Integrated Virtual Lab Automation for HP Quality Center
The Challenge
The Solution: Surgient and HP Quality Center
How it Works
Benefits
Technical Specifications
The Challenge
Leading organizations rely on HP Quality Center everyday to effectively manage application testing tradeoffs. But there’s a new and growing source of tradeoff pressure – the unmanaged test lab. Manual setup of test environments can often take days or weeks leading to longer test cycles, reduced coverage and increased delivery risk. While HP Quality Center has helped organizations dramatically increase the effectiveness of test management and execution, little has been done to automate the test lab. That is, until now.
HP Quality Center with Integrated Enterprise Test Lab Management
The Surgient Platform enables HP Quality Center customers to accelerate test cycles by consolidating test infrastructure and automating the setup of test environments on-demand. Surgient complements HP Quality Center to eliminate two pervasive testing barriers: insufficient or unavailable test infrastructure and the excessive time required to deploy and configure today’s test environments.
- Centrally manage and allocate test lab resources across multiple, distributed teams according to business policies and quotas
- Automatically and reliably provision complex, multi-machine test configurations on a scheduled or on-demand basis
- Maintain a comprehensive library of known-good test configurations and customer/production environments
- Securely request, access, save and restore environments for manual or automated testing from any browser or test script worldwide (24x7)
- Leverage standard reports, or author custom reports using 3rd-party SQL tools, to accurately measure and track test lab resource use
How the Integration Works
Multiple methods are available to integrate the Surgient QA/Test Solution and HP Quality Center based on your testing needs and existing processes:
- Testers login to the Surgient Platform and self-serve their test configuration needs instead of submitting requests to IT or lab admins
- With HP Quality Center and Surgient, testers can automatically launch test sets against dynamically deployed test configurations
- Testing tools (e.g. HP QuickTest Professional, HP WinRunner), request test configurations programmatically using APIs or CLI
In all cases, the flow of events is as follows:
- The QA/Test Solution is requested to reserve a test configuration where availability of (and access to) configurations is controlled by security policies
- At the scheduled time or on-demand, the Surgient Platform automatically provisions the requested configuration from a central library onto shared resources
- The Surgient QA/Test Solution configures the test environment and makes it available for use (e.g. networking, isolation, remote access)
- Other software (e.g. build, patch) may be manually or automatically installed until the environment reflects the system under test
- After testing is complete, the QA/Test Solution may be requested to snapshot (save) the environment in its current state for additional testing or analysis
- Lab resources are immediately freed up and available for other requests
Parallel testing, where multiple configurations are deployed at the same time until the entire test matrix has been executed, is also supported.
Only HP Software offers an end-to-end solution for manual and automated testing combining enterprise test management and test lab management.
Benefits of HP Quality Center integrated with the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform
- Cut test cycles in half by fully automating test environment setup and teardown on-demand
- Improve quality by testing as close to production as possible
- Expand testing capacity without adding test hardware or personnel
- Ensure testing consistency across distributed dev / test teams
- Eliminate time spent reproducing defects in complex applications
Technical Specifications
Supported Applications:
HP Quality Center 9.2
VERIFICATION ENVIRONMENT:
Hardware:
Minimum of (2) x86 servers; minimum 2GB RAM and 40GB free disk space each
Surgient Software:
Surgient QA/Test Solution 5.4 or later
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
Microsoft IIS 6.x w/ ASP.NET
Microsoft Data Access Client 2.8
Microsoft IE 6.0 / 7.0
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 / 2.0
Virtualization Software:
VMware ESX 3.0.1 / 3.5
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2
Guest Operating Systems:
Any guest operating system supported by virtualization software
About HP Verified Integrations
HP Verified Integrations are product-release specific interfaces built by HP partners that are tested and verified by HP’s Verified Integration team.
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