Positive trends around QTP

Just wanted to write a short note on the latest improvements in public visibility around HP QuickTest Professional product, which I used to work on as part of Functional Testing R&D team.

NOTE: Sorry – no facts, only my personal impression and private vision.

First simple point is that though price and licensing matters are not the most attractive sides of the product – HP has considerably simplified the process of getting a copy for evaluation. Now like with almost everything else on the Web – just download and try it! Sounds peculiar in 2010, but it wasn’t that easy before.

Secondly, it seems to me that functional architects Ayal Cohen and Roy Nuriel are becoming more proactive in gathering feedback from customers (even from those who don’t use traditional paid customer support services for some reason). At least I see HP presence and increased activity in functional testing and quality assurance forums, and also on pages of LinkedIn Professional network – and you know – information gathered from those sources (like e.g. Your chance to impact QTP future roadmap) is taken seriously. The same thing about other popular resources like AdvancedQTP and Tarum Lalwani’s blog. IMO, it is definitely a positive trend.

The third and final thing I’d like to mention here is “How QuickTest Professional Identifies Objects” post by Motti Lanzkron. For three years of my work there, I have seen no such precedents: typically QTP wisdom is collected by advanced users and is scattered throughout dark corners of the Web (sometimes it even ends in Google cache only). Though product documentation improves from version to version due to huge efforts of documentation team lead by Jackie Rosenzveig, business processes are getting even more complex and product becomes too variadic to be completely understood from the docs solely. So technical posts like Motti’s should come into play and help QTP users understand the product better – I would say it is a piece of wisdom coming right from the heart of the product R&D team.

I wish technical blogging became a part of QTP R&D usual process, there are still so many areas to uncover.