Introduction

When developing performance test scripts in IBM® Rational® Performance Tester, you can use the version control features in IBM Rational Team Concert to enhance the management of the script versions. When you consider version control and development-process control, you confront three issues:

1. Managing and controlling the progress of the team
2. Sharing individual work with the team efficiently, especially with teams that are distributed worldwide
3. Providing the source control and version control of the scripts to support reuse or subsequent script reviews

In the fast pace of agile software development, increasing numbers of teams are adopting Rational Team Concert as their project management tool.

In addition to project management features, Rational Team Concert can also maintain version control while governing the development process. You can collaborate efficiently to develop Rational Performance Tester projects and scripts with the help of Rational Team Concert.

To use the techniques here, you need some basic knowledge of Rational Team Concert. Information about user management, project area management, and project-administration actions are not included in this paper. For details about these aspects of Rational Team Concert, see the "Resources" section.

Test-script development management in Rational Team Concert

Rational Team Concert provides a strong collaborative development environment for project team management. In test-process management, you can also use the application to track the progress of the test project for the team. For example, the test manager can create a story, "Script Development," in Rational Team Concert to trace the test-script development related to that story. Later the testing manager can create the story, "Test Execution," to trace related tasks during test execution. Finally the test manager can use the story, "Reporting," to trace the progress of presenting test reports. This paper focuses on the first phase - Rational Performance Tester script development management.

Figure 1 illustrates the main script-development process under Rational Team Concert source control.

The process in detail

Here are the detailed steps in this process:

1. The test manager creates in Rational Team Concert the story, "Script Development," for a performance test.
2. The test manager creates the tasks that belong to the story from Step 1. Each task describes the content and steps that are required to implement one use case in the test plan. The product of the task is an executable Rational Performance Tester script.
3. The test manager assigns these development tasks to testers.
4. Testers log in to Rational Team Concert and check for assigned tasks.
5. Testers prepare the Rational Performance Tester development environment and begin to work on tasks.
6. Testers resolve the task by delivering the finished test scripts to the server.
7. The test manager accepts all the scripts from server and validates them.
8. The test manager resolves the story or reopens some tasks for further work.

In this workflow, Rational Team Concert helps control centrally the development process and all team members work on the same project collaboratively. Meanwhile, you can control all versions of the test scripts that testers develop in Rational Performance Tester in Rational Team Concert. The scripts can also be traced or reused.

In the following sections you see in detail about how to develop Rational Performance Tester scripts under the Rational Team Concert source control.

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Prepare Rational Team Concert source control for the performance test project

For Rational Team Concert to manage the source control of the project, you must integrate Rational Team Concert with the Rational Performance Tester workbench. You must also prepare for collaborative development on the Rational Team Concert server.

Install Rational Team Concert, and connect to the server

Before you begin, collect the following information regarding your Rational Team Concert server that hosts your project area. Keep the information available for use in Step 6.

• The server URI
• The server name
• Your user ID for the project area
• Your password for the project area

To install Rational Team Concert and connect to the server:

1. Install the Rational Team Concert client on the computer that runs your installation of Rational Performance Tester.

Larger view of Figure 2.

2. During installation, select the package group that contains Rational Performance Tester. By selecting this package group, Rational Team Concert client and Rational Performance Tester are automatically integrated during installation. See Figure 3.

Larger view of Figure 3.

3. After the installation finishes, start Rational Team Concert. The Work Items perspective opens. If you need to open this perspective, click Window > Open Perspective > Other > Work Items.
4. To connect to your project area on the Rational Team Concert server, on the Team Organization page, click Connect to Project Area.

5. Click Create a new repository connection.

6. Complete the fields with information that you collected earlier.

7. Select the correct project area to connect to. After connecting to the repository, your repository is listed on the Team Artifacts page, as shown in Figure 8.

Add the Rational Performance Tester project to source control in Rational Team Concert

Before the team can begin collaborative script development, the test manager must create a Rational Performance Tester project, and then add the project to source control on the Rational Team Concert server. To add your performance test project to the Rational Team Concert server:

1. Open the Test Navigator view in the Rational Performance Tester workbench.
2. To share a project for collaborative development, right-click the performance test project, and then click Team > Share Project. The Share Project window opens.

3. Select Jazz Source Control as the repository type.

4. Select the repository workspace and the component to share the project. The repository workspace is the Rational Team Concert server that you connected to in the previous procedure.

5. Select the project to share. You can add more than one project.

6. Click Finish. The project to share is displayed in the Pending Change view in your workspace as shown in Figure 13. The project is added to your repository workspace. Other team members, however, cannot see the repository until you deliver the repository.

After you deliver the shared project to the server, team members can access and modify components under source control on the Rational Team Concert server.

Join the project

Each team member needs permissions to connect to the server and access and deliver task changes to the Rational Team Concert server. (Setting the permissions is a Rational Team Concert server administrator task; see the link to the Rational Team Concert Information Center in the "Resources" section.)

After you connect to the Rational Team Concert server and project area as described earlier, create a repository workspace, and then you must load the contents of the Rational Performance Tester project to your workspace. To load the contents:

1. Open the Team Artifacts page.
2. Select the component where the Rational Performance Tester project is located. For example, in Figure 14, SCM Project Team Default Component contains the project.
3. Right-click the component, and then select Load. The Load Repository Workspace window opens.

4. In the Load Repository Workspace window, click Find and load Eclipse projects. This action loads the Rational Performance Tester project to your local workspace.
5. Click Next.

6. Open the Performance Test perspective in Rational Performance Tester, right-click the project, and then select Refresh. The performance test project opens in the Test Navigator.

Note:

If the Test Navigator does not display the project automatically, contact your project leader and get the correct .classpath file for the project. Add the file to the project root directory in your local file system.

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Develop Rational Performance Tester scripts under Rational Team Concert source control

After you connect to the Rational Team Concert project area and load the project onto your local workspace, you are ready to develop Rational Performance Tester scripts under Rational Team Concert source control.

Changes to the check-out process

Unlike the source control of IBM Rational ClearCase®, you do not check out files for modification. You modify the artifacts in the Rational Performance Tester workbench directly. When you save your changes, the files are decorated with a light orange rectangle as shown in Figure 16. Your changes are not available to other team member until you deliver the change to the server. In this arrangement, a number of users can modify the same script synchronously.

Check in files

After you validate the script in your local workspace, you can right-click the file, and select Team > Check-in. This action confirms this change in your repository workspace, where the changes wait to be delivered.

After you check in the artifact, a new pending change is created in the Outgoing directory in the Pending Changes view. Your modification is ready to deliver.

Important:

An artifact that is checked in means that your changes are saved in your local repository workspace, but the changes are not available to team members. To make your changes available to your team, select Check-in and Deliver described in the subsequent section. By making this selection, you do not need to check in the changed files first.

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Deliver changes

You can deliver changes in several ways.

Deliver changes without pending changes

If the changes that await delivery are independent of other changes, the changes can be delivered directly. Users can check the pending changes status in the Pending Changes view.

Deliver with pending changes

Pending changes mean that other files have been modified and your delivery of changes depends on them. In this case, the change cannot be delivered before you resolve the pending changes. You can find the related artifacts listed in the Pending Changes view.

In Figure 20, the createDefect.testsuite artifact has data substitutions from the users.datapool data file. Because one team member modified the data file while another team member modified the artifact, the artifact shows as a pending change. The team members must deliver the artifact with its pending changes together.

Deliver changes with assigned work items

You can harness Rational Team Concert functions to help manage development progress and processes. The test manager can create work items that correspond to Rational Performance Tester scripts to be developed and assign the work items to available team members. This ability helps the test manager track the progress of each team member. In this case, team members associate the changes with an assigned work item. When they deliver these associated changes, the work items are resolved automatically. To deliver and resolve work items:

1. With the Pending Changes page open, select an outgoing change set.
2. To associate your "in-progress" work item with the change set, right-click the change set, and select Associate Work Item. (See Figure 21.) A list of available work items opens, as shown in Figure 22.

3. Right-click the associated change set, and select Deliver and Resolve Work Item.

Your change is delivered to the server and the associated work item is resolved automatically.

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Accept Changes

In addition to sharing your changes with the team, you can accept changes from team members who deliver changes. To accept changes:

1. In the Pending Change view, right-click individual changes or the directory that contains several changes.
2. Select Accept. Changes that others make are delivered to your local workspace, thus keeping your work synchronized with the team.

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A strong combination

Rational Performance Tester provides the tools you need to test and enhance product quality. Integrate the testing tool with Rational Team Concert works to help you and your team work efficiently - in concert - toward common goals.

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Good lessons learned

We would like to share some useful tips that we found during our in-house deployment of Rational Team Concert and Rational Performance Tester. Use these tips to help you go beyond using Rational Team Concert as a source-control application for Rational Performance Tester scripts.

Tips for recording a script

Earlier, you learned how to change saved performance testing scripts and deliver the changes to a Rational Team Concert server to share with team members. However, to record and share a new script, consider these details.

You might encounter this situation: Rational Performance Tester is integrated the Rational Team Concert client. You have started developing a performance test project under Rational Team Concert source control. You cannot, however, record a new script on the server that is directly connected to project.

As shown in Figure 25, when you try to record a new script on the server that is connected to the project, the Finish push button is unavailable. You cannot start to record the script. However, recording scripts for local projects, which are not in source control, work well. We use these steps to work around this issue:

1. Create a local project in the same workspace where you loaded the source controlled project in Rational Performance Tester.
2. Record the new script in the local project.
3. Test the script to confirm that the script can be played back and that 100% of the verification points pass.
4. From the file system, copy the new script from the local project directory into the directory of server connected project.
5. In Rational Performance Tester, refresh the project that is under source control.

The script that you created is located in the project and is listed as pending change, as shown in Figure 27.

You can follow the earlier steps to deliver and close a work item or further change the file and share the project with your team later.

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Record a new script

Previously, you read about making changes and deliver the changes to the Rational Team Concert server. You saw how to share Rational Performance Tester scripts with team members. When you record a new script and share that asset, be aware of this issue:

After you integrate Rational Performance Tester with the Rational Team Concert client, you cannot record a new script directly into a Rational Performance Tester project that is under source control.

If you attempt to record a new script directly into the Rational Performance Tester project that is under source control, clicking Finish does not start recording the new script.

To workaround this problem, record the new script into a local Rational Performance Test project first:

1. Create a new local performance test project in the same workspace where you load the source controlled project in Rational Performance Tester.
2. Record the new script into this project.
3. After you complete testing and editing the script, use Save As to put the script into the Rational Performance Tester project that is under source control.

The new script is listed in the project and shows as a pending change as shown in Figure 30.

Follow the steps in the previous section and to make further modifications and share the items with team members.

The ignored resource

Earlier, you learned how to add a new project to the Rational Team Concert server for source control. The final step of sharing the project on the Jazz server is to select the ignored resource for sharing, as shown in Figure 31.

Rational Team Concert provides Ignore Patterns to help you define the types of resources not to be shared and automatically ignores matching resources. Any file or directory that matches any one of the patterns is ignored while you update files or commit changes.

In addition to the defined ignore patterns, when sharing projects, you can also ignore any artifact that you select during the development process.

Right-click a file, select Team > Add to Ignore List, and then select what and where to ignore in the window that opens.

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Source control for performance testing and beyond

Based on the integration of Rational Team Concert and Rational Performance Tester, you can manage the development of performance testing scripts and provide source control. This collaborative development-management environment can enhance test management, script reuse, and version control. In addition to Rational Performance Tester, you can benefit from similarly integrating Rational Team Concert with other Eclipse-based development applications. You can extend this working model to most of the development tools and platforms that are based on Eclipse.

Resources

Learn

• Learn about other applications in the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, including collaboration tools for parallel development and geographically dispersed teams, plus specialized software for architecture management, asset management, change and release management, integrated requirements management, process and portfolio management, and quality management. You can find product manuals, installation guides, and other documentation in the IBM Rational Online Documentation Center.
  
  
• Visit the Rational software area on developerWorks for technical resources and best practices for Rational Software Delivery Platform products.
  
  
• 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 Rational Edge newsletter for articles on the concepts behind effective software development.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Read Getting Started with Jazz Source Control
  
  
• Read How to use the Scrum project management method with IBM Rational Team Concert and the Jazz platform
  
  
• Explore the Rational Performance Tester page on IBM® developerWorks® for links to technical information for software developers and testers and to related IBM software.
  
  
• Explore the Browse the Rational Performance Tester Information Center.
  
  
• Learn more on the Rational Performance Tester product page.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Download trial versions of IBM Rational software.
  
  
• Download these IBM product evaluation versions and get your hands on application development tools and middleware products from DB2®, Lotus®, Tivoli®, and WebSphere®.
  
  
• Download the trial version of IBM Rational Performance Tester.
  
  

Discuss

• Check out developerWorks blogs and get involved in the developerWorks community.
  
  
• Join the Performance Testing forum, where you can share you questions and knowledge about IBM performance testing products, including IBM Rational Performance Tester (now integrated with IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit). General performance testing, VU scripting, and load testing topics are also discussed in this forum.
  
  

About the authors

Dan Liu has worked as a system tester with IBM Rational software for two years. Currently, Ms. Liu focuses on performance tests for Jazz-based products and test automation.

Chuck Berry has worked in software development and quality engineering for 27 years. He has many years of software testing experience and, over the past 12 years with Rational and IBM, he has tested numerous products: IBM Rational Robot, LoadTest, IBM Rational Quality Architect, IBM Rational TestManager, IBM Rational Functional Tester, IBM Rational ClearQuest test management, and IBM Rational Quality Manager. He has worked with IBM Rational quality management software for the past six years. Currently, Mr. Berry focuses on testing the performance of Rational Quality Manager.

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Table of contents

• Introduction
• Prepare Rational Team Concert source control for the performance test project
• Develop Rational Performance Tester scripts under Rational Team Concert source control
• Deliver changes
• Accept Changes
• A strong combination
• Good lessons learned
• Record a new script
• Source control for performance testing and beyond
• Resources
• About the authors
• Comments

Next steps from IBM

• Try: Rational Performance Tester
• Demo: Unify your System i test efforts with IBM Rational software
• Webcast: IT performance management: Measure, monitor and modify for operational excellence
• Briefing: Quality driven software delivery
• Buy: Rational Performance Tester

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