Overview of Rational Quality Manager

IBM® Rational® Quality Manager is a collaborative, web-based tool that offers comprehensive test planning, test construction, and test artifact management features throughout the development lifecycle.

Rational Quality Manager is based on the Jazz™ platform and inherits many of its characteristics. For more information about the Jazz platform, see Jazz.net and the IBM Rational Jazz page on ibm.com. 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

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?"

The test plan can be configured to meet the needs of your organization. You can use the test plan to do any of the 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 the interdependencies between the two
  • 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 particular point in time
  • Define quality goals, entrance criteria, and exit criteria
  • Create and manage test cases
  • View test execution progress

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.

Test script construction and reuse

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

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

Test execution

Rational Quality Manager includes an integrated test environment for running 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 and test suite execution records to directly map test environment information to test cases and test suites

Test analysis, reporting, and live views

Rational Quality Manager includes a set of predefined reports to help you get status on your project. You can also install the optional Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence component or Rational Insight for more reports and the ability to customize reports to suit your particular business needs.

In addition, you can see live, test execution status just by opening a test plan or by browsing a list of test plans and opening the execution view. You can trace the relationship between test artifacts, requirements, and development artifacts by browsing a list of certain test artifacts and opening the traceability view.
Note: If you have enabled configuration management, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), IBM(r)Cognos® reports, Rational Insight, 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 the IBM(r)Rational(r) 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.

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 Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM), 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 on and what they are working on. Team members can be notified automatically of changes, inputs, and iterations that affect their work.

Furthermore, authors of test plans, test cases, and test scripts can 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.

Web application security

Rational Quality Manager helps IT and security professionals protect against the threat of attacks and data breaches through its integration with IBM Security AppScan Tester Edition. Security testing for your web applications can result in higher-quality, more secure applications at a reasonable cost.

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 and designs. Use configurations (streams and baselines) from CLM applications to manage reuse, traceability, and parallel development. Assemble configurations into global configurations so that artifact versions that are linked across CLM applications resolve correctly. Teams can use their configuration management- enabled CLM applications to contribute requirements, 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

Governance

Rational Quality Manager helps ensure that your business processes comply with industry, corporate, and departmental standards and regulations. Throughout the testing lifecycle, Rational Quality Manager provides the tools to obtain an up-to-the-minute measurement of software quality and project metrics. With its comprehensive test planning, and integration with requirements management and defect tracking tools, Rational Quality Manager helps streamline your test strategy and produce reliable records of test results and project history that can be used for auditing purposes.


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