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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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Pricing

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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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  • No setup fee

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  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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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 30)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Sudheer Thokala | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have various criteria as a part of the requirements in which we gathered from teams. We started evaluating each requirement across the tools, and we started providing score ranges from 1-10 and the Quality center holds top to that.
Some of them are listed below:

User Experience
  • The tool should be easy to use for testers, end-users, and administration
  • The tool should have available integrations to IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio and IntelliJ, which are used most commonly. Ability to execute tests from within the IDE
  • Available integrations to ALM tools (Jira) , where we are able to associate Requirements, Defects, Epics and User Stories with Test Cases. Ability to measure test effectiveness through these integrations
  • Availability of relevant documentation for users, administrators and managers.
  • Availability of on-line help for quick resolution to tester’s needs.
  • 24x7 Vendor support for quick resolution to issues and to ensure maximum productivity
  • Availability of intuitive, easy-to-use interface for end-users
The tools should have the ability to import test cases from common tools like Excel and export test results into Excel and PDF
There is a low learning curve for end-users. The ability to quickly onboard technical and non-technical end-users quickly is great.
The tool should have powerful search capabilities and should provide the ability to search and filter based on test case information or attributes of the test cases.
The tool should provide the ability to search and replace text or field values and auto-replace content based on conditions.

Test Management

The tool should support Central management of test artifacts, and support for product structures for managing test artifacts.
The tool should be able to provide support for popular Testing Methodologies including Agile, Exploratory, TDD, Black box testing, Functional testing, etc., and should support Finastra’s shift-left philosophy.
The tool should support the ability to create and manage test cases and test steps.
The tool should be able to segregate manual and automated tests and should be able to measure effective automation at the product level. The tool should also provide the ability to link/associate manual tests to automated tests.
The tool should provide the ability to create test suites by associating test cases and have the ability to execute test suites as well as report on tests at the test script, test case, test suite, and product levels.
The tool should support Test Data - Defect Link and should be able to provide complete Traceability Coverage at product and release levels.
The tool should provide the ability to stop tests before complete execution. The tools should also have the ability to resume test execution from the point of last pause or failure.
The tool should provide the ability to capture screenshots of successful or failed tests for documentation purposes and to capture replication steps.
The tool should allow capturing and storing attachments at a test step or test step level.
The tool should support parameterization for different test data.
The tool should have versioning capability for test artifacts.
The tool should have the ability to integrate with Mobile testing tools and should help manage test cases related to the native apps, simulators, and emulators for mobile testing.
The tool should have the capability of creating manual template tests.
The tool should provide history changes for all available fields.
The tool should have the capability to save and view Favorites
The tool should provide a shortcut key functionality for features.
The tool should have the capability of scheduling the test suites to run.
The tool should provide the capability of the "Check Spelling" feature while writing tests.

Reporting and validation

The tool should support standard test reporting out-of-the-box.
The tool should provide the capability of creating, saving, and reusing reports and dashboards for all users.
The tool should provide the capability of sharing reports within user groups.
The tool should provide the capability of exporting reports and report data to Excel and PDF.
The tool should provide the capability of customizing, configuring, and modifying reports to suit product development team requirements.
The Tool Should provide Dashboards, Widgets, and Reports which can be customizable for business teams to highlight scheduled tasks and provide insight into progress.
The tool should provide Full Coverage and traceability Matrix reports.

Administration and Usability

Tool - Server installation should be available on Windows and Linux
The tool should support Windows, Linux UI, and Mac for client interface.
The tool should have support for Web interface and should have support for commonly used web browsers like IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
The tool should have support for LDAP servers (AD) and should support single-sign-on capabilities. The tool should provide the ability to integrate with multiple LDAP servers simultaneously.
The tool should have the ability to create users at the tool level (outside the LDAP domain) to support partners and 3rd party entities.
The tool should have APIs for integrations and reporting. Preferably, the tool should support REST and SOAP APIs.
The tool should provide authorization and authentication through user groups.
The tool should enable an easy way to create, manage, delete, and deactivate users and user profiles as required. The tool should have the ability to move users across groups in a simple and intuitive manner.
The tool should provide the ability to import and export users from Excel, LDAP, and through APIs.
The tool should provide the ability to segregate roles and responsibilities at a tool level, project/product level, or a group/team level.
The tool should support a distributed topology for implementation and installation.
The tools should provide clustering capabilities, high availability architecture, and options for disaster recovery implementation. The licensing option for the tool should also support these capabilities.
The tool should provide out-of-the-box capabilities for backup and recovery of data in a simple, initiative manner.
The tool should have the ability to integrate to Jira, HP ALM, GIT, and other standard tools that are defined in Finastra.
The Tool should provide the capability of configuring file change alerts and to whom to send the Email notifications.
The Tool should provide the capability of configuring user notifications.

Integration , Automation, and Operation

The Test management tool should provide Rest API support for integration with the test automation framework.
The Test management tool should support rest API integration with the test automation framework. It should support the following features:
Automated Test suite creation, modification, and deletion
Automated Test case creation, modification, and deletion
Manual test case mapping with automated test scripts. API capability to do mapping externally
It should support live reporting of automated test during execution
It should support controlling test execution from external tools like Jenkins, VSTS etc.
Capability to upload, modify and delete automated test reports
The Test management tool should Feature to map automated test scripts with manual test cases and update test status and reports
The Test management tool should Feature to create automated test suites and execution controller dashboard with live report capability. Capability to define test execution dependency.
The Test management tool should report dash board for both manual, automation and test report history
The Test management tool should be able to run Test execution on remote machine and parallel execution capability
The Test management tool should have CI / CD support and integration with different tools like Jenkins, VSTS etc..
The Test management tool should have GIT integration
The tool should have support for mobile testing. The tool will have the ability to integrate with Mobile testing tools like Appium, Mobile Center, Perfecto, etc.
The tool should support native mobile application testing, simulation-based testing, and emulators-based testing to support shift-left.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Easy reports
Ease of use
Ease of traceability matrix
Executions are so easy with all options of evidences tracking

Cons
QA is rigid in some of the features, like reports, dashboards, and doing integration with some other tools like loadrunner, JMeter, and even Jira. A few reports we can not edit which might be because of its own UI friendliness.

March 29, 2021

Quick Center

Bharath Bhushan Sontike | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • BMC Helix ITSM (Remedy)
Firstly, it's a management decision to use HP Quality Center. But if you ask me why I would recommend Quality Center over other products is majorly because of automated regression testing, user interface, security/authorization restrictions and reporting features. Other product which I used was complicated and UI was not user friendly. Also, most of the features available in Quality Center are available in them.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
ALM/QC does not stack up too well against other lifecycle management products, in my opinion. ALM/QC does good in certain areas, such as the quick assigning of tasks to be done, but it falls short in too many areas in terms of being a realistic product to use for the different phases and lifecycle of IT processes. There is a notable lack of cohesion among certain functions of ALM/QC, almost as if separate products were purchased and then consolidated into one product.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Among a number of other tools used in our business, ALM is best for:
  • Long-term projects.
  • Waterfall projects.
  • Critical business components development and monitoring.
The growth of customer base and business needs is changing fast, however, older systems that hold key business functionality require a steady maintenance flow. This is more easily managed using ALM compared to other tools that cater only for agile projects.
  • Business evolution and analysis.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have selected ServiceNow (SNOW) in lieu of HP Application Lifecycle Management. SNOW allows complete integration into our internal corporate web-based systems where ALM does not. Because of this complete integration, we are able to provide users with a consistent user experience matching those of all our other solutions. ALM was not able to provide this interface.
November 06, 2018

QA Quality

Dishank Vishnoi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We require a project management tool for waterfall projects with very heavy testing cycles (4-5 regression cycles), definitely no other tool in the market provides the level of support for test management that HP ALM provides.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Micro Focus LoadRunner (formerly HP LoadRunner), JIRA Software, Rallybound, Bugzilla and Umantis
Quality Center does a great job on its own and is still a very competitive tool. However, with newer methodologies coming and most of the companies moving towards Agile, it requires an upgrade - without which, it will not survive. It has done a great job so far for years together. But Rally and other software are more aligned with Agile. There are features missing in Rally - which is where Quality already has a base. With a few tweaks and design changes, It can easily dominate. Quality Center also cannot do any load testing or stress testing. This area can also be improved.
Sourav Singla ,Safe Agilist, CSP,  ICP-ACC, CSM, CSPO, SSM, LSSG | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We require a project management tool for waterfall projects with very heavy testing cycles (4-5 regression cycles), definitely no other tool in the market provides the level of support for test management that HP ALM provides.

On the top of that, testing scope was huge, it covers functional, security & performance testing & we want to track all the suites under one roof which was only feasible in HP ALM. Also we were planning to automate using HP UFT which also integrates well with HP ALM.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP is unique in its own way. We chose HP because it is standard and an end-to-end solution. However, we also use other tools for the same work that we currently do. HP is good for waterfall projects. It has an excellent defect management module.
Sourav Halder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP ALM has always been the best tool in the industry for QA management. Thoroughly trusted and used by the top-notch organization through the industry.
The USP is the total coverage of Test Cycle which other tools lack.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I was not responsible for selection of ALM. Given the size of the company of the client I am engaged with who is using it, I would have picked something with similar features like Rally or VersionOne. These tools are far easier to use - less clicks! The choice, however, was likely based on the fact that other HP products are in use in the company.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP Quality Center and IBM Rational Team Concert have an option for a sync up which allows a person to automatically create a defect on rational team concert from a Quality Center note just by using a sync up button. Though HP quality centre does not give us many options to track development on Quality Centre, it does let us view the metrics and SLAs on a defect life cycle. This enables the QA team to ensure the bugs are fixed in a timely fashion and the business needs are met. This is the reason why I picked Quality centre over the other tool.
Derek Wallis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
There is a desire from some areas in the company to move to TFS and Microsoft Test Manager. The issue with the MS tool set is that they are more geared for developers rather than testers and business users, so great for Agile (assuming developers do carry out testing) but if you are looking for a full end to end QA tool that anyone can use then I'd stick with ALM.
Tina M. Musso | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

For requirements, we have also reviewed Blue Print, Version One, etc. Currently, the go forward solution is being decided. Whatever the final requirements application is, integration with HP ALM will be done to support traceability.

For testing, there are a large number of applications available. None of them have the traceability functionality that ALM incorporates from a native perspective. That being said, many automation test tools can now be integrated with ALM, allowing users to run their automated tests and record results within ALM, while leveraging the better functionality provided by Selenium or other testing applications.


The biggest drawback for the defect module is the inability to report across multiple repositories within ALM. The solution for us was to leverage templates and add a reporting tool that pulls in the defect information into a single pool. We are transitioning away from ClearQuest because it is not as agile for changes and updates to the database and interface.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have other tools in our organization like Atlassian JIRA and Microsoft Team Foundation Server, which are very capable tools but very narrow in their approach and feature set and does not come even close to the some of the core capabilities of HP ALM.

HP ALM is the "System of Record" in our organization. It gives visibility for an artifact throughout the delivery chain, which cut downs unnecessary bottlenecks and noise during releases.
October 13, 2016

ALM - What...why...how

Shayne Froelich | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have had ALM back when it was called QC (Quality Center) and this was before my time, so I cannot say why it was chosen over other applications. I do know that it has been our defacto standard for many years now and all users of the program are very happy with it.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP needs to have better support for agile testing as compared to JIRA. JIRA also has some powerful integration using REST APIs. Silk Test's portability enables users to test applications more effectively with lower complexity and cost in comparison to HP QC.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HP ALM is the best for tracking testing no questions about it, it is more robust and mature than JIRA or IBM Rational. It has the capability to track not only test, requirements and even software or project development. Reports can be easily configured and produced from ALM, when compared with other similar products like JIRA., Well the disadvantage is the pricing, JIRA can be had for free or minimal fees and that is an advantage that might work for smaller projects/companies.
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