In many organizations QA teams use HP ALM to manage application lifecycle information in the context of requirements, test plans and defects. On the other hand business analysts or architects are using Sparx Enterprise Architect® as their modeling tool to capture functional requirements and business processes in a visual way.
In many organizations QA teams use HP ALM to manage application lifecycle information in the context of requirements, test plans and defects. On the other hand business analysts or architects are using Sparx Enterprise Architect® as their modeling tool to capture functional requirements and business processes in a visual way. To build a single point of truth with the best-of-breed approach of tools and methodologies it is very valuable to share the mentioned information between the teams responsible for design, implementation and quality. HP ALM offers a web service interface as Sparx Enterprise Architect® offers XMI data scheme and COM automation interfaces for the automation of seamless data exchange to build a comprehensive and coherent application development repository without media breaks.
The HP ALM web service interface is built by a powerful set of REST methods offered by the HP ALM repository server. This API e.g. allows to transfer test cases from a tool directly into a test plan including the design steps and test case supplementary information. Because of HP ALM’s flexible structure defining meta-data the REST API is quite complex in its generic character. The following figure shows the processing business process model data from Sparx Enterprise Architect® into the HP ALM repository.
The processing of models into test cases used by HP ALM includes the following operations within the BPM-Xchange® model bus:
- Load the model data from SPARX Enterprise Architect using the XMI or COM interfaces
- Run a reverse decomposition to create end-to-end process flows
- Run the model-based test case generation to derive test cases from the end-to-end flow
- Push the test cases including design steps and additional meta-data into HP ALM
During the same processing the diagrams can be converted into HP ALM format and can be reused for requirements definition and assignment of test cases. If functional requirements and use-cases are modeled in the model tool as well they can be processed in a similar way to be leveraged by HP ALM. In addition to echanged test cases data, also the business process diagram can be loaded from Sparx Enterprise Architect® into the HP ALM requirements section using an XMI to XPDL transformation of the BPM-Xchange® model bus. Because the REST interfaces also allows reading the HP ALM repository, reusable information like e.g. defects and requirements can be retrieved and loaded back into the modeling tool. Thus a perfect loop in the application development lifecycle is established.