Quality Center
Introduction to Quality Center:
Quality Center, also known as QC is a web-based test management tool from HP provides
software quality assurance services, including requirements management, test management
and business process testing for software project/applications.
The management of all software testing activities in complete SDLC cycle is known
is Test management. Test management includes both manual and automated software
testing activities. For better management of these activities there are many open
source and paid tools are available in the market. Test management tools help to
manage business requirements, test resources, software testing artifacts and defects
etc. These tools help to provide quick stats on project status by providing a customized
dashboard, automatic generation of requirement traceablity matrix (RTM), defects
reports/graphs and other critical reports/graphs/information which can be helpful in
quick decision making.
Quality center is one of the most demanding web based test management tools which
help by providing an organized framework for testing software/applications and helps
in managing all software testing process. QC saves a lot of time with better management
because software testing has many time consuming activities. Quality Center helps
to maintain a project database of tests that cover all aspects of application functionality.
Quality Center can be integrated easily with automation testing tools like QTP and
Load runner, so that we can get a fully automated application testing. Also, QC
can be integrated with your email system which helps to send email notification
for project related activities to all concerned stakeholders such as developers,
testers, support team and management team members. Quality Center provides very
interactive graphical reports to analyze the present status of the project under
test.
Quality Center Components
Quality Center has the following components which play very important role in the
test management process.
1. Release management:
is a software engineering process intended to manage the development, testing, deployment
and support of software releases.
2. Requirement management:
is a software engineering process of documenting, analyzing, tracking, prioritizing
and agreeing on functional and non functional requirements and then controlling
change and communicating to project stakeholders.
3. Test plan:
is a systematic approach to testing to define what need to be tested, when need
to be tested and how testing will be completed.
4. Test lab:
is a process which helps test scheduling, organizing, running or executing the tests
and finally in the test result analysis.
5. Defect management:
is a process of recognizing the defect found in application during test execution,
investigating the defects, taking action and fixing of defects.
6. Dashboard:
Interactive and graphical representation of summary of project. The summary may
include test coverage, requirement coverage, defect summary, upcoming project delivery
details etc.
Quality Center Interesting features and benefits:
- Quality center is a web based application which can be hosted on Windows and Linux
based servers.
- QC supports multiple projects and each project has its own database for requirements,
test cases and defects.
- Admin or any other authorized user can create a new project, rename existing project,
copy the existing project and assign/ unassigned users to the project.
- QC provides easy management of users. Users can be added, modified and deleted by
admin or any other authorized person.
- QC support project groups. Users can be assigned directly to project groups. User's
permission can be customized at project group levels.
- Custom fields can be created as per project requirements. You can create new fields
and map them with type like string, list and numbers etc.
- You can create/ modify requirements or sub requirements. QC supports different views
of requirements like Coverage view, Grid view etc.
- QC support test plan creation in hierarchy of folder/ sub folders. Test cases can
be created under test plan folder/ sub folders.
- QC support mapping of test cases to requirements and summary reports.
- You can create test iterations (rounds). QC support creation of “test sets” and
mapping test cases for each test set.
- QC record test execution results and defects found in each iteration. Finally, you
can generate test execution reports.
- QC provides easy defect management by configuring the defect life cycle as per project
requirements. It provides security features for defect status change.
- Defects can be easily linked to requirements, test cases. QC supports different
type of defect reports.
- Requirements, defects and test cases can be imported or exported to excel files.