« Moved to WordPress
Resource Hacking for Beginners »

Mercury Quality Center in "It Supports Exploratory Testing" Shock

I can't believe I'm about to promote Mercury Quality Center, particularly in regards to exploratory testing, but here goes...

Mercury appear to have licensed Blueberry consultants Ltd Technology into Mercury Quality Center as part of their Mercury Screen Recorder.

This is great news for any tester that has Mercury Quality Center installed on their machine at work, as the Screen Recorder is an addin that you can download from your add in page. (a submenu off the Help menu)

I had a quick look in the resource information in the MSR Recorder.exe file and saw the mention of BB Flashback. So I'm not sure which functional suite has been licensed from Blueberry Consultants. BB Flashback might just be the default name from which all components are built, certainly it looks like BB TestAssistant to me.

Here is the resource information that I found:

<description>BB FlashBack</description>
<assemblyIdentity
    version="1.0.0.0"
    processorArchitecture="X86"
    name="BB FlashBack"
    type="win32"
/>

 

The icon sets seem to suggest that it is BB TestAssistant.  Below is your chance to play spot the difference 

image image

So how can you use this for exploratory testing?

The default use of the software in Quality Center is to create a defect in Quality Center from the movie.

image

But if you choose to 'Edit the movie before submiting the defect to quality Center' (yes I know there is a spelling error there, but the spelling error is present in the dialog above). So 'Edit...' it then you get access to a more common BB Flashback/Test Assistant view:

image 
And from here you can save, export, edit, annotate, etc.

I'm happy to have found this but I'm kicking myself for only discovering this now. So the main reason for blogging this? You have no time to waste if you have Quality Center in-house - start using the Screen Recorder now.

Obviously a more expensive way of getting the BB recording technology on your computer but, as I say, if you already have TD installed (I found this using version 9 - I'm not sure if the Version 8 recorder is based on this technology or not)  then you get access to one of the most commonly promoted Exploratory Test Tools.

I installed the Add-in from Quality Center using the Addins submenu of the Help menu. And on the install at work, I had to go to the 'more addins' section.

Now... at least to the point of helping me record testing sessions... Mercury Quality Center can support me in my exploratory testing sessions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Mercury Quality Center in "It Supports Exploratory Testing" Shock”

  1. I think this is the same in 8.2. That is, it looks like I’m running 8.2 right now and everything looks pretty much the same.

    Thanks Jared. I think I skipped a few releases and went from companies using v7.5 to another company using v9 and managed to skip the v8 branches. Glad you left a comment - I’ve added your blog into my aggregator.

  2. Interesting coverage, I didn’t know they probably bought a ready-made screen recorder. We wrote our own custom screen video recorder for recording test runs in Testuff.

    Thanks for the pointer Ido, I haven’t had a look at your tool yet.

Leave a Reply