HP Quality Center Premier:

reaping the benefits of enterprise

release management
White paper
Table of contents
Asset sharing and reuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Cross-project reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Process enablement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Defect sharing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
High-availability servers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Why HP Quality Center Premier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Figure 1. Enterprise release train: a group of initiatives, which may touch some of the same applications, released together at
pre-determined intervals, for example quarterly

Release train is done on a timeline, for example quarterly.

“Initiatives” Vendor specific objective

SAP phase 1 Siebel Keep the change
evidence (VSOE)

“Applications” • Customer relationship • CRM • Savings • Billing

management (CRM) • Portal • Data Mart
• Portal • Data Mart
• Data Mart*

Quality Center Premier manages the quality process across projects.

*In this example, a change made to Data Mart by one initiative is populated to the other initiatives by Quality Center Premier.

Mature organizations who implement centers of excel­ HP Quality Center Premier encompasses all of the capa­
lence (CoE) often manage their application releases bilities of HP Quality Center Enterprise in addition to
in a sophisticated fashion compared to traditional some unique features designed specifically to help
application release methods. Traditionally, application ­customers manage Enterprise releases. The following
releases are managed in silos and the requirements, capabilities are offered in HP Quality Center Enterprise:
tests, and defects are managed within a single project, • Requirements management
while communication is sparse, or non-existent, between
• Risk-based test management
application teams. But mature organizations manage
complex releases with up to hundreds of applications • Release and cycle management
that are tested and released together to support a • Versioning
business goal. They often refer to these as “enterprise
• Baselining
releases” or “enterprise release trains,” where a release
train occurs every quarter, for example. (See Figure 1.) • External Resource management
The applications that are ready get included in the • Defect management
release; those applications that aren’t ready must wait • Reporting, graphs, and dashboard
until the next release train.
HP Quality Center Premier also adds these unique
HP Quality Center Premier software has been designed features:
to address the challenges of mature customers who
• Asset sharing and reuse
are managing these complex enterprise releases. It
helps customers reduce costs by enabling centralized • Cross-project reporting
management and enforcement of consistent workflows • Process enablement
and processes, by reducing duplication of effort through
• Defect sharing
asset sharing and reuse, and by increasing visibility to
aggregated quality status, requirements coverage, and • Unlimited high-availability servers
defect status and trends across projects to support more
informed decisions at the enterprise release level.

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 Figure 2. Asset sharing and reuse

“Initiatives” Payment card industry (PCI) New checking VSOE

Shared
library

Quality Center Premier manages asset sharing and change management across projects.

Chart 1. Asset sharing and reuse

Assumptions:

Type of tests used in projects

20% New test cases per Quality Center project

70% Test cases copied from other Quality Center projects
10% Reusable test cases not found that have to be manually recreated

• 500,000 test cases are created annually across 800 HP Quality Center projects
• 2 minutes to copy a test between Quality Center projects and recreate traceability
• 2 hours to manually recreate a new test
• $75 per hour labor rate for a QA Tester

Total hours: (500k x 70% x 2 min. + 500k x 10% x 120 min.)/60 min. = 111,666 hours

Total savings: 111,666 x $75/hour labor rate = $8,375,000 annually

Asset sharing and reuse time an enterprise release is scheduled and a project
needs to be tested, the testers manually copy the
HP Quality Center Premier enables the sharing of
assets from one project to another. When doing so,
requirements, tests, and automation assets across
the traceability between the tests and the requirements
­projects. (See Figure 2.) Sharable libraries eliminate
is lost, as is the defect and test execution history. After
duplication of effort by allowing sharing of reusable
copying the assets, the testers have to manually re-link
assets across projects while maintaining traceability
all of the tests and requirements in the new project to
between the assets and ensuring compliance to stan­
re-establish traceability.
dards. Asset sharing and reuse also allows customers
to aggregate quality metrics across projects to con­ In the Chart 1 example, we’ve assumed that for each
solidate them into a single view for a more compre­ new project, 20% of the test cases are new and that
hensive dashboard. up to 70% can be copied from other projects. When
done manually, testers might miss 10% of the test
The return on investment (ROI) of this feature can be
cases that could have been reused but weren’t identi­
easily demonstrated using an actual customer example.
fied as such and had to be manually re-created.
Without asset sharing and reuse across projects, each

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Figure 3. Cross-project reporting

Chart 2. Cross-project reporting

Assumptions:

• 75 business initiatives spanning multiple HP Quality Center projects (Customers frequently set aside an HP
Quality Center project per business initiatives.)
• 4 hours per week to manually aggregate data across multiple HP Quality Center projects (Aggregated business
initiative progress and status view)
• $75 per hour labor rate for project manager or reporting expert

Time to manually aggregate data per project:

4 hours/week x 4 weeks/month = 16 hours/month x 12 months = 192 hours/year
Time to manually aggregate data across projects:
192 hours/year x 75 business initiatives = 14,400 hours/year
Annual cost savings:
14,400 hours/year x $75 per hour labor rate = $1,080,000 annually

This customer had 500,000 test cases that were created
annually across 800 projects. It takes 2 minutes to
log in, copy a test between projects, and re-link the
tests to the requirements. For each test case that has
to be re-created, it takes 2 hours.
You can calculate the number of hours saved by shar­
ing and reusing assets, multiplied by the $75 per hour
labor rate for a typical tester and arrive at over $8.3
million in annual savings from automating this feature.
Cross-project reporting
HP Quality Center Premier enables cross-project repor­t­
ing, which allows customers to aggregate quality met­
rics, requirements coverage, and defect trends across
projects for a more holistic view of quality ­status
across projects in order to make a more informed
decision at the enterprise release level. (See Figure 3.)
To demonstrate the ROI of cross-project reporting, we’ll
again use an actual customer example. (See Chart 2.)
A customer managing an enterprise release might
have 75 large business initiatives spanning multiple HP
Quality Center projects running simultaneously. If the
customer spends, on average, 4 hours a week to
manually aggregate the quality metrics across HP
Quality Center projects in order to compile a consoli­
dated dashboard for a weekly status meeting, they
would spend 192 hours per year, per initiative to
aggregate the data. Then multiply that by 75 business
initiatives and you get 14,400 hours per year. At an
average $75 per hour labor rate for a project manager
or reporting expert, automating this task alone would
save over $1M annually.

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 Figure 4. Process enablement

“Initiatives” SAP phase 1 Keep the change initiative. VSOE

Quality Center Premier centralizes the management and enforcement of consistent

workflows and processes.

Project template:
process workflow and
user-defined fields

Chart 3. Process enablement

Assumptions:

Small Quality Center projects: 650 requiring 2 hours per update

Large Quality Center projects: 75 requiring 5 hours per update
Quality Center project repositories: 75 requiring 10 hours per update

Total: 800 Quality Center projects annually requiring updates

Scenario 1: Small projects Scenario 2: Large projects Scenario 3: Project repositories

10 process updates per Quality Center 10 process updates per Quality Center 10 process updates per Quality Center
project annually project annually project annually
2 hours per update 5 hours per update 10 hours per update
650 Quality Center projects requiring 75 Quality Center projects requiring 75 Quality Center projects requiring
updates updates updates

Total: 10 x 2 x 650 = 13,000 hours Total: 10 x 5 x 75 = 3,750 hours Total: 10 x 10 x 75 = 7,500 hours
Total savings = 13,000 x $75/hour = Total savings = 13,750 x $75/hour = Total savings = 7,500 x $75/hour =
$975,000 yearly $281,250 yearly $562,500 yearly

$75 per hour labor rate for HP Quality Center Administrator; total savings $1,818,750 annually

Process enablement It’s simple to compute the ROI of process enablement

Process standardization is a necessity for enterprise-
wide reporting, asset sharing, and reuse. HP Quality
Center Premier enables customers to enforce standard­
ized processes and best practices by allowing them to
centrally create templates with mandatory workflows
and user-defined fields and propagate them automati­
cally across projects. (See Figure 4.) When there’s a
change to the process, that change can be imple­
mented once in the template and propagated to all
of the affected projects to ensure that each team is
using the same standards and the same processes.
Standardized workflows and user-defined fields also
support the ability to conduct cross-project reporting
using a common set of metrics for greater visibility.
using an actual customer example as shown in Chart 3.
This customer had 800 projects per year that required
process updates to either workflows or fields. They
chose to “tier” the projects based on how active they
were and the amount of time and complexity required
to make changes to the processes.
By using a conservative estimate of 10 process updates
per year for each project multiplied by the amount of
time required for each process update, we can easily
calculate the number of hours consumed by this task,
then multiply it by an average $75 per hour labor rate
for the HP Quality Center administrator performing
the updates. Automating this feature will save this cus­
tomer over $1.8 million per year in administrative costs.

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Figure 5. Defect sharing

“Initiatives” Vendor specific objective

SAP phase 1 Siebel Keep change.
evidence (VSOE)

“Applications” • CRM • CRM • Savings • Billing

• Portal • Portal • Data Mart
• Data Mart* • Data Mart

Quality Center Premier automates the aggregation of defects into a centralized

repository and propagates fixes.

Shared library
Data Mart
defects

Developer

*In this example, Data Mart is the application being tested within three separate initiatives.

Chart 4. Defect sharing

Assumptions:

• 600 Quality Center projects that are part of multiple business initiatives
• 30 minutes per day for a team lead to open Quality Center projects, find and copy defects to a central
repository
• 20 average working days per month
• $75 per hour labor rate for a team lead

Time per year spent on finding and copying defects per Quality Center project:
30 minutes/day x 20 days/month = 10 hours/month x 12 months = 120 hours/year

Time per year spent on finding and copying defects across Quality Center projects:
120 hours/year x 600 projects = 72,000 hours/year

Annual cost savings: 72,000 hours per year x $75 per hour labor rate = $5,400,000 annually

Defect sharing Once again, as noted in Chart 4, we can calculate

the ROI of automating defect sharing using an actual
HP Quality Center Premier allows customers to share
customer example. This customer has 600 projects
defects across projects which reduces risk and increases
and spends 30 minutes per day to have a team lead
developer efficiency by helping developers find, prior­
open the project, find and copy the defects to a cen­
itize and resolve defects sooner. (See Figure 5.) Because
tral repository. With an average of 20 working days
the defects are stored in a centralized repository, the
a month, that translates to 120 hours per year, per
developer doesn’t have to log into each project to
project, or 72,000 hours per year to copy defects
search for them. The centralized defect repository also
manually from all 600 projects. At the $75 per hour
enables the organization to aggregate defect metrics
labor rate, automating this feature would save the
and report defect status and trends across projects for
­customer $5.4 million annually.
a more comprehensive view of quality status.

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 High-availability servers
With HP Quality Center Premier, customers can install
an unlimited number of high-availability servers at
no additional charge. High-availability servers are
designed to support mission-critical deployments
requiring 24x7 availability. They are global licenses
that allow for clustering, load-balancing, redundancy,
and failover. A license is required for each additional
node in a cluster.
Technology for better business outcomes
To learn more, visit www.hp.com/software
© Copyright 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to
change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty
statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an
additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
4AA2-5210ENW, May 2009
Why HP Quality Center Premier
HP Quality Center Premier has been designed specifi­
cally for mature organizations who need sophisticated
capabilities to manage complex enterprise releases.
The software helps customers reduce costs by enabling
centralized management and enforcement of consistent
workflows and processes, and by reducing duplica­
tion of effort through asset sharing and reuse across
projects. It reduces risk by helping developers find,
prioritize, and resolve defects faster, as well as
increasing visibility to quality status, requirements
­coverage, and defect status and trends across ­projects
to enable c­ ustomers to make more informed decisions
at the enterprise release level.