leading to frustration and disappointment. Some users even mentioned encountering unhelpful or dismissive responses from customer support representatives, further exacerbating their negative experience.

Users highly recommend ALM for test management and bug tracking, as it is considered a modern and good software for testing and Application Life cycle Management. ALM is seen as a complete tool for testing with handy and useful customization options. It is recommended for build integration with Agile and Continuous integration tools. However, some users suggest that ALM could use some UI updates and recommend considering a cheaper alternative if not all features are needed. Nonetheless, users highly recommend ALM for managing and logging defects, tracking test cases, bugs, and creating automated test cases. They also recommend demoing ALM for both business and technology users. ALM is seen as a solid tracking tool for data requests and change management activities. Users highly recommend using ALM for maintaining software test plans and executions. Furthermore, ALM is considered a great tool for keeping track of requirements, testing, and defect tracking, which helps in improving project quality. Users suggest having IT-literate employees assigned to ALM and recommend hiring experienced consultants for setup and mentoring. Finally, users highly recommend ALM for evaluating a Test Management Tool.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 31)
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Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Test Management tool for our land transport application. Testcase creation, Testcase execution, burn down charts. It is a very powerful tool we have established to use across all divisions for professional Software Quality Assurance and Test Management.
  • Testcase creation
  • Testcase execution
  • Test reports
  • UI feels rather old
  • List views could be easier to handle from a user's perspective
Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center is a good choice for all your software quality assurance needs. Including Test case creation, test case execution, and all kinds of reporting measures.
Sudheer Thokala | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Quality Center is used as an ALM solution by the entire R&D across the organisation. We as a company create 60+ banking products which involves, SAAS, PAAS, BAAS and On-premise editions as a part of complete ALM solution from Collecting requirements, releases, Testplan Test execution, and defect management and reporting happens in the Quality center. It solves complete Software life cycle phases.
We can write our own code using vbscript to cover all our business requirements.
It is highly scalable as it supports clustering.
It is a robust tool but not Agile.
  • Test Plan and Test execution
  • Release Management
  • Defect Management
  • Requirement Management
  • Workflow Management
  • User management
  • Site administration
  • SAFe
  • Agile
  • Portfolio
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use QC for various test management activities, also for end-to-end req tracing in an agile world. Another use case is performance center execution and the same is integrated with QC. Application Life Cycle ALM. Integration with CI CD. Requirement gathering also happens for many projects which in turn provide confidence in agile methodologies.
  • Integration
  • Ease of requirement tracing.
  • End to end execution evidences tracking.
  • Ease of use
  • User friendly
  • Integration with load runner, PC and also with Jmeter.
  • Performance
  • Requirement template should be customizable.
Well suited for defects mgmt and traceability matrix. Less suited for, required gathering with agile models, less documentation, and in customizable dashboards.
March 29, 2021

Quick Center

Bharath Bhushan Sontike | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Quality center is used in most of the departments for defect management. Testing is performed in two ways:
  1. (Scheduled) Regression testing is performed on quarterly basis.
  2. New product development/service development.
Regression testing will address any issues in the existing functionality and defects will be raised accordingly. Quality Center simplified the process of segregating the test results in better ways and defects are tracked accordingly. Single dashboard can be made available to showcase the status of the defects.
  • Reports can be retrieved according to the user requirement.
  • Single dashboard can be organized based on the projects and domains.
  • Security /Authorization - administrator can provide access to individuals based on the job profile.
  • SSO - Single sign on feature is available.
  • Defect status and report can directly sent via email to single/multiple users.
  • Organizing the defects and search optimization is another feature.
  • Frequent search word/terms inside Quality Center can be prompted (Search Help).
  • Dashboard - while exporting the report, pivot table (Pre defined) selection can be made available.
  • Automated E-mail should be made available when ever a new defect is raised to relevant person/team.
Quality Center is well suited for product based companies rather than service industry. The effectiveness of usage is more in product development projects. Defect maintenance and reporting in product development projects will have tailored outcomes. The report extraction is another feature which provides overview of the current project status. Service industry - majorly the tickets raised will get unnoticed if the volume of tickets are huge and monitoring will be difficult.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
ALM/QC is used within our IT department, specifically within our development and customer application departments. We currently only use ALM/QC for our lower test environments, and not for production. ALM/QC is used for a variety of tasks: creating work items to assign to a resource (DBA, Developer, Analyst, etc.), creating ad-hoc requests for others to carry out, tracking defects and development of defect solutions as they move from test to production, as well as for project-related tasks.
  • ALM/QC has a very useful function of sending an email directly to an assignee when they are selected. This is a time-saver so that you don't have to follow up with your own email every time you assign a ticket.
  • Tracking the history of changes made whenever someone modifies a ticket is a big plus for ALM/QC.
  • Ease in attaching items and linking tickets to other tickets allows for quick UI navigation.
  • Licensing behind ALM/QC can pose a problem if many users will be accessing it. If an IT project is occurring, and many testers, analysts, developers, architects, PMs, etc. are using ALM/QC, there exists a problem in too many users being in the environment at once and causing active users to be kicked out. Having many licenses will alleviate this issue, but the trade-off is expense.
  • One of the great features of ALM/QC is that it sends emails. However, when this doesn't occur, and you assume that it does, it can be frustrating, as the assignee of a ticket will have no way of knowing something is assigned to them (or at least won't know in a timely manner, until they manually check themselves).
  • UI and navigation layout seems dated, as if it is a late 90s product. Many similar looking fields can be confusing to users and cause them to miss something because they are not able to discern.
ALM/QC is well suited for assigning relatively quick, simple tasks to IT resources. I do not feel it is a holistically good product in terms of retaining a knowledge base for IT areas or problems. For example, the amount of clicking, different windows, and navigation that needs to occur to track an original issue through to its analysis, to its solution development, to its deployment is a very time-consuming and cumbersome task. It would be fair to say that the product was not intended for this, but it offers features to accommodate this, so it's also legitimate to criticize this aspect of the product.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Application Lifecycle Management is widely used by different business units to manage different project life cycles. In my business unit, we use this to track the progress and monitor defects on all our waterfall projects. We use other platforms for Agile projects. This allows us to track all our business requirements, technical requirements, changes requests and all defect resolutions. Along with all this, our test teams can manage their test cases, defect logs, and share knowledge on the application growth, development and challenges allowing us to create our internal "lessons learnt" portfolio for multiple separate but related projects. As a large organisation, we do not only use this tool but other business needs dictate the need for alternative tools depending on our security needs, business requirements, skill sets and the licensing cost.
  • Well-structured folder system for all projects.
  • Easy to import data from Excel files.
  • There is room for integration improvement with other tracking tools.
  • Automate Backlog/Project items notification to all team members.
It is a great tool for long-term projects that require absolute certainty before starting. ALM will work best for projects that do not have much change or alterations to the business requirements. I highly recommend it when a business or team is looking for a tool that will simplify the project documentation process, allow for a growing project portfolio, and use on projects that may require the input of third-party applications or external stakeholders.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP Application Lifecycle Management was previously used by my organization to manage project defects. With the completion of a recent large-scale project, all development teams have moved into an Agile model which no longer fits well with HP Application Lifecycle Management.
  • Allow organization and separation of various projects into specific work areas with specific users
  • Provides sufficient reporting on the state of project defects
  • Allows linking to other defects within ALM
  • Provided for easy inclusion of attachments to a defect
  • The user interface is very basic an unappealing
  • The is limited or no ability for an end-user to create a custom view of a defect to display only the desired information
  • The login cannot be easily linked to Active Directory requiring the creation and maintenance of application-specific user accounts
I found the entire application to be unappealing both aesthetically and functionally. It gave the feeling of an older, text-based or mainframe-based application and not a modern, graphical, interactive application. If one needs simply to track problem tickets without any real flash, ALM might be well suited to your need. I would not personally recommend it.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use HP Quality Center across the entire organization to manage defects and roll out enhancements. We track enhancement backlogs in QC by prioritizing, assigning responsibility, estimating level of effort and gathering user stories/requirements. We're working to make it a more robust regression testing solution by organizing our test plans better for repetitive use.
  • Easy to track defects within our Agile release cycle passing them from developers to project managers to the testing team
  • Gives us visibility into previous release cycles and plan our future iterations
  • Should give us the ability to make regression testing easier
  • Since all of our teams use HP Quality Center we're forced to use fields and page layouts that don't make any sense to our team. It feels very jerry-rigged sometimes and we don't have flexibility to add our own fields since there's no user permissions/roles to control what different groups of people should see.
  • Our contractors don't have licenses to use HP Quality Center and the cost makes it a prohibitive option so we have to duplicate enter all of our items into SharePoint so our contractors can see.
  • The design is rather dated and its clunky to navigate. On newer systems the resolution is extremely small and you have to force IE into legacy mode. This product could really use a new coat of paint.
HP Quality Center is a solid product for release management and testing. It's got a pretty singular focus which is great in that it does that one thing well and keeps everything in one ecosystem from conceptualization of a solution to rollout and future regression testing. It's just sorely in need of a remodel. The product is far from perfect or refined.
November 06, 2018

QA Quality

Dishank Vishnoi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP ALM is a project management tool with strongest test management. We are using ALM as our bug lifecycle management tool. The major benefit of this tool is its ability to integrate with HP's other testing tools, which makes it a perfect automated testing framework.
  • Defect/Bug management.
  • Traceability with requirements, test cases and defects
  • Defect linking
  • It's very slow sometimes. There is improvement required in this context.
  • Excel reports are not easy to create. Earlier versions were better at this.
  • Only compatible with IE
HPE ALM is the market leading QA tool for a reason. It provides a single view of the QA process and allows anyone to see what they need to see, from auditors who only need to view information to the end QA engineers who actually do the work. The USP is the total coverage of Test Cycle which other tools. This is suited in mid to big projects/programs for testing.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Quality Center has been used by our organization for years for software testing. It is used by different departments, but not all, as different software requirements cater to different needs. Some of our projects follow Agile while some follow a waterfall strategy. Quality Center is not fully suitable with Agile. It is still being used as it is our primary tool. Quality Center is more useful when there is a standard waterfall practice. It helps to keep defect count, defect analysis, reporting, Tests bed management and acts as a primary tool for software certification.
  • It does particularly well to track defects and generate customized reports
  • Test scripts upload and requirement mapping can be done on this platform. This helps the developer understand exactly where the requirement is for a defect.
  • It has a role based model that lets developers do certain actions, and testers can play their own.
  • You can use it in the cloud
  • Quality Center has a lot of room for improvement for reporting and analysis. Because it does not provide crystal clear reports by itself, we have a separate team that creates dashboards from Quality Center data. Some basic business and analytic reports should be available by default that can be published on the intranet so that anyone can view them. The software mandates a user to login and create reports, which is not practical for anyone in senior management.
  • Quality Center is run as a web based EXE tool. It is appreciable how it has been implemented, but there is a little lag because of this.
  • It does not let a user save a defect template. This results in tremendous redundancy of work. In a large scale organization, we are creating tools to minimize these efforts. A shortcut to save multiple defect templates helps testers avoid redundancy and focus on their own business functions.
I would recommend Quality Center to track defects for anyone who wants to do a waterfall project and requires a very detailed defect /test analysis to be completed. It is less appropriate when someone is using Agile technology or an iterative model. For Agile, we have user stories and templates that are only suitable with other software like Rally. Unit testing is done at every level and requires a quick and ease with which defects can be logged. Quality center can take forever to achieve this. It is also less appropriate for a mobile project. The reason is that mobile projects require a totally different structure to log defects. There is also no AI that tells the user of any duplicate defects. Although this might sound very advanced, AI is becoming available slowly.
Sourav Singla ,Safe Agilist, CSP,  ICP-ACC, CSM, CSPO, SSM, LSSG | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP ALM is project management tool with strongest test management capabilities.

We are using this tool for managing projects working with waterfall methodology, HP ALM is sued to store requirements, estimates, test scenario creation, management, execution, reporting & tracking project status. Its rich reports & dashboard help in keeping the transparency & helps higher management in taking decisions.

For agile teams where JIRA is being used, we also use HP ALM for test management. The model is requirements, tasking and tracking in JIRA while test cases, creation, execution, snapshot capturing in HP ALM. Definitely trace-ability is an issue with this kind of model where two tools are used & add up to some waste. It is used at program level.
  • 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.
  • It is a very costly tool so unless you wanna use most of its features don't go for it & alos if you want it to manage agile teams , I will recommend tools like JIRA, Rally, Active Collab & AgileCraft since these tools understand agile principles & scrum practices better than HP ALM.
  • It has a very rich UI interface & is indeed a very simple tool but few minor issues like not opening another window , not allowing copy paste repetitive Dev-QA tasks makes things difficult for users.
  • Though with new version Octane they try to incorporate new features & integrations supporting agile principles & practices but still many things are missing making it excellent tool for waterfall projects but not for handling agile teams.
  • You can not run scrum meetings with distributed teams like you can do in AgileCraft. Also support for retrospectives is not up to the mark.
  • It is highly dependent on internet explorer.Support for other browsers like chrome and Firefox is not there.

HP ALM is well suited for waterfall projects specifically if the teams are novice. It provides excellent support for project planning, tracking & test management. Top leadership can efficiently track, measure and report on project milestones & key performance indicators. Development teams have access to a wide variety of tools to automate their development, testing, bug tracking, and reporting tasks in one place. Its extensive documentation and tutorials help new users to learn this tool pretty fast. Though for agile teams HP ALM Octane can be explored but its not value for money & did not handle distributed teams well.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP Application Lifecycle Management is used in our whole organization for testings new requirements.

We are using ALM as our bug lifecycle management tool. The major benefit of this tool is its ability to integrate with HP's other testing tools which makes it a perfect automated testing framework.
  • Simplicity and broader ways to integrate other project management tools with it. The tool has a good GUI and better test data management mechanism
  • Notification mechanism and reporting features are also competitive
  • ALM only works well with Internet Explorer, and because of that it inherits all the performance issues from IE
  • It's very slow sometimes. There is improvement required in this context.
  • Initial learning curve is a bit steep due to digital signs.
This is suited in mid to big project/program for testing.

Good for life-cycle for identifying bugs, assigning to responsible teams and getting to a resolution.

Reports needs some work but they are manageable.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used across the whole organization/multiple departments. It helps track defects and projects effectively.
  • Defect lifecycle/tracking.
  • Script execution uniquely by projects.
  • Ability to integrate with Microsoft Excel and email clients.
  • Dashboard/reporting/SQL services.
  • Reporting - there is no network-based easy to use reporting process in QC. We had to build an internal website for this.
  • Bug analysis - having an AI to understand bug patterns/similar bugs would be very helpful.
  • Inherit queries like getting and reporting bugs that were logged the same day or fixed on a given day would help.
HP is well suited when you are a part of large projects in a waterfall methodology. It is useful to track bugs, scripts, and execution status of projects.

It is less appropriate for Agile methodology as requirements are done in the form of user-stories. So, in that case, we would not be able to use this tool at all. Some reporting features require refinement and major changes. No bug learning/AI features. QC has a few bugs in itself when it comes to caps ON/OFF when searching for defects. That small improvement would help.
Sourav Halder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my current organization, HP ALM is being used across the whole organization based on various worldwide locations.It is a mandatory tool for all kind of QA management activities. It also serves as one of the key methods of compliance. All testing activities has to be logged in ALM starting from Requirement analysis to execution of Test Cases and then Bug/Defect closure.
  • Requirement analysis as a stepping stone of Test Case creation.
  • Test Case creation to execution and corresponding logging and artifacts uploading.
  • Defect/Bug management.
  • Complete Test Cycle/Management coverage.
  • Should have features that will help organization to implement new methods of Software lifecycle like Agile or DevOps.
  • Features of Risk Based Testing should be more enhanced.
  • Should of built-in features of version management.
If you are looking for a tool that will cover all the facets of Test management, go for it.
If you are using UFT or QTP as the Automation testing tool, go for HP ALM as integration is easy.
If you are tight on budget and/or running fast cycles through Agile, you might consider JIRA.
November 30, 2017

HP ALM

Midhun Prabha | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP ALM is being used by the various teams in IT department. It's mainly used for Test Management and Defect Management.
  • Defect Management and Reporting
  • Test Management and Reporting
  • Traceability with requirements, test cases and defects
  • Custom reports
  • Excel report are not easier to create. Earlier versions were better at this.
  • Cloning a defect and editing will not save the data if we move to another defect in between editing.
  • Sprinter integration can be improved.
HP ALM works well if all of the test management including requirements, test cases, and defects are handled in QC. It doesn't work well when there are multiple tools involved in requirements, test cases and defects. Integrating all can be a pain sometimes.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
A current client I am working with is using ALM for test case management and defect tracking. They are leveraging the tool to organize all test suites, create test runs, and link defects to specific tests. They also link it with AGM to track stories to specific projects and test runs.
  • Defect linking
  • Test case creation
  • AGM Integration
  • Search tool is cumbersome
  • Organizational structure is also cumbersome
  • Only compatible with IE
HP Application Lifecycle (ALM) is well suited for simplified test suites with minimal sub directories. Once test suites become more complex the tool is quite a bit of a pain to use. Its UI feels dated and the search filter is extremely cumbersome as well. In a fast-paced Agile scenario, it becomes more of a burden than an asset in my opinion.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by my entire organization as a tool to manage testing and to log the defects and bugs that are found in our applications. It allows us to keep track of various scenarios used by testers for testing under various environments and also to log the results. It also provides us with enough metrics and other reports that enable us timely management of the defects and the various stages in a defect lifecycle.
  • It is an excellent tool to manage defects - and lets us see all the defects logged for that application.
  • It has provisions to enter detailed test scenarios that can be listed to be run on the test labs.
  • It has various metrics and reports that enable the entire team to keep an eye on the various stages of the defect lifecycle.
  • It is also synced to another project planning tool of this organization called the RTC.
  • It could have better dashboard views of defects.
  • The reverse sync between RTC and Quality Center could be a new area to explore.
  • A new functionality to add the incidents and other walk-up tickets that are raised during the building of an application.
I would suggest this tool for testing and the defect lifecycle. It could have a better way of managing the requirements of a project. Also if it has a way to track development then it would serve as a go-to tool from the start of a project through the implementation.
Derek Wallis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

HPE ALM, previously Quality Centre, is the main building block for our professional testing QA team. It allows us full traceability of the requirements, tests and bugs to make an informed decision as to the quality of the code. We have customised it to restrict access to different modules or restrict permission within the modules according to the business requirements.

The traditional QA engineers/testers use it to help audit the testing process and guide business users for any testing they are involved in. The developers can update the bugs raised and follow the test steps themselves to investigate issues. Reports generated using the inbuilt functionality can be sent out to the project team on a daily basis.

  • The whole end to end QA lifecycle can be covered and mapped, allowing a single view source of the quality of the application under test.
  • There are multiple add-ins that can be used to enhance the reach of the application.
  • The workflow is easy to customise in order to hide fields or restrict permissions within modules.
  • Native reports and graphs allow simple exporting and time saving when reporting to the project team.
  • The tool isn't cheap, but then again neither is something like a Ferrari or other high quality item.
  • The current guise of ALM does not lend itself to Agile, although this is being rectified with the HPE Octane delivery.
  • The underlying code is old and can sometimes slow down IE, but again Octane should fix it.
HPE ALM is the market leading QA tool for a reason. It provides a single view of the QA process and allows anyone to see what they need to see, from auditors who only need to view information to the end QA engineers who actually do the work. As mentioned, the Agile process is not a perfect fit but using some of the add-ins or Octane will help negotiate this.
Tina M. Musso | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a system of record for requirements, tests and defects across the organization. The company has two major instances of ALM that support over 20,000 named users, with approximately 5,000 users accessing per month. ALM allows for traceability between requirements, tests and defects. We are in the process of standardizing testing tools, and ALM was the first one to meet the standard. This allows for ease of use across departments, consistent training, and good metrics across the organization.
  • The traceability between tests and defects allows testers to create defects directly from the test case, including the detailed steps to recreate the defect for the developers. Upon fixing the issue and deploying, testers can rerun the appropriate tests.
  • Being able to test across multiple environments ensures that visibility into issues, developing regression scripts and other repeatable actions are available for different teams, reducing duplication of effort.
  • Integration with testing tools such as Selenium, Unified Functional Test, etc. allows for development of automated regression suites to assist in maintaining clean code as it moves through the development lifecycle, especially on mature applications.
  • 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.
We have introduced template functionality across both ALM instances. This ensures that all users are leveraging the application consistently, and that key fields use the same data. Only certain fields are available for project specific lists. A major effort was undertaken to define fields for teams across the enterprise. Only high-level fields for reporting are required, allowing different teams to use specific fields for their current business process, while enforcing uniformity and ease of reporting. In addition, the common topography will allow us to integrate easily with other testing tools and systems of record to provide better reporting for senior management, while supporting day to day testing and code development.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

HP ALM is the only comprehensive enterprise grade ALM solution in marketplace today to scale the challenges faces by small to large enterprises with local and global teams. It provides necessary framework to small teams to quickly establish themselves on the process ladder and at the time provides the governance framework to large teams, who already have the established maturity scale.

The solution can be used out of the box for its core capabilities like Release & Cycle planning, Requirements Management, Test Management and Defects management or can be highly customized to fit to an organization SOP. It's tentacles reaches beyond the core capabilities and can be extended to PPM solution and other development and DevOps tools within and outside the organization. HP ALM is very intuitive and very easy to navigate. It is a very mature product and brings the rigor you need in your organization to surpass the development and quality challenges.

  • Release & Cycle Planning - Whether it is a new release or managing change requests, HP ALM can handle it all. In one click you can generate the status of a particular release from scoped requirements to test executed and everything in between. It also have KPI functionality which cane generate health indicators for each release to make go and no go indicators. The baseline features is a well thought out feature which is often neglected in many organization.
  • Requirements Management - HP ALM provides all the features which are needed by robust requirements management professionals. Teams can easily create and update the requirements and provide the full visibility to the team downstream. The tractability and impact analysis feature is the greatest suite of HP ALM complemented with great reporting and graphs.
  • Test Management - This is strongest module of HP ALM and provides the maximum values to team using HP ALM. Teams can perform manual, automated, performance and mobile testing with HP ALM. WIth HP UFT, teams can easily execute automated test case within ALM and report the results back. It also integrates with HP Mobile Center and test can be executed within HP ALM.
  • Defect Management - Simple and Strong are the two words to describes HP ALM defect module capability. Team can use it out of the box or customize it using workflow scripts to accommodate any process flow a organization may have. Their tons of features within this module which helps in expediting your release cycle and help you market the release faster.
  • Dashboard & Reports - HP has made numerous improvements to this module since I have known this product. You can generate any report or metrics if the data is present in ALM. Their are many after market solutions which can extend ALM data beyond the out of box reporting capabilities.
  • HP ALM is little late in adopting the Agile methodology but with the new HP ALM Octane products, organization can easily manage teams and projects which follows that methodology. I would like HP to make an effort to gel this two products capabilities in one product in future.
  • HP ALM shall invest some more resources in making HP ALM Synchronizer product more robust. HP ALM Synchronizer is a very good tool to synchronize data e.g. Requirements and Defects between HP ALM and other endpoints like Team Foundation Server and JIRA.
  • HP ALL is still hard to implement if you want to build a true DevOps team. This feature definitely need some improvements for "non-product" oriented organization to adapt it.
Greatly suited for large enterprise to small enterprise with geographically spread, multi disciplinary, multi methodology teams. Bring out of the box features and process governance to take you to the next level. Mix it with other HP Products like UFT, Mobile Center, Performance Center, Fortify and you have a full fledged value chain to give the best ROI in your organization.

The HP ALM licenses may be cost prohibitive to some organization with small budget and small teams.
October 13, 2016

ALM - What...why...how

Shayne Froelich | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We utilize it in a dual function. First, we use HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to monitor and control the workflow of all defects for our major custom applications. We can set up proper workflow statuses and if it is not followed, then the system notifies management of a breach in process flow which can then be followed up on. We also use it to document and track all of these defects. Second, we use it as a document repository as a replacement solution for RecPro.
  • Defect management. It does a fantastic job of being able to manage the lifecycle of a defect.
  • Automated testing. We use ALM in conjunction with QTP and UFT for automated tests.
  • Some of the administrative functions could be better laid out. For example, you can add users to a project from within the project, but it doesn't always "take" and you have to go back to the main admin screen to add them.
  • If something goes wrong with the program, it is a decent amount of work (possibly even blowing away the entire user account on the computer) in order to get it back in a working order again. This is mainly because this is a full fledged application inside of a web browser.
It is well suited for defect management, gold source documentation for business and use cases and automated testing in conjunction with UFT (Unified Functional Testing) and QTP (QuickTest Professional). The ability to track the lifecycle of a defect from start to finish and monitor the process flow to ensure proper workflow is great.
June 29, 2016

Moment_of_Truth

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP Quality Center is used for continuous integration, reporting, managing projects, and defect management purposes.
  • Great tool for project management and handling everything in one tool.
  • Great tool for reporting, documenting business requirement documents, managing test cases, and converting them for daily continuous integration.
  • Great tool for defect tracking alongside of project management and reporting makes it easier to handle one tool for everything.
  • Some more user friendly server navigation process and reporting can an area of improvement.
Well suited for a large corporation where everything can be managed in one tool. Handling projects is easier.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP Quality Center is being used for IT quality management of complex healthcare applications. It is used for managing requirements, tests, and business components for sales and enrollment applications.
  • It works well with Automated Unit testing. Test scripts can be written once and executed multiple times. This saves a lot of time otherwise spent in manual testing.
  • HP Quality center provides a concise way to write the requirements, create test cases, link them to requirements, create test sets and execute the tests, create defects and link them back to test cases and eventually to requirements, linking all the test assets (test cases, requirements and defects) on multiple levels to Releases and cycles.
  • It is possible to associate requirements with more than one release. This was particularly handy when we needed to move the requirement to another release or have to split the requirements across multiple releases.
  • Task tracking was a challenge, especially with the development community and integration with the development tool was difficult.
  • If we are creating a large number of test scripts, and storing it in QC, and using QC to kick off tests, then it's overkill and probably not worth the license fee.
  • HP QC defines relational database as supporting the relationship between test and test sets. These are primarily undocumented tables. The tests are not stored in a database, though, and so there is no rollback if Quality Center or QTP has problems. Cleanup is manual and depends on your knowledge of the disk directory structure and the database layout and table relationships.
It is good for a Windows operating system. You have to use a virtual machine for other operating systems.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP ALM is a tool I use to manage the testing life cycle for woftware implementation projects. The teams that use the tool are project team members from development and testing teams and some members of the management team to review status. HP ALM is a very handy application to keep track of all things related to testing. In recent updates they have added functionality to track the general software implementation life cycle, but my experience is focused on the testing aspect of it. HP ALM is a single repository that can be accessed universally by project team members through a browser, where you can upload your project requirements, then add your test cases and link the requirement to those test cases and then execute and track the test execution and log and track defects all on the same application.
  • Keep track of project requirements and review requirement coverage and fulfillment with relation to test cases executed. In HP ALM you can easily review the project requirements and assess the current status by looking at passed and failed requirements based on the execution results of the test cases linked to these requirements.
  • Execute test cases and keep track of the execution - HP ALM can track both Manual and Automated tests (with the help of HP UFT). Test cases can be easily organized and assigned to testers, then the actual test execution can be tracked in HP ALM where testers will pass or fail individual and detailed steps of the test cases in HP ALM. From here you can generate real time reports on test execution, on testers, or on tests executed by day etc.
  • Create and track defects - HP ALM will let you log defects found in software applications for a specific project, or test phase, add the detail (even screenshots) using its own screenshot tools and assign these defects to the developers which in turn can provide feedback and status resolution that will notify the tester whenever a defect has been modified or fixed in order to be re-executed until the defect reaches the final closed status. All history is kept in HP ALM.
  • While very useful, HP ALM is an expensive tool, price for licensing is one of the main reasons clients tend to refrain from user HP ALM
  • While HP ALM has a native connectivity with HP UFT for test automation, integrating other tools with HP ALM though possible is not as straight forward as could be, HP ALM could make connections to it easier for third party applications.
  • Some browsers are better prepared to work with HP ALM, if some of the plugins that are loaded at the first tme login fail to load, the 'recipe' to bypass this error and make it load can be difficult and sometimes some security settings in the network need to be set for ALM to work
HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is best suited to handle testing for software implementation projects. That is ALM allows for easy import of functional requirements, then creation or importing of detailed test cases. These can be linked to the requirements previously uploaded in order to link the test execution result to the actual status of the requirement. SO Requirements will be then covered by test cases and depending on the execution result of the test, the requirement will show as Green or Passed or Red meaning Failed, this is a great feature to quickly review the project requirement readiness in real time during the testing phase.
Abbas Virji | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use HP Quality Control (QC) for tracking defects in our agile software development life cycle (SDLC) process. The global tech department is using it - unfortunately they are now deciding to get rid of QC and use JIRA only. I will explain why and why it’s a bad idea.
  • HP QC is not fancy - it takes seconds to load - it is fast and immediate. If I am on a call with a business client and if I need to find something on QC - it does not waste seconds over a call.
  • The filters are great - plus there are exports for pivots on Excel.
  • I like the fact that everything about a defect is compacted on one screen - the summary, the descriptions, and comments. I don't need to scroll unless the comments and summary are too long (which is NOT normally the case).
  • I am not able to filter by word, so If I want to search for the word "Tier" in all the defects - I can't find it.
  • I have to export, and filter it via Excel.
  • I want to be able to hit the"Tab" button on the keyboard to go to the next field. I don't think this works effectively today.
  • Also I want to be able to choose what fields should be required (or not required) when creating a new defect.
One really strong reason for using HP Quality Control is - I am not sure how to describe this technically because it is something to do with the local laptop (desktop). I can open HP Quality Control without worrying about getting signed out from the actual production application.
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