| Developer(s) | IBM / Rational Software |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 3.0.1 / June 2011 |
| Development status | Active |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows Linux |
| Type | Test management tools |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | Rational Quality Manager Web Page |
IBM Rational Quality Manager provides a collaborative application lifecycle management environment for test planning, construction, and execution.
Contents |
IBM Rational Quality Manager enables quality assurance teams to track all aspects of the quality assurance effort. The central artifact in the tool is a dynamic test plan that contains all information pertaining to the quality assurance effort, such as goals, schedules, milestones and exit criteria as well as links to associated test cases, requirements and development work items. Rational Quality Manager further includes modules for requirements management, manual test authoring and execution, test lab management, test execution, reporting and defect management.
Quality Manager is a web 2.0 application which runs in a browser. Data is stored and managed on the Rational Quality Manager server.
It is built upon the IBM Rational Jazz technology platform. The Jazz technology platform is a common server foundation shared by several Rational tools which facilitates information sharing between teams and applications. Through the Jazz technology platform, Rational Quality Manager can share requirements information with Rational Requirements Composer, and share work items and defects with Rational Team Concert. The Jazz platform also provides a universal API for sharing information with other 3rd party applications.
IBM Rational Quality Manager and the Jazz technology platform are developed on Jazz.net, where developers and users participate and communicate in discussion forums, newsgroups, and the development process. The Jazz.net community site includes technotes, articles, forums, wikis, blogs, current documentation, and other troubleshooting and support resources.
Requirements are a key input to the quality assurance process. IBM Rational Quality Manager provides two requirements management options. First, IBM Rational Quality Manager can integrate to external requirements management systems such as Rational DOORS, Rational RequisitePro and Rational Requirements Composer. In this scenario, requirements are managed externally, and Rational Quality Manager establishes live links to the external requirements. Alternatively, Rational Quality Manager contains its own requirements management facility. This streamlined facility enables requirements management direction from the Quality Manager interface. Regardless of the source of requirements, Rational Quality manager can generate test cases from requirements, can associated test plans and test cases to requirements and will notify the user when a requirement associated to a test plan or test case has changed.
The test plan is the central artifact in Rational Quality Manager and contains both static and dynamic information regarding the quality assurance effort. Some of the static information gathered includes Business Objectives, Test Objectives, Test Team, Entry and Exit Criteria. Some of the dynamic information contained in the test plan includes requirements and test cases.
Test cases are the single most important element of the test plan. The test case defines the what, where, why and how of a test. Specifically, what is to be tested, on which platforms it is to be tested, the purpose of the test and how the test will be executed. In terms of execution, Rational Quality Manager has the native ability to author and execute manual test scripts as well as the ability to launch automated test scripts from Rational Functional Tester, Rational Performance Tester and Rational Service Tester. Various execution adapters are also available which enable execution of other tests from third party vendors.
Test lab management involves the tracking of test lab assets and their configurations, provisioning of test lab assets and scheduling of test lab assets. Rational Quality Manager provides a basic lab management capability as a standard feature and also offers additional functionality from Rational Test Lab Manager for additional lab management functionality, such as integrations to automated lab discovery and provisioning tools from IBM Tivoli.
Defect reports are one of the key outputs of the quality assurance process. Like requirements management, Rational Quality Manager offers the ability to manage defects natively, within the Rational Quality Manager architecture or to establish links to external issue tracking solutions such as Rational ClearQuest and Rational Team Concert.
Rational Quality Manager offers a series of packaged reports for reporting on all aspects of the quality assurance process. With the v2.0 release, Rational Quality Manager has begun integrating new advanced reporting functionality which enables users to create and modify additional reports.
The Rational Quality Manager dashboard itself is not a key artifact, but the default interface which displays artifact information. The dashboard in Rational Quality Manager is fully customizable so that users can choose what content they would like to have on their desktops at all times. The dashboard can display information from Rational Quality Manager as well as from RSS feeds.
The following is a release history of IBM Rational Quality Manager.
Having been in the market for less than 24 months, Rational Quality Manager's primary criticism relates to its newness. This is an issue for all new products, and one that should dissolve with time.
The Rational Quality Manager provides an API which accepts REST requests to create, read, update and delete artificats and attachments, but there is no reference manual that describes the functionality.
The standard reports in the reporting section are not very customizable and have a plain appeal, e.g. there's no standard report to list requirements, test cases and execution result on the same sheet.