Overall Satisfaction with HP Application Lifecycle Management
HPE ALM, previously Quality Centre, is the main building block for our professional testing QA team. It allows us full traceability of the requirements, tests and bugs to make an informed decision as to the quality of the code. We have customised it to restrict access to different modules or restrict permission within the modules according to the business requirements.
The traditional QA engineers/testers use it to help audit the testing process and guide business users for any testing they are involved in. The developers can update the bugs raised and follow the test steps themselves to investigate issues. Reports generated using the inbuilt functionality can be sent out to the project team on a daily basis.
- The whole end to end QA lifecycle can be covered and mapped, allowing a single view source of the quality of the application under test.
- There are multiple add-ins that can be used to enhance the reach of the application.
- The workflow is easy to customise in order to hide fields or restrict permissions within modules.
- Native reports and graphs allow simple exporting and time saving when reporting to the project team.
- The tool isn't cheap, but then again neither is something like a Ferrari or other high quality item.
- The current guise of ALM does not lend itself to Agile, although this is being rectified with the HPE Octane delivery.
- The underlying code is old and can sometimes slow down IE, but again Octane should fix it.
- It has made the whole QA process more professional and robust - long gone are the days of using spreadsheets to record and track progress.
- It is expensive and the different licence types need to be investigated fully to understand the best option.
- The different modules and add-ons allow it to be configured to suit the end user needs.
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.