Baselines vs. Versions – 3 Reasons Why it Matters in HPE ALM and QC

By: Matt Angerer

ResultsPositive recently wrapped up a best practices session about Quality Center’s libraries and baselining feature with a client. We explained to our client that baselining provides them with the ability to take a snapshot of current project activities whereas versioning helps compare saved entities with their current state while also restoring to older versions if necessary.

Yes, it’s true that versioning will provide you with the ability to compare changes on an entity-by-entity basis (micro). The libraries and baselining feature, however, enables you to specify the entities you want to compare at a macro level. Both features are important aspects of ALM and Quality Center for QA Leaders and Project Managers. Specifying libraries and then baselining allows you to gain better control and visibility over specific features within your application under test (AUT). The examples below show both features can help you as a Quality Leader:

  • Quality Leaders must work closely with their Product Owners who are the liaison between the Development Team and Business. The Product Owners work directly with your Scrum Masters to propose User Stories and Requirements. As a Quality Leader, it’s your responsibility to track, oversee, and control how the evolution of requirements impacts the design of your test cases. After all, your test plans need to reflect the reality of your AUT — otherwise, they are ineffective. In order to do that, you need a quick and effective means to compare and contrast baselines of requirements. With Quality Center‘s libraries feature, you can quickly specify a library and take a snapshot (or baseline). A few weeks later, you can take another baseline and compare the differences to see how the requirements have evolved as a result of change requests or enhancements. With that information, you can work with your Testing Engineers to update test cases and ensure adequate coverage.
  • ALM and Quality Center Enterprise provide you the ability to maintain a shared object repository for HPE Unified Functional Test (UFT) assets. Often times, you’ll have a team of Automation Engineers (sometimes offshore) manipulating this object repository to accommodate the needs of an evolving AUT. With the libraries and baselining feature, you can baseline a shared object repository at various time intervals and track changes to it overtime. Leveraging this feature of ALM or QCE helps keep you in the driver’s seat with specifics on what your team is changing each week.
  • Versioning within ALM and Quality Center Enterprise can be enabled on a project-by-project basis. Versioning is different from Libraries and Baselines in that it provides you with a micro-level view of an entity within the platform. Say for instance a change request was cancelled at the last minute before a build was scheduled for delivery to production. Your test engineers closely analyzed the requirements associated with the change request and updated a batch of regression test cases accordingly. New design steps and additional parameters were added for exercising various branches of logic in the AUT. However, the cancellation of the CR means that these feature enhancements will never make it to the live production-ready system. With that information handy, you are able to revert back to the older version of those regression test cases with a few clicks — while saving the updated version.

At ResultsPositive, we provide our customers with 1-on-1 coaching and mentoring across a myriad of products, including: Quality Center, Application Lifecycle Management, Octane, Sprinter, Unified Functional Test (UFT), LoadRunner, Performance Center, StormRunner, Fortify On-Demand, and AppPulse.

As an HPE Platinum Partner, we not only resell the suite of ADM products — but we provide the support apparatus and long-term mentoring to help your organization make the best use of each product. Download HPE’s versioning best practices whitepaper. Let’s talk today.

 

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