Micro Focus ALM / Quality Center

Testcase creation

Testcase execution

Test reports

UI feels rather old

List views could be easier to handle from a user's perspective

Test Plan and Test execution

Release Management

Defect Management

Requirement Management

Workflow Management

User management

Site administration

SAFe

Agile

Portfolio

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Defect linking

Test case creation

AGM Integration

Search tool is cumbersome

Organizational structure is also cumbersome

Only compatible with IE

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.