Mercury Quality Centre(Test Director)

Mercury Quality Center is a web-based test management tool. It gives you a centralized control over your entire testing Project. It can make the task of the testers and managers easy by giving an easy interface to manage and organize activities like Requirements coverage, Test Case Management, Test Execution Reporting, Defect Management, and Test Automation. All these activities are provided from a single tool, which is web-based and can be accessed from any where. Mercury Quality Centre can be divided into two parts. One for tool administrator and another for tool user. These two parts are called Site Administrator Bin and Quality Centre Bin. These parts are discussed in more detail in the next section.

Site Administration Bin ( SABin ) : This is an important part of the software and also starting point for the usage of Mercury Quality Centre project. All the administrative activities like creating the projects, assigning users to the projects, creating specific roles etc. is done from this area. This section is also used for configuring your application with the tool. For example, if you want to use the Winrunner or Quality Test Professional ( QTP ) scripts from Quality Center, you need to specify it here. If you are using Winrunner, you need to make sure that backward compatibility property of the application to true. SABin can also be used to configure the mail servers. Password for site admin is defined during the installation so make sure that you remember the password during installation.

Quality Center Bin ( QCBin ) : This is how user interact with tool. QCBin interface gives functionality of creating test plans, defining requirements, creating test cases, creating test labs, associating requirements with defects in essence, everything that as a tester or test manager you need to do in your day to day activity apart from execution.

This article will start off with the explanation about SABin and then move towards using Quality Center using the QCbin.

Quality Centre is installed as a service in your windows environment. Before start working on it, make sure that Mercury Quality Centre service is running. As mentioned earlier, Quality Centre can be accessed from web browser using http://:8080/sabin/SiteAdmin.htm format, assuming that Quality Centre is listening on default port. This page is the starting point and gives a login screen where you need to provide admin credential which were used during the installation of Mercury Quality Centre. Once you are logged on to the SABin, you can perform all the administrative tasks mentioned above. You can also verify your licensing information, information about database etc. using SABin.

After you are done with defining your projects, user etc. it is time for QCBin to come into the picture. This is the most common interface used by the customers or users. Quality Center provides the role based accessed to the Projects. For example, A Test Manager can create projects and Test Lead can prepare test plans and tester can write the test cases. This role based access makes it very easy to control access to various artifacts of the project and also distribution of responsibility among team members.

There are four distinct things which can be managed in Mercury Quality Centre :

1. Requirements
2. Test Plan
3. Test Lab
4. Defects

These four items can be termed as the 4 pillars of the Quality Process for any organization. Each of these components sections contain information about different projects created using SABin.

Hope you have got good knowledge of Mercury Quality Centre on the above. To take it further, let us explore functionality of QCBin in step by step manner.

• Create a test project in SABin.
• Now log on to QCBin by providing your credentials and access the project that you have created.
• After you log in to the QCBin you will notice different tabs for requirement, TestPlan, TestLab and Defects.
• Click on the Requirements tab. Under this tab, you can organize your project requirements. You can also create folder hierarchy to represent various features in your project. This can be accomplished by just right-clicking and choosing appropriate options.
• After you have created new requirements its time for the Test Plan. Test Plan will have information about the test cases. These test cases can also be mapped to requirements created in the earlier steps, thus makes foundation for the traceability metrics.
• Each requirement can be mapped to one or more than one test cases. After creating new test case you will see in the left hand pane. The right hand pane will have tabs for writing the steps, mapping to requirements, description, expected result etc.
• Every test case will have steps and for every step you can specify the expected behavior. These test cases can also be linked to the QTP or Winrunner Scripts, thereby providing you better management for the automation and capability of executing automation scripts from Quality Centre itself.
• After the Test Plan preparation its time for the Test Execution. You have to create a Test Lab for managing test execution for specific release. Test Labs can be created, specific to the release and execution of test cases specific to release can be managed very easily using this concept.
• In the Test Lab you can identify the set of test cases already written under test plan to include for execution. These test cases are already linked to the requirement so after each test cycle the management will be able to trace what requirements have been tested.
• Automated Tests can be fired from Test Lab if you have integration with QTP in place. When you choose the option of manual test execution, a window will open up containing the steps to execute. These steps are executed and after every step you can specify whether it is passed or not. Quality Center also allows parameterized manual test execution, where some of the default parameters like username, password etc. can automatically be read during the manual execution. For example, suppose you have a template test which logs in a user with a specific password when you start your application, you need to call this test at the beginning of each test. In some cases, you will want to log in as a regular user while in others, you will need to log in as the administrator. You can therefore create two parameters, <> and <>, and change the value according to which type of test is calling your template test.
• The defects encountered during the failure of any of the steps can automatically be logged in to the defect tracking system, already integrated with Quality Centre.
• After the Test Execution the important part is Defects :) As already mentioned, this is integrated with the Qulaity center and incase of any failure from the manual or automated tests, defects can be logged.
• One of the most important part of the test management is generating reports. After all the planning and execution, its REPORTING time. Quality Center provides a very good reporting feature by providing certain pre-defined reports and also capability to create your own reports.

Hope information provided above would have provided you a good overview about Mercury Quality Center.

So lets test yourself with the Quality Center interview questions asked in different Companies

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