I’m excited to announce the release of ALM/Quality Center 17.0. Throughout recent releases, we’ve consistently focused on the strategic areas that our customers care about, such as the web interface, cloud adoption, analytics, ease of administration, and compliance support.

Many organizations face shrinking budgets, a shortage of labor, and stringent compliance requirements. With trends like cloud adoption and remote work, businesses must evolve and adapt to survive and thrive.

Let’s see how ALM/Quality Center 17 features and enhancements help you better adapt to the changing business landscape.

Boost User Experience and Productivity

A remote workforce needs tools that help them stay productive. ALM Web Runner—a client that works on any browser—runs on MacOS, Windows, and any other OS your users prefer in their PC environment. We also designed a modern UI to increase productivity.

In this release, we significantly expanded Web Runner functionalities:

• Most common end-user tasks now can be done in Web Runner.
• We added Releases and Requirements modules.
• The customizable workflow you love is now in Web Runner and allows you to program using JavaScript.
• Enhanced Test Plan, Test Lab, and Defects modules improve convenience.
• Test Lab allows you to create test sets and instances and see more details through the information tabs.

Figure 1. ALM 17 Web Runner UI

Discover More with Visibility and Analysis

There is a lot of valuable information buried in your test management data. The key is to visualize and find meaning in it. That’s why every release brings new capabilities in this area.

ALM 17 features a new graph type—Test Execution Treemap. It intuitively presents the testing status and scale of each test set. You can instantly notice problematic areas and drill down.

Figure 2. Test Execution Treemap

We introduced ALM Quality Insight last year. Powered by a new analytics engine, it lets you track cross-project KPIs. In ALM/Quality Center 17, we added support to KPI cards for more types of entities. Besides defects, it can give insights on requirements and test instances.

A new type of Project Report—Test Set Execution Preview—allows you to review the relevant test design steps and parameters for selected test sets before execution, to avoid unnecessary failures.

Figure 3. Test Set Execution Preview

Manage Your ALM on SaaS

Many customers found that ALM/Quality Center on SaaS helped them reduce costs and maintenance. A good SaaS offering must give subscribers enough flexibility and control, so we continuously enhance both.

In the past, SaaS subscribers were not able to perform Site Admin tasks. The ALM Site Admin REST API, at its first release, only supported on-premises deployments. ALM/Quality Center 17 remedies this issue.

Customer administrators can now directly use part of the API calls, so that they no longer need to rely on Micro Focus staff. We’ve enriched the API set and added more functions. Plus, Swagger documentation makes API programming much easier.

Figure 4. Swagger documentation for Site Admin REST API

Empower Administrators with Better Tools

Easier administration not only reduces time and money, but it also prevents failures due to human error. You will benefit from these administration features and enhancements:

‘Admin Report’ REST API call

You can get every detail of your ALM instance using this Site Admin API call. Use scripts to automate the monitoring and handling of events you may be interested in.

Single sign-on configuration wizard

The single sign-on configuration tool now has a wizard to guide you through the setup steps, simplifying a complicated task.

Test Execution Agent monitoring

Test Execution Agents (TEA) installed onto testing hosts enable ALM/Quality Center to kick off automated tests and collect results remotely. How many testing hosts are there, and what’s their status? New TEA monitoring provides you with the visibility to these resources so that you can better manage them.

More efficient upgrade and backup

Throughout recent releases, the project import, export, and upgrade functions have been consolidated under the ALM Robot tool. With ALM Robot, you can automatically upgrade multiple ALM/Quality Center projects in parallel to a new version.

For even better upgrade and backup experiences, we delivered an archiving wizard to monitor ALM Robot activities. In this release, the project export has been enhanced further so that it needs much less temporary storage space than before.

Enhance Auditing

ALM/Quality Center has strong capabilities to support the compliance and audit activities in regulated industries, such as pharmaceuticals, biotech, financial services, telecommunications, and defense. It is a focus area in every release.

This time, we added user login/logout time as an auditing target. We also introduced audit filter, which lets you separate the user management events from others. Stay tuned for more filtering functions to come.

See ALM Test Status in Azure DevOps

Separate from major releases, ALM Test Management extension for Azure DevOps (ADO) was released in July 2022. It works with ALM version 15.0.x and above. Like the ALM-Jira native integration, this extension allows ADO users to see the quality process managed by ALM/Quality Center while doing their work in ADO.

Inside the ADO environment, you can see the status of ALM/Quality Center test cases at once. In addition, a hyperlink is provided pointing to the relevant information in ALM/Quality Center. If needed, you can click on it to access more details.

You can integrate multiple ADO projects with ALM/Quality Center to gain a holistic quality view.

Figure 5. ALM Test Management extension for ADO

For More Information

Read the release notes for the full list of changes and visit our page of ALM/Quality Center 17 resources. 

Evolve your quality management solution by upgrading today. The new capabilities you’ll gain will help you adapt in a rapidly changing business landscape. Consider migrating ALM/Quality Center to SaaS to set you free from future upgrades. 

Bookmark ALM/Quality Center homepage to keep informed of latest news. Have questions? Contact us anytime.