QA Bean

For those of you who start with HP ALM, or using it for basic functionality and looking to increase the capacity of the tool, I wanted to mention one of the most powerful features within HP ALM, and the one that sets it above the competitors - the ability to fully customize most of sections within the tool. This customization goes as far as giving the possibility to create new buttons with customizable functionality, updating functionality of existing functions and adding fields to different components. All that can be achieved through HP ALM’s workflow section. This sections allows configuration of day to day functionality like preventing defect from being closed without a reason, to a more complex customization with have VBScripting like exports, execution or even initiation of other tools and applications. In future posts I’m planning to explore some specific application of this powerful tool, meanwhile for those who interested here are some examples of what can be achieved...

Lately, I was facing a strange issue when the defect notification coming from HP ALM were all missing the video attachment which were there to help with the bug reproduction process. It was the first project with this client that decided to include video attachment instead of a screenshots and it was obviously related to the size. Reviewing of HP documentation shows that there is a parameter in Site Administration tool that defines this limitation it's called: ATTACH_MAX_SIZE By default this parameter set-up to 3000kb which allows for 3Mb of email attachments, any attachment above this size will be excluded from the email. We did a quick check of our attachments and found out that we don't need more than 10Mb for our purpose and hence the Outlook server limit was set to 20Mb we were good to go with the change. Now if you looking to limit the attachment size or type to a specific module (e.g. Defects, Test Plan) you will need to use ALM workflow to achieve that.