Directly following on from my previous blog on the EMEA Roadshow in London the announcement of ‘ALM Octane’ local user group (LUG) on the Vivit-Worldwide slack channel #ALMOctane . A few weeks later, we organized to meet at the Micro Focus offices in London to discuss and share our experiences of enterprise adoption of ‘ALM Octane’.

Click the Vlog above for a quick summary of topics explored at the LUG event, along with some bonus follow up material see the [COMING SOON] section.

First, I would like to thank our UK LUG leader, Richard Bishop for organizing the event, then the Micro Focus partners who attended to showcase the art of the possible with ‘ALM Octane’:

• Tom Millichamp (Edgewords) & Steve Brooker (EOH) – Presentation on “Test Automation with ALM Octane”
  • BDD Cucumber/Selenium/Octane/Jenkins - Webinar Recording
  • UFT/GitHub/Octane/Jenkins - Webinar Part 1 (17 July)
  • UFT/GitHub/Octane/Jenkins - Webinar Part 2 (24 July)
• Adam Smith (CTO) from Dragonfly – Presentation on “Actionable Insights powered by Artificial Intelligence”
  • Predictive ALM / ALM Octane / ALM.NET / Jenkins / JIRA / Data Visualization / Actionable Insight (Slack / Email) – [COMING SOON]
• Huw Price (MD) from Curiosity Software – Presentation on “Supercharging ALM Octane to enable Continuous Testing awesomeness”
  • Model-Based Performance / LoadRunner / Test Data Management / RPA / Slack – Webinar Recording
  • Model-Based Testing / TestModeller.io / ALM Octane / LeanFT (Docker) / Data Visualization – [COMING SOON]

Additionally, I would like to also thank the Micro Focus customer success, research & development and product management teams for supporting the event and organizing some additional follow up content – [COMING SOON].

I was lucky enough to be involved with the ‘ALM Octane’ beta programme about 4 years ago, so had direct involvement on some of the feature enhancements such as the GERKIN syntax parser.

I also spoke at conference about the next generation predictive ALM capabilities that ‘ALM Octane’ has planned to release at launch (https://www.slideshare.net/Jonathon_Wright/unicom-agile-methods-designops-hitchhikers-guide-to-next-generation-alm) and I was glad to hear that they are planning to support some of the use cases for Predictive ALM through future integrations with Vertica the Micro Focus Predictive Analytics & Big Data platform.

In the meantime, it was great to see what the Data Scientists at Piccadilly Labs have been working on pulling reference data from ALM, Jenkins, JIRA & GIT to provide Predictive ALM algorithms for example defect triage and automatically identifying the most suitable to provide the fix with over a 70% accuracy rate. Adam Smith also demonstrated the gamification and data visualization techniques to provide goal-driven insights that provide enterprise-grade executive scorecard (cascading KPIs).

After a fantastic practical end to end ‘ALM Octane’ demo from Tom Millichamp a certified Micro Focus trainer from Edgewords, the main discussion quickly focused on sharing experiences of enterprise adoption ‘ALM Octane’ product with the enterprise customers and user community at the event. The main concern raised was around the migration from the traditional ‘ALM.net’ product to ‘ALM Octane’ especially when it came to the investment of automated script repositories stored in the ‘ALM.net’ platform directly.

• Migration of Test Assets from ‘ALM.net’ to ‘ALM Octane’;
• Productivity improvements and PPM integration;
• Leveraging UFT object repositories within LeanFT
  • The conversion process being only one-direction?
  • What will happen with AI-based object identification released this week in UFT 14.53?
  • Default Jenkins node is master and must be manually changed to slave node to support execution of UFT runner.
  • Lack of support for YAML or low-code / no-code to describe tests within pipeline (manually selecting Jenkins plugins)
• Support for GERKIN execution directly from ‘ALM Octane’ test editor for SDET persona and LeanFT IDE support for Cucumber / Specflow
• End to end demos featuring a breakdown of each product/capability and persona i.e. Developer, SV as Code, GITOps, CDD and collaboration (Slack/Teams).

The user community plans to follow up with Micro Focus directly on the above-raised concerns around enterprise adoption beyond ‘ALM Octane’ and will hopefully have answers for the next LUG meetup.

In the meantime, why not visit our YouTube channel and hit subscribe, that way you will be able to receive all the [COMING SOON] content mentioned in blog / VLog.