TrustRadius Insights for OpenText ALM/Quality Center are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
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.
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.
Pros
Testcase creation
Testcase execution
Test reports
Cons
UI feels rather old
List views could be easier to handle from a user's perspective
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
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
Test Plan and Test execution
Release Management
Defect Management
Requirement Management
Workflow Management
User management
Site administration
Cons
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.
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
Integration
Ease of requirement tracing.
End to end execution evidences tracking.
Ease of use
User friendly
Cons
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.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Quality Assurance (10,001+ employees)
Quality center is used in most of the departments for defect management. Testing is performed in two ways:
<ol><li>(Scheduled) Regression testing is performed on quarterly basis. </li><li>New product development/service development.</li></ol>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
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.
Cons
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.
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
Well-structured folder system for all projects.
Easy to import data from Excel files.
Cons
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.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
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
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.
Cons
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.
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
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
Cons
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
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
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
Cons
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.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Marketing (5001-10,000 employees)
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
Defect/Bug management.
Traceability with requirements, test cases and defects
Defect linking
Cons
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.
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
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
Cons
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.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
