Polarion ALM

Simple & Effective ALM Tool

Comments: Simple Tool with a quick learning curve.

Pros:

Simplicity to maintain documentation (test cases, requirements) is one of the most useful features of this ALM tool.

Cons:

The reports that can be generated from Polarion are of basic nature. They could add facilities to add more kinds of reports/dashboards based on the data available to Polarion ALM.

Head Programmable Systems R&D

Comments: We are using Polarion ALM since 2006 in Software as Medical Device development. It is fully integrated into our process landscape and serves as a perfect basis for full traceability. Proprietary configurations, widget pages and embedded scripts allow full coverage of aspects like requirement , document, test usability and risk management. Furthermore, additional processes like tool validation and management activities are supported.

Pros:

+ Polarion ALM provides full Traceability+ Polarion ALM provides the ability to configure all elements (workitems, documents widget pages,...) which allows high degree of adaption to internal processes+ Integrated electronic signature and document workflow ease document release+ Provides wide range of functionality to cover all software development related process elements+

Cons:

- Document editing is not state-of-the-art

"Polarion Review by engineering manager in OCM"

Comments: I am an engineering manager and fusion organizational management lead for my company, the software we deployed for our transformation,now now resulted better experience and result for maintaining all the business information in one place safely"

Pros:

Software is very simple to use based on a very simple infrastructure, most likely is a web tool so easy to access and use.

Cons:

Sometimes the intranet issue is there it will be slow.

Good first impression during evaluation but impossible to make it run on our server

Comments: We tested Polarion on a Siemens' server during approximatively 15 days, and it looked really nice.
As a former DOORS 9 administrator, I found it really user-friendly (this is the main criticism I heard from users with D9): the documents can be edited as LiveDocs, but requirements can still be easily tagged, and linking seemed quite easy.
As we had no requirement management tool for the moment, it was important to have a good word importer too. And, compared to the other products we tested, Polarion's one is the best I experienced.
Licensing pricing seemed quite correct too. Not the cheapest, but not the most expensive.
So we ordered licenses for our team and installed it in one of our server...
Since we installed it in end of January, I saw it run only one time. Contacting Siemens's support was really hard (my colleague took approx. one week to get in touch with them), and after many hours spent trying to solve the problem, Polarion's server is still down, and we had to come back to our old habit of writing specs with Word.
I am really regretting not to have asked IBM for a pricing of DOORS NG... As during the 3 years I was DOORS 9's administrator, IBM's support has always been easy to contact and efficient...

Pros:

GUI user-friendly Word round-trip very quick and efficient Web-based application

Cons:

Impossible to make it run on our server

Good tool for application lifecycle management

Comments: Polarion ALM is a great tool for experienced users.

Pros:

Polarion ALM is quite a complex tool that includes a wide range of functionality. For example Creation of functional test times, in which the time of the test can be measured during execution and thus make testing more effective

Cons:

It has an older and confusing design. It is quite complex, so in some cases it is difficult to understand how it works. Dark mode is missing.

Best Technical Management Software for V Cycle Development

Comments: We are using this software for embedded software development in automotive oem as well as tier 1 supplier, requirement exchange is really good across teams. All other features are useful like source code management, test management, across V cycle.

Pros:

Requirement Management is one of most useful feature from Polarion ALM, it also provide well integrated solution for Change Management and Source Code management.

Cons:

Integrations with third party tools and automation using scripts shall be added.

Product development and writing requirements

Comments: I do use the tool for entering/writing records and files including test plans/STDs and other more.
I also use it for test execution and traceability matrix generate.

Pros:

As one that was involved in writing requirements to the development team per our intended use: Traceability matrix is the most complicated module in the SW and it is just done properly and in a correct way. The navigation within the tool is also easy and reasonable.

Cons:

there is no such thing in Polarion organization by 'Folders' or 'Tree', everything is done by searching and it is enough not to give the right name or it was forgotten, you will easy get lost.

Good and complete ALM solution with all you need in a single Solution

Comments: I am usin Polarion for my software factory and I have complete control of the actual status of all the projects.
Delays, control of the developers, defects, versions, costs, documents, all in one single solution
Also I can provide access to my customers to let them see the status of their development.

Pros:

- Everyting you need to control the development of your teams in a single solution. - You have all the relationships between all the artifacts on your development - You can deploy your own development methodology from agile to waterfall or hybrid even your own defined methodology in an easy way - You can control in "real time" the satus of your development - You can extend or connect the solution with webservices

Cons:

- Some lack of the documentation to make extensions or connections with other solutions

Polarion ALM with cusomization

Comments: I am using Polarion tool for requirements management for the complete product line. This is one of the best tools I have used till now.

Pros:

1. It is a web based tool. So, there is no issue with the speed. 2. user friendly - word document look alike interface for writing the requirements. 3. Trace-ability - Very easy to make the trace-ability between different levels of requirements. 4. Review process - This tool can also help in the independent review of the requirements. 5. Customization - This tool can be customized according to the project or organization needs.

Cons:

1. Training - end users need lot of training to use this tool which is bit expensive. 2. The document needs to be saved as and when the requirements are written on the interface document. There is no auto-save option.

Easy to Use for non-specialists

Comments: I started using Polarion in University during a practical project and really like it. I'm not too experienced in software development but found Polarion to be very intuitive and I consumed a lot of tutorials and learning material in general that Polarion/Siemens offers. I only know Jira besides it but I prefer to have everything in one package as it seems more simple to me. The performance is very stable and reliable.

Pros:

easy to use learning material performance

Cons:

we used the biggest package and I don't know the cost so it may be pricy, but I suppose there are smaller licence options for less money.

Polarion is the tool for people who know what they are doing..

Comments: Polarion is our de-facto standard for product documentation. Everything is catalogued, earchable comparable and versioned. The Support answers very competent and really helps you usually in a matter of hours

Pros:

Polarion is superflexible and very configurable. If you use the standard configurations, you use less than 20% of the product. The power of Polarion lies in its customization. There are already a lot of extension examples in the contained sdk. Studying these examples make your head spin as you discover a lot of additional possibiities to adapt Polarion closer to your processes. But also as a standalone product with standard configuration you have a tool with a super solid versioning concept. You can look and compare every version of your documents, WIs, testruns, heck you can even examine when configuration were changed. In this way it is very difficult to lose information. Also Polarion is super stable. The underlaying SVN-Repository and its datastructure is still backwards compatible with very old versions. Plugins usually work also after every updates (sometimes the JDK changed and you need to recompile).

Cons:

It is easy to shoot yourself into the foot. With all this flexibilty it is an easy mistake to fulfill every small wish in every small team. This leads to disfunctioning cross team processes. However this is an organizational issue, not the tools fault. But as the tool is very flexible and if you are a person who really like to adapt a tool very perfectly you can overengineer and get lost. A Polarion Consultant usually knows the limit of customization you should not cross.

10+ years experience with Polarion ALM and still very happy with it

Comments: We have been using Polarion ALM for test management and in the meantime for requirements management and several other purposes for over 10 years and we are still very happy with it! It is a great tool for managing both manual and automated tests, as well as tracking test results. Same goes for requirements management and the other ALM functionality. The built-in reporting features are also very helpful, allowing us to quickly generate detailed reports on the status of our tests, requirements and any other information which are stored in Polarion. Overall, we have found Polarion ALM to be a very valuable tool that has helped us to improve the quality of our projects.

Pros:

Polarion is extremely customizable to our company needs. Especially we like that it can be "tailored" to specific workflows and processes. But also, it is easy to build own extensions and plugins. Additionally, there are many community-created extensions and plugins available that can be used with Polarion. So, we could implement our way-of-operating in Polarion but not vice versa.

Cons:

If you've ever updated your Polarion software, you know that the process can take a long time to complete. The reason for this is that the software needs to reindex all of your data after the update. This process can take several hours, or even days, to complete, depending on how much data you have in your system.

Easy to use tool for requirements and systems engineering

Comments: Clean and easy usage across all relevant topics for requirements and systems engineering.

Pros:

For me the greatest advantage of Polarion is how easy you can handle the traceability over multiple levels of development between the requirements (customer requirement to system requirement to component requirements etc.), different levels of test cases, issues and change requests. Report pages provide you a quick and easy overview of your data. Polarion has an intuitive user guidance and different project templates help to establish agile development in the company to develop systems efficiently. Also, when developing huge systems, the performance of Polarion is still good.

Cons:

If you want to have very specific reports or functions, that are not available by default or in the extension portal, you need to build that by yourself, using the open API

Top tool for improvement of quality

Pros:

Compared to other tools Polarion is easy to use and has a brilliant core idea. All functionality is based on the same or on a similar usability. This means that the handling of Requirements is nearly the same as for test cases, or for issue management or change management and so on. Workflows may differ and attributes for sure, too, but the core functionality can be tranferred to every area. The traceability and especially the reports or live created information is easy to use and helps especially in regulated areas like medical, automotive, railway or aviation. But it raises the quality in any other area, too, if you come to the point to manage a complex system or a huge amount of requirements. Consistency checks are very easy to perform and as Polarion always comes with an "all in" installation, you do not need to add new software when using more and more features.

Cons:

Web based means, that you have to remember to press the "save" button. To keep the speed high it also makes sense to use more Tabs but this makes an overview hard, if too many of them are open.

Stay away

Comments: 2 Years Polarion Administrator

Pros:

Nice markiting slides. Its hard to find any pro.

Cons:

Still doesn't work even after spending a fortune for consultants. Very slow Crashes frequently Its is necesarry to manipulate .xml files to get trivial task done. No admistration tools. Outdated user interface. Supports blames the browser however no major browser works flawless with polarion. Distracts people from getting their job done.

Ein ALM Tool für alle Projekte und Aufgaben

Comments: Wir schreiben nicht nur Software - wir Supporten auch für unsere Kunden die unterschiedlichsten ALM System (IBM, HP, Atlassian, Bugzilla, PHPBugtracker, ........ und viele mehr) und aus meiner Sicht finde ich Polarion ALM als eines der Besten aktuell am Markt befindlichen Werkzeuge. Die Luft wird langsam dünner und Siemens muss zukünftig nachlegen, aber bei Siemens wird heute noch Musik gemacht. In Summe geht es für mich am Tagesende darum einem Stempel vom TUEV oder einer anderen Zertifizierungsstelle für das entwickelte Produkt zu erhalten. Mit Polarion ALM ist dies auf jeden Fall möglich und deutlich einfacher als mit Excel und Word bzw. einfachen Trackern.

Pros:

Leider lässt dieser Absatz maximal 1500 Zeichen nur zu und so war ich gezwungen den Absatz stetig zu kürzen damit ich möglichst viele Vorteile dieser Software hier ansprechen konnte. Sie können beliebige Workitemtypen anlegen und diese nach verfolgen. Sie können auch die Items entsprechend heutigen Normen und Standards verlinken und die Verlinkungen auswerten. Dabei spielt es keine Rolle welche Methode (agil vs. classic) in Ihrem Projekt verwendet wird. Insgesamt glänzt Polarion ALM mit seinen Auswertemöglichkeiten und unterstützt dabei alle beteiligtem im Projekt gleichermaßen. Auch beim Testen erfahren die Anwender Unterstützung. So kann die Testdurchführung und Dokumentation bei den Anforderung abgelegt werden. Der Hammer bei Polarion ALM ist der gewählte dokumentenbasierende Ansatz. Anlog zur verschiedenen Branchen habe URS, FS und DS Dokumente bzw. Lastenhefte und Pflichtenheft. Diese Dokumente können von jedem im Betrieb geschrieben werden der auch ein Word bedienen kann. Wir haben in unserer Firma von einfachen Lessons-Learned Projekten über den IT-Betrieb bis zur Software-Entwicklung mit oder ohne Safety die unterschiedlichsten Projekte abgebildet und durchgeführt. Die Anpassbarkeit von Polarion spielte hierbei eine entscheidende Rolle. Auch ein wichtiger Punkt ist die leichte Erweiterbarkeit über bereits vorhandene AddOns bzw. AddOns die selbst entwickelt wurden. Dazu kommt die Möglichkeit der Connectivity die keinen Wunsch in der heutigen Zeit offen lässt.

Cons:

Der schwierigste Punkt für uns ist und war ein projektübergreifendes Resourcen und Projekt Management. Je nachdem wie eine Firma strukturiert ist wird dem ein oder anderen etwas Funktionalität fehlen. Funktionalität die ein MS Projekt hat und die keiner nutzt, weil solch komplexe Projekte auch nicht mit einem MS Projekt verwaltet werden.

Application Lifecycle Management at its best

Comments: Wir nutzen es für unserer Softwareentwicklung (Requirements-Management, Quality Assurance sowie Issue-Tracking) diese helfen uns in unserem Tagesgeschäft und liefern ein Rückverfolgbarkeit in den verschiedenen Software-Versionen.

Pros:

Polarion ist intuitiv zu bedienen und sehr gut dokumentiert, man kann bestehende Word- oder Excel-Dokumente importieren und so diese Daten direkt wiederverwenden. Die integrierte Risiko-Bewertungsfunktion sowie das optionale Varianten-Management ergänzen das stimmige Bild.

Cons:

Meine Testinstallation lief erst nach einer halben Stunde, das könnte man optimieren.

Vielseitiges Tool mit diversen Konfigurationsmöglichkeiten

Comments: - Vielseitiges Tool mit diversen Möglichkeiten, z. B. Tests, Dokumente und Artefakte zu gestalten.
- Ermöglicht kollaboratives Arbeiten

Pros:

- Polarion ALM bietet viele Möglichkeiten zur Konfiguration, sodass Prozesse exakt abgebildet werden können. - Die Traceability zwischen Work Items lässt sich leicht herstellen und nachverfolgen. - Kollaboratives Arbeiten ist problemlos möglich. - Keine größeren Bugs oder Performanceprobleme bisher erlebt

Cons:

- Einige Funktionen sind etwas versteckt und weniger intuitiv in der Bedienung, z. B. das Hinzufügen von Absätzen durch das Anklicken auf das aktuelle Work Item. Man benötigt durchaus etwas Zeit, um sich in Polarion ALM komplett zurecht zu finden. - Verbesserungsvorschlag: ein Tool/Test Run o. Ä. zu Überprüfung, ob jedes Work Item die gewünschten Traceability-Anforderungen einhält. Dies muss momentan noch händisch erledigt werden.