Components
Rational® TestManager is the central console for test activity management, execution and reporting. Built for extensibility, it supports everything from pure manual test approaches to various automated paradigms including unit testing, functional regression testing, and performance testing. Rational TestManager is meant to be accessed by all members of a project team, ensuring the high visibility of test coverage information, defect trends, and application readiness.
Solving the complexity of test and test asset management
Support for all test types: Plan, manage and execute functional, performance, manual, integration, regression, configuration and component testing from the same interface. Gives QA leads, project managers and business analysts a comprehensive view into all of the test activities and test results for the application.
Customizable test management: Open APIs in Rational TestManager let users build support for new test inputs (e.g. system requirements from a third-party tool) and test types (e.g. home-grown unit tests).
Support for local and remote test execution: Run tests on the local machine or on remote machines in the test lab. Parallel test execution is limited only by the number of system resources at your disposal.
Establish and manage traceability: Requirements are linked to test cases, ensuring proper test coverage. In addition, suspicion analysis ensures that when requirements change, test cases traced to the requirement are automatically flagged as possible candidates for modification.
Detailed test evaluation: An integrated log viewer constructs a log for each test run, including test status, environmental information and additional informational tags such as runtime analysis information gathered by Rational PurifyPlus.
Generate meaningful reports: Rational TestManager includes a series of predefined graphical and textual reports capturing the crucial aspects of application quality and test completeness. Special reports exist for performance test analysis, including correlation reports combining response times with resource utilization metrics from remote machines. TestManager also ships with a flexible reporting engine enabling the creation of custom reports required by your organization's internal development processes. New report templates we find useful for our customers are periodically posted to the Rational domain of the IBM developerWorks® website for public consumption.
Deep integration with Rational's Team Unifying Platform tools: Out-of-the-box integration with Rational RequisitePro ensures seamless traceability between requirements and test cases, resulting in clear test coverage metrics and sensitivity to requirement modification. Out-of-the-box integration with Rational ClearQuest enables in-context defect submission directly from the TestManager Log Viewer, automatically porting test run data into the defect report to ensure accuracy. Out-of-the-box integration with Rational ClearCase LT delivers full baselining capabilities to accommodate the natural evolution of a project, moving from one build or release to the next.
Introducing automation to the test lab
Test Lab Management
Rational TestManager, through a unique integration with VMware® server virtualization software, simplifies and automates one of the true headaches for QA teams - configuration testing. Thorough configuration testing involves the repetitive execution of test suites on machines running a wide variety of targeted hardware, software and application combinations. A classic example is internationalization testing, ensuring that your organization's software can run on multiple flavors of an operating system (US, French, Japanese, etc.). Configuration testing is traditionally rife with difficulty:
Manual setup-teardown procedures are error prone and take up an excessive amount time better spent on greater value-added tasks.
Schedule restrictions require high expenditures on multiple hardware systems to ensure configuration testing is completed on time.
One solution adopted by organizations is the usage of virtualization software1, creating a library of configurations that can be installed automatically. This technique certainly addresses some of the pains of configuration testing, but it also introduces a few problems of its own. Library management requires its own dedicated resources, while hardware resource management is crucial to ensuring servers aren't overtaxed, bringing test playback to a crawl. And keeping track of which tests ran on which set of configurations can be cumbersome and error-prone.
Rational TestManager's test lab management capabilities leverages the strength of VMware virtualization technology to simplify and automate configuration testing while adding automation capabilities to eliminate maintenance overhead. Test execution suites in TestManager specify which of the desired configurations stored in VMware configuration "images" are targeted by a predefined set of test cases. Through an integration with VMware's GSX Server technology, these images are automatically pulled from a configuration library and instantiated on specified machines. TestManager executes its tests on these now configured machines and then, upon completion, directs the GSX Server to load a new image.
The entire process is automated. Once VMware configuration images are created and stored in the GSX Server library, no manual work is ever required.
Testing can be done serially or in parallel. Based on server statistics gathered by the GSX Server, TestManager determines on the fly how many configuration images can be run in parallel on the same machine. TestManager is able to differentiate one image from another and can thus run different test sets on each image - maximizing the usage of existing hardware resources.
Test execution information is recorded to the TestManager test logs in full, eliminating opportunities for data loss or confusion about which tests were run where.
Footnotes
1. Virtualization software simplifies computing infrastructure by partitioning and isolating servers in secure and transportable virtual machines each of which can run standard Windows or Linux operating systems and applications. To ensure high performance, each virtual machine has direct access to the host machine's resources such as CPU, memory, disk, networking, and peripherals.
