by Iris Boers
Vivit EMEA Local User Group and
Special Interest Group Liaison
For some years now, a Special Interest Group has been formed within the German User Group (LUG Germany) on the topics of "Testing, Quality and Application Lifecycle Management (TQA)", which meets at regular, half-yearly intervals at so-called regional meetings. This group is led by the Vivit leaders and co-leaders Dr. Andreas Birk and Dr. Carsten Neise, who also organized the planning and organization of the three regional meetings in September/October this year in Hanover, Cologne, and Eschborn. This special interest group within Vivit LUG Germany is dedicated to organizational, methodical and technical questions concerning the use of the Micro Focus products ALM Enterprise, Quality Center Enterprise, Performance Center as well as Unified Functional Testing. One of the important objectives of this group is to foster experience sharing among users, to communicate feedback to Micro Focus and sharing information and education around the ADM products of Micro Focus.
As usual in the past, these three regional meetings also took place at companies from the user circle or the partner network of Micro Focus. The hosts were this time NordLB in Hanover, HDI Systeme AG in Cologne and Deutsche Bank AG in Eschborn. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all three companies once again for providing the facilities and for their hospitality. After short introductory presentations of the host companies regarding their experiences and best practices in the field of test management and the use of ALM/QC and ALM/Octane, the Micro Focus experts did some fantastic demos of some selected new product features on ALM Octane and they also informed about changes and news in license sharing. A further topic that was intensively discussed during the events was Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and how it can help to accelerate software testing. Udo Blank, Micro Focus Technical Consultant for Specialist for Application Delivery Management solutions, explained what kind of activities can be automated, as test Automation is already in place and where RPA fits at all in software testing. He showed which areas within software testing can only be scaled by RPA and which tasks are repetitive and mundane in testing and could currently not be automated at a scale the testers need.
Due to the special nature of the regional meeting in Eschborn, which also bears the nickname "banks roundtable" among the members, there was a slight deviation from the agenda in that Micro Focus expert Mathias Mezger, distinguished Engineer for Enterprise DevOps IBM Z , added an interesting and very valuable demo to "Agile Software-Development meets Mainframe: ALM Octane and UFT integrated with modern COBOL and PL/I development for IBM Z", which was well appreciated by all attendees.
With around 60 participants at all three locations together, the Regional Meetings were once again very well attended. The feedback from all participants was consistently positive and we are now looking forward to the meetings in spring 2020. Interested users are already cordially invited to share their experiences or discussion topics with us for the upcoming events.
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