User:Babbling Bob/sandbox

QC Reporting is a web-based reporting tool. It extracts data from a database to produce reports by the test tool HP Quality Center (its predecessor being HP Test Director). The resulting reporting media can be in the following formats:
 * PDF
 * Microsoft Excel
 * Screen table
 * Adobe Flash Graph
 * Microsoft Word
 * HTML

QC Reporting targets testing resources who spend time writing and maintaining test reports by attempting to reduce cycle times and improving accurately. QCReporting is usually installed as part of a company's intranet to preserve accessibility.

Need for some QC Reporting tool
The testing product that is used with QC Reporting is Quality Center. Quality Center comes with reports that can be built and set by the user but they often lead to a very long HTML output. Over the years, testers (usually the test manager of a test team) would spend time creating and formatting reports for senior management. This process has been known to take a full working day to complete, usually involving multiple Excel report extracts. This in turn led to the writing of custom reports. These were often developed using one of two methods:
 * By connecting to Quality Center using 'VBScript' report script which extracts the data and creates a formatted report. The format of the report is set in the code.
 * By scripting with VBScript inside Quality Center in its workflow area. Quality Center allows adding custom buttons to its dashboard, which can then be used to trigger the custom report script.

The first option became the most popular with extracts also being written to Microsoft Excel which could then be used to create graphs.

The need for up-to-date information inspired further ways to extract data from Quality Center and format a report.

Example of a VB Script used to extract a QC report
The following VBScript can be executed by typing wscript scriptname.vbs at the command prompt.

The tool helps make the need for scripts such as these a thing of the past. The following script is an example of what a test manager would have had to use to extract data from Quality Center.

Marriage of QCReporting to Quality Center
There are a number of ways where a marriage relationship is apparent between the reporting tool and Quality Center.
 * Users are not created in QCReporting, instead they are synchronized from Quality Center. The synchronization includes their user settings and access rights to domains and projects.
 * Data managed and altered in Quality Center is reported on using a read-only user in QCReporting.
 * Customisation, such as user fields, made in Quality Center are reported on through QCReporting.

QCReporting tool support
The tool offers user support and functionality to manage itself.

User support is primarily managed through a web based ticket system of the clients own installed instance of the tool.
 * User Support
 * Tickets can be user or group owned
 * Tickets can be escalated
 * Simple requests such as wanting a new report can be raised as a ticket
 * Fixes to tickets appear through the automatic update system


 * Tool maintenance
 * An auto update facility downloads and installs the latest updates from the support site. The update is encrypted over https.
 * The tool verifies each transmission with its unique client license information

QCReporting was born
Quality Center is a testing tool that is very common in the testing world. The test tool is divided into four main categories. The QCReporting follows those categories. They are:
 * Requirements & coverage assurance report. These can be business, design, functional and non-functional requirements.
 * Test plan
 * Test Lab
 * Defects
 * Dashboards. These are overview cross-project and cross-domain reports. (Most popular with upper management).
 * Test Exit reports - at the end of every phase and cycle issue the report summaries the finding, the coverage and the outcome.
 * The additional category is Audit reports which follow the Sarbanes–Oxley legislation.

The tool is positioned as a time-saving device that improves accuracy: producing the Test Exit report, which includes all the customized fields of QC is just one button click away; or a few if you would like to exclude certain parts of the default settings.

The tool provides a comprehensive overview of the test coverage reports showing horizontal and vertical tractability between all of the project requirements and test scripts whilst highlighting where there may be gaps, such as missing requirements or orphaned test scripts.

QCReporting aims to provide a comprehensive, intuitive dashboard that allows the user an overview of their project.

The tool plays a role in the Impact Assessment procedure, providing conscious and unambiguous views of the real impact of the change or of the delay to the defect fix.