What is Micro Focus ALM?
Micro Focus Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a set of software tools developed and marketed by Micro Focus for application development and testing. It includes tools for requirements management, test planning and functional testing, performance testing, developer management, and defect management. It was formerly known as Hewlett Packard ALM, Hewlett Packard Quality Center (QC) and Mercury Interactive Test Director. It was based on ActiveX technology and therefore relied on Internet Explorer (IE) to be able to display its "web pages".
Why Are Companies Switching to SpiraTeam?
Over the past few years, companies have been looking for more modern quality management tools that provide all of the functionality of Micro Focus ALM, but are cross-browser, modern and are better suited to modern agile projects. With its modern user interface, simplified administration and new features such as agile boards, resource management, multiple requirements views, Gantt charts, easy DevOps integration and real-time analytics, SpiraTeam has emerged as one of the most popular replacements for ALM.
The phase-out of IE has become the final additional reason why companies and government agencies are accelerating their plans to migrate from ALM. With this in mind, we have improved our already easy to use, out of the box migration tool for ALM.
Improvements to the ALM Migration Tool
The major improvements we have made to the Micro Focus ALM migration tool are for the benefit of customers looking to migrate very large projects to SpiraTeam. The new importer offers these enhancements over the previous version:
- The importer now displays the progress of the import with a percentage complete and estimate for the time to import the remainder of the project
- Sometimes ALM would go offline during the middle of the import. With the new version, you can now resume imports from any point, if this happens.
Display of Import Progress
During the import process, the importer shows the current session identifier (which is part of the session log name), as well as the progress and estimated remaining time for every artifact.
The Event History at the bottom logs important events of the session. As each of the types of artifact are imported, the progress display will change (as shown above).
Ability to Resume the Import from Any Point
If you can cancel a session part way through, or the session fails for any reason, you can easily resume importing artifacts from that session. Each import session is saved as a flat file that you can pick from to resume the import from that point in time:
This means that very large project migrations that could sometimes be impacted by network outages or failures in ALM are no longer a problem.