IBM ClearQuest: The best answer for your Quest on Change Management.
August 22, 2016

IBM ClearQuest: The best answer for your Quest on Change Management.

Charanya Rajagopalan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM ClearQuest

IBM ClearQuest was a client provided software for our project as per the agreements. It was used in several other projects too on the client side but not across the whole organization. The decision to use IBM Clear Quest was done by the client project heads considering various parameters like budget, project size, and our input on the best software in the market for managing workflow through our past experience with the products.

The main business problem that it handled was managing workflow, creating and assigning service/task requests, logging bugs, defect tracking and monitoring, and automatically mailing the assignee and the assigner, a snapshot of the request status whenever an update happens.
  • Effective change management, workflow management.
  • Bug tracking.
  • Integrates with the IBM versioning tool for version management.
  • Integrates with IBM rational testcase for achieving an overall test management.
  • Creating reports on the task status for managing deadlines and deliverables.
  • Does not provide complete test management like HP QC. Although it can be easily integrated with IBM's rational test case manager and versioning tools.
  • UI look and feel is good but can be improved in terms of usability.
  • Positive: Quality product that adheres industry best practices for a considerably cheaper cost.
  • Negative: Maintenance of more than one tool for overall project management.
IBM clearquest would the BEST option if you are looking for managing change requests, managing project workflows, generating reports on status of requests. The reason being: cost, cost and cost. It almost handles everything that you would need for your project including bug tracking unless you want something really fancy (like HP QC) with a higher cost that supports a wide variety of needs which you might need to evaluate based on your project needs. For example, if you would be really making use of all those additional features provided by HP Quality Center. To be honest it depends on your project size, the skills of team members and of course budget!
Well Suited:
  • Best suited for handling change management.
  • Workflow management. Creating and assigning change requests for a particular product/service/business area and managing their workflows.
  • Also handles bug tracking.
Less Suited:
  • It is less appropriate for handling test management on a whole unlike HP Quality Center (HP QC) which is really useful for the testers in our project to integrate their test cases, automation test scripts and linking them with the bugs in a single tool/interface and hence not having to maintain tow different tools for tracking incidents and writing their tests.