Broadcom Agile Requirements Designer Reviews

I think it helps the communication between the testing organization and the requirements group. It helps us to simplify the work. Instead of dealing with individual test cases, you're working with a model. And a lot of people - and I agree with that - like the visual aspect of the modeling.

The modeling, without question. The modeling is a game-changer.

I think it's already coming, but more automation aspects involved with it. There is a tab for Automation, but I think it's not robust. I think that it's going to be a crucial element of the tool.

I have been playing with the solution for a short timeframe, two weeks. So far very good. I haven't tested the scalability of the solution, but so far, I would say very good.

I have not engaged technical support. As far as I have heard from other customers, the technical support is great.

We're using BPT from HPE ALM. It was not from me, the direction, but I think my leadership saw the opportunity of shifting to the model-based testing, and to have a more connected way to work the requirements. So that was the driving force to the shift.

It's a client install and we got it packaged very well within our company. So, I didn't have any problems at all with installing the client.

I would say it's an eight out of 10. It's a great solution for its purpose, but I think there are going to be more things which need to be added to it to make it a full-scale solution for the problem that we're dealing with. So, I give it an eight, but a strong eight.

We use CA ARD to accelerate our testing. Currently, we write manual test scripts, and if you bring new people onboard, they have a learning curve because they do not know the products as well as experienced people. So, one of the primary things that we use the ARD for is to erase that SME knowledge versus newbie mentality. Once you put the requirements into the model diagram, the tool does all the test cases for you. It takes away all the time to construct test cases, so it is all automatic now, but it also levels the playing field. 

1. Now, we get automated test cases, where before we did not. It cuts out the construction time of testing, about 75%, is what we found. 
2. It is a store that we keep all of our requirements in where, before projects would come in and we would not have a place where we keep the past requirements so there was always a fight between development, testing, and the business writers because they can't remember how functionality works. Now, there is a black and white copy of how the processes are flowing through the system, so there is not a fight anymore about what is happening and what is not happening.

The only thing CA does not have today is a testing engine. So they have got the requirements piece, SDLC lifecycle with Rally (or whatever it is called now), but they do not have an engine to house test scripts to really pull together the testing pieces of it like HPE does. Really that is the piece that I would love to see them either acquire, build, or figure out how to incorporate into their test suite, because they have got every other software that you can think of except for that one piece that really is essential for a QA organization.

It is really stable. The learning curve depends on the talent of the people using it and their skills, but the stability is really good. CA has been great about helping if something goes wrong or breaks but there's not a whole lot of that. 

The scale possibilities are endless, especially when combined with all the other products that CA has to offer. If it is a company that has the means to be able to purchase all the pieces together to build a full scale model, then the possibilities are endless.

I was involved in the initial acquisition so I came to CA World two years ago and found the product and brought it back and then we piloted and then we rolled it out to the larger team.

The initial setup was straightforward.

However, we are still not tapping into the full potential of the tool. We have only had the tool in-house for a year now, and we are getting ready to acquire or purchase more to make it a full scale rollout. I really think that the tool is getting ready to grow and to really expand its base at the company, so I am looking forward to growing with it.

The cost of the tool was well worth the benefit that we saw on the back-end. We were able to scale down some resources to basically self-fund our ability to purchase the tool. It was a no brainer.

We, myself and someone who works for me, researched a lot of companies and a lot of software. This was the Taj Mahal of this particular ability to do model diagramming and automate test cases. 

We looked at HPE, Modius, CA, Conformiq, and TCS. The CA solution is so well-developed that it was really the forerunner due to the price and the use of it. 

I was involved in the initial acquisition. I came to CA World two years ago and found the product. I brought it back, then we piloted it, and rolled it out to the larger team.

Where I work there is a lot of red tape, because they are a financial company, not really a tech industry, so there are a lot of barriers internally. CA worked really well with us to kind of break down those barriers and find the solutions that we needed. 

Start small. If you want to pilot the solution, because everybody starts with a pilot, pick something that is low complexity and low change, that way you can learn the tool and understand the full breadth of what it offers you, because we made the mistake of trying an agile transformation in one of our highly complex digital solutions. We only scratched the surface of what the tool was capable of because there were a lot of band-aids. There was a lot of, "Okay, let me go do this really quick," and not really understanding what the tool could fully bring and really learning about the tool. Really, just make sure you learn the tool before you start implementing and you will get a lot more use out of it. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: price. For our company, it is price. We have to make sure the bucks are worth their bang. Then really, it is the people, like the sales team, the support team, their response times, how friendly they are, and how honest they are because we have found dealing with vendors for two years now and there have been some dishonest ones. So, we really value CA, their teams, and how they interact with their clients. 

We use it primarily to model our applications to automatically generate test cases.

It's great. It's preformed very well. It's very useful.

There are three major benefits. The first one is there is a time savings. It's much faster to create the model than it is to generate test cases. It's much faster to update the test cases in the model than it is to update them manually. 

The second benefit is really around organization. It helps you organize the different parts of your application and it really forces you to understand how they work well together. 

The third benefit is it's a visual representation of your requirements, which is very useful when communicating with a business partner or communicating with another person inside the company, to help them understand the application.

The most valuable feature for us is the automatic creation of the test cases, based on the models. And the impact analyzer that shows you where your change is impacting your test cases, and the ability to export that to our TFS Instance.

We're actually participating with CA to provide some enhancement requests on new features we'd like to see. I can't think of any specific ones off the top of my head, but I know they are evaluating, and they have already provided us features based on our feedback previously.

In terms of improvements, just licensing. That's a big area.

There are some opportunities to improve the stability. The application will often times, if you put your computer to sleep and you open it back up, not be responsive any longer. You'll have to kill it and open it back up. But the good thing is that I've talk with CA about that, and they're actually fixing the issue.

They're very receptive to fixing the product. It's a fairly new, young product.

I don't see any concerns with scalability. It's really a local install. I don't have any concerns there.

Tech support is one of their strongest features. The people that support the tool, know the tool. The product owner is here at the CA World conference. I've met him; I already knew him from interactions with support. So they're very, very good and responsive as it relates to support.

My CA representative and I were talking about a problem I was having and he described to me how this tool could help with it.

This was a problem that we were having independent of CA products. It was a problem that we were having in our testing space. This was a tool that we weren't actively using but helped to resolve that issue.

Everything but the licensing was straightforward. The licensing is extremely complex. It needs work. That's probably the biggest issue. I know they are redesigning the licensing model, but that was a royal pain, to be honest.

When looking for a vendor, there are a few key things. 

• The features of the tool - do we already have something that exists that has that capability today?
• Cost, obviously - what's the cost? 

Those are the main areas.

I rate it a nine out of 10 based purely on the experience with licensing. If that were resolved it would absolutely be a 10.

Regarding advice to a colleague looking at this type of solution, I would say buy it. Start using it. I would give them an overview of what it does. There are great YouTube videos out there on ARD. That's how I initially learned about it, outside of the conversation with my CA rep. So go look at the YouTube videos, but then get your hands dirty. Get in there and start working with it, because it's really powerful once you learn it.

Because we have a lot of applications, we test ARD on three use cases at the same time. I don't remember exactly, it was a Java-oriented application for our agency in Africa.

The added value is testing design. Also, it's very useful when you're working with the Agile methodology. It's a great tool within the CA catalog. 

Modeling how the application works, and then getting every use case we can test. Designing the right tests, what are the most critical tests we must do.

We are waiting for new features that we know that CA is working on. For example, to be able to deliver scripts directly from ARD, and then provide automatic testing. After that, with other tools we have, we could have a complete chain to test our application, beginning with ARD and then to Micro Focus UFT, for example. And without manual design.

There are another two issues, I don't remember them exactly, but CA is working on them, so it's okay.

We have just started using it. It's simple, but we don't see any issue at this time.

We are very satisfied with technical support.

Technically, it was very simple. But the difficulty in starting to use it was more inside our company than a CA or a technical issue.

Start using it now.

Primarily, we use it to convert our test process to model-based. It has actually changed our entire process from script-based to model-based.

It has been pretty dramatic. We have rolled it out across many of our digital teams. In the first year, we saw about a 70% reduction in our script creation time. So, we went from five days per sprint to one day, one to one and a half days per sprint in the script creation. So, it has been really effective.

1. The co-monitorial modeling. It lets us reduce the amount of scripts that we need to execute to get complete coverage. That is really important to us. 
2. Traceability from requirements through test cases.

1. A better alignment to compliance-related requirements and being able to get visibility into those. It is really important for our industry. 
2. Test data: There is Test Data On-Demand and there is the vTDM solution. We would like to see a nice integration between the data and the models. That is really going to help us in terms of CI/CD.

Stability is good. Any issues that we have had in terms of rollout, the CA team has been there to support us all along the way. All the solutions solved our problems so that has helped a lot to ensure we are using the product right. Where there were gaps, they closed them pretty quickly. We had the CA team and the whole group combined spent a lot of time with us, and they have been really responsive. From that perspective, where there were issues, we have solved them pretty fast.

I am not seeing any real issues here. Early on, we had implemented in a way that was not very scalable. We quickly corrected the way we had it implemented. We would love to see it go to a SaaS solution. It is just easier from a procurement and onboarding perspective. However, so far, the scaling has been fine.

Make sure CA is with you regarding the support.

We are a large legacy company with a lot of legacy software. Converting to DevOps and agile, obviously, we had to get faster to the market. Our mind was already wrapped around how we enable teams. When we found the solution that fit nicely into where we are trying to go with our development process overall, it just kind of evolved. 

I was involved in the initial setup. What is good is there were some consulting services to make the complex a little more simple. We have some real talented guys on our team that were more instrumental in that rollout than I was. So, it was not that difficult. One of the more difficult things is just getting people to think in terms of drawing models instead of writing scripts. Changing that mindset was something that we had to do, but CA helped us through that as well.

There is the open source community, then there is the traditional HPE product suite that we are already using. However, there were not a lot of products that did model-based solutions like this. Specific to this tool, probably just HPE.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

The tool capability is important, but we also assess the risk of the company. For example:

• How stable are they? 
• Are they enterprise-wide? 
• Do they understand a company of our scale? 
• Can they scale with us? 

That is really important. 

The second thing I look for is support. It is really difficult to affect change if you are in it on your own trying to get it done. So, having a team there beside you which helps facilitate the change is really important. I think CA has done a good job with that.

The ability to provide developers information on how to design the request.

By using ARD it allowed junior developers to write code because they had all of the requirements in the business flow.

It could be quicker to use. Because we do so many things with it, sometimes it takes a long time to create a flow.

Two years.

At the beginning. I believe the stability issues have been addressed.

At the beginning they did not have a cost effective way to get a viewer in front of our developers without giving them a copy. Now there is a viewer that addresses that issue.

Techinical support is the best! Would give technical 10 out of 10.

It was just user stories in an agile environment. Not very good.

Moving the software between computers is challenging. We tend to get new PCs, or people leave our company and the migration to a new PC is not easy.

If you can speed up productivity the price is good. If not, it is pricey.

Just manual processes, like Visio. Not a good solution when compared to ARD.

Take a piece at a time. It can do a lot.

• Model building: Creating business process flows
• Test case generation: Manual or automated
• Automation script creation and management

Test data management is coming at the end of March. That will be one of the biggest new leaps for us. We are very excited about adding TDM to the suite.

The new release CA Agile Requirements Designer 2.4 offers more flexibility when exploiting the APIs of test and defect management tools. CA has addressed this concern with release 2.4.

We deliver test cases ten times faster and automate in hours vs. days or weeks. We went from 90+ days behind in new automation to full, in-sprint automation with little to no technical debt.

Automation maintenance is now manageable. It reduced the number of people required for testing by 75%.

We deliver more stories faster.

Adding more connectivity to outside applications and the amount of detail we can export to systems of record could be improved. Otherwise, this is a very solid tool with tons of real valuable functionality.

The new release, CA Agile Requirements Designer 2.4, offers more flexibility when exploiting the APIs of test and defect management tools. CA has addressed this concern with release 2.4.

Our group has been using CA ARD for two years. At our company, we have been using it for about three years.

Version 2.3 is very stable and reliable.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

CA support has been extremely helpful. Using the forum is a great way to get help, because the issues are usually user errors.

We utilized HP UFT”. “We changed toll sets when we changed to a model based testing strategy”. In addition we moved away from HP UFT in favor of a Selenium, Java, TestNG framework. This allowed for more integration with addition toolsets and allows for a more open and flexible framework and test harness.”

The setup is not hard at all. It is very simple, like any other desktop-type software installation.

If you have a large group, don’t mess with nickel and diming the licensing. Just do your PoC. Then get the Enterprise agreement if you have the user base and roll it out. Otherwise, you could make the transition and cost painful.

We did evaluate other products. All of them had some good points and value. I chose CA Agile Requirements Designer because it would help us reach our goals and solve the most number of DevOps, CI/CD, testing issues, and future issues we would have.

Kick it off with users who are excited and interested in making the change. Users who are not on-board with the transition will have a difficult time in making the adjustment to the change in process. Excited, interested users make the best implementers.

It removes ambiguity in requirements, meaning that there are fewer demands for clarifications afterwards. We are using it to improve communication between business, tests and development.

For testing, it gives a very good view of the test cases and shows priorities of action so that the most important things are tested first. This helps us to save time as well.

The best example of improvement would be better communications available for my project.

When you have long flows or models, the display can be problematic, as it necessitates zooming in on the GUI and you lose the full display.

As your model grows in size, it becomes increasingly difficult to get a meaningfull view of the entire model. You might have a view with the whole model, but then the text and flow will be incomprehensible. Likewise, as you zoom in, you lose the entirity of the model. A workaround is zooming in as much as needed and scroll around from there, but one could wish for a better solution.

I have been using the solution for about 10 months.

We haven't encountered issues with stability but we have experienced some problems with our JIRA project, which takes too long to load because of its size.

Larger models do require significant time for analysis.

I would rate the technical support as top notch. They are very responsive and they help us solve problems quickly with brainstorming discussions which is amazing.

I didn't previously use another solution.

I was involved in the setup and there were some security issues which proved to be complications because we are running it with VMware and there are some difficulties with offline registration and license revalidation.

We have Test Data Manager but didn't evaluate other solutions.

You should have a detailed discussion with the vendor as to what your actual requirements are. Also, concerning test data management integrations, there are quite a few valuable features which require TDM so you should consider if you need the full value trail there.