5 reasons you need to migrate from ALM to a modern test management tool 

The enterprise software development approach has gone through a paradigm shift in the last few years to meet the increasing demand of delivering continuous quality customer experience. It has become more agile to support frequent incremental changes leading to more releases in a short time period. This change is across the board and impacts the software quality process as well.  In this agile environment, legacy test management tools like HP QC or ALM and others can be quite unfitting and create speed bumps for your digital transformation journey. If you’re considering migrating from legacy tools such as ALM to a modern, agile/DevOps-ready test management tool that is lightweight, intuitive, and designed for better scalability, then you’re not alone. If you’re still stuck with your ALM, watch out for these five tell-tale signs that it’s time for your legacy software tool or application lifecycle management product to retire. 

1. Skyrocketing maintenance cost: Maintaining and trying to build more integrations to meet your needs of adopting agile tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, CI/CD, and modern test automation is a massive overhead for your organization with no value add.  With growing spectrum of new age tools, it becomes cost prohibitive and time consuming to scale a legacy application like ALM with an age-old architecture. Thus, your system becomes too fragile, rigid, and non-scalable. The quick fix applied to solve this rigidity is mostly a patchwork effort creating an unmanageable, hard to scale, and tough to operate test management software. This can also lead to high maintenance costs, which ultimately will affect the overall organizational efficiency and the bottom line.  
2. Inability to integrate with other systems: Not too long ago, tools were built to work independently without being integrated into other tools. But over time, companies have realized that no one tool can work alone. Thus, the need came to integrate one tool with another. But the siloed architecture of old legacy tools means they cannot communicate or integrate with other project management or CI/CD tools, thus becoming redundant in the present IT operating scenario.  While this is a reiteration of the first point we discussed, independently this is a very important point to consider for your test management tool.  It is the command-and-control centre for all your test projects.  By that definition, the openness to connect with multiple software testing tools, requirements and project management applications, CI/CD tools, and others is a very important requirement.  Test Management tools with modern architecture can support this seamlessly through out-of-the-box integrations and REST Open APIs.
3. Lack of real-time insights and data: Displaying a huge amount of complex data in tables to users was the best practice, well, not so long ago. This meant many unwanted data, which led to huge file sizes, which in turn, affected the load time. And so, data could only be accessed at the “end of day cron” runs. Thus, there were no real-time updates, and users could access the data only a day after, affecting the decision-making timeline. On the other hand, modern test management tools offer advanced analytics, dashboards, and real-time, cross-project reporting for various metrics to give you high visibility. The visual and query based customized reporting can help generate actionable insights across management and execution levels to track productivity, traceability, test coverage, and any slice and dice of data that helps in delivering better software faster.
4. Inability to meet customer expectations: Legacy tools were built when the market was not so fiercely competitive. So, users had to do with whatever was available at their disposal. However, the scenario has changed pretty much since then. Today there are numerous tools available, and each is competing against the other to provide the most valuable benefits to its customers. Thus, user experience plays an important decisive factor in determining the fate of a tool.  Legacy tools score poorly on usability with everyday challenges of frozen screens, incompatibility with various OS, and a general design language that was not meant for the modern user. Modern teams today demand a streamlined interface supporting multiple tools and platforms, enabling consistent performance and usability. 
5. Go to market time: Digital transformation is demanding ever-shortening release cycles.  Continuous customer feedback translates into more software updated or created at a breakneck speed.  The methodologies like agile and DevOps can enable to meet this demand of building software at speed.  It is also important to support older development methods like waterfall and provide an easy transition path towards Agile/DevOps.  To deliver on the promise of faster Go to Market, test management tools should support a scalable, multi-methodologies support, with integrations to enable continuous quality within the CD cycle.  The old legacy tools don’t allow integration with other tools. And hence, for all the required actions and tasks that need to be performed, manual intervention is required, prone to error, and slow in execution. 

The way ahead: If you’re facing these bottlenecks with your old legacy tool, it is probably time to migrate to modern test management tools. There are several ways to conduct a migration smoothly. If you have in-house capability, you can always do it on your own without any external help. Alternatively, if you don’t have internal resources, QMetry offers expert support who can guide you through the entire migration process. QMetry also has partners who can do the job for you. You can also benefit from open API and migration utility to conduct a smooth migration.