Notes from Rational Support

Learn the main guidelines to build an automated development and testing framework using scripts. In the following blog post, Aya Elgebeely (Application Developer, IBM) highlights how using scripts to automate your development workflow can have a magical effect on your work quality and performance:

Streamline development efforts with scripts- There are quite a few steps to set up an environment or modify and build a substantial amount of files. If you use scripts, one command can do all the work at once. That's a big difference (and savings in time and energy) from doing the steps one-by-one. This gives you the time to focus on the important and innovative tasks and let the script do the mundane tasks.

With scripts you can combine various technologies under one custom framework. As if you are playing with Lego parts; scripts are the connectors between the different building blocks of your build and test environment. With scripting capabilities the intended workflow runs automatically with minimal user intervention.

Read on for the full article

Service Virtualization Testing in Managed Environments (Part 1)- This video describes what devops means for testing. It also explains multi-tier applications, and inter-application dependencies. The tools focused on are UrbanCode Deploy and GreenHat. Follow-on parts provide question-and-answers, and a tool demonstration.

 

 

0:05 - Introduction
1:34 - Devops Maturity Model - Development/Test and Release/Deploy
4:51 - Multi-tier applications present specific challenges to devops
7:37 - Bringing Managed Environment Capabilities and Test Virtualization together
12:47 - How the capabilities work together
14:24 - Preparing virtualized service tests
16:28 - Preparing test stubs and automated tests
17:40 - Understanding environments in UrbanCode Deploy and Rational Test Workbench
19:24 - Understanding transient environments
20:44 - Defining test components
23:36 - Externalizing properties
24:33 - Continuous Feedback - testing against the live environment

 

 

Service Virtualization Testing in Managed Environments (Part 2)- IBM senior technical staff member Michael Elder continues the discussion on devops and testing with questions and answers, as well as a tool demonstration.

 

0:07 What is a transient environment and how is it deployed?
2:38 Are the deployable test components GreenHat stubbed services?
6:45 How are the test cases fetched in a process?
7:58 Is it possible to deploy multiple "copies" of a test environment to the cloud to execute multiple tests?

 

 

 

 

 

Here is another update to the IBM Education Assistant site for Rational!  A new module is available that demonstrates how to use the Excel Importer tool for Rational Quality Manager:
  
 

Getting started with the Excel importer

   

Join us June 2, at 2pm EDT for this great webcast - Building mobile applications with quality and testing. Learn ways to reduce the cost and complexity of testing mobile applications and help to ensure data security and reliability.
                  
Presented by Leigh Williamson (Distinguished Engineer, Rational Software CTO Team) and moderated by Chris Ruoff (Senior Manager for Sales and Channel Development), this free webcast will discuss ways to reduce the cost and complexity of testing mobile applications, and also examine how static and dynamic analysis of the applications can help to ensure data security and reliability.

This free webcast is brought to you through a collaboration between IBM and the IEEE Computer Society. Register now to get your seat!

By default, IBM Rational Performance Tester provides essential performance metrics, such as throughput, response times, concurrency, and success rate. However, it also includes several advanced features for detailed analysis, many of which are not commonly used. Proper use of these options provides deeper insight when analyzing test results.

This new developerWorks article gives five tips for using some of these advanced features, all of which have helped tremendously in real-world performance testing projects with large companies.

Advanced Rational Performance Tester Reports: 5 Ways to Get Deeper Insight into performance test results