Reinventing HPE ALM/Quality Center
Taking a bold approach to redefine what a market leader in quality should do - embracing change, building open systems, and evolving with our customers.
The HPE Application Lifecycle Management/Quality Center product has been in the market for a long time. It serves a dominating ~30%+ of IDC's ASQ market which is roughly $2.5B, including 24 of the Fortune 25 companies, as well as customers many industries. Customers from banking to aerospace have made ALM/QC a central part of their mission critical processes.
A couple of years ago, I got the honor to lead a team of talented product managers who have lived and breathed that product line; some from before HP acquired Mercury. My team and I decided to take a risk, we decided to be bold; we decided to redefine what a market leader in quality should do.
We started by embracing the fact that the world is always changing and it is our job as leaders in the ADLM market, and more specifically the quality market, to make sure we evolve with it and provide a path forward for the customers who have staked their careers on us. The second commitment was to build an open system that is flexible enough to work with any tool across the lifecycle of an application. With these fundamental truths in mind, we set out on our journey.
Along the way, the product team faced a lot of hard questions about how bold we could truly be. We as a group prioritized user-experience as critical, just like stability and scale. We also knew that we needed to ensure we focused on the requirements of the team, but also the requirements of the enterprise.
Now, these are all high-level market ideas that could arguably be applied to any product. What types of things can you expect from us with respect to the actual domain of quality?
Now for some people, these may seem like no-brainers and for others maybe a bit shocking. I can remember many arguments and many passionate discussions as we formed our point of view.
Our Core Beliefs
First, we believe that transparency, visibility, and collaboration across the lifecycle of an application is paramount to its success.
Second, we believe that in a modern enterprise there will be a mix of process from waterfall to agile and we should understand that, but adhere that quality is the key component.
Third, we believe that to adapt to a changing world of process and practices we shouldn't abandon our past, but should offer an evolutionary approach towards new software delivery processes.
Product Philosophy
Specifically at the product level, we believe in source control (SCM). We believe we should offer the option for our customers to store their tests with the code and always have them versioned. We also believe in the continuous integration process and that quality is a core component of that.
Furthermore, there are tools used for SCM and Continuous Integration that aren't core to our business. Therefore, we embrace open source completely to leverage in our products and commit to fostering open source development. Not everything we create to help us deliver software will be something we will sell; some projects we will simply contribute to the community.
Team Approach
Lastly, from a team perspective. We believe we should practice what we preach. The team that I have the honor of working with is agile, delivers software continuously, and has rigorous quality standards to ensure our customers can consume our software as quickly as we push it to production.
Today, I am excited to announce publicly, that we have embarked on this journey and I would ask for your thoughts and your help. You can see what we've done and what we've built in detail in this sneak peek of our first public beta. Enjoy!