Now that I've been at my new place for some time, and I'm two nines sure that I won't run into it, I will start ripping on HP Quality Center.

That piece of garbage exemplifies the worst aspects of line of business applications: resource intensive for no reason, uglier than a pink house, and more unusable than a fuse box. If it were a body builder, he would go through steroids faster than a cow eats grass, looked like he caught a rocket with his face, be leaking muscle everywhere, and so big to need to buy 2 side by side seats on an airplane or in a theater. His voice would be so thick and low that you're not sure if he wants to come to your fitness show or pile drive your skull.

It's more of a web-enabled app rather than an actual web-app. It's a large ActiveX control that needs to be installed in IE. It crashes more often than Windows ME. On a modern Core 2 based system with a few gigs of RAM, it loads within 10 seconds. On everyone else's P4, it's about 20 seconds. It makes the business app I was developing in Flex/Flash look good by comparison.

I'm not sure what UI widget toolkit they're using, but it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with rusty iron spikes. Quickly selecting something in a drop down is an exercise in futility (it closes upon mouse wheel scroll, arrow keys don't do anything). The thing throws popup dialog boxes like it's 1997. Every cell in a table is a text box, and CTRL+A selects entire table, not the text of the cell I'm in.

Because I was only a mere 'developer' in the system, I could only modify about 2 fields, and could not create issues. I, alone, couldn't do much, which actually worked to my advantage the last 2 months I was there, bored out of my mind. It's not like I could create work for myself!