Quality Center Review

• Integration with other HPE products
• APIs
• Dashboards

Defects and Test management were earlier conducted with the help of Excel sheets. Now, they are tracked in the Quality Center leading to accountability, dashboards, and being tracked in a single place.

Licensing model: HPE has one of the most rigid, inflexible, and super expensive license models. It is an extremely heavy system application. The UI is very dated. Most applications these days have a light UI that can be accessed by pretty much any browser; QC still uses a UI which has a look almost the same for the past 20 years! I am guessing they are doing this to maintain the same look and feel so that they do not have to get their customers familiar with a new UI. When you compare this system's heavy UI with JIRA or TFS, the difference is evident!

I have been using this solution from the time it was part of Mercury Corp as a Test Director. That makes it around 17 years.

Past versions were a pain to use with frequent crashes. The current version also has its own set of problems with HPE deciding to do away with its HTML/Lite version leading to a lot of confusion.

While getting additional licenses is straightforward, HPE's licensing model makes life difficult with customers having to submit a "non-usage" agreement if they do not want active support for part of the licenses. For example, you have 100 licenses and decide to get an additional 50; later on you want to downscale to 50, you will need to sign a document that says that you will not use those licenses even though you OWN the licenses! We found this extremely irritating and impossible to explain to end customers who were (and still are) irate. Support should not have anything to do with usage!

Technical support is pretty good. However, their SLAs are based on locale, timing, etc.

We did not previously use a different solution.

HPE has one of the most complicated installations. Upgrades are a nightmare. Even HPE recommends doing a fresh installation and a cut-over.

HPEs licensing model is inflexible, rigid, and is not customer-centric.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

I would recommend going towards another solution unless you have an entire HPE shop. Other similar products offer more features, are lighter, and are very light on the pocket book, too. We are also moving away from this product, primarily due to licensing costs