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.

Pros and Cons

Test Plan and Test execution
Release Management
Defect Management
Requirement Management
Workflow Management
User management
Site administration

SAFe
Agile
Portfolio

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

April 28, 2021

Senior Perforamnce Test Engineerblead

Verified User

Team Lead in Quality Assurance

Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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

Module Lead

Capita IT and Networks (Ventura India Pvt., Ltd) (Information Technology and Services, 5001-10,000 employees)

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Quality center is used in most of the departments for defect management. Testing is performed in two ways:

(Scheduled) Regression testing is performed on quarterly basis.
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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

February 25, 2020

ALM/QC - Probably Not the Best

Chris Oros

IT Analyst

Duquesne Light Co. (Utilities, 1001-5000 employees)

Score 4 out of 10

Vetted Review

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Support Rating

Support for ALM/QC is responsive, but because the product is lacking in some areas, the response is not always helpful. This is a scenario where you can't blame the messenger. Shortcomings in ALM/QC are usually explained to be "intended functionality" or the client having an unorthodox use of the product.

February 12, 2020

ALM for All Mission-Critical Projects

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Financial Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

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Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Support Rating

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.

September 01, 2018

HP ALM - Excellent tool for managing Waterfall Projects

Sourav Singla ,Safe Agilist, CSP, ICP-ACC, CSM, CSPO, SSM, LSSG

Enterprise Agile Coach

Tata Consultancy Services (Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees)

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

November 06, 2018

QA Quality

Dishank Vishnoi

Senior Consultant

Areteans (Computer Software, 10,001+ employees)

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

April 25, 2017

HP ALM Templates to the Rescue

Tina M. Musso

Business Systems Consultant

Wells Fargo (Financial Services, 10,001+ employees)

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

December 12, 2017

ALM-the solution you are looking for QA Management.

Sourav Halder

Senior Specialist

Linde India Limited (Chemicals, 10,001+ employees)

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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

Lead Software Quality Engineer

Advance America (Financial Services, 201-500 employees)

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HP ALM is being used by the various teams in IT department. It's mainly used for Test Management and Defect Management.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

April 25, 2017

HPE ALM, still a market leader for QA engineers

Derek Wallis

Technical Test Analyst and Automation Engineer

Unum (Insurance, 10,001+ employees)

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

October 13, 2016

ALM - What...why...how

Shayne Froelich

Analyst

Manitoba Public Insurance (Insurance, 1001-5000 employees)

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

April 14, 2016

HP Quality Center is very very good for tracking defects - very fast and compact

Abbas Virji

Business Solutions Analyst

Bank of America (Banking, 10,001+ employees)

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

December 14, 2015

Great Test Management Tool...

Brad Jennings

Lead Analyst, Project Manager for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) & Knowledge Management (KM)

John Deere (Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, 10,001+ employees)

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HP Quality Center is used to store and execute test scripts. I am leading an effort to streamline our testing efforts, which includes integration to Worksoft and integration to SAP Solution Manager. The tool is the enterprise tool for our company. However, many groups that are using an agile methodology do not use the product.

Pros and Cons

Requirements Traceability
Integration with other tools
Reporting for testing

Pricing & Licensing
Support
User Management

Likelihood to Recommend

HP Quality center is well suited for a traditional, waterfall methodology. It is also useful for large implementations where many applications and teams need to be involved. The requirements traceability feature works well, in conjunction with the reporting capabilities, to ensure testing is complete and successful.

HP Quality Center works well with SAP Solution Manager to help streamline testing efforts. It includes requirements traceability, change analysis and semi-automatic test set creation.

December 11, 2015

HP Quality Center/ALM Great Tool or Greatest Tool?

John Berek

Senior System Engineer

Tx3 Services, LLC (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees)

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Reseller

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use HP Quality Center for our internal testing and we configure QC/ALM for our clients. HP QC is a fully functional software lifecycle tool, but it is strongest in its test management capabilities. We further extend its functionality by adding on a custom layer of coding that enhances its features and brings advanced functionality to the tool.

Pros and Cons

Test Case and Run Management
Requirements Management
Release and Cycle Management

Defect Management
Flexibility
Interface

Likelihood to Recommend

HP Quality Center is well suited to any company looking for a robust and full fledged application lifecycle management tool. Once extended by the tools that Tx3 Services provides, HP QC is an excellent choice for any company looking to control and track requirements, tests, runs, defects and more. It may be less appropriate for smaller companies who cannot afford the "Top-Shelf" software.

January 16, 2019

HP Application Lifecycle Management may be the tool for you, but was not a great fit here

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Automotive Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 3 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

November 09, 2018

Comprehensive Cloud-based ALM that Feels a Bit Outdated

Verified User

Project Manager in Marketing

Automotive Company, 5001-10,000 employees

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

October 17, 2018

Quality Center - Core of Defect tracking

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

April 11, 2018

HP Quality Center Review

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used across the whole organization/multiple departments. It helps track defects and projects effectively.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

May 14, 2018

Comprehensive Testing Cycle Management System

Verified User

Manager in Corporate

Biotechnology Company, 5001-10,000 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

April 17, 2017

A 6 Stars ALM Solution!!

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Medical Devices Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

July 28, 2017

Cumbersome Application Management Tool that feels dated

Verified User

Team Lead in Quality Assurance

Information Technology and Services Company, 51-200 employees

Score 3 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Defect linking
Test case creation
AGM Integration

Search tool is cumbersome
Organizational structure is also cumbersome
Only compatible with IE

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

June 06, 2017

HP Quality center - The reality in IT industry

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

May 27, 2016

Test faster, test faster with HP QC

Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Insurance Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 6 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is good for a Windows operating system. You have to use a virtual machine for other operating systems.

May 04, 2016

The best for handling all things in testing projects

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology

Banking Company, 51-200 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (30): 85%
8.5
Likelihood to Renew (2): 90%
9.0
Usability (2): 30%
3.0
Support Rating (4): 73%
7.3

What is Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center?

Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center is presented as a comprehensive, unified, flexible and extensible application life-cycle management product. It aims to provide teams with visibility across all enterprise projects and the complete application life-cycle. It establishes consistent, repeatable processes for managing requirements, tests, and business components, in order to effectively increase speed, improve quality and reduce cost.

Micro Focus 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

Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center Competitors

Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center Pricing

More Pricing Information

Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center Technical Details

Deployment Types	On-premise, SaaS
Operating Systems	Windows, Linux, Mac
Mobile Application	No

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center?

Micro Focus offers the former HPE application lifecycle management and quality assurance suite, Application Lifecycle Management / Quality Center (or ALM/QC).

What are Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center's top competitors?

Jira Software, Bitbucket, and IBM Rational ALM are common alternatives for Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center.

What is Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center's best feature?

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 7.3.

Who uses Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center?

The most common users of Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center are from Enterprises and the Unknown industry.