Mercury Quality Centre is a web-based test management tool. It gives you a centralized control over the entire testing life cycle. It gives an easy interface to manage and organize activities like Requirements coverage, Test Case Management, Test Execution Reporting, Defect Management, and Test Automation. All these activities are provided from a single tool, which is web-based and can be accessed from any where. Hence, making the task of the testers and managers easy.

Mercury Quality Centre can be divided into two parts:

- Site Administrator Bin
- Quality Centre Bin

Site Administration Bin: It is the starting point for the usage of Mercury Quality Centre. This part is used for all the administrative activities. Password for site admin is defined during the installation so make sure that you remember the password during installation. From this part of Mercury Quality Centre, we generally do the following activities:

- Creating the projects
- Assigning users to the projects
- Creating specific roles
- Configuring QTP or Winrunner scripts to use from Mercury Quality Centre
- Configuring the mail servers
- Verifying licensing information
- Information about database

Note: If you are using Winrunner, you need to make sure that backward compatibility property of the application to true.

Quality Center Bin: This part of Mercury Quality Centre gives functionality of almost everything that as a tester or test manager you need to do in your day to day activity apart from execution. This is the most common interface used by the customers or users. In this part, we generally do the following activities:

- Creating test plans
- Defining requirements
- Creating test cases
- Creating test labs
- Associating requirements with defects in essence

Mercury Quality Centre is installed as a service in Microsoft windows environment. Before start working on it, make sure that Mercury Quality Centre service is running.

As soon as you access the application, the first screen is a login screen where you need to provide administrator credentials which were used during the installation of Mercury Quality Centre. Once you are logged on to the SABin, you can perform all the administrative tasks mentioned above.

Note: If Mercury Quality Centre is listening to default port, then you can access the application using the following URL:

http://%7Byourmachinename%7D:8080/sabin/SiteAdmin.htm

Define your projects in SABin. Mercury Quality Center provides the role based accessed to the Projects. For example, A Test Manager can create projects and Test Lead can prepare test plans and tester can write the test cases. This role based access makes it very easy to control access to various artifacts of the project and also distribution of responsibility among team members. Following four things can be managed in Mercury Quality Centre:

- Requirements
- Test Plan
- Test Lab
- Defects

Once you have created a project in SABin, Now log on to QCBin by providing your credentials and access the project that you have created. Here, you will notice different tabs for Requirements, TestPlan, TestLab and Defects.

Under Requirements Tab, you can organize the project requirements. You can also create folder hierarchy to represent various features in your project. This can be accomplished by just right-clicking and choosing appropriate options. After creating requirements, move on to next tab Test Plan.

Test Plan Tab will have information about the test cases. These test cases can also be mapped to requirements created in the earlier steps, thus makes foundation for the traceability metrics. Each requirement can be mapped to one or more than one test cases.

After creating new test case you will see in the left hand pane. The right hand pane will have tabs for writing the steps, mapping to requirements, description, expected result etc. Every test case will have steps and for every step you can specify the expected behavior.

The test cases written here, can also be linked to the QTP or Winrunner Scripts. This way, it is providing you better management for the automation and capability of executing automation scripts from Mercury Quality Centre itself. Once you are done with Test Plan preparation, move on to the next tab Test Lab.

To manage test execution for a specific release, you have to create a Test Lab. Test Labs can be created, specific to the release and execution of test cases specific to release can be managed very easily using this concept. In the Test Lab you can identify the set of test cases already written under test plan to include for execution.

If the test cases are already linked to the requirements, then after each test cycle the management will be able to trace what requirements have been tested.

When you choose the option of manual test execution, a window will open up containing the steps to execute. These steps are executed and after every step you can specify whether it is passed or not. Mercury Quality Center also allows parameterized manual test execution, where some of the default parameters like username, password etc. can automatically be read during the manual execution. If you encounter any defects during the failure of any of the steps, it will be automatically logged in to the defect tracking system of Mercury Quality Centre. Once you are done with Test Execution move on to next tab, Defects.

Report generation is one of the most important part of the test management process. Once you are done with planning and execution, its REPORTING time. Mercury Quality Centre provides a very good reporting feature by providing certain pre-defined reports and also capability to create your own reports.

Also see: Other Mercury Tools for Software Testing:

- QTP Part - 1
- QTP Part - 2
- Load Runner
- Test Director