Mercury TestDirector for Quality Center is an enterprise-class solution, recognized as one of the most complete and integrated software suites geared towards the management of testing- and quality-related activities. Mercury Interactive, the company behind TestDirector, was bought by Hewlett Packard in 2006 for USD 4.5 billion (Wikipedia). TestDirector is used by several important organizations such as Nextel, the United States Navy, Nestlé, Qualcomm and Shell (Mercury Website, 2007a).
Mercury TestDirector provides the following features (Mercury Website 2007b, 2007c & 2007d):
- Requirements Management: analysts can use TestDirector to define the complete business needs of the software solution to be tested and evaluated, as a list of individual pieces of functionality; this way, the testing teams can evaluate the testing coverage across the software solution in terms of covered functionality.
- Test Planning: test managers can use TestDirector to build, document and share the complete test plan, even allowing the direct import of Microsoft Office documents into the TestDirector repository.
- Test Automatization and Scheduling: test engineers can create integrated test scripts directly in TestDirector, and trigger their execution at defined times.
- Defect Management: developers are notified of defects found in the system using the integrated bug database.
- Reporting: TestDirector is able to export data to a wide variety of formats and supports, to allow stakeholders to be aware of the current state of the quality processes.
- Integration with External Tools: TestDirector can be integrated through its open, documented API with external bug tracking systems, such as Atlassian JIRA (JIRA Community Space) or source code management systems, such as Subversion (Collab.net Website) or IBM Relational ClearCase (Mercury Website, 2007e) among other tools.
- Multi-platform Support: Mercury TestDirector is a J2EE application, that can be installed in any system with a JRE (Windows, Linux, Solaris) and a compatible application server (JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic), using many different database backend systems (Oracle or MS SQL Server).
TestDirector provides the main benefit of the complete integration of the whole quality process, thanks to its complete toolkit:
Using TestDirector for Quality Center, multiple groups throughout your organization can contribute to the quality process:
- Business analysts define application requirements and testing objectives.
- Test managers and project leads design test plans and develop > test cases.
- Test managers automatically create QA testing requirements and test assets for SOA services and environments.
- Test automation engineers create automated scripts and store them in the repository.
- QA testers run manual and automated tests, report execution results, and enter defects.
- Developers review and fix defects logged into the database.
- Project managers can export test and resource data in various reports, or in native Microsoft Excel for analysis.
- Product managers decide whether an application is ready to be released.
- QA analysts can auto-generate test asset documentation in Microsoft Word format.
(Mercury Website, 2007a)
In conclusion, TestDirector enables an unparalleled level of integration between the testing and development teams, while at the same time offering a high degree of visibility to all stakeholders about the quality process.
References
Collab.net Website, “Supporting Mercury Test Director bug tracking with Subversion”, [Internet] http://connectors.open.collab.net/alm-process/2-Articles%20and%20docs/documents/td_svn_use_case.pdf (Accessed May 5th, 2007)
JIRA Community Space, “JIRA to Mercury TestDirector bridge”, [Internet] http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRACOM/JIRA+to+Mercury+TestDirector+bridge (Accessed May 5th, 2007)
Mercury Website, “Mercury TestDirector”, 2007a [Internet] http://www.mercury.com/us/products/quality-center/testdirector/ (Accessed May 5th, 2007)
Mercury Website, “Mercury TestDirector - How it Works”, 2007b [Internet] http://www.mercury.com/us/products/quality-center/testdirector/works.html (Accessed May 5th, 2007)
Mercury Website, “Mercury TestDirector - System Requirements”, 2007c [Internet] http://www.mercury.com/us/products/quality-center/testdirector/requirements.html (Accessed May 5th, 2007)
Mercury Website, “Mercury TestDirector - Data Sheet”, 2007d [Internet] http://www.mercury.com/us/pdf/products/datasheets/DS-1134-0906-testdirector.pdf (Accessed May 5th, 2007)
Mercury Website, “Rational ClearCase Version Control Add-in”, 2007e [Internet] http://updates.merc-int.com/testdirector/td80/version_control/RCC_vc/index.html (Accessed May 5th, 2007)
Wikipedia, “Mercury Interactive”, [Internet] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive (Accessed May 5th, 2007)