codebeamer

Codebeamer is very powerful, because it's very flexible.

With great flexibility come a great many settings. Some of those (such as role permissions) are very tedious (and error-prone) to set up. A few buttons with macros, or a text-based interface would have been nice.

Also, automation across trackers (say, tasks in user stories) can be tricky/not satisfactory.

codeBeamer ALM is extremely customisable; it covers all aspects of ALM; requirements, software architecture, computer programming, software testing, software maintenance, changes, continuous integration, project management, and release management; allows multiple teams, geographically dislocated, to seemingly work on the same project; tracks every single activity in the process; has a good potential for writing good Wiki pages; has placeholder for technical documentation; practically every tracker type item has comments, attachment, description, etc.; well established links between trackers, downstream references; customisable automation, say you can generate downstream task when system requirements change to a state; completely configurable state diagrams, etc.; excellent testing framework, test cases, test sets, test runs, etc.

As with every system, the value of it depends on how much you put into it; but IMHO codeBeamer ALM has a very high potential to give you exactly what you need from an ALM tool; say there is integration with SVN, etc.; there is a danger of overcomplicating, but that is the price of very flexible customisation; if you design your process well, you should be OK, etc.

Absolutely Nothing.

The instructional videos look nothing like the actual tool. The instructional videos and the help feature for CodeBeamer are worthless. Just garbage. I can't follow any of the instructions.

Very flexible and powerful platform that can be adapted in a variety of ways to align to your process and practices for managing your application lifecycle. Expect to invest time and effort to configure the platform to meet your needs and expect significant return on your investment.

Over a 6 month window we rolled out codeBeamer capabilities for:
1) Requirements Management
2) Risk Management
3) Architecture and Design Management
4) Test Management
5) Defect Management
6) Scrum Team Rituals (Sprints, Stories, Tasks, ...)

codeBeamer is now our single digital system of record for the full Application Lifecycle.

It can be challenging to debug why a user is unable to execute a task given the intersection of
1) license constraints
2) project permissions
3) tracker permissions
4) field permissions