Table of contents. Tools and techniques for superior test management. White paper

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1 Tools and techniques for superior test management White paper Table of contents Introduction The need for test management What is test management? The test management process HP Quality Center software Summary

2 Introduction In recent years, the field of application testing has evolved. The growing complexity of today s applications, combined with increased competitive pressures and skyrocketing costs of application failure and downtime, have catapulted the need for testing to new heights. While the pressure to deliver high-quality applications continues to mount, shrinking development and deployment schedules, geographically distributed organizations, outsourcing and high turnover rates for skilled employees make application testing challenging. Faced with the reality of having to do more with less, juggling multiple projects and managing diverse and distributed project teams, many organizations are adopting test management methodologies and are turning to automated test management tools to help centralize, organize, prioritize and document their testing efforts. This white paper explores the challenges and rewards of test management and provides practical ways to help you implement an organized and structured testing process. In addition, this paper discusses the benefits of HP Quality Center software, which addresses the need for global test management. The need for test management In the world of application development, many organizations do not seriously consider testing until programming is almost complete. Testing at this phase is inadequate in light of increasing demands for software quality and shorter release cycles. As a result, the role of testing in the application lifecycle is changing. Fueled by competitive pressures and high costs of downtime, organizations are now beginning to define their testing plans as they create their applications. Planning your testing in parallel with your development provides a key advantage. The knowledge you apply to the application design can also apply to your testing strategy. The application testing strategy is evolving into a multistage process with its own methodology, structure, organization and documentation. Similar to the development process, a testing process needs a methodical, building-block approach that includes your testing requirements, planning, design, execution and analysis to provide coverage, consistency and reusability of testing assets. 2

3 Based on a project s objectives, your test managers can create a master test plan, which communicates the testing strategy, priorities and objectives to the rest of the team. Using the master plan, your testers can define test requirements or specific testing goals. Requirements define what needs to be tested and identify the objectives, such as performance goals. Once your testers have defined your testing requirements, they can begin developing testing procedures that meet and validate your requirements and run the tests. The goal of a test management process is to create one central point of control that is accessible to all members of the testing team. This central point houses all testing assets and provides a clear foundation for the entire testing process from deciding what needs to be tested to building tests, running scenarios and tracking defects. The test management methodology also supports the analysis of test data and coverage statistics to provide a clear picture of the application s accuracy and quality at each point in its lifecycle. What is test management? Test management is a method of organizing application test assets and artifacts such as test requirements, test plans, test documentation, test scripts and test results to support easy accessibility and reusability. Its aim is to deliver quality applications in less time. Test management is firmly rooted in the concepts of better organization, collaboration and information sharing. Planning, designing and running tests represent a considerable amount of work, but these efforts are rewarded when all testing assets are shared by testers, developers and managers alike, preserved when a tester leaves the team and reused throughout an application s lifecycle. Do it right or do it over compelling reasons for test management Although test project management is widely accepted as a common practice, most organizations don t have a standard process for organizing, managing and documenting their testing efforts. Often, testing is conducted as an ad-hoc activity that changes with every new project. Testing without following planning and design standards can result in the creation of tests, designs and plans that are not repeatable and cannot be reused for future test iterations. If you think a testing process is difficult to implement and even more challenging to enforce and maintain, consider the cost of redundant work and accidentally lost and overwritten testing assets. Without a central point of control and clear, repeatable methodologies, it s difficult to keep your testing projects on track and deliver quality applications on time with limited resources. 3

4 Without a standard foundation for test planning, execution and defect tracking, testing efforts are non-repeatable, nonreusable and difficult to measure. Daily builds and numerous tests The process of releasing a new build every day and then checking it for consistency, functionality and compatibility is becoming increasingly popular not only in the web environment, but in any organization that builds complex, dynamic applications. The sheer number of tests and versions can make the testing process overwhelming and nearly impossible to manage. A well-defined, systematic approach to testing and a centralized repository for test plans, tests and execution results can significantly increase the accuracy of your tests and add value to frequent builds. Managing changing requirements Complete requirements-based testing helps a new application meet your users needs. Ideally, you would test each requirement at least once and some requirements several times. But constant time and resource constraints make it extremely difficult to conduct comprehensive testing of all requirements. As a result, your testers must prioritize the requirements that they test. And requirements undergo frequent revisions and changes, which your tests should reflect. Without a test management process that ties test plans to application requirements and lets you track changes in requirements to test cases and vice versa it s nearly impossible to design tests that verify that your application contains the functionality that you require. Global testing Globalization is affecting testing, like most other IT operations. Even small companies often distribute their testing teams throughout a country or the world. In addition, as part of cost-saving measures and higher availability of qualified testers, some companies are turning to an outsourced testing model. It s not uncommon to have multiple development and testing teams, composed of in-house and outsourced staff, spread around the world, working on the same project. The Internet makes communication among these teams easier, but how can you prevent members of your distributed team from accidentally deleting each other s files or working on duplicate defects? Without a clearly defined testing process and an easy-to-use, intuitive collaboration method, a geographically distributed, virtual testing team likely results in greater problems and complexity than benefits. Many tests, many projects Effective testing requires a systematic process. When your testing team manages multiple projects, each with its own cycles and priorities, it s easy to lose focus. Almost no organization can dedicate a testing team to one development project. At best, a testing team is part of the development group for a particular product. Additionally, you need to validate multiple functional areas, builds and baselines, different platforms and environments, and a vast number of integrations. To track multiple test cases, your testers need a process that allows them to manage multiple projects and clearly define the objectives of each one. More than bug tracking meet business outcomes Some IT organizations regard testing as a bug-tracking activity. It s true: your testing team s primary responsibility is to find defects. However, a testing process is more than recording bugs and passing them to developers. Testing should focus on verifying that the application s design and functionality meet your business requirements and your users needs. To achieve those goals successfully, a testing process requires clearly defined system specifications and application business rules. Early in the lifecycle Early problem detection can be as much as ten times less expensive than finding issues during production, requiring that testing and development begin simultaneously. However, to implement testing earlier in the lifecycle, your testers need a clearly defined set of goals and priorities to help them better understand system design, requirements and testing objectives. A well-defined, structured and intuitive test management process can help them meet your testing goals and enhance the quality of your applications. 4

5 The test management process The basic principles for test management are the same, regardless of the underlying platform or how you write your tests. Test management begins with gathering and documenting your testing requirements and continues through designing and developing your tests, running the tests manual and automated, functional and load and analyzing application defects. The testing process is not linear, and it differs depending on your organization s practices and methodologies. This section delves deeper into each phase of the test management process and explores what it means to have an effective method for organizing, documenting, prioritizing and analyzing your entire testing program. Requirements management The testing process begins with defining clear and complete application requirements that can be tested. Developing and managing these requirements are critical for developing and testing your software applications and should reflect your organization s needs. To use a metaphor, a team of architects needs to consult with the homeowners and thoroughly document their requirements before designing and building a house. Otherwise, the homeowners may end up with a house that completely differs from what they envisioned. Building a house without requirements is difficult enough, but the problem becomes greater when dealing with software applications, which are intangible, complex and constantly changing. Research shows that more than 30 percent of all software projects fail before completion and that this failure is largely due to ambiguous, poorly worded and badly defined requirements. All too often, requirements are neglected in the testing effort, leading to a chaotic process in which your testers fix what they can and accept that they will not verify certain functionality. during the development process, you need to test the entire application based on its requirements so that the application functions as expected. Of the many types of requirements, functional and performance requirements most often apply to the testing process. Functional requirements help validate that the application contains specific functionality and should be derived directly from the use cases that developers use to create the application. Performance requirements include the performance standards and specifications, such as transaction response times or maximum numbers of users, identified by the project team. These requirements also referred to as service-level objectives (SLOs) increase the likelihood that the application can scale to the expected number of users and provide a positive user experience. Both functional and performance requirements give the testing team a clear, concise and functional blueprint with which to develop test cases. Most software testing managers agree that it s impossible to test everything, even in a rather simple application. To test every feature and functional permutation, you may need to develop thousands, if not millions, of test cases, which is unrealistic given time-to-market goals and other pressures. Requirements-based testing is one way to help you prioritize your testing effort. You can group requirements according to how critical they are to your business success. You must test extensively the requirements that affect the core functionality of your application. You can address the not-so-critical requirements with minimal testing effort or later in the lifecycle. For example, if you test a new release of a mature product with only a few functional changes, your testing effort should concentrate on the modified or enhanced areas. These changes are usually welldocumented in the development or marketing specification documents, and you can derive the testing requirements from them. You achieve quality only through testing the application against its requirements. Although unit testing of individual components may be sufficient 5

6 The test management process lets you organize, document, prioritize and analyze your organization s entire testing effort. Recognizing the importance of requirements-based development and testing, testing solutions now include a variety of tools designed to aid the creation, traceability and management of application requirements. Some of these enterprise requirements tools are sophisticated and complex. Others offer basic functionality designed to assist in creating, storing and documenting requirements. The key to selecting the appropriate tool is the functionality you need. Most organizations still use word-processing tools or spreadsheets to track requirements; however, commercial tools designed for requirements management are a better choice if you want a solid, flexible, requirements-based testing process. Requirements-based testing helps keep your testing effort on track even when priorities shift, resources become tight or the time for testing runs out. Requirements-based testing measures quality against your end users needs. Planning tests Comprehensive planning is critical, even with short testing cycles. Planning your tests and designing your applications simultaneously gives you a complete set of tests that covers each function the application is designed to perform. If you do not address test planning until later in the application lifecycle, much of the design knowledge is lost, and testers will need to return to the analysis stage in order to recreate what had been done before. During a test planning phase, your testing team identifies test-creation standards and guidelines, selects hardware and software for the test environment, assigns roles and responsibilities, defines the test schedule and sets procedures for running, controlling and measuring the testing process. The test plan itself contains test designs, test procedures, naming conventions and other test attributes. Use the planning phase to define which tests are needed, how to execute these tests and the risks and contingencies that require planning. Establish the rules Your testers don t need overly bureaucratic processes to slow them down, but ambiguities and a lack of clearly defined procedures can make testing a bottleneck for product deliverables. You should establish rules for keeping test logs and documentation, assigning roles within the team, agreeing on naming conventions for tests and defects and defining the procedure for tracking progress against project goals. Set up your test environment You need to create a test environment to support all testing activities. Consider all issues that have long lead times as early in the testing process as possible. The planning phase is the time to complete hardware and software procurements, network installation, test environment design and special arrangements that may be necessary during the actual testing phase. Define test procedures During the planning stage, your testers determine whether tests are going to be manual or automated. If the test is automated, your testers need to understand which tools to use for automation, and estimate what techniques and skills are needed for the effective use of these tools. While test automation is mandatory for many organizations, most companies still use manual testing. Regardless of the type of testing you use manual or automated you need robust test management processes. 6

7 Develop your test design You can represent your test design as a sequence of steps for executing a test (as done in manual testing) or as a collection of algorithms and code that support more sophisticated, complex tests. During test planning, your testers create a detailed description of each test and identify the types of data or ranges of data that the tests require. Map your test data You need to map the requirements for your test data against your test procedures. Your testing team must understand what types of data they need to support each type of test, and how to obtain or generate this data. Design your test architecture The test architecture helps your testers understand the test building blocks and assists them in developing the actual tests. The test architecture helps you plan for data dependencies, map the workflow between tests and identify common scripts that may be reused for future testing. Communicate your test plan Once you create the test cases, you must create a master test plan and communicate it to the rest of the organization specifically project leaders, developers and marketing personnel letting them know what your testing group will be testing. In this way, more people in your organization have visibility into the project and can add their input, questions or comments before the actual testing begins. The test plan can also provide visibility into testing projects for your executives. Having access to organized, detailed plan data gives your executives the confidence that they are working with a professional quality assurance (QA) organization and are getting value from their technology and human resource investments. Running your tests After addressing test design and development issues, your testing team can start running tests. To test the complete application, your testers need to perform various types of testing functional, regression, load, unit and integration each with its own set of requirements, schedules and procedures. operating systems, different browser versions or other configurations. During the test-run phase, your testers can set up groups of systems to increase the efficiency of your lab resources. Scheduling automated tests is another way to optimize the use of your lab resources as well as save your testers time by running multiple tests simultaneously across multiple systems on the network. You can schedule tests to run unattended, overnight or when a system is in least demand for other tasks. Using automated tests also makes the scripts more reusable and easier to maintain by letting you create more modular tests and schedule them in a certain sequence. Having an organized, documented process not only helps your automated tests. It also helps make your manual tests more accurate by providing your testers with a clearly defined procedure that specifies the tasks they need to perform at each step in the manual testing. For both manual and automated tests, your testers must keep a complete history of all test runs, creating audit trails to help trace the history of the tests and test runs. Create your test sets A popular way to manage multiple tests is to group them into test sets, according to a business process, environment or feature. For example, you can group all tests designed to verify the log-in process under the Log-in test set. You can assign individual tests, both manual and automated, to test sets to help your testers thoroughly cover the functional areas of your application. Set your execution logic To verify application functionality and usability, your tests must realistically emulate your end users behavior. You should follow the predefined logic, such as running certain tests after other tests have passed, failed or completed. For example, a user logs into the system, enters a new order and then exits the system. To emulate this simple business process, you should run the tests in the same sequence: log-in, insert order, log-out. You should set the execution logic rules prior to executing the actual tests. You set up the test environment in the planning phase, so at this time, your testers can view the available hardware and choose which tests to run on which systems. Typically, applications are tested on different 7

8 Manage your test resources After setting up and configuring your test environment, your testers define what tests or groups of tests should run on which systems. You can set up your hardware to test a particular operating system, platform or browser. Additionally, managing test lab resources by assigning tests to individual systems helps to use your hardware and network resources efficiently and effectively. Run your manual tests Running manual tests involves manually interacting with an application then recording actual results against expected outcomes. While some manual tests are routine, they are an essential part of the testing procedure, allowing your testers to verify functionality and conditions that automated tools cannot handle. Schedule automated test runs After developing automated tests and assigning them to host machines, your testing team needs to create an execution schedule. Scheduling is another way to avoid conflicts with hardware and system resources. You can schedule tests to run unattended, overnight or when a system is in least demand for other tasks. Analyze your test-run results When your tests execute, your testers uncover application inconsistencies, broken functionality, missing features and other problems commonly referred to as bugs or defects. The next step is to view the list of failed tests and determine what caused a test to fail. If your tester determines that the test failed due to an application defect, you need to report this defect into the defect tracking system for further investigation, correction and re-testing. Managing issues Managing or tracking issues and defects is a critical step in the testing process. As today s systems become more complex and mission critical, so does the severity of the defects. A well-defined method for defect management benefits not just the testing team. Developers, managers, customer support, QA and even beta customers can effectively contribute to the testing process by having access to an open, easy-touse and functional defect-tracking system. The key to making a good defect-reporting and resolution process is to set up the defect workflow and assign permission rules. In this way, your testers can define how a lifecycle of a defect should progress and who has the authority to open a new defect, who can change its status to fixed and under what conditions the defect can be closed. You should also maintain a complete history and audit trail throughout the defect s lifecycle. Extra time spent on documenting the defect and its history is often rewarded with easier analysis, shorter resolution times and better application quality. Analyzing defects helps your managers make go/nogo decisions about application deployment. By analyzing defect statistics, your testers can analyze your applications and determine how many defects they have and other related factors, such as their status, severity, priority and age. By giving different team members access to defect information, your testers can greatly improve communication in your organization and share the current status of your applications. Agree on a naming convention Effective defect management relies upon communication across the different parties involved in the process. Before you establish reporting mechanisms, your testing team needs to set the rules, such as defining the severity of bugs, and agree on what information must be included in the defect report. For example, many testing organizations categorize defects as follows: Cosmetic or user interface Inconsistency Loss of functionality System crash Loss of data Cosmetic and inconsistency defects are the easiest to report and address. Although they make the application more difficult to use, they don t affect the application s functionality. Defects that result in loss of functionality are more severe and more urgently require correction. Defects that cause the system to crash or lose data are commonly called showstoppers. You must document these types of defects as thoroughly as possible and correct them before your application goes live. 8

9 Extra time spent on documenting a defect and its history is often rewarded by easier analysis, shorter resolution times and better application quality. Establish reporting procedures For good defect reporting, you need to supply your developers with the information they need to reproduce and fix a problem. A defect report generally includes a summary and detailed description of the problem, version and system configuration information, the steps needed to reproduce the problem and any relevant information and attachments that help illustrate the issue. Set permission rules Each step in the test management process requires different access privileges. This is especially true in managing defects, as defect information helps your managers make go/no-go decisions regarding application release. Before the testing begins, your testers must decide which team members have permission to report, open or re-open defects, adjust status and determine that a bug has been fixed and is closed. Establish the process flow After you find a defect, submit it into the defect repository. A developer should review it and determine whether the reported issue is indeed a defect. If so, the developer assigns it a new status. As few development organizations have the bandwidth to repair all known defects, a developer or project manager must prioritize them. If your development group is pressured to release the next version of the application, a project manager can decide to fix only show-stopper defects and correct others after the release cycle. This process flow creates an accountability chain, which defines who owns which defects and the status of the corrections. Retest repairs After a known defect is repaired, you need to retest the application to see that the changes have taken effect and that the correction did not introduce additional problems and unexpected side effects. If the defect does not appear when you retest the application, you can change the status to closed. If the problem persists or the correction introduced additional problems, re-open the defect and repeat the cycle. Analyze defects Analyzing defects is critical. With analysis, your testers can understand the application being tested and view the number of known defects and related information, such as their status, severity, priority and age. Through defect analysis, your management can make an informed decision whether an application is ready for deployment. 9

10 Figure 1. Comprehensive testing. HP Quality Center links test cases to testing requirements and traces the testing process. HP Quality Center software HP Quality Center software is web-enabled, test management software that supports the test management process in one powerful, scalable and flexible solution. It combines an integrated suite of rolebased modules, a business dashboard and an open, scalable and extensible foundation all designed to optimize and automate key quality activities, including requirements, test management and defects tracking, functional testing and regression testing, and manual and business-process testing. Seamless integration among these modules provides smooth information flow among the different stages of the testing process. With HP Quality Center, you get enterprise-level functionality that meets the needs of the most sophisticated application testing projects. In today s organizations, different groups are involved in the testing process managers, developers, customer support, in-house and offshore teams and even customers. By using a browser, all these groups can easily access testing information and collaborate seamlessly. In addition, HP Quality Center can configure user groups and set up permissions to help maintain access privileges and preserve information integrity so that users see only the tests and assets that are relevant to them. This functionality is particularly beneficial for offshore testing projects. The web-based software can also synchronize users through version upgrades or installing new modules. As a result, users no longer need to go offline during upgrades. They simply refresh the browser and synchronize with the rest of the organization. Global, web-based test management HP Quality Center is global test management software. By being web-enabled, it supports communication and collaboration among distributed testing teams whether they are located in different parts of the world or separated by organizational boundaries. 10

11 Requirements management The Requirements Management feature in HP Quality Center links test cases to testing requirements, providing traceability throughout the testing process. This lets users easily see what percentage of application functional requirements are covered by tests, how many of these tests have run and how many have passed or failed. Developing testing requirements starts with reviewing the documentation for the application being tested, including marketing and business requirements documents, system requirements specifications and design documents. You can use these documents to gain a thorough understanding of the application being tested and to determine the testing scope: test goals, objectives and strategies. Based on the testing scope and goals, your QA managers can begin developing requirements, log them into the HP Quality Center requirements tree and assign responsibilities for specific areas. The requirements tree is a graphical representation of your organization s specific requirements and displays the hierarchical relationship among the different requirements. Each requirement in the tree is described in detail, such as the reviewed status, priority and creation date, and includes any relevant attachments. Requirements Management provides two ways to link your requirements to tests: Your testers can automatically generate tests based on application requirements. Or, if they have an existing test plan, they can link requirements to tests that are associated with defects. In this way, your testers can track their testing needs at all stages of the testing process. If a testing requirement changes, they can immediately identify which tests and defects are affected, and who is responsible. Your testers can group and sort requirements in the tree, monitor task allocation and the progress of requirements and generate detailed reports and graphs. At any stage in your testing process, HP Quality Center can help your testers generate graphs and reports quickly to gain accurate status information about the tested application. For example, once you complete your requirements, your testers can quickly extract information on what percentage of the requirements the tests address and what the status is of those tests. They can also extract information on how many requirements were rejected in the review process and need to be repaired and which requirements have urgent priority and need to be validated as soon as possible. With HP Quality Center, you can save all filters, reports and graphs as Favorites for public or private access. Only the person who creates private favorite views can access them. Public favorites, however, can be used by the entire team. For example, a manager needs to have updated information on the status of all testing requirements for a particular application for a weekly meeting. She only needs to create the report once and save the filter under Favorites. From that point on, HP Quality Center automatically updates her view with new information, and the manager gets an updated status of all requirements every week. HP Quality Center also helps organizations maintain an audit trail by providing the history of any changes made to a particular requirement. This helps preserve information integrity and allows your testers to trace events throughout the requirement lifecycle from initial creation through changes to its status, priority or test coverage. 11

12 Figure 2. Graphically view your test plans. A test-plan tree in HP Quality Center is a graphical representation of your test plan. Planning your tests The test-plan tree in HP Quality Center is a graphical representation of your test plan. It is a hierarchical list of tests, organized according to topic, and describes the set of tests needed to meet your quality requirements. Your testers can also associate a test with specific defects. This is useful, for example, when you create a new test for a known defect. Through association, your testers can determine whether the test should run based on the status of the defect. HP Quality Center allows your testers to link each test in the test-plan tree with a requirement in the requirements tree. By defining the requirements for a test, your testers can track the relationship among the tests in the test plan and the original testing requirements. For each test, HP Quality Center helps your testers create test steps that describe which operations to perform, what specific areas to check and which results to expect. After your testers define the test steps, they can decide whether to perform the test manually or to automate it. In addition to supporting both manual and automated tests, HP Quality Center supports the migration from manual to automated tests. If your testers automate a test, HP Quality Center creates a template for an automated test based on the design steps. Your testers only need an automated testing tool, such as HP WinRunner software or HP QuickTest Professional software, to record the business process and complete the test. Before you execute your tests, you should review the test plan to determine how well it meets the goals that your testers defined at the beginning of the testing process. They can analyze their test plan by generating customizable reports and graphs. For example, they can create a report that displays design step data for each test in a test-plan tree. They can also use this report to help determine their test design priorities. As with reports and graphs in the requirements tab, testers can save their test plan views as Favorites and access this information at any time. 12

13 Figure 3. Run tests locally or remotely. With HP Quality Center, tests can run locally or remotely on any available system on the network. If your planning information is already stored in an application, such as Microsoft Word or Excel, your testers can reuse this information and import it into HP Quality Center, preserving your investment and eliminating the need for redundant planning efforts. Additionally, HP Quality Center allows your testers to create attachments so they can add information, such as design documents or feature specifications, to a specific test. Running your tests The Test Lab feature in HP Quality Center helps your testing team manage the scheduling and running of many different types of tests. To help organize the tests that need to run, HP Quality Center uses the concept of a test set. A test set is a group of tests in a project database, designed to achieve specific testing goals. Test sets can include all tests that validate specific functionality, such as a log-in process, or that verify an application works with a particular version of a browser. With HP Quality Center, you can add tests to a test set from the planning tree by dragging and dropping. Your testers can also create a filter inside the planning tree and export it into a test set for all tests that satisfy specified criteria. In addition, your testers can define the execution conditions and control the execution of automated tests in a test set. They can set conditions and schedule the date and time for executing automated tests. They can also set the sequence in which to execute the tests. For example, to verify a simple business process in which the user logs into a system, creates a reservation, enters payment information and logs out, you can create four modular tests: Log-in, Create Reservation, Insert Payment and Log-out. To emulate this simple business process, you can arrange the four tests sequentially, beginning with Log-in and followed by Create Reservation, Insert Payment and Log-out. You can also define the execution conditions. In this example, you can set the Create Reservation test to run only after the Log-in test passes. The Log-out test, on the other hand, can run regardless of whether the previous test passes or fails. For example, you can set Log-out to run after Insert Payment has finished, regardless of the result. 13

14 Figure 4. Analyze application defects. The Defect Management module in HP Quality Center logs, tracks, manages and analyzes application defects. With HP Quality Center, your testers can run tests locally or remotely on any available system on the network. Through the Host Manager feature, they can define the systems for running tests and group them by task (functional or load testing), operating system (Windows or UNIX ), browser type and version (Netscape or Internet Explorer) or by any other specification or configuration. HP Quality Center is tightly integrated with other HP quality management offerings. You can also use its open API to run tests using a third-party testing tool. Your testers can schedule automated tests to run unattended, either overnight or when the test lab systems are in least demand for other tasks. Using its scheduling mechanism, HP Quality Center invokes the automated testing tool, runs your tests and reports results back into the central repository. Managing issues Information about issues or defects is critical for determining the status of an application and deciding whether it is ready for deployment. The Defect Management feature in HP Quality Center logs, tracks, manages and analyzes application defects. Different types of users testers, project managers, developers, beta customers and many others can use it to enter defects directly into the database. An effective defect-tracking process is firmly rooted in the concepts of well-defined workflow and permission rules. Your testers can define how a defect should progress through its lifecycle from initial problem detection through solving the problem and verifying the correction as well as set permission rules and access privileges for any member of the organization. 14

15 Using customization options, you can establish the workflow rules that are most appropriate for your process. For example, a defect must start its cycle with the status new. It cannot be closed without a QA manager reviewing it first, then it transfers to the development team. A developer either rejects the defect or corrects the problem and assigns a new status, fixed. The defect remains open until the project manager reviews the corrections and changes the status to closed. By setting the workflow and permission rules for different members of the team, you can configure HP Quality Center to reflect your process flow and organizational requirements. Share customizable analysis tools Based on organizational roles, you can restrict individuals from viewing certain records in the defecttracking process. For example, you can restrict some developers to viewing only defects that have been assigned to them. Similarly, you can block beta customers who have access to the defect database from viewing the target fix date for any defect. Your testers can attach information to a defect, such as a description file or a view of the application being tested, to help illustrate a problem. To further help development reproduce the issue, your testers can attach information about all system components, such as memory, operating system or color settings. Attached as a text file, all this data can help reproduce the problem and accelerate problem resolution. The filters, reports, graphs and favorites in the Defect Management feature in HP Quality Center can help assess whether an application is ready to be deployed by answering the following questions. Are your testers finding more defects than they are fixing? Are your developers overloaded with too many urgent bugs assigned to them? Are there more defects in the current version of the application than in the previous release? All of this information is available through the customizable analysis tools and can be shared across the organization. 15

16 Summary The application-testing process is unique for every organization. However, many testing teams follow a similar methodology that includes identifying the functional requirements, creating a test plan, running tests and tracking application defects. This approach to testing requires powerful software that can promote communication and collaboration among teams, while adding organization and structure to the testing process. HP offers global test management with HP Quality Center. By integrating requirements management with test planning, test scheduling, test execution and defect tracking in a single web-based application, HP Quality Center streamlines and accelerates the testing process. To learn more, visit Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. 4AA1-2314ENW, May 2007