Why must UFT be installed on the TFS agent machine?

[HilaryGreen]

The installtion expects UFT to be installed on the TFS agent machine, even when I only wish to run tests remotely on a separate remote testing host (never locally from ALM or from the FileSystem). Why is UFT needed for this?

[EvanChen1989]

If machine A is only a caller to ALM to run test on machine B. Then there's no need to install UFT on it.

[HilaryGreen]

The installation procedure does not work if UFT is not installed on the machine A. In order to communicate with ALM I believe you would need the tdconnect.exe ALM connector to be installed on machine A. However your installation procedure would need to be changed.

If this scenario could be made to work, the runner process would run on machine A and the tests run on machine B. Actually what is really wanted is for the runner process to be running on machine B as well as the tests (so machine A has no processing load from the tests). This would need a slave process on machine B. (see the Jenkins master-slave concept).

Until this functionality is supported properly, this AD;-TFS extension is not a workable proposition.

[EvanChen1989]

Do you mean the caller is machine A while you don't want ALM running on machine A? While this extension can only do the same as inside ALM client, specify a remote machine when running a test set. It's impossible to manipulate how ALM work here.

[HilaryGreen]

I log into ALM on machine a and tell it to run a test-set on machine B, which leaves the runner process on A and the tests run UFT on the remote machine B. This is how ALM works normally. I expect this TFS extension to do just this (ALM on machine A and UFT on machine B). But this is exactly what the extension cannot do AND the extension cannot be installed on A (because the installer demands UFT is installed on A).