HP-ALM

HP ALM (Application Life Cycle Management) is a test management tool under a proprietary license.
We can access ALM/ Quality Center over the internet or intranet, Web browser.

It involves interrelated steps such as defining release, developing requirement, designing and execution of tests, monitoring and reporting defects.

•    Quality center is one of the best test management tools in the market. It has a lot of features and can be accessed through an IE browser.
•    It has a different set of modules and we can create releases, requirement and its traceability, test plan, test lab, logging defects in defect modules. .
•    Defect assignment can be easily done in QC and in turn QC itself can generate emails to intimate the responsible person assigned to a particular activity.
•    QC provides various customization filters which can be used for creating reports and graphs.
•    QC can be integrated with QTP and HP Load Runner and HP Performance Center

The Quality Center modules are:

·         Dashboard

·         Management

·         Requirements

·         Testing

·         Defects

Dashboard: Helps to create graphs, reports and excel reports, analysis, view

The dashboard analysis consists of two views
•    Analysis View:  It consists of the analysis tree using which project managers/QA can arrange all of their analysis items like-graphs, excel reports and project reports
•    Dashboard View: It consists of the dashboard tree in which managers or testers arrange dashboard pages that can arrange multiple graphs that was formed in the analysis tree and manifest them in a single view

Types of graphs

•    Progress graphs are available for all tables.
•    Summary graphs are available for all tables.
•    Test lab has additional graphs
  -cross test set progress
  -cross test set summary
•    Defects table also has Age graphs

Types of Reports:
•    standard reports
•    Document generator
•    snapshots
•    full reports

Management:

Management has consists two modules
•    Release module: Enable us to define release and cycles for the application management process.
•    Libraries module: Enables us to define libraries to track changes in project, reuse entities in project, or share entities across multiple projects. A library also allows one to collect the same entities as in versioning.

Requirement:
Helps us to manage requirements. This includes defining what we are testing, defining requirement topics and items, also analyzing requirements.

The benefits of Requirement traceability track from links indicate requirements that affect a selected requirement. Trace to links indicates requirements that are affected by a selected requirement.

Yes there are two ways to generate test from requirements. Convert Requirement to test and Generate a test from requirements.

If a requirement depend on other requirement then treating Child requirements to the main requirement you can evaluate the sub requirements related to the main requirements.

You store requirements in Quality Center for following reasons
•    to ensure 100% coverage: You can create and track test plan / sets for the requirements stored in Quality Center to ensure all the requirements are tested.
•    Easy Change Management: If any requirement changes during course of test case creation, the underlying test case is automatically highlighted and Test Engineer can change the test case to suite the new requirement.
•    Ease of Tracking: Using Advanced Reporting & Graphs provided by QC, Managers can determine various metrics useful in project tracking and monitoring.

Testing:

Test resources

Test plan

Test lab

Business requirement

•    Test Plan: Enable us to develop and manage test in a hierarchical tree-structure. Tests can be linked to requirement and defects. Testing can start before all tests are created while keeping the plan orderly.
•    Test Resources: Test Requirements refer to objectives or conditions that must be satisfied during testing

      Business Requirements: High-Level objectives of the customer requesting the product

      User requirements: Describe tasks the user must be able to accomplish with the product. Tasks captured in use cases or scenario descriptions.                  

       Functional requirements: documented in a software requirements specification (SRS). Define the application's software functionality to enable users to accomplish their tasks..

•    Test lab: Enables us to run tests and analyze the results. Test lab is a part of Quality Centre where we can execute our test on different cycles creating test tree for each one of them. We need to add test to these test trees from the tests, which are placed under test plan in the project. Internally Quality Centre will refer to this test while running then in the test lab.

·         Business requirement: Quality Center provides Business Component for Business Process Testing (BPT).
•    Many Enterprise Applications are

a) Complex and b) require extensive test scripts/case.
•    A Test /Automation Engineer cannot handle both complexity of Application under Test as well as extensive test script/test case creation.
•    Using Business Component, Subject Matter Experts (who are experts on the Application under Test) can create tests in a script free environment without involving in the Nitty-gritty of test case/script designing. It helps increase test coverage and creates re-usable business components used for testing essential Business Processes.
•    Development of Test Script / Cases is done by Automation / Test Engineer

Instance-- A Test Case imported from Test Plan module to Test Lab module is called an Instance of that test case. It is possible to have multiple instances of the same Test Case in the Test Lab Module

Coverage View--is used to check which tests are linked to a specific requirement.
Use this view to find untested requirements. We link requirements to a particular test using Requirements coverage tab.

Document view-- displays columns for all requirements.

Filter-- Filters allow you to restrict the scope of data displayed in the graph, report or grid according to criteria that you specify. When a filter is applied, only those records that meet the filter conditions are displayed. Filters are available for Graphs, Reports and Grids.
Scheduler-- the Scheduler is a QC feature that allows timed execution of automated tests. You can specify the date and time when a test will be run. This is useful for running large no. of tests unattended, such as overnight.

Defect: Defect Module: Helps us to report defects, determine, repair priorities and reopen defects.

The Defect ID is automatically generated after clicking Submit button.

Track defects Maintains a centralized database, Standardize defect reporting, Prevent duplicate defects, Attach supporting information easily, Analyze defect data using reports and graphs.

HP-ALM workflow includes:

    Release Specification

Requirement Specification

 Test Planning

 Test Execution

   Defect Tracking

                                                                             

•    Setting up the QC project
•    Requirements Management
•    Create Test Cases
•    Run Tests and Analyze Results
•    Report and Track Defects

IN A REAL- TIME PROJECT

After completing the test cases, we do:
•    Export the test cases into Quality Center.
•    The test cases will be loaded in the test plan module.
•    When execution is started.

 We move the test cases from test plan tab to the test lab module
•    In test lab, we execute the test cases and put as pass or fail or incomplete. We generate the graph in the test lab for daily report and sent to the specific user.
•    If we got any defects and raise the defects in the defect module. When raising the defects, attach the defects with the screen shot.

ADVANTAGES OF QC

•    Quality Center is referred as a complete test management tool
•    It is a web-based tool and backs up high level of communication among various stake-holders (Developers, Business Analyst, Testers and so on) driving a more efficient and effective global application-testing process
•    With Quality Center automation tools like UFT and Load Runner it can be integrated.  For analysis and tracking for test processes, it can also create reports and graphs.

FEATURES OF QC

•    Entirely browser based
•    Project customization now a separate module
•    Test requirements management
•    Execution Flow tab
•    "Drill Down" in graphs
•    save graph, report and grid settings for reuse
•    Attach screen snapshots to any object that accepts attachments
•    Web Defect Manager Functionality built into Defects tab.

A QC project can be stored and managed using the following data sources.
•    Microsoft SQL
•    Oracle
Note: Default database is Microsoft SQL.

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