Everything you want to know about Visual Studio ALM and Farming
Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. Learn more about Brian.
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**UPDATE** This post is now obsolete. Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb840033.aspx for more info on integration solutions.
I see a fair number of customers where the development team uses TFS but the QA team uses HP Quality Center. There has been a growing interest in interoperatbility between TFS and Quality Center that allows developers and testers to work more closely together.
For the past 6 months or more we've been working with HP to develop just such a solution. The TFS 2008 - HP Quality Center Connector is the result of this collaboration. You will need to register with connect.microsoft.com to download it but it's available for anyone to download.
The TFS 2008 - HP Quality Center connector enables bidirectional synchronization of defects between Quality Center 9.2 and TFS 2008. This synchronization can be performed interactively with a Windows (GUI) application or as a background task (running as a service).
The tool is currently still in pre-release form but we've done private testing with a number of customers now and have some confidence that it should work for most people. We could really use your help in flushing out any remaining issues and ensuring that we have a quality integration experience between the two systems.
You can read more about it on Jim Lamb's blog. If you run into issues you can post them on the TFS General Forum (or post something here and I'll route it :)).
When using this tool, licensing is something you will need to think about. The tool itself is "free", however using it costs money :) There are two general approaches.
Option 1) Everyone using TFS or accessing TFS synchronized defects through Quality Center have TFS CALs.
Option 2) Everyone using TFS has TFS CALs plus you have a TFS Data Synchronization license that allows you to synchronize TFS with Quality Center using this tool and you don't have to worry about TFS CALs for Quality Center users.
While the tool is in pre-release form, you are free to use it for testing & evaluation purposes but once it "releases", you wil need to true up your licensing.
Thanks and let us know what you think!
Brian
If you have questions or feedback on the TFS-QC Connector, you can also contact me directly by email from the main "Connection" page on Microsoft Connect linked to from my post. Alternatively, you can use the Contact page on my blog to email me:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jimlamb/contact.aspx
Are there any plans to sync the requirements from tfs (which we'll assume are the user stories) to QC requirements - to allow us to test case to requirements mapping in QC?
We have talked about it and are going to investigate the possibility but no commitments right now.
When is the scheduled date for the general availability release of the TFS 2008 - HP Quality Center Connector?
We don't have a committed release date yet. We plan a public Beta in early April and will then release it when we've gotten sufficient feedback that it is ready.
If the requirements could be synced between tfs and QC, then that would mean an integrated end to end solution would be available. This would be very useful.
I'm currently trying to get the beta version working and I'm having issues. It works great adding items form one side to the other but when you try to update it throws errors. I've sent an email about the issue and postes on the General forum but haven't gotten any responses. Is there any where else or anyone else someone can go to get answers?
I think this connector is great and I would love to get it to work to make my teams life easier.
Is this work dead? I have tried looking for help on Microsoft Connect, Codeplex and the TFS General forum but there seems to be nobody interested in helping. Would you guys consider publishing the code so that the community could use it? HP has advised us to not use the competing product from Juvender. So at this point it is build our own, or drop the effort and continue to do double work in 2 tools.
It is definitely not dead. We are still working on it but have had some problems. Send me an email and I'll have someone follow up with you.
"HP has advised us to not use the competing product from Juvender"
Any particular reason why they through this comment out?
We are also in a search for tool to synchronize TFS and QC and evaluated both this and Juvander version, right now thinking on which way to turn. And right now it looks like going into Juvander direction as it just seems to work for us and support we got during our evaluation was just superb!
I don't know why they would advise that. I've generally heard reasonably positive reports about the Juvender tool.
What parameters should I specify during the QC Connector MSi installations for the "Set Server Login" screen. I tried the Windows Live ID that i used for registration but that didnot work
Hi all,
Even we are using Juvander to sync between QC and TFS, but we are facing a major problem. once the TFS template has been created no futher changes can be done in both QC and TFS . and if we want to make any change its taking long time to get them updated. Is this the same with the connector as well?
Hello Prudhviraj,
Sorry to hear that you are having trouble with the Juvander tool. I'm not familiar with this issue, but I would recommend you contact them to see if it is a limitation of their tool, or a problem they can fix. I have heard good feedback from customers that they have been responsive to fixing issues with the tool.
Regarding the QC Connector, what we have currently available will allow the bug definition to change on either TFS or QC, and updating the configuration settings would allow this to continue working correctly. However, this tool is not moving forward rapidly due to other work our team has for other tools to migrate/sync with TFS. In the meantime, working with Juvander is probably the best way to get past this problem.
Are there any plans on upgrading the connector so that integrating TFS 2008 and HP QC 10.0 would be possible?