HP's upcoming Quality Center 10 focuses on cohesion

Article Source:  http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33101 

HP QC 10 will arrive in January, according to announcements made by the company at its annual user conference in Vienna, Austria, today.

The biggest change for users of the existing quality assurance suite will be the more cohesive package around the testing, life-cycle management and requirements gathering tools that make up HP QC 10.

Mark Sarbiewski, senior director of products at HP Software, said that QC 10 will use Web-based portals to coordinate all of the work around software projects inside of an enterprise. What's changed in version 10 is the ability to control those projects in a more collaborative way and to extend them out to users who would normally live within the walls of their own projects.

Previous versions of QC, said Sarbiewski, focused on handling development in a project-specific fashion. With version 10, sub-projects and individual components are no longer isolated islands, as connections between requirements, issue tracking and testing persist across project boundaries.

This time out of the gate, requirements can be tied to bugs and workflow can be analyzed by managers, without extra modifications or customizations. The goal is to give developers and business intelligence workers a single place to deal with all of their software creation needs, yet still allow the individual tools of development, such as bug tracking and repository controls, to be interchangeable. 

As such, QC 10 is available a la carte. Existing customers may qualify for 0% lease financing, a major new sales pitch at this year's user conference. HP sees a need to make its software more enticing to cash-strapped organizations, and it hopes that this financing effort will drive sales, said Sarbiewski.

QC 10 is also available as a software-as-a-service offering directly from HP. Sarbiewski said that such offerings eliminate the need for IT to implement and maintain development systems. The SaaS offerings behind QC 10 will also be available in January.

Article Source: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/bethgb/archives/2008/12/hp_announcement_1.php

HP Quality Center 10.0 supports automation of requirements management, performance loading, and testing. This helps ensure that testing is aligned with business requirements. Given the breadth of methods, technologies, and solutions in the enterprise, including agile development with very short iterative cycles, Web 2.0, SOA, composite applications, SaaS and cloud computing, it is becoming more difficult for CIOs to focus on the most critical investments to drive top line revenue and customer satisfaction. HP Quality Center 10.0 automates management of IT assets across the enterprise.

Quality Center 10.0 incorporates ITL 3 practices for ensure service continuity, and manages requirements throughout the entire lifecycle. It helps managers prioritize projects and optimize the application portfolio. They can put in KPIs, resource costs, and monitor projects, even integrating with development tools, to ensure projects stay on track and deliver business value. 

The automated workflow capabilities can ensure business requirements are managed through security and quality testing.

Quality Center also addresses another hot topic among CIOs – using virtualization to cut costs. Quality Center can identify hardware platforms with excess capacity that can be better utilized if shared across departments and applications. It also automates monitoring and change management processes. Quality Center requirements management capabilities are integrated with the Universal Configuration Management Database.