IBM® Rational® Quality Manager is a Web-based, centralized test management environment. It provides a collaborative and customizable solution for test planning, workflow control, tracking, and metrics reporting that can quantify how project decisions and deliverables affect and align with business objectives. Version 1.0.1, released in late February 2009, is the first release since the introduction of Rational Quality Manager in the fall of 2008. Although it is not a major release, there are new and noteworthy features, which this article introduces:

• Support for multiple projects
• Adoption of the IBM® Rational® Team Concert server
• Architectural foundation for integration with IBM Telelogic DOORS
• Performance tuning and regular maintenance tools

Support for multiple projects

Multiple project support enables teams with more than one testing project to isolate data associated with that project into its own project area. This benefits teams working on multiple projects that need to ensure that only certain users have access to certain projects. Figure 1 shows the drop-down menu.

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Adoption of the Rational Team Concert 1.0.1 server

Rational Quality Manager and IBM Rational Team Concert are built on a common server architecture. In this release, Rational Quality Manager adopts the latest release of this common server, the 1.0.1 version. From a feature perspective, adoption of this technology brings the following benefits to Rational Quality Manager users:

Floating license support

Floating licenses allow more than one user to share an access license, though not at the same time. These newly introduced floating licenses are available for full client access users as well as viewer access.

SQL server support

The 1.0.1 foundation server supports the use of SQL Server 2005 SP2, and SQL Server 2008 as the data storage engine.

Stronger integration with Rational Team Concert

Effectively, this enhancement enables stronger defect tracking and management, several ways:

• Defects can be created and tracked from one Rational Quality Manager project to any Rational Team Concert project.
• Defects can be created from different places at different stages during the test run:
  • Manual execution and defects can be fired at specific steps
  • Manual or automatic execution and defects can be fired at the end of the execution
  • Scriptless execution and defects can be fired at the end of the execution
  • Test Execution Record-level and defects can be fired for selected test execution records
• An existing defect in Rational Team Concert can be searched and associated with a test run.
• The defect can be tracked and associated at different levels, with enough insight information (ID, summary, state, and so forth):
  • The Manual Steps icon
  • The Defect Table in the execution result
  • The pop-up and related information panel in the Test Execution Record list
• The defect can be blocked from the execution result, which then can be seen from Test Execution Record. The blocking status can be changed as required.
• The navigation can be seen from both Rational Quality Manager and Rational Team Concert, which makes testing and development collaboration easier. You get two options:
  • Navigation from where the defect can be seen in Rational Quality Manager to the Rational Team Concert work item editor
  • Navigation from the Rational Team Concert work item editor to the Rational Quality Manager Test Execution Record

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Architectural foundation for integration with IBM Telelogic DOORS

Although this will have no impact and will not provide any additional functionality in this release, this is an important architectural step for Rational Quality Manager, because it lays the foundation for Rational Quality Manager to integrate with IBM® Telelogic® DOORS for requirements management. Ultimately, this will give you three options for requirements management:

• Internally, using native functionality within Rational Quality Manager
• Externally, with IBM® Rational RequisitePro®
• Externally, with Telelogic DOORS

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Performance tuning and regular maintenance

As with all releases, user feedback and continual testing often uncovers opportunities for incremental optimization. Most of these updates affect small areas of the application, often for a given set of circumstances. Delving into the details and technicalities is beyond the scope of this article.

However, of all of these updates, the ones with the most general applicability are the performance enhancements for dealing with large volumes of data. What constitutes large will vary, but for our internal testing, we were working with test plans with 1,000 to 5,000 test cases. If your assets are in those ranges, you will find significant improvements in return times when working with your test cases and other records.

Resources

Learn

• Visit the Rational software area on developerWorks for technical resources and best practices for Rational Software Delivery Platform products.
  
  
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• Browse the technology bookstore for books on these and other technical topics.
  
  

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About the author

Brian Bryson joined Rational Software in 1995 with a strong background in Quality Assurance. Currently, he is a member of the product team that plans and delivers the IBM Rational automated toolset. A former instructor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, Mr. Bryson has taught the Rational approach to quality automation to college students as well as employees of organizations such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle.

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Table of contents

• Support for multiple projects
• Adoption of the Rational Team Concert 1.0.1 server
• Architectural foundation for integration with IBM Telelogic DOORS
• Performance tuning and regular maintenance
• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

Next steps from IBM

• Try: Rational Quality Manager
• Demo: Video: Quality management in 3 minutes
• Webcast: Reduce cost and speed time to market with quality management and asset management
• Briefing: Quality driven software delivery
• Buy: Rational Quality Manager

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