On the Quality Center side that came from the Mercury organization, HP is introducing a new requirements management module that will be tied to quality center. The goal is to drive testing of business requirements, and provide the necessary traceability to go with it. It will offer traceability by requirements types, which could include functional requirements, system requirements, testing requirements, and so on.
HP’s move echoes that of Compuware, which recently announced that its strategy to drive project management, development and design, and testing through a new requirements offering.
HP also has added time boxing into its QA Test Director offering to accommodate agile development approaches, which are typically conducted in shorter increments.
In a related development, HP’s consulting services unit, which already had a modest QA practice, is expanding it to capitalize on the fact that it now has Mercury in house. Specifically, it will take Mercury’s existing QA methodology and structure new services around it. And it will open an onshore/offshore hybrid QA program that will take a follow the sun approach to testing services.
HP has been slowly ramping up the services. Currently with about a dozen clients, HP claims that it has tens of prospects in the pipeline.
Finally, HP rounded out its announcements with a new added capability to its Universal CMDB to store change requests submitted through Service desk. The goal is to give the change advisory boards that are emerging in many organizations a single place to view all requests that they must consider.
Our View
The dual QA and service management mix of HP’s slew of software announcements looks at first glance to be a bit of an odd couple because these are traditionally two separate segments that have had little to do with each other. But following the acquisition of Mercury, and with the impetus of ITIL, which had driven codification of processes around IT infrastructure, it make sense for HP to start developing synergies here. It echoes efforts that IBM’s Software group is conducting in building bridges between rational and Tivoli.
And the unveiling of a QA service from HP’s consulting group is also, in retrospect, a no-brainer. The obvious ingredients were there: HP has a large consulting group, and it has a new entity (Mercury) whose offerings are well suited to services. It’s something that Mercury, as a product company, did not previously have the resources to deliver. And despite the automation that tools like Mercury’s provide, QA remains a labor-intensive process, where throwing teams of specialists at it can make a real difference.
