In March 2014, soon after we had published the February 2014 update of the Requirements Management (RM) tools list, HP Software released a new version of its HP Quality Center / ALM product: HP ALM 12. (HP Quality Center and HP ALM are two different editions of the same base product.) During summer, also HP ALM 12.01 became available with additional feature enhancements. HP Software has also coined the term HP Apps 12 to denote the entire product family of its release 12 products, such as HP Unified Functional Testing, HP Performance Center, and several others. The “Apps” term shall also indicate the increasing support for mobile apps development.

The HP ALM 12 update is important from a requirements management perspective: HP Software has renovated and re-implemented the HP ALM’s requirements module. First, new features have been added to the traditional Internet Explorer web client. Second, a completely new web-based client has been implemented. It supports a wide range of browsers and can be used from mobile devices, too. The new web client provides an entirely new user experience and also enables new features. Users might know the new look-and-feel already from HP Software’s Agile Manager product. In addition, with HP ALM 12, the defect management module is available with a new web client as well.

The new RM features of HP ALM 12 and 12.01 include:

  • More flexible layout of customized item type presentations
  • New authoring mode in a wordprocessor-like style
  • Extended drag-and-drop functions
  • Enhanced traceability view
  • Integration with HP Agile Manager

Some of these new features are available in only one of the RM module’s two client versions (due to technological reasons), others are available in both versions.

For details check out the following resources of HP Software: