Mercury Quality Centre

Introduction:

Testing Tools - Test Management

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 -

• Requirements
• Test Plan
• Test Lab
• 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.

Source: http://www.testinggeek.com/index.php/testing-tools/test-management/85-mrecury-quality-centre-introduction

A perfect Quality Center and application managaement tools makes the Website Quality a lot better.