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.

- 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

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

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.

+ 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+

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

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...

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

Impossible to make it run on our server

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.