IBM® Rational® Test Lab Manager is an extended component of IBM® Rational® Quality Manager, which is collaborative, Web-based, quality management software for comprehensive test planning and test asset management. Built on the Jazz™ platform, Rational Quality Manager is designed to be used by test teams of all sizes. It supports a variety of user roles, such as test manager, test architect, test lead, tester, and lab manager, as well as roles outside of the test organization. With the Rational Test Lab Manager component, your team can integrate test lab activities into your organization’s quality management lifecycle so that you can centrally manage all resources -- people, artifacts, and lab machines.
This article describes how test lab management works with Rational Quality Manager. It also shows you how to create and view lab resources and work with lab resource reservations and requests.
The nature of test lab management
At the last Fortune 100 company that I worked at, we had hours and hours of automated regression tests. Some of those were at the unit level, some were at the API and Web service levels, and others were at the GUI level. For our GUI-level and Web service regression tests, we maintained a test lab of test execution machines. At one point, I think we had more than 70 machines in the test lab.
The biggest difficulty in managing a lab that size, aside from just keeping the hardware up and running, is managing the various test configurations and keeping track of who is running what tests on which machines. Even when we replaced our hardware and migrated to virtual execution machines, the challenges of managing test configuration and coordination were costly.
Rational Quality Manager introduces the notion of test lab management -- functionality designed to solve the problem. You can track the resources in your lab by usin the lab management tools. You can create data for physical machines and virtual images, search for resources with specific configurations, and manage requests and reservations for lab resources.
Creating and viewing lab resources
Lab management tasks are often performed by people in the roles of lab manager and tester. Therefore, to work through the exercises in this article, create two users and assign one of them to each of those roles. This is important because the role associated with each account determines the options that are available and the functions that can be accessed in the lab manager editors.
There are different types of tasks that are typically associated with these two test lab roles:
- Lab managers typically manage resources in test labs. These resources can include physical machines, virtual machines, and virtual images, and lab managers can work with team managers to allocate lab resources across the products under test, and to install, set up, and maintain software applications across the entire lab. The lab manager role is for a team member who deploys builds to test environments and who ensures that the lab resources are set up correctly.
- Testers simply run tests on lab resources.
Creating a new test lab machine
The basic building block of lab management is the lab machine. You can create physical or virtual machines, and you can create them one at a time or import multiple lab resources by using XML. For this article, you'll be adding a simple physical machine to the test lab by following these steps:
- In the left navigation pane, click the Lab Management icon (two computers) and select Create Machine from the drop-down menu. (Figure 1)
Figure 1. Create a lab machine
- This should open the Create Machine editor. You need to enter a name for the machine and then assign an Owner and an Operational Status (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Select owner and status from options
- Next, you'll enter more information about the host machine. You can enter as much or as little of this information as you like. However, the more the better. Figure 3 shows the summary information for the test machine used for this article, including location, administrative status, operational status, and details about hardware, software, and the operating system (OS).
Figure 3. Test machine details
- In Operational Status, make sure that you select Available, and in Administrative Status, select Enabled.
- After you have finished entering your lab machine's information, click Save. If you get error messages the first time that you save (as I did), hover your cursor over the error message to get more details about the problem. When you have saved successfully (which may take a minute), you will see a "Saved successfully at..." confirmation message.
- If you want to make sure that your machine is entered correctly, you can click the Lab Management icon in the left navigation area and select All Lab Resources. You should see the computer added to the list (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Verifying that the machine is added correctly
After you have added a lab resource, you have a variety of methods of managing that resource. This article does not cover setting up each method, but they are important to cover briefly so that you are familiar with the test environment, virtual collection, and lab resource group features. You can access these groups from the Lab Management icon.
Test environments
One way to manage lab resources is to create test
environments. In Rational Quality Manager, you can create a test environment that
can be stored and reused in different lab management tasks. Environments are
useful in fulfilling lab resource requests and searching for lab resources with
common criteria. Think of a test environment as simply a set of attributes:
available memory, operating system version, or specific installed software.
Virtual collections
Virtual collections are logical groupings of
virtual images or virtual machines that represent application topologies. A
virtual collection could consist of a virtual image for a Web server and another
virtual image for a database server when both are used together. If your systems
is integrated with an external provider that manages virtual images and machines,
you can view, deploy, and assign test environments to virtual collections in
Rational Quality Manager.
Lab resource groups
Creating a lab resource group enables you to to
track and manage multiple resources together. You can also associate teams of
people with the group. A common use for this might be automated test execution
machines or any group of machines that are dedicated to a particular group of
testers. The team always has exclusive access to the group of lab resources that
you define. You can view all lab resource groups by team area to see who has
access to what resources.
Working with lab resource reservations and requests
So why, you may ask, do you need to set up and enter all of these computers? What's the point? The advantage? On past projects, I've managed the status of the lab machines by using spreadsheets. From software versions to who had a machine "checked out", everyone was supposed to keep the information in the spreadsheets up to date. How well do you think that worked?
Not very well. My experience is that the information about the software installed quickly becomes out of date. The information about the hardware (typically RAM for physical machines) becomes outdated. The status of who is using which computer daily is inaccurate, and few people check in their machines early if they finish their testing early, if they check them back in at all. It ends up taking a lot of manual effort, e-mailing people to update their status, and shared frustration across the team.
In Rational Quality Manager, one of the core ideas is that you can manage your resources across the team or even across teams by using those lab resources groups. You can reserve lab resources for immediate use or for specified periods of time. You can also request a lab resource that may not even exist yet, thereby giving the lab manager one place to look for the list of new configurations to create.
If you are a lab manager, you can track and manage lab resource requests by viewing the status of all requests, assigning requests to lab personnel to fulfill, or fulfilling them directly. When you read "lab personnel," don't just think of a group of people who just manage lab equipment (few teams are that big). Instead, think of different roles: someone who has access to the room with the physical machines, someone who has administrative access to the virtual images, someone else who manages licensing for testing tools, someone else who has root access for specific servers, and so on. Different people on the team, even if they are all testers, might have different lab roles. For some teams, assigning and tracking requests is, largely, effectively coordinating how all of those people work together.
Creating a request for a lab resource
The whole process gets kicked off by requesting a lab resource. It's the basic building block of the lab manager's workflow. To request a new resources, try the following steps:
- In the left navigation pane, click the Lab Management icon and select Create Request (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Requesting a new lab resource
- This opens the Create Request editor (Figure 6). Select a Priority for your request, a Respond by date (if applicable), and a Summary of your request (required).
Figure 6. Create Request editor
- Next, enter the date you want the resource by in the Reservation. For this example, assume that you want the resource over the weekend. Use the down arrows to select From and To dates (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Specify dates to reserve the resource
- In the Lab Resources section, specify the test environments that you
want to request. To start, click the Add Criteria icon
(lowercase letter
A in a green circle). - In the resulting Select Attribute dialog (Figure 8), select Operating System and then click Add and Close.
Figure 8. Select Attribute dialog
- In the Lab Resources section (Figure 9), you will see the Operating System attribute added with a drop-down menu beside it. In that drop-down menu, select the operating system that you specified for your resource earlier. Windows XP Professional" (or whichever OS you gave your resource in the first part of the article). You can repeat this for as many attributes as you like.
Figure 9. Lab Resources view to specify test environments
- Finally, if you have specific setup or configuration details that you require for your testing, you can add a details about that in the Comments section (Figure 10).
Figure 10. Comments section
- When you are finished, click Submit.
You have just created your first request. Next, you'll see how you find and fulfill requests.
Now that there is a request waiting for fulfillment, let's look at the methods that you can use to find it. There are two basic ways to monitor requests.
- The first is the brute force method, which is to look at all of the requests and then filter based on different criteria.
- The second method is similar but a bit more elegant: you can add a Viewlet to your dashboard.
Here, you'll add a Viewlet, but you can get to the same files by clicking the Lab Management icon and selecting All Requests.
To create a Requests Viewlet for your dashboard, perform these steps:
- On your dashboard (the Home tab), click the down arrow on the General tab and select Add Viewlet (see Figure 11).
Figure 11. Dashboard view
- In the resulting Viewlet explorer (Figure 12), select Requests under Rational Test Lab Manager, and click Add viewlet.
Figure 12. Viewlet explorer
- This will add the Requests Viewlet to your dashboard (Figure 13), probably at the top of the screen. You can move it around, but wherever it is, you should see the request that you just entered.
Figure 13. Requests Viewlet
- Assuming that someday you'll have a thriving test team with hundreds of requests, there are several filtering options available to you. The default is "All Unassigned." Assume that you're a lab manager or one of the team members in that role, and you want to select "All Assigned to Me" (Figure 14).
Figure 14. "View" field with drop-down menu to select
Even better, you can create multiple Viewlets with different views.
Now that you can see your request, you can start work on it:
- In the Viewlet, click the link to the request that you created to open the
Request editor. It looks a lot like the Create Request editor, but
there are subtle differences:
- First, you can assign the request to someone on the team (for example, a
system admininistrator may need to provide the specific access requested in
the Comments section), as this image shows.
- Second, you'll see Fulfill and Return buttons at the top (Figure 15). Fulfill is a command that pushes the request through the workflow for request tickets.
- Third, under Lab Resources, you'll see a Find Machine(s) section (Figure 16).
- First, you can assign the request to someone on the team (for example, a
system admininistrator may need to provide the specific access requested in
the Comments section), as this image shows.
Figure 15. Options for managing the request
Figure 16. Find Machines section
- To assign the request to a machine (or set of machines), select Find Machines.
- After the list of matching and available machines loads, select the check box next to the machines that you want to reserve. For this example, select only the one that you added earlier (Figure 17).
Figure 17. Assign the request to a machine or set of machines
- When you are finished, click the Reserve icon
(spreadsheet with a blue
cell). This will update the ticket to show the machine reserved.
Figure 18. Request status updated
- When you are finished, click Fulfill.
Now that you have a reservation to process, you can view it in the same ways that you viewed your requests. This time, rather than using a Viewlet, use the Lab Management icon:
- Click the Lab Management icon and select All Reservations.
- Again, you have the option to change your view. You can see the status of each request and the associated details (see Figure 19).
Figure 19. Select which reservations to view
-
If you select a reservation, you can cancel the reservation by using the
Cancel Selected Reservation icon
, which has a red X in
the upper-left corner.
Lab management using Rational Test Lab Manager with Rational Quality Manager is about bringing order to chaos. This article merely scratched the surface by looking at the basic building block (the machine) and the basic workflow. The next steps for setting up Rational Quality Manager are to configure the test environments, virtual collections, and lab resource groups for your team. You will also start integrating other Rational tools into the workflow (IBM® Rational® Functional Tester and (IBM® Rational® Performance Tester, for example) and learn how the lab management structure helps you manage those tests. Watch developerWorks for articles on intermediate and advanced Rational Quality Manager topics.
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Michael Kelly is currently an independent consultant and provides custom training in the IBM Rational testing tools. He consults, writes, and speaks on topics in software testing. He is currently serving as the Program Director for the Indianapolis Quality Assurance Association and is a Director at Large for the Association for Software Testing. He can be reached by email at Mike@MichaelDKelly.com.
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