The new UX of HPE Quality Center/ALM

Choosing the UI-Stack

Five years ago, I joined Hewlett Packard from a dev-tools and UX company, Infragistics. The Director of Products at that time asked me what we should do to refresh the UX of Quality Center. Should we focus on web or mobile? What technology would I chose; the emerging Silverlight or HTML or maybe WPF or GWT.

I said, "If I was in your shoes, the next generation of Quality Center UI will be in the command prompt/terminal." He laughed his usual laugh and said 'come on be serious.'

Five Years Later

I'm the Director of Products for Quality Center/ALM. We've been on a journey to refresh the UX, but I decided to change all that. I'm pleased to announce the next UI for HPE Quality Center/ALM is…the command line, code-named: QC-Retro.

QC-Retro

This new version will be available soon and will be the first version of Quality Center truly running cross-OS. With the power of the terminal, teams will be able to visualize their progress and quality without opening a browser.

In extensive usability testing with developers, we found that in general the browser window was only open for viewing critical information such as "Funny Cats Big Compilation 2015! [New]" or "Your cat is a lot deeper than you think." After releasing a private beta of QC-Retro, one of our beta customers, Matt Brayley-Berger said "I've seen increased productivity from my team since adopting QC-Retro as the possibility of distractions in the browser window are now a bit further removed."

So, how does it work? We've taken a dependency on NodeJS and with simple node queries a developer can easily visualize the status of his dev-environment. For instance, I can simply call MyCriticalDefectList and it returns a list of my critical defects.

From the terminal, we also support creating defects, changing the status of defects, updating test runs, etc.

HPE QC-Retro Enterprise Edition

In addition, to promote developer and dev-test productivity; I'm pleased to announce our HPE QC-Retro Enterprise Edition. This allows for a full dashboard; so tech-savvy executives can be 'legitimate' with their developers and still get the information they require!

ALM/Quality Center Beta

On a more serious note, I recently announced a beta for the journey that we are on in redefining ALM/Quality Center (not QC-Retro). You can access the beta here. As soon as this beta goes GA and the public API's get locked down; I'll make the QC-Retro source code available (maybe, I'll get someone to re-write it properly as it's been a while since I've gotten to code…).

Special thanks to my friend and a genius Yaron Naveh who wrote the terminal widget library I used for creating this dashboard "Blessed-Contrib" found on Github here. He actually added the stacked-column chart for me on request and did it on trans-Atlantic flight. Now that's dev-efficiency! Thank You, Yaron!