Overview

Your ALM decisions depend on the quality of the data across your ALM projects. Inconsistent data results in reports that lead to bad decision making and fundamental misunderstanding of your development and testing effort.

Many organizations manage their enterprise releases, projects and application across multiple HP ALM or HP Quality Center projects, such a setup is in-line with HP's ALM best practices. When your testing initiatives span across multiple ALM projects it is crucial to have standardized values across your ALM projects.

Assessing your data structure and quality periodically is paramount in the rapidly evolving software development world of today.

The Challenge

When organizations realize they need to improve the quality of their data in HP ALM/QC, fixing the data is a time consuming and complex task, often involving thousands of changes across hundreds of HP ALM/QC projects, affecting millions of DB records.

The stages of HP ALM/QC Data Standardization are:

• Assessment - discovery of pain areas, scope of the problem, change impact analysis
• Design and usability - must be of high standard to be able to manage a large number of changes, and to be able to leverage SME’s in the work
• Value mapping - a mechanism that can support multiple teams/SME’s
• Stability and a proven technology - mitigate the risk as this is your critical data we are dealing with!
• HP ALM/QC assets changes - assets that depend on the data must be handled - graphs, reports, favorites, history, filters and more..
• Low Maintenance - making sure the solution works with future HP ALM/QC versions and patches, as data standardization is usually a continuous activity

The Solution

Assure Data Standardizer is an end-to-end solution for standardizing your HP ALM/QC data across projects.

Assure Data Standardizer is designed to let you easily assess, map and convert the data in your HP ALM/QC projects, and to continuously report on the progress and impact of the change.

Assure Data Standardizer is an efficient tool for making the change.

Assure Data Standardizer is tested and reliable - after all, we’re talking about your data.

Key Features

• Assessment Capabilities
• Data mapping reuse across projects
• Leverage your Project Staff / SME’s
• Maintains HP ALM/QC project data integrity - nothing is broken, nothing is lost
• Security - control which users can map projects and convert data
• Works across HP ALM/QC versions and patches

What is Data Standardization?

Data standardization also known as "data cleansing", or "scrubbing", is the process of ensuring that data is kept accurate and up-to-date. Its purpose is to ensure that records are complete, correct, and relevant.

Why is Data Standardization for HP ALM needed?

HP ALM/Quality Center Projects can be customized to suit different testing needs and processes. This benefit and flexibility can easily become a challenge.

Since projects can be customized independently of each other, they often have different look-up list values.

Projects with different values present challenges with

• Cross-Project (and single project) Reporting
• Cross-Project integrations
• Sharing and Copying data between the projects

Data is often inconsistent across projects and business units, as they often use different business rules, naming conventions, fields and list values.

Data inconsistencies are very common after consolidations, mergers and acquisitions.
Often, data quality is a serious challenge even within a single HP ALM/QC project, as business rules and their corresponding list values change over time and mistakes are made due to human error when entering new values.

Inconsistent data value will eventualy lead to:

Data Standardization Process Overview

The Data Standardization Process consists of the following main steps:

Assure Data Standardizer guides you through the process:

• The first step is to use the Assessment feature to understand the current data standardization level. The assessment results indicate which HP ALM/QC projects you need to prioritize
• The next step is Data Mapping - where you map existing values in your project fields to commonly agreed list items that you have decided to use in your projects
• A mapping report can be produced prior to the actual data conversion is done so any customizations, integrations and workflows can be modified in advance
• Assure Data Standardizer will then automatically convert the linked values to correct ones based on the value mapping

Complete Standardization

Assure has been providing HP ALM/QC standardization for years. Assure Project Harmonizer has been widely used to standardize ALM project structures (project fields). However, a complete standardization of your ALM projects require more than structure standardization as the data contained in these structures plays a major role and has to be standardized as well.

Assure is proud to offer a complete standardization solution by combining Assure Project Harmonizer and Assure Data Standardizer.

Reporting - the main driver for Standardization

Assure provides an advanced BI solution for HP ALM customers - Assure TotalView.

Our Assure TotalView customers often report on multiple ALM projects and expect to be able to compare and combine results across projects. Often, it quickly becomes evident that data across projects is not consistant. Customers want to compare 'apples to apples' and have been asking Assure for solutions. That's how Assure Data Standardizer was born.

Other customers, who are using reporting solutions other than Assure TotalView are facing the same challenges and have been approaching Assure for solutions.

Complete standardization of both structure and data is a prerequisite when it comes to reporting.

Other drivers for Complete Standardization include integrations and asset sharing.