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Quality Center - Specific Question and then some general ones

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11 replies

by cupcake

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Hey fellow TR members...

I have been tasked to do some major cleanup in our Quality Center DB, but I hate staring at the screen. I could do much better if I could print out the directory structure and then be able to 'check off' or highlight folders or tests that need editing. But I cannot find a way (short of screen shots, which I don't want to do) of printing the hierarchical structure. Does anyone know how to do this? Or even if it can be done?

Second, can anyone suggest a place or website or book that can help me improve my QC skills?

Thanks in advance!

11 replies

by tig2

First- what DB is your Quality Center built in? That will determine if and how you would get to the hierarchal structure.

Second- the toughest thing that you will run into is that different sources call the QC different things. A clearer understanding of WHAT the tool does for you will tell me where to send you for more comprehensive information. For instance, is your QC an element of a CMDB? Does your shop have full or partial ITIL implemented or are you focused on getting to ITIL?

Finally- the best way to approach this task may be to break it into manageable chunks. Kinda like how best to eat an elephant.

by cupcake

Um, Quality Center is the database, its HP's Quality Center. Is that what you're asking me? It used to be Mercury, but HP purchased sometime during the last year (I think).

Right now, the primary task is to standardize for test scripts... naming, steps, etc. I am starting with the naming convention. So in the test plan, I simply want to print out the complete list of projects and the test scripts that are contain within.

Make sense?

by charliespencer

If all you want to do is print the directory tree on a Windows system, Google 'TreePrint'. It adds an option to your right-click menu in Explorer to print the directory tree down as many levels as you specify, or save it as a text file.

by jaqui

a linux or unix environment,
open a terminal window and type:

ls -R >> ls.txt

and it gives you exactly the same thing, a recursive listing [ ls -R ] in a plain text file [ >> ls.txt ]

edit to add:

just make sure you are in the top level directory you want the listing for. or add the path/to/directory/ after the ls

and the capitol R is needed, lower case r reverses the order not recursive.

by charliespencer

Bill would have built this functionality into the OS, along with a 'Print Screen' key that actually prints the screen. I guess improving the graphics on 'Minesweeper' took priority.

by cupcake

I appreciate everyone's suggestions, but this is within the software application HP's Quality Center, not from a Explorer directory.

Correct me if I am wrong, and I will look into TreePrint.

by cupcake

A quick search shows a version for 95, 98 and NT but not one for XP. Am I looking in the wrong place?

by jaqui

to use sql dump and include structure.

do not include content in the dump, that would include the entire database in the printout.

by jaqui

add this basic functionality?
they don't think that a command line is useful, and ls / dir are command line tools.

not to mention the critical limitation of being case ignorant, removing the capability of having all the switch options for the command line tools.

by charliespencer

The description isn't updated but it will install and function in XP. However, based on your subsequent posts I don't think it's the tool you need. I initially missed the bit about the HP app. TreePrint won't delve into that; sorry about the distraction.

by wilsonmar

Quality Center is a shared web application with several modules (Requirements, Business Components, Test Plan, Test Sets, Defects). Each of these modules is an app on its own right The product's ease of configuration can result in quite a mess to clean-up if various people have worked on it over time.

Getting a hierarchy list is the least of your problems because there are dozens of tables in the database linked all sorts of different ways.

To do your job properly, your organisation needs to control the data in Quality Center just like its accounting application system, with the correct staffing and controls on users.

Customizing the application's edits and workflow requires VBScript and VB6 COM programming expertise.

All this complexity means you need duplicate sets of hardware for separate dev and production environments.

To create reports and extracts to Excel, You need someone skilled in manipulating hierarchies with SQL Query code. There are free-form multi-attribute value tables in the database. Coding for all this differs significantly between MS SQL Server and Oracle implementations.

I have created Oracle code to list the hierarchy tree for each of the several trees in the system (Requirements, Test Plan, Test Set, etc). But it's too long to list here. Which hierarchy do you need listed?

I've also found it helpful to have SQL code to monitor the number of rows in each table, and track that over time in an Excel graph so you can avoid sudden outages due to running out of extents.

This means that you also need someone skilled with creating Excel charts and managing worksheets that update over time.

Additionally, SQL code to provide a count of how many of each value selected by users helps to identify fields that should be either enforced or eliminated.

- Wilson Mar at gmail dot com

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