**UPDATE** This post is now obsolete.  Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb840033.aspx for more info on integration solutions.

I see a fair number of customers where the development team uses TFS but the QA team uses HP Quality Center.  There has been a growing interest in interoperatbility between TFS and Quality Center that allows developers and testers to work more closely together.

For the past 6 months or more we’ve been working with HP to develop just such a solution.  The TFS 2008 – HP Quality Center Connector is the result of this collaboration.  You will need to register with connect.microsoft.com to download it but it’s available for anyone to download.

The TFS 2008 – HP Quality Center connector enables bidirectional synchronization of defects between Quality Center 9.2 and TFS 2008.  This synchronization can be performed interactively with a Windows (GUI) application or as a background task (running as a service).

The tool is currently still in pre-release form but we’ve done private testing with a number of customers now and have some confidence that it should work for most people.  We could really use your help in flushing out any remaining issues and ensuring that we have a quality integration experience between the two systems.

You can read more about it on Jim Lamb’s blog.  If you run into issues you can post them on the TFS General Forum (or post something here and I’ll route it :)).

When using this tool, licensing is something you will need to think about.  The tool itself is “free”, however using it costs money 🙂  There are two general approaches.

Option 1) Everyone using TFS or accessing TFS synchronized defects through Quality Center have TFS CALs.

Option 2) Everyone using TFS has TFS CALs plus you have a TFS Data Synchronization license that allows you to synchronize TFS with Quality Center using this tool and you don’t have to worry about TFS CALs for Quality Center users.

While the tool is in pre-release form, you are free to use it for testing & evaluation purposes but once it “releases”, you wil need to true up your licensing.

Thanks and let us know what you think!

Brian