What's wrong with HP Quality Center?

This entry is rant so you might just want to skip it.

HP Quality Center (formerly Mercury) is a, how so amusingly called, web-based test management tool. You will find a lot of marketing information if you ask Google, most of which is irrelevant and may only have 1-800 number for support; because they know when you are looking for it on web, you are in trouble and no one can help you. Unfortunately, I've to spend a good amount of time on this tool these days and it inspired me a great deal to write my inexpressible ovation for this tool here.

As a programmer, HP Quality center is one of the worst and most annoying tools you may have to work with (some may compare it with Lotus notes though).

This tool is implemented as a giant Active X; Apparently, they didn't want to make it web-based but when sales team threatened their developers, they some how adjusted their extra-thick client to web by (evil) means of Active-X(TM) technology. It only takes one or two more minutes to load than my Eclipse instance does, in Intra-net i.e.. It works only on lame Internet Explorer, in a sense that makes it 70% less web based. To add to the insult of using this tool, you have no option but use god-forsaken IE6 (or 7 if you are slightly lucky).


HP Quality center crashes at will, each crash is designed scientifically so that you waste a few hours to get back to normal work before it crashes again. For example, I add attachment to a defect; next, I go and try to add comment on it and it crashes - right on time. I open new IE window; browse it and wait for it to load, log-in again (this special web based tool doesn't have feature to remember your password in an enterprise-wide SSO environment). After recalling what I was doing last, I go to the defect where it crashed and try to add comment again; only to discover that it still thinks I'm working on it. 'The object is locked by user: [my userid]'. You will praise arcane brilliance imbued in this tool because these problems disappears randomly once it pisses you off - it knows when.

Some more praise on it's resource utilization, so one can't wonder why it is rightfully web-based. HP Quality Center uses ~120mb of your core if you have no defects in your view. This amazing tool can make your wish to see memory usage on crack come true, have 50-40 defects in your view and see the difference.

This is only the tip of the iceberg but gives you bigger picture and idea why companies make more money in support, there's always room for new version, patch, hotfix etc. Why in the world people pay for such crap? there are ton of free alternatives which are hundred times better and are totally free. And the other day someone was complaining about open-source tool usability...