ALM/Quality Center 16.0 is now available. Version 16.0 continues to strengthen the strategic areas our customers asked us to focus on, such as web interface, cloud adoption, analytics, Agile integration, and compliance support. This release also adds a brand-new integration with Microsoft Teams, to support the new normal of remote work. 

Following are the highlights of new features and enhancements delivered in this release.

Work remotely where and how you want

As more companies embrace remote work initiatives and adopt cloud solutions, ALM/Quality Center continues to strengthen its web interface.

Web Runner has got more function. On top of the existing functions of test execution, defect management and dashboard view, in this release we’ve added test authoring capability, providing your QA staff with an even more complete work environment.

Version 16.0 also introduces a brand-new Web Administration interface that enables administrators to manage their ALM/Quality Center environments from anywhere and any browser. 

Finally, this release delivers a brand-new integration with Microsoft Teams. Now project members can be informed about ALM/Quality Center events directly in Teams. This allows for real-time discussion between project members and stakeholders, making remote collaboration fast and easy.

Figure 1. Notification of new defect sent to Microsoft Teams

Get up to speed through 'My Homepage'

Introduced last year, ‘My Homepage’ is a personalized landing page showing each user’s recent work. It lets you immediately start from where you left off and focus on your personal tasks, increasing productivity. In this release, My Homepage is enhanced to include a personal dashboard where you can pin your own graphs, enabling easy access and monitoring of metrics of your concern.  

Figure 2. Personal dashboard on My Homepage

Bring faster insights

In test management, continuous improvement based upon analysis is key. This release introduces a new analytics engine powering an executive dashboard called ‘Quality Insight’. The dashboard currently supports KPI cards for monitoring the status against your testing goals. Stay tuned for more Quality Insight features in future releases.

Figure 3. “Quality Insight” executive dashboard

Discover delays and anomalies

Following the Composite Graph and Trend Graph introduced in version 15.5, we are adding more useful graph types in version 16.0. The ‘Cycle Time Graph’ gives you the power to analyze elapsed time such as time-to-resolution to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your application delivery process. The ‘Anomalies Graph’ lets you identify entities such as defects that have been stuck for an extended amount of time and act against them.

Figure 4. Cycle Time Graph

See ALM test status in Jira

We are making the Jira integration even better by introducing the ALM Test Management plugin for Jira. The plugin allows Jira users to see the quality process managed by ALM/Quality Center, while doing their work in Jira.

Inside the Jira environment, you can see the status of ALM/Quality Center test cases immediately, such as whether assigned or executed, and the execution result. 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, such as test runs, trends, graphs and more.

Figure 5. ALM Test Management plugin for Jira

Track more events in audit log

ALM/Quality Center has strong capabilities to support the compliance and audit activities in regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, and defense. Now information like workflow changes and IP addresses of connected users can be recorded in audit log. We also added the ability to query for entity linkage information from history.

Other enhancements

Lab Management

We’ve added UI support for recurring time slots for automated tests.

Graph Settings

With the new Analysis and Dashboard framework, it’s now possible to sort data in Summary graphs by certain attribute, e.g., value.

Figure 6. Example graph with bars sorted by value in descending order

For more information

Ready to maximize the value of your ALM/Quality Center? Consider migrating your ALM onto the Cloud to make future ALM upgrades easier.

Read the release notes for a full list of changes delivered, and visit the release lookbook for more information.

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