Introduction to HP ALM(Quality Center)

Introduction to HP ALM(Quality Center)

Quality Center was initially a test management tool developed by Mercury interactive.

• HP Quality Center, a test management tool is now popularly known as Application Life Cycle Management Tool(ALM) is a web based tool that helps organizations to manage the application life cycle right from project planning, requirements gathering, until testing & deployment.
• ALM also provides integration to all other HP products such as UFT and Load Runner.

History of QC

• Quality Center was earlier known as Test Director which was developed by Mercury Interactive.
• In 2008, Version 8 was released, and the product was renamed as Quality Center.
• Later, HP acquired Mercury Interactive and re-branded all mercury products as HP.
• So Mercury Quality Center became HP Quality Center
• In 2011, Version 11 was released, and Quality center was rechristened as HP ALM.

Why is ALM/QC used?

ALM helps make project management, from requirements to deployment easier. It increases predictability and creates a framework to manage projects from a central repository.  With ALM you will be able to:

1. Define and maintain requirements and tests.
2. Create Tests
3. Organize tests into logical subsets
4. Schedule tests and execute them
5. Collect results and analyze the data
6. Create, monitor and analyze defects
7. Share defects across projects
8. Track progress of a project
9. Collect metrics
10. Share asset libraries across projects
11. Integrate ALM with HP testing tools other third party tools for a complete automation experience.

HP ALM Editions:
HP ALM is a commercial licensed tool and HP deploys it in 4 different editions that are listed below:

• HP ALM
• HP ALM Essentials
• HP Quality Center Enterprise Edition
• HP ALM Performance Center Edition

ALM Workflow

1. Planning and drafting, Release details: Determine no of Cycles in each release & Scope of each release
2. Requirement Specification: We draft the Requirements Specifications.
3. Test Planning: Based on the requirements, Test plans and test cases are created.
4. Test Execution: Executing the created tests plan
5. Defect Tracking: In this test processes is tracking and fixing the defects detected in the execution stage

During all stages, analysis is done, and reports and graphs are generated for test metric generation.