OpenText ALM/Quality Center (ALM/QC) is a test management and application lifecycle management tool to govern software quality and implement rigorous, auditable processes. Designed for complex multi-application environments, it helps organizations achieve high efficiency with a requirements-driven and risk-based approach, and measure quality using advanced reporting and analytics.

January 2024: What’s new in ALM/Quality Center 24.1

ALM/Quality Center 24.1 continues to delivery new features focused on the strategic areas that our customers care about, such as user experience, analytics, ease of administration, cloud adoption, security and compliance support. Below are the highlights.

Empower QA teams with a productive environment.

Web Client

ALM/QC Web Client (renamed from the earlier “Web Runner”) delivers an OpenText-branded new face with more functionalities and productivity boosts. As of release 24.1, developers and testers can work in Releases, Requirements, Test Plan, Test Lab, Test Runs (added in this release) and Defects modules and can view dashboards to understand the progress and metrics of testing and quality.

Filtering, grouping, and favorites make you stay focused. Instead of searching work items every time, saving views into favorites puts all the information you need at your fingertips.

Figure 1. ’Favorites’ feature

Grid view of requirements lets you see them in a flat list instead of hierarchical, making it easy to organize and find items.

Seven languages are supported in Web Client - English, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, enabling your QA teams worldwide. We also introduced Web Client keyboard navigation, providing accessibility for those who rely on simple keys to interact with the system due to motor disabilities or other reasons.

We continue to strengthen the customizable workflow for Web Client and made more events available for workflow control. Moreover, we introduced advanced workflow scripts enabling stronger control from the server side, validating data before it is saved to the database.

Desktop Client

For desktop client users, the “Recycle bin” feature in Test Plan and Test Lab modules safeguards entities from accidental deletion, minimizing the impact of user errors on data loss.

“Purge test runs” has been enhanced. The purging tasks now run in the background, ensuring that the UI stays unblocked during the processes.

The new ‘Shared Overview’ in My Homepage allows project managers or team leaders to share their personal overview with the team to facilitate communication.

Unlock the full potential of your data.

With OData (Open Data Protocol) feed you can send data to BI or ETL tools (such as Salesforce Tableau and Microsoft PowerBI) for advanced analytics.

You can now create report templates with 64-bit Microsoft Office. This removes the limitation of using 32-bit Office for this feature. 

Custom grouping in defects age graphs introduced a flexible way of configuration allowing you to divide defects into a custom number of groups at a custom age interval.

Streamline administration.

API key management and Web Client management (enabling or disabling Web Client or its modules) have been moved under Site Administration, combining all administrative work to a single place. API key management screen also gets redesigned to be more convenient.

Figure 2. New “Add API Key” screen.

In addition, new REST API calls for customizing project lists are added, making it easy to customize project lists using script/program.

Enhance cloud experience.

For ALM on SaaS subscribers, license assignment within their organization by their own admin has been simplified and become more friendly with a new design.

Figure 3. License Assignment screen for ALM on SaaS

Strengthen security and compliance.

ALM/QC 24.1 supports connecting to Microsoft SQL Server using Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication. Using AAD for identity management enables modern security features for database authentication and facilitate centralized identity management.

REST API calls for managing API keys (in Site Administration REST API) is added. Using REST APIs for managing API keys provides a secure, standardized, and scalable approach, making it easier to distribute, control access to, and audit the usage of API keys in various applications and environments.

At the auditing side, customizations on project entities and requirement types can now be recorded by ALM/QC audit log.

Other features and enhancements

For a complete list of new features and enhancements in ALM/QC 24.1, refer to the release notes and watch the what's new video to see a demo.