 | Level: Intermediate Michael Kelly (Mike@MichaelDKelly.com), Consultant, www.MichaelDKelly.com
30 Dec 2008 Learn how to get started with IBM® Rational® Quality
Manager, which is collaborative, Web-based, quality management software for
comprehensive test planning, manual testing, and integration with automated test
tools. This article describes the primary features, provides an introduction to
workflows and roles, and shows you how Rational Quality Manager can integrate with
your other tools and the way that your team works.
IBM® Rational® Quality Manager helps teams collaborate by synchronizing
teamwork throughout the software development life cycle, helps them automate
labor-intensive activities, and helps them better govern their projects by
providing reliable and timely metrics. It is built the IBM® Jazz™
platform, which is a collaborative, role-based, business-driven environment that
provides tools for workflow control, tracking, and metrics reporting.
Rational Quality Manager is collaborative, Web-based, quality management software
for comprehensive test planning, manual testing, and integration with automated
test tools. It can replace IBM® Rational® Manual Tester, Rational
ClearQuest® test management tools, or Rational® Test Manager™. It
is intended to be used by test teams of all sizes and 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. This article describes the
primary features, provides an introduction to workflows and roles, and shows you
how Rational Quality Manager can integrate with your other tools and the way that
your team works.
What Rational Quality Manager can do for
you
IBM Rational Quality Manager includes a long, long list of features. There is no
other Rational product like it, so it can take a while to figure out the scope.
Figure 1 summarizes some of the key features, and the rest of this article digs
into each of these five areas.
Figure 1. Rational Quality
Manager features
Share information seamlessly
One of the core ideas behind Rational Quality Manager is information sharing.
The focus is on making information freely available to everyone on the team so
that anyone can check the status of the project. Information and reporting are
real-time, with information aggregated in one place for more powerful reporting.
IBM® Rational® Quality Manager is built on Java™ and Web 2.0
technology-based architecture. This means that team collaboration doesn't
have to be any more complicated than opening a browser. No heavy installation or
proprietary, limiting Microsoft® ActiveX® technologies are required.
This enables team members to assign tasks and defects to each other and to view
everyone's status. Test plan authors and test case designers can distribute their
work for review and track the status by each reviewer. New and changed
requirements are visible to the team, as are the test cases that are needed to
satisfy those requirements. Team members are notified automatically of any changes
and milestones that impact their work.
The central repository stores versioned histories of test assets and templates
for reuse. Currently, Rational Quality Manager provides support for medium to
large teams of up to 250 members, distributed or local.
Manage the whole project life cycle
Rational Quality Manager enables full life cycle versioning and traceability from
requirements and tests to defects and remediation. You can create requirements
directly in Rational Quality Manager, or you can track requirements through a
dynamic link to requirements management tools, such as IBM® Rational®
RequisitePro®. Test cases can be linked to requirements. This provides
project teams with traceability so that when issues are found during test runs,
defects can be entered and tracked back up to the originating requirements.
Rational Quality Manager is built on a flexible process framework that enables
you to change your development practices over time. As delivered, it defines the
roles, processes, and ownership of deliverables, plus automates the flow of work
and assets. There is shared access to and traceability of assets throughout the
software development life cycle. The software also provides contextual information
tailored to the individual. Users can customize the layout and content on the
Rational Quality Manager dashboard, and, because the dashboard is continually
updated, they can view the most current information that pertains to their work,
individually.
In addition, Rational Quality Manager helps ensure that your business processes
comply with industry, corporate, and departmental standards and regulations.
Throughout the testing life cycle, you'll have the tools to get an
up-to-the-minute measurement of software quality and project metrics. You can use
it to produce reliable records of test results and project history, too.
Manage manual testing
With IBM Rational Quality Manager, a test plan is a dynamic, living document
that evolves with the project. It is a quality management contract that clearly
describes project goals and entry and exit criteria, while also tracking
prioritized items for validation. Static data, such as business objectives, and
dynamic data, such as requirements and test cases, is captured in the plan. The
test plan is also the cornerstone of the test management process.
From the test plan, you can use an integrated manual testing feature. Testers
can use the rich text editor that can capture test steps alongside embedded
images. Using this editor, testers can record the test steps that must be executed
to validate a given function of the application. You can also embed test data as a
property of a given test step.
During tests, the tool populates the Microsoft® Windows clipboard with that
text, so that the tester can paste the text into the application. This can help
eliminate transcription errors. For validating data, they can copy data from the
application to the clipboard. Rational Quality Manager can then compare this to
baseline data stored as part of the test and highlight any discrepancies in the
test log.
To enable test reuse, Rational Quality Manager uses keywords, which allow
testers to share common steps between tests. These can be manual steps or
automated test scripts. Creating hybrid manual tests with automated keywords is
often a very simple way for manually focused test teams to leverage the power of
test automation, without making a full commitment to a test automation framework.
Use automation to accelerate project
schedules
In the test plan, you can plan and track test execution schedules. That enables
you to track coverage by schedule, as well as by environment. When used in
conjunction with Rational Test Lab Manager, Rational Quality Manager provides lab
management capabilities that enable you to create requests for the test
environments specified in your test plan. You can then ensure that lab resources
and test environments are available when you need them. Lab managers can track all
lab resources from a centralized resource repository, and they can track service
requests from the test team.
You can create data for physical machines and virtual images, search for
resources with specific configurations, and manage requests. If you have the lab
management client access license and administration permissions, you can create
reservations for lab resources. If your system is integrated with an external
provider application with virtualization capabilities, you can work with virtual
machine and image collections. If it is integrated with provider applications that
provide deployment and inventory capabilities, you can update lab resource data to
display the latest lab resource configurations and new lab resources that have
been added, and you can run scripts, projects, or libraries that are configured in
the external provider applications on remote lab resources.
You can reserve lab resources for immediate use or for specified periods. You
can also request a lab resource from a lab manager. Lab managers can track and
manage lab resource requests by viewing the status of all requests. They can
either assign the requests to lab personnel to fulfill or fulfill them directly.
However, the reservation functions described in this section of the Help feature
might not be available, depending on how lab management permissions and client
access licenses have been defined for your user account.
IBM Rational Quality Manager includes technology that is designed to
automatically identify and select the minimum number of tests required for a given
level of environment coverage. This enables testers to ensure that they optimize
configuration coverage within their time or resource constraints.
Report on project metrics for informed
release decisions
Rational Quality Manager can create and track prioritized work items for all team
members. This capability enables teams to keep track of work that must be done to
complete a quality assurance project. This feature establishes clear, prioritized
ownership for project deliverables, thus ensuring that nothing falls through the
cracks. This also allows the individual team members to see what work has been
assigned to them, or they can view a team event log that updates automatically as
activities occur and progress.
With the reporting features included in Rational Quality Manager, you can tailor
content and present information on customizable dashboards. Each user can
customize home page content and layout, thereby leveraging automated data
collection with extensive filtered reporting. This leads to a constantly updated
team status that everyone can see.
Rational Quality Manager
user roles and workflows
Rational Quality Manager includes several roles and workflows. The goal isn't to
get you to do things "the Rational way,: Instead, it is to give you
something you can use as-delivered to demonostrate some of the capabilities so you
know what's possible, as well as to show you what others in the industry may be
doing. By default, Rational Quality Manager includes these predefined user roles:
- Architect
- Test manager
- Test lead
- Tester
- Lab manager
- Everyone (meaning everyone else)
You can create or remove roles as needed. When you first install the software,
all permissions are enabled for all of the default roles. When your administrator
creates user IDs, each user ID is assigned to a role. Your team can configure the
roles so that certain functions are enabled or disabled for each role. Because
roles are configurable, your test team can customize Rational Quality Manager to
suit their needs.
The diagram in Figure 2 shows one possible workflow for a test team that
consists of a test manager, test lead, tester, and lab manager. In Rational
Quality Manager, you will see different activities, transitions, and states for
various artifacts to support workflows like this. The diagram implies that each
task follows sequentially; whereas, in reality, most tasks can be acted on
simultaneously.
Figure 2. Example of the
workflow through Rational Quality Manager
In this workflow, each role might perform the tasks shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Typical tasks for key roles
| Test manager | Test lead | Tester | Lab manager |
|---|
| Create, edit, and version test plans and test
cases | Create, review, and approve test cases | Review work items | Fulfill requests for lab resources |
|---|
| Review and approve test plans and test cases
cases | Associate requirements with test cases | Create, reuse, and review test cases and manual test scripts | Manage test lab resources |
|---|
| Assign work items | Run reports to track project status | Run test execution records using manual and automated scripts | |
|---|
| Run and review reports to track project status | Create test execution records | Request lab resources for testing | |
|---|
| Create lab resource requests | Create defect reports | |
|---|
| Monitor status, requirements, and traceability | Assign work items | | |
|---|
| Create defect reports | | |
|---|
| Manage test lab resources | | |
|---|
Your team might use a different set of roles and a different workflow. For
example, some companies separate test automation, performance testing, and
security testing into separate roles. If that's your situation, you can set up
those roles and associate tasks with them in your workflow. If you are on the
other end of the spectrum, and you only have testers who do everything, then you
do not need a complicated role hierarchy. Just set everyone up the same and move
on. It's there to support your workflow, not to change it.
Automated testing
overview
Rational Quality Manager enables you to manage and run automated test scripts
created with other test tools. You can create test scripts that refer to existing
tests that were created with IBM Rational Functional Tester, Rational Performance
Tester, Rational Service Tester, Rational Robot, and Rational AppScan Tester
Edition. The test scripts that you create are references to the actual tests
created in the other testing tools.
When you choose to run an automated test, Rational Quality Manager sends commands
to the machines in your test lab, causing the native test to be run and the
results to be displayed in your browser. Automated tests can reside on test
machines in your test lab or at shared network locations. When you create a
reference to an automated test, you must specify where the test resources are
located. You can also perform bulk imports of your automated tests.
Automated test tools integrate with Rational Quality Manager through the use of
adapters. Each adapter serves as a bridge between the test tool and Rational
Quality Manager. The adapter receives requests from Rational Quality Manager and
then runs tests on the test machine where the test tool is installed. In most
cases, the adapter is installed with the native product. For example, the Rational
Performance Tester adapter is installed with Rational Performance Tester on the
performance tester test machine in the lab. Any configuration required for the
adapter is also handled on the machine where the native product is installed.
In the illustration in Figure 3, you can see how Rational Quality Manager drives
automated tests through assets local to an execution machine or assets located on
a shared server.
Figure 3. Rational Functional
Tester resources accessed through Rational Quality Manager
- In both workflows, in Step 1, the user chooses to run an automated test
through the Web client.
- In Step 2, the adapter receives the request and initiates a test run on the
test machine. If the test resources are shared, then the adapter receives the
request and copies the test from the shared location to the functional test
machine.
- In Step 3, the test runs on the test machine, and the adapter sends the
results back to the Rational Quality Manager server.
- Finally, in Step 4, test execution and test execution results can be viewed in
the browser on the Web client.
Next steps
Rational Quality Manager is an environment for both decision makers and testers.
Your challenge as you start to get more involved with it will not be getting it to
do what you want, but figuring out how to effectively use all of the information
provided and how to customize some of the common features and artifacts to be most
effective for you and the way you work. Watch developerWorks for future articles
on intermediate and advanced Rational Quality Manager topics.
Resources Learn
- For more on getting started with Rational
Quality Manager, check out Managing your first project with IBM Rational Quality Manager by Michael
Kelly (IBM developerWorks, October 2008).
- For more about lab management options in
Rational Quality Manager and how you can use it to handle reporting, read Lab management using IBM
Rational Test Lab Manager by Michael Kelly (developerWorks, October 2008).
- Read author Mike Kelly's article: Test analysis and
reporting using IBM Rational Quality Manager for an in-depth look at this subject (December 2008).
- You can find more information about IBM
Rational Quality Manager and related products on the Software
Testing and Quality Management of IBM.com.
- Explore Rational computer-based,
Web-based, and instructor-led online courses. Hone your skills and learn
more about Rational tools with these courses, which range from introductory to
advanced. The courses on this catalog are available for purchase through
computer-based training or Web-based training. Additionally, some
"Getting Started" courses are available free of charge.
- Subscribe to the IBM developerWorks
newsletter, a weekly update on the best of developerWorks tutorials,
articles, downloads, community activities, webcasts and events.
- Browse the technology
bookstore for books on these and other technical topics.
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About the author | | | 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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