This last week (while I was out on vacation no less) Mercury Interactive was bought out by Hewlett Packard (HP), and is causing a lot of us in the QA/Testing profession to wonder what is going to happen next.  As Scott Barber said in his blog this week, we have seen some major players (Rational & Segue) in the Test Tool marketplace get acquired in the last couple of years and a couple of new entries (Microsoft (or a re-entry, anyone remember MS-Test?), Akimbi) that have caused quite a stir.  This is change, and whether we like it or not it does happen.  Sometimes for the better and other times not.  But this is what life is all about, change.  How we cope with it and learn to live with it.

This type of "Sea Change" has happened before, and before the Dot.com boom of the late 90's.  There have been other tools and companies that have come before and either merged, emerged, or died. Early on in the PC software world when DOS was dominant there were only a few test tools around (AutoTester, QES QA/Architect, etc.), and those companies all pretty much died off when the GUI market started to boom with Windows 3.0 and OS/2.  Companies like Mercury (XRunner & WinRunner), SQA (Robot), Segue (QA/Partner), Softbridge (Automated Test Facility or ATF), Compuware (QA/Run) and Microsoft (MS-Test) all took off and pushed us to the next generation of tools and automation.  Right before the Dot.com craze started some of the companies were bought out (SQA by Rational, Softbridge by Teradyne), sold off their products (Microsoft with MS-Test to Rational) or emerged as the main players (Mercury, Segue, Compuware, and Rational with acquisition of SQA).  This scared some of us then too.  I switched quickly to Windows and QA/Partner, when OS/2 started to go down in flames, after working with ATF for 4 years.  I learned other tools and survived.  I adapted to the change, and the last few years have been focused on the Mercury toolset.  Now I will need to adapt again possibly.  This is a change I will need to roll with.  Only time will tell what other changes are in store for us.