The Mercury name may be dead and gone, but Hewlett-Packard has kept Quality Center alive and well. HP QC 10 will arrive in January, according to announcements made by the company at its annual user conference in Vienna, Austria, today.
The biggest change for users of the existing quality assurance suite will be the more cohesive package around the testing, life-cycle management and requirements gathering tools that make up HP QC 10.
Mark Sarbiewski, senior director of products at HP Software, said that QC 10 will use Web-based portals to coordinate all of the work around software projects inside of an enterprise. What's changed in version 10 is the ability to control those projects in a more collaborative way and to extend them out to users who would normally live within the walls of their own projects.
Previous versions of QC, said Sarbiewski, focused on handling development in a project-specific fashion. With version 10, sub-projects and individual components are no longer isolated islands, as connections between requirements, issue tracking and testing persist across project boundaries.
This time out of the gate, requirements can be tied to bugs and workflow can be analyzed by managers, without extra modifications or customizations. The goal is to give developers and business intelligence workers a single place to deal with all of their software creation needs, yet still allow the individual tools of development, such as bug tracking and repository controls, to be interchangeable.
As such, QC 10 is available a la carte. Existing customers may qualify for 0% lease financing, a major new sales pitch at this year's user conference. HP sees a need to make its software more enticing to cash-strapped organizations, and it hopes that this financing effort will drive sales, said Sarbiewski.
QC 10 is also available as a software-as-a-service offering directly from HP. Sarbiewski said that such offerings eliminate the need for IT to implement and maintain development systems. The SaaS offerings behind QC 10 will also be available in January.