By Sandhya Sapru
The Quality Center 10.0 was launched on 14th January 2009 and came into the market finally from Jan 30th, 2009
The new Version 10 is an absolute milestone not only for tests managers. It also makes life easier for Testers, for R&D persons, Test Managers, as well as QC System administrators. The new functions have been anticipated for quite some time and have been implemented in the new product in a well-conceived manner.
• Editions Of QC 10.0
1. QC Starter Edition: This Edition is for small teams , managing small teams.
2. QC Enterprise: Targeted at Mainstream QA Organization that are involved in managing medium to large Releases and are having new capabilities.
3. QC Premier Edition: Mainly for Large and mature Organization who have either or implemented COE (Center Of Excellence) in their Organization and who are managing enterprise releases.
• Versioning:-
Initially there were change related problems that the QA people had to face like
1. Frequent changes in Requirements and tests…
2. Repeated copying of Project related assets leads to chaos.
3. There is lack of visibility when priorities change.
For that matter Versioning concept has been introduced in QC 10.0 to improve the chaos, improve the change related problems to Requirements, Tests and Components.
In this manner, the people involved will have latest information related to the Project and there is no need to purchase third party version tools as well as data integrity can be maintained across projects.
• Baselining:
Capture project related information or assets at key point of time to make it clear what was agreed to and what was delivered. If any problem happens at any particular version of the project baselining helps you to go to the previous version or rollbacks to previous version of the project assets and also helps in to sign off when a particular milestone is reached.
• Integrated Dashboard :
Initially in previous version of Quality Center the Dashboard has to be installed separately. It had separate database, complex and hard to use.
Quality Center 10.0 includes a role based Dashboard which enables a QA Manager, R&D Manager, Business analyst and Team Lead to create their personalized Dashboard. This Dashboard is for a single project and replaces the dashboard of previous versions. It is now finally possible, when working on a QC project, to get an overview of all of one’s ongoing projects. These dashboards are freely configurable and can be designated to be personal favorites or publicly accessible. Special Excel reports also enable direct access to the database via SQL. The generated reports can then be graphically processed at the same time by means of VBScript
Helps in Real time progress and status reporting with focus on individual stakeholders in effective release decisions and there is no need to manage Servers.
No linkage between legacy Dashboard and new Dashboard of QC 10.0.
• Enhanced Risk Based Quality Management with Testing effort:
The QC 10.0 has a strategic test plan that helps to identify the Testing Effort of a particular Requirement of a particular Business Risk. This helps to accurately plan the project deliverables and how much testing effort should be put on Requirement of a particular level.
• Shared Libraries or Library Management: Sharing tests , requirements and components:– With QC 10.0 a Shared Library can be created for requirements , Tests and Components, can be re-used and distributed
A library represents a collection of entities in a QC project, including their relationships to each other. When dealing with many similar projects, it offers the advantage of not having to repeatedly create entities. Libraries can be imported from project A into project B, compared against each other, or even synchronized. A library also allows one to collect the same entities as in versioning. With Quality Center Premier Edition, Defects are not included, but they can be shared with the new “HP Quality Center Synchronizer” manually among several QC projects.
• Cross Project Customization
Many organizations have defined standards, such as a uniform defect status field or a standardized priority scale, for their software quality-related areas. However, these fields and lists were often changed or even deleted by QC project administrators. Some companies have even gone to great lengths in using their own programming to define a template that can be distributed to all QC projects, thereby establishing a uniform standard.
Site Administrator now provides a way to link projects with a template. If the template is changed, the data can then be passed on later at the right point in time. This function has been awaited not only by test managers who like to have the same configuration in all their projects, but especially also by the respective operators of QC installations, namely the system administrators. Cross Project Customization is also only available in the Premier Edition.
