We spent last week training on HP's Quality Center product (previously of Mercury Interactive), which is a web-based server product allowing QA teams to collaborate and store test requirements, test cases, test sets, perform defect tracking, manage releases and test cycles, perform predictive time estimation, and so many other features that I can't list them all here.

What a polished product. In about eight hours of total work, we've got the thing almost completely configured for our environment. The only items left to go are for us to VB-script it to the point where it meets our needs perfectly. The APIs available in the product and the out-of-box customization are both very impressive and simple to do.

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised to see a product in its 9.2 release being so polished, but (as many of you know) most enterprise software sold by big vendors is pure overpriced garbage, with horrible and inefficient UIs and cumbersome customization (if any at all). It's really been a breath of fresh air to pick up a product that does the job very well out of the box, and makes it so easy to tweak for our needs.

Well, that's how the setup has gone, anyway. Let's see what I think of it in a few months after we've been using it. Expect to hear more on our experiences right here.