Overview of Rational Quality Manager

IBM® Rational® Quality Manager is a collaborative, web-based tool for planning, constructing, managing, and executing tests throughout the development lifecycle.

Rational Quality Manager is for test teams of all sizes and supports various user roles, such as test manager, test architect, test lead, tester, and lab manager. The application also supports roles outside the test organization.

For role-based guidance about how to get started with Rational Quality Manager, see Getting started with Rational Quality Manager.

Rational Quality Manager is the Quality Management (QM) application in the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) and IBM Internet of Things Continuous Engineering (CE) solutions. These solutions integrate IBM Rational products to provide a complete set of applications for software or systems development.

Four hexagons, each representing part of the CLM/CE solution, arranged around a central hexagon listing key features. Overview of Rational DOORS Next Generation Overview of Rhapsody Model Manager Overview of Rational Team Concert Overview of Rational Quality Manager Getting started with global configurations Overview of Reporting Overview of Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager

Comprehensive test planning

A test plan that you define in Rational Quality Manager drives activity for distributed teams through all phases of the project lifecycle. The test plan defines the objectives and scope for the test effort, and contains criteria to help teams determine the answer to this question: Are we ready to release?

You can configure the test plan can be configured to meet the needs of your organization. You can and use the test plan to do any of for these following tasks:

  • Define business and test objectives
  • Establish a review and approval process for the test plan and for individual test cases
  • Manage project requirements and test cases and establish interdependencies between them
  • Estimate the size of the test effort
  • Define the schedule for each test iteration and track the dates of other important test activities
  • List the various environments to test and generate test configurations
  • Create a read-only snapshot of the test plan at a specific point in time
  • Define quality goals, entrance criteria, and exit criteria
  • Create and manage test cases
  • View test execution progress

For more information, see Test plans.

Test design with test cases

You can use the test case design-and-construction features to define the overall design for each test case. Each test case includes a rich-text editor that you can use to include background information about the test case. A test case can also include links to development items and requirements. You can associate a test case with other test artifacts, such as test plans, test scripts, and test case execution records. In addition, test cases can be combined into test suites. For more information, see Developing test cases.

Test script construction and reuse

Rational Quality Manager provides a full-featured manual test editor. You can add reuse and automation capabilities to manual tests by using keywords.

With Rational Quality Manager, you can manage and run test scripts that were created with other tools such as IBM Rational Functional Tester, IBM Rational Performance Tester, Rational Service Tester for SOA Quality, and IBM Security AppScan® Tester Edition. For more information, see Developing manual test scripts.

Test execution

Rational Quality Manager includes an integrated test environment for running both tests that are developed within the product and tests that are created in other manual, functional, performance, and security testing tools. Many options for test execution are available:
  • Run a test case directly
  • Group test cases into test suites for parallel or sequential execution
  • Create test case execution records and test suite execution records to directly map test environment information to test cases and test suites

For more information, see Preparing for test execution.

Test analysis, reporting, and live views

Rational Quality Manager includes a set of predefined BIRT reports to help you get status on your project. Jazz® Reporting Service includes some predefined cross-project reports for test management, for example test cases per requirement, or test execution per requirement. You can use the Jazz Reporting Service reports as a starting point to develop reports that serve your specific business needs.

To see live, test execution status, you can open a test plan or browse a list of test plans and open the execution view. You can trace the relationship between test artifacts, requirements, architecture elements, and development artifacts by browsing a list of specific test artifacts and opening the traceability view.
Note: If you have enabled configuration management, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), IBMCognos® reports, and any other reports that use the CLM data warehouse as a data source will not work, and will not be visible from the Reports menu. For configuration-enabled projects, you can use document generation, which is the built-in, template-based reporting in the CLM application or by using IBM Rational Publishing Engine. The other reporting options for configuration-enabled projects in this release are technology preview features and are not intended for use in production environments. For more information, see Authoring document-style reports.

Team collaboration

Rational Quality Manager makes it easy to share information with other members of your team. By using the work item system in the Rational solution for CLM or IoT CE Solution, team members can assign tasks and defects to each other and view everyone's status. Test plan authors and test case designers can distribute their work for review and track the status of each reviewer. The team can see new and changed requirements. The team can also view the test cases that are needed to satisfy those requirements. Team members can see who is logged in and what they are working on. Team members can be notified automatically of changes, inputs, and iterations that affect their work. For more information, see Tracking work by using work items.

Authors of test plans, test cases, and test scripts can also place a lock on their artifacts to prevent others from editing them.

Lab management

With the lab management capabilities that Rational Quality Manager provides, you can create requests for the test environments that you specify in your test plan. You can then work with the lab manager to ensure that lab resources and test environments are available when needed. Lab managers can track all lab resources from a centralized resource repository and service requests from the test team. For more information, see Lab management.

Configuration management

You can use the configuration management capabilities in Rational Quality Manager to create versions of test artifacts and link them to other team artifacts, such as requirements, designs, and models. Use configurations (streams and baselines) from CLM or IoT CE applications to manage reuse, traceability, and parallel development. Assemble configurations into global configurations so that artifact versions that are linked across applications resolve correctly. Teams can use their configuration management- enabled applications to contribute requirements, models, designs, tests, and global configurations to a larger working environment. Global configurations assemble contributed configurations in a hierarchical tree view. Use global configurations to plan and manage the reuse of configurations in the many versions or variants of your software, system, or product line. For more information about configurations, see Getting started with configuration management.

Note: When you enable configuration management in a project area, the default versioning feature, snapshots, is turned off. For more information about snapshots, see Creating versioned test artifacts with snapshots. For more information about how enabling configuration management affects application capabilities, see Considerations for enabling configuration management.

Part of the Jazz community

The CLM and IoT CE products are developed transparently on the open and extensible Jazz platform. On Jazz.net, you can download the products and their milestones, track development schedules, join discussion forums, open enhancement requests, and interact with the product developers. To learn more about the products, see the developer-written articles in the Jazz.net library or the topics about complex deployment scenarios on the Deployment wiki.