HP Quality Center Tutorials – Learn HP ALM/QC in 7 Days

Our recent QTP online training series with 25+ in-depth tutorials is helping many readers to get started in QTP. After this series we have received many requests to cover HP Quality Center tutorials.
So from today, we are starting QC tutorial series. This will be HP ALM/QC test management software online training in 7 in-depth tutorials. Again, Swati Seela, our guest author for QTP, is helping us for these tutorials.
We have listed all tutorials on this page for your convenience. It’s recommended you read these tutorials sequentially. I’m sure, once you are done with reading, you won’t need any other training to start using this tool on your live projects.

Quality Center Tutorials

• Day #1 Tutorial: Introduction to HP Quality Center (HP ALM)
• Day #2 Tutorial: Quality Center Installation guide
• Day #3 Tutorial: Requirements and Release Cycle Management
• Day #4 Tutorial: Creating and Managing Test Cases
• Day #5 Tutorial: Executing Test Cases Using ALM/QC
• Day #6 Tutorial: Adding Defects and other miscellaneous topics
• Day #7 Tutorial: Project Analysis Using the Dashboard Tools

Day 1 – HP Quality Center Introduction and Installation

This tutorial covers HP ALM/QC introduction, installing ALM, and understanding different components.
Introduction to HP Application Lifecycle Management/Quality Center:
HP ALM formerly known as Quality Center is a Test Management tool to manage entire Quality Assurance and testing process for an organization. Before being called HP Quality center it used to be Mercury Test Director.
In my experience I have come across very few projects (Manual and Automation) that did not use Quality Center software. It is a very simple tool to use, extremely user friendly. Even if you have never used it before, chances are you will be able to figure out how to in a really short time. However, there is a lot of difference between being able to navigate through the tool and being able to exploit its potential to benefit your project.
So here is a tutorial to easily learn Quality Center capabilities and use them successfully.
Download HP ALM/QC Trial: The current version of HP ALM is 11.5. You can download the trial version from the following link: Hp Quality Center Download
It is a little tricky to install it on your local machine. But you will be able to do so, if you have a compatible machine and understand the components ALM has.
Briefly, the following are the components:

• A server
• A client
• Database

Each component has a certain version that is compatible with ALM.
For system requirement please refer to the page: HP ALM System Requirements

Why is ALM/QC used?

ALM helps make project management, from requirements to deployment easier. It increases predictability and creates a framework to manage projects from a central repository.  With ALM you will be able to:

1. Define and maintain requirements and tests.
2. Create Tests
3. Organize tests into logical subsets
4. Schedule tests and execute them
5. Collect results and analyze the data
6. Create, monitor and analyze defects
7. Share defects across projects
8. Track progress of a project
9. Collect metrics
10. Share asset libraries across projects
11. Integrate ALM with HP testing tools other third party tools for a complete automation experience.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) flow:

How to start ALM

Step #1: To start ALM type the address http://<ALM Platform Server Name>[<:Port number>]/qcbin
Step #2: Click “Application LifeCycle Management” in the below window.
 
Step #3: Enter the user name and password. “Authenticate “button gets activated. Click on it. The Domain and Project fields get activated. Depending on your login credentials you have access to certain projects. (This information is set by your ALM Admin). (Click on image to enlarge)

Step #4: Choose the Domain and Project as required and click “Login”. Once you are logged in, ALM window opens up and displays the module in which you were working last.
Domain is nothing but a logical division of departments for your organization. Example: Banking, Retail, Health Care etc.
Projects are the different teams working within the domain. For example in a Retail project, they could be working on the front end store Point of sale app or the back end inventory module.
The Domain and Project information is set by the ALM Admin.

Step #5: The user domain, Project and user information is displayed on the upper right hand corner. Also notice the side bar. It contains the components from the ALM flow.

• Dashboard
• Management
• Requirements
• Testing
• Defects

ALM is all about these components and we will learn what each one is for.  Even though Dashboard is the first in the list, we will discuss it last in our series, simply because it is an overall monitoring feature and it will be more practical to see the data that we actually create.
In next tutorial, we will continue HP ALM/QC training by taking an example of Gmail application. This session will cover what HP ALM can do for your project and how best you can manage all your testing related activities at one place.