QC11 - The next chapter

This story begins several months ago, when I downloaded the trail version of QualityCentre 11 with only intensions of 'playing'. Yeah right! As with most software trails I played hard for the first few days and then the interest slid south. I liken it to the Garnter hype-cycle... I climbed to the top of the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" and then coasted down to towards the Trough of Disillusionmen - but on the way down I had several little bumps which again have tweaked my interest. I'm not disillusioned at all, rather beaten by circumstance - let me explain.

In my current role, like all that have come before, I am the administrator of our QC instance. As such when it begins to play up, then the server/infrastructure team comes knocking on my door. Recently my little QC has not been playing nicely with the other applications in the sandpit - namely SQL and MOSS. It appears the QC service is hogging all the CPU on the server and as such the other applications, which are also critical, suffer. All this means is that nobody is happy with the testing team!

The solution I thought was to simply capitalise on my investment in the QC 11 trail and install QC 11 on the new (well additional server) and then migrate the old projects from QC 10 on the old congested server to new, fresh and totally dedicated QC 11 server. Oh if it were that simple then I guess we'd have done it my now!!! The first hurdle I encountered was that the trail period for QC11 had expired - not really a big deal I thought I'll just build another virtual server and install it again, besides I could use the practice for when I have to do it for real. First mistake, foolishly I thought that since I'd done it before, blogged about my experiences it would be a smooth process. Seems I was wrong, I encountered several of the errors I had seen previously and a few I hadn't. This time around the QC Service failed do to a java issue - the 'java virtual machine failed to load'. I so tried at least a dozen different ways of setting JAVA_HOME but none seemed to work. I reverted to editing the .bat file with little success, at one point I even installed JBoss standalone. This was the turning point as I discovered that JBoss would run with all the setting as they were. Now having narrowed in to the problem (I thought) I investigated the jboss installed by QC only to follow it down a rabbit whole the likes of which Alice in Wonderland would have enjoyed. Though at the end of this wonderful adventure I discovered I'd been looking the wrong spot - doh. All of this adventure was on my virtual PC at home. We then tried it for real on the new server.

Not surprising we encountered the same issues on the new server as I had had on the virtual, this time we were quicker in debugging the issue. We were able t o get the QC 11 instance up and running, all be it through the .bat file rather than the QCServices. It was at this point that we encountered what would be the mount everest of problems. When we confirmed that QC had started we navigated to the url using the browser which was installed on the server (win2003) which happen to be IE6. A simple detail which I over looked in my excitement to install the trail, and the fact that all my playing was on a win2008 server which has IE7 as default. QC 11 requires IE7 or IE8 BOOM our journey had come to a screaming halt. The network that we work on, is closed to the outside world - entombed to operating systems of days long since gone. The governance of this network doesn't allow for changes to occur without a lengthy consultation process etc. So now we're almost back to square one but not quite and this is the kicker - the simple solution install QC10 on the new server seemed to be the obvious choice, but again the best intensions were thwart, no one can find our QC 10 installation media! Guess this is still a work in progress :-)