Versioning and Baselines with

HP Quality Center 10.00—Estimating

storage requirements
White Paper

HP Quality Center software is an enterprise quality

management platform that combines requirement,
test, and defect management into a single, globally
accessible web-based application with traceability
across the entire application quality lifecycle. It is
used by QA teams, developers, and business analysts
to manage and verify the quality of various IT and
application projects and environments. Through defect
prevention, proper quality planning, risk analysis,
testing, issues tracking, and real-time visibility into
project status and progress, stakeholders can manage
the release process better and make more informed
release decisions.
HP Quality Center 10.0 offers two new features
that enable users to store previous versions of their Both features have storage implications on the
test assets: HP Quality Center database and file repository.
• Versioning HP Quality Center projects tend to grow over time,
and therefore, the HP Quality Center site administrator
−−Versioning enables organizations to maintain
must take the additional storage requirements of these
control over changing business assets by storing a
two features into consideration to provide adequate
history of HP Quality Center entities, which can be
storage space. This document provides guidelines
viewed, compared, and restored.
for estimating data growth while implementing the
−−Versioning is enabled at the project level. Once Versioning and Baseline features in HP Quality
enabled, HP Quality Center stores previous Center 10.00.
versions of entities that are changed in the project.
• Baselines Understanding data growth
−−The project administrator defines a logical The storage consumption of the Versioning and
collection of entities called a library, and can Baseline features is attributed to their method
then store snapshots of the entire library, of operation:
called Baselines.
• Each new version of an entity creates a copy of
−−Baselines enable organizations to take snapshots that entity in the HP Quality Center database and
of business assets—HP Quality Center entities file repository.2
and the relationships between them. Baselines are
• Each Baseline creates a copy of all entities in
created at critical stages of development to assess
the library. This does NOT mean that all of the HP
the impact of change and to sign off on significant
Quality Center data is going to be duplicated over
milestones.1
and over again.

1
Note: The two features are independent. Baselines are
available on Versioning-enabled projects, as well as on
Versioning-disabled projects.
2
Note: The “Enable versioning” action by itself has no effect
on storage consumption. The data is duplicated only when an entity
is changed.
 • The requirements, tests, HP QuickTest Professional
resources, and HP Business Process Testing
components of HP Quality Center entities benefit
from the Versioning and Baseline features; other
HP Quality Center entities do not support these
features by design. This means that only the storage
space used by the entities mentioned above is
expected to grow. The majority of storage space
used by an HP Quality Center project is used by
other entities (defects, test runs, and the like), and it
is not expected to change.
• Only a relatively small percentage of entities are
duplicated, even for the versioned and baselined
entities like tests, and the amount of duplication
corresponds to usage patterns.
The next section elaborates on all of the parameters
that should be taken into account when estimating
the data growth.
Parameters affecting data growth
• Current storage size used by versioned entities: This
is the percentage of the database and file repository
used by versioned entities. The test entity is the most
substantial consumer of storage of all the versioned
entities. The percentage of storage that test entities
use out of the total project size determines the
impact of Versioning and Baseline growth on
storage requirements.3
• Normal growth rate: HP Quality Center projects
tend to grow over time, as new entities are constantly
being added. When measuring the impact of
Versioning and Baselines, it is important to consider
this parameter. (Note that if the current practice of
keeping the entity’s history is based on copying and
pasting it once for each generation, and HP Quality
Center 10.00 Versioning is employed, this “normal”
growth is expected to diminish.)
• Average change rate = Additional growth rate in
a versioned project: This is the average number of
times per year an entity is modified by users. This
is the main parameter affecting Versioning storage
growth, because with versioned projects the user
must check out the entity in order to edit it. When
editing is complete, the changes are committed to
the database by checking the entity in, thus creating • The Baseline creation frequency policy is creating a
a new version.
3
Note: Automation tests such as HP QuickTest Professional Tests and
WinRunner Tests use a most of the file repository for storing their
results. Baselines and Versioning do not copy those test results, and only
the test scripts are duplicated. Sites with custom test types can also
configure Baselines and Versioning not to copy their results files. See the
HP Quality Center Custom Test Type Guide for further details.
2
• Live data percent = Baselined content: This is the
percentage of entities actually accessed in the
last year. It serves as a good estimate for what
percentage of entities would be included in libraries
since they normally consist of only live, recently
accessed data. This data will be included in
Baselines later if baselining is also used. Therefore,
it is also the main parameter affecting Baseline
storage growth.
• Baseline creation frequency policy: This is the
organization’s policy regarding how often the
HP Quality Center administrator should create
a Baseline of the libraries in the HP Quality
Center project.
Calculation examples4
Version control
• An HP Quality Center project uses 20 GB of storage
size (database and file repository)
• 30,000 tests, with an average storage size of
20 KB per test in the HP Quality Center database
and file repository. The current storage size used by
test entities is 30,000*20 KB = 0.6 GB
• Each year, 5,000 additional new tests are created—
this is the project’s normal growth rate, which
amounts to 5,000*20 KB = 0.1 GB
• Now, the HP Quality Center administrator enables
Version Control for the project. (As noted, this action
by itself has no impact on storage consumption)
• The average change rate is 2—each test is changed
two times per year on average.
• Each year, the HP Quality Center project will grow
an additional 30,000*20 KB*2~= 1.2 GB = 6% of
20 GB, on top of its normal growth of 0.1 GB
= 0.5% of 20 GB
Baselines
• The live data percent for the same HP Quality Center
project is 50%
• The HP Quality Center administrator creates a single
library that contains all the live data = 50% of the
tests. The storage used by tests in the library is 50%
of 30,000*20 KB = 0.3 GB
Baseline for each library, once a month
• Each year, the HP Quality Center project will grow
an additional 12*0.3 GB = 3.6 GB = 18% of
20 GB, on top of its normal growth of 0.1 GB =
0.5% of 20 GB
4
See Appendix A for the methods used in obtaining the statistics
 Current Storage Size Used By Versioned Entities Normal Growth Rate Versioning Growth Baselines Growth

Normal
file- Additional Additional
system file-system file-system
repository Average repository repository
absolute change rate absolute absolute
Current growth of Test entities growth growth
project’s Percent of Normal per year = Additional per year per year
total file- file-system Percent growth attributed growth per attribute Factor of attributed
Current system repository of DB size rate of Test to Test year when to Test growth Live data to Test
project’s total repository used by used by Test entities per entities Versioning is Versioning (Versioning/ percent of Baselines
DB size (GB) size (GB) Test entities entities year (GB) enabled (GB) Noram) Test entities (GB)
Project 1 0.1904883 0.3 46% 14.55% 46.03% 0.1 127.37% 0.2 2.8 47.42% 0.77
Project 2 0.8155823 0.5 52% 3.07% 33.30% 0.1 40.97% 0.1 1.2 25.57% 0.86
Project 3 1.0279312 0.8 51% 2.45% 66.60% 0.3 141.04% 0.6 2.1 52.45% 2.54
Project 4 0.0353012 0.8 47% 18.28% 99.80% 0.4 168.12% 0.6 1.7 50.40% 2.28
Project 5 0.9112473 1.5 91% 5.02% 149.95% 2.0 226.71% 3.0 1.5 100.00% 16.04
Project 6 0.5046387 2.1 88% 27.96% 20.00% 0.4 81.08% 1.5 4.1 34.43% 7.63
Project 7 1.0169043 3.2 5% 4.35% 99.98% 0.2 346.30% 0.6 3.5 51.41% 1.04
Project 8 0.1241504 3.8 26% 4.38% 69.75% 0.7 457.77% 4.5 6.6 63.76% 7.53
Project 9 0.7722473 5.2 2% 15.94% 70.58% 0.1 250.19% 0.3 3.5 65.50% 1.00
Project 10 9.8007736 5.6 80% 0.56% 92.23% 4.1 188.19% 8.4 2.0 53.53% 28.74
Project 11 1.7274805 7.0 2% 21.13% 92.28% 0.2 176.17% 0.3 1.9 73.33% 1.50
Project 12 12.467471 9.9 61% 1.80% 28.59% 1.7 194.04% 11.9 6.8 51.53% 37.77
Project 13 2.1373926 10.1 32% 2.00% 34.31% 1.1 278.56% 9.1 8.1 50.79% 19.83
Project 14 1.8886719 15.7 47% 11.80% 60.00% 4.5 300.21% 22.4 5.0 62.65% 56.06
Project 15 10.046758 17.5 40% 6.56% 36.36% 2.5 153.26% 10.7 4.2 33.42% 28.11
Project 16 3.9500781 18.3 1% 17.12% 21.21% 0.0 55.72% 0.1 2.6 20.91% 0.30
Project 17 5.4873047 24.5 20% 12.77% 23.58% 1.1 81.31% 3.9 3.4 29.16% 16.94
Project 18 1.3234277 27.5 5% 10.46% 57.14% 0.7 169.76% 2.2 3.0 57.16% 8.99

Average 3.0126583 8.5761296 39% 10.01% 61.21% 1.1 190.93% 4.5 3.6 51.30% 13.22

Research results Recommendations

In order to get rough estimations for those parameters,
we have conducted extensive research on the data
and usage statistics of 18 of our representative
customers, displayed in the table above.
Summary
Conclusions
The two new HP Quality Center 10.00 features
—Versioning and Baselines—are powerful tools
that allow the organization more visibility and
manageability of the quality assurance process.
However, they do impose a capacity cost to some
degree. This cost depends greatly on the specific data
and the actual usage pattern of these features in each
HP Quality Center site and project.
When trying to assess the impact of this capacity
cost, we should take into consideration the parameters
discussed above.
The amount of impact can be very hard to predict
without proper testing for a specific site, therefore we
recommend that a customer do the following:
• Test typical scenarios in a staging environment on
typical HP Quality Center projects and with user
activity as similar to daily behavior as possible in
order to assess the capacity growth needs
before activating Versioning and Baseline
features in production.
• Perform a gradual implementation of Versioning
and Baseline features, initially using a few
projects a month, and monitor the change in
storage requirements.
• Define a clear policy for managing libraries and
Baselines that can best serve the user needs without
overloading the system.
• Consider using a separate file system for Versioning
and Baseline data (See Appendix B).
• Consider a purging policy—delete Baselines that are
no longer needed (See Appendix C).

3
 Appendix A: Obtaining research
statistics
The following methods were used to obtain the
research statistics:
• Current project database size: Database specific
queries on the data dictionary
• Current project file repository size: Simple Operating
System commands
• Percent of file repository used by test entities:
A script was used to traverse the “tests” and “attach”
repository folders, aggregate test scripts and
attachment sizes, and to separate these from
test results
• Normal growth rate: A database query on the
TS_CREATION_DATE column
• Average change rate: A database query on the
AUDIT_LOG table
• Live data percent: A database query on the
VER_STAMP column
Appendix B: Configuring a separate
file system for versioning and
Baseline data
As shown above, Versioning and Baselines both
impact the file repository storage consumption, by
creating copies of attachments and automated test
scripts. HP Quality Center allows the administrator
to store this data in a file system specifically used for
Versioning and Baselines, separate from the one used
for the project repository. This can provide a solution
for the following cases:
• The file system used for the project file repository
is close to its limits (maximum number of files,
storage capacity).
• The project file repository uses a high performance
file system, which is costly. The HP Quality
Center administrator can choose to use a low
budget secondary file system since performance
requirements for Versioning and Baselines data
are lower.
Technology for better business outcomes
To learn more, visit www.hp.com/go/quality
© Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to
change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty
statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an
additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
4AA1-5906ENW, January 2010
Configuring a Separate File System
By default, the file repository used by Versioning
and Baselines is located in two subdirectories of the
HP Quality Center project directory:
• baseline: A subdirectory for storing attachments and
automated test scripts stored in Baselines
• hist: A subdirectory for storing prior versions
of attachments and automated test scripts in a
Versioning—enabled project
HP Quality Center enables the site administrator to
configure the paths to these two subdirectories using
the project’s DATACONST table. The configuration is
performed by defining an alternate path in the DC_
VALUE column for the DC_CONST_NAME parameters
“hist_directory” and “baselines_directory” (or “unix_
hist_directory” and “unix_baselines_directory” for a
UNIX based file system)5. Note that the paths can be
specified either relative to the project’s repository path
or by specifying an absolute path.
For example, for the “baselines_directory” parameter,
the administrator can specify “E:\mnt01\baseline_
storage” path. This will result in attachments and test
scripts being stored in E:\mnt01\baseline_storage
instead of in the default C:\Program Files\HP\Quality
Center\repository\qc\ REVISIONS_10\REV3\
baseline location.
Appendix C: Purging baseline data
HP Quality Center provides limited purging abilities.
If the HP Quality Center administrator decides that
data in a certain baseline is obsolete and no longer
needed, the baseline can be deleted. Deleting the
baseline releases all the storage space it is using,
both in the database and in the file repository. Note
that this action is irreversible, and should be used
with caution.
5
Note: The baseline folder cannot be updated after any Baseline has
been created. The hist folder cannot be updated after versioning has been
enabled for the project.
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