Today is the last day of the call for papers for Innovate 2010, the conference formerly known as The Rational Software Conference.
Th new name for the conference reflects the new reality of software delivery, where we area all trying to design and build the smarter products and services we need to build a smarter planet.
The Rational Tester will be chairing the Quality Management track at the conference, and looking for any and all topics related to smarter quality management. As always, if you submit a paper and get accepted, you’ll get a free pass to the conference, which will be held in Orlando from June 6 to 10. We’re looking for any topics related to Quality Management, but with so many new adopters of Rational Quality Manager, I’d like to specifically invite you to submit content related to Rational Quality Manager. Anything from:
Recently, I’ve had a few requests to talk about Rational Test Lab Manager. Rational Test Lab Manager is an optional component of Rational Quality Manager that enables quality assurance teams to manage all aspects of a test lab: Asset Inventory, Test machine scheduling and provisioning and Asset utilization reporting. It’s a very powerful component of Quality Manager that enables management with a host of integration points:
A VMLogix integration enables lab management of Virtual Machines
A Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database integration enables automated inventory of lab assets
A Tivoli Provisioning Manager integration enables provisioning and configuring of remote lab assets
As always though, it’s easiest to understand through a demo. This morning, I posted a quick overview demo we used at our Rational Software Conference 2009. The demonstration covers all the basic functionality and benefits of IBM Rational Test Lab Manager. Enjoy.
At the Rational User Conference last June, we did our first demonstration of Rational Quality Manager integrating with Rational DOORS (formerly Telelogic DOORS). With this integrations, users of Rational DOORS who manage their software and system requirements in DOORS can link these to a test plan and test cases in Rational Quality Manager. This link enables requirements based quality, where requirements drive the test plan.
This link is bi-directional. Initially, Requirements are exported from DOORS to Rational Quality Manager. In Rational Quality Manager, these requirements can then be associated to test cases and test plans. When the test cases are run and produce a test execution result, the results are automatically sent back to Rational DOORS, where the latest execution verdict is displayed as a requirements property.
When requirements are updated in DOORS, the user can send these updates to Rational Quality Manager where the requirement will be flagged as updated in the GUI. This signals the tester that they may potentially have to re-examine the requirements, or re-run the test as a result of the requirement change.
Requirements management from DOORS is only one of the requirements management options for Rational Quality Manager. Besides using requirements from DOORS, Rational Quality Manager can link to requirements in Rational RequisitePro as well as use its own native requirements management functionality.
Users of Rational Quality Manager 2.0 might want to download the latest fix pack which is available from Jazz.net.
There are a significant amount of updates and changes in this fix pack, many introduced for backward compatibility reasons. As with all Rational Quality Manager updates, the easiest way to download and install is through the Update Packages wizard in the IBM Installation Manager. Enjoy!
Still running Rational Quality Manager v1.x? If so, a new fix pack just went live for users of Rational Quality Manager 1.0, 1.0.1, or 1.0.0.1. The fix will bring Rational Quality Manager up to v1.0.1.2. The fix addresses about 10 reported issues, full details of which can be found on the announcement page.
Just a heads up that this week, on Wednesday and Thursday, IBM Rational will be at the STAR West testing conference demoing Rational Quality Manager. The conference this year is in Anaheim, CA at the Disneyland hotel from October 5 to 9.
IBM Rational will have a booth on the EXPO floor, and on top of Rational Quality Manager, you’ll be able to get a look at Rational Requirements Composer, Rational RequisitePro, Rational Functional Tester, Rational Service Tester and Rational Performance Tester.
There are various packages to attend the conference, but if you just want to pop in and say hello to IBM Rational, you can get a free expo pass which gets you into the hall on Thursday. See you there!
The 2008 inaugural release of Rational Quality Manager introduced a new approach to test case management. The Rational Quality Manager dynamic test plan allowed test cases to be associated to a test plan in a non-hierarchical nature. There are many benefits to this approach, the main being that in a distributed test team, where many people are working off a test plan, having tests tied to a hierarchy often makes them difficult to find. While the categorization, of filing of test cases in folders of folders of folders might seem logical and simple to the person who originally created and organized the structure might seem logical and obvious, for anyone coming in new to the structure, navigation is much more difficult.
You can think of this as similar to the way Google and Yahoo took to indexing the web. Yahoo originally, and still available today, used hierarchical directories to categorize web content. Google of course simply put all websites into one group, and enabled you to find what you were looking for with a powerful search facility. Both valid approaches, but how do you find what you want on the web? Exactly.
What made Rational Quality Manager approach possible was the advanced tagging and searching mechanism. Using a paradigm similar to the Google approach, all test cases are stored in one bucket, with a very powerful and fast search feature that enables you to find what you are looking for based on all the common identifying properties of a test case such as names or tags. Rational Quality Manager’s web 2.0 sytle dynamic filtering further enhances this, enabling you to see search results returned as you type.
Hierarchies, however, are not without their benefits. Viewed from above, they provide a good graphical representation of content. You can quickly see relationships between artifacts and get an idea of the number of artifacts in a certain area, such as the number of test cases for a given requirement.
Accordingly, new in Rational Quality Manager 2.0 is a hierarchical view of assets. In this tree view you can see how the Viscosity Defect is attached to the Viscosity Execution of the Viscosity Test, attached to the Viscosity Test Case of the Viscosity Requirement in the Red Test Plan in the Paint Shop project.
This powerful new view enables testers to visualize relationships while still being able to leverage the powerful searching and tagging facilities for finding test cases. Two approaches to viewing your data, with two different benefits makes this one of Rational Quality Manager 2.0’s most powerful features.
If you were at the Rational Software Conference 2009 you got wind of some of the new features headed our way in Rational Quality Manager 2.0. With the arrival of Beta 2.0 you can now download the latest and have a look at some of the key features:
Risk Based Testing
Productivity Boosters
Reporting and Closed Loop Analysis
Over the next few weeks we’ll look a little closer at these features, and dive deep into how you can use these features to manage the risk associated with your quality management projects.
“What is Rational Quality Manager” and “How do I get started”. Those are two questions that we hear on a daily basis. The answer is pretty simple, but nothing we’ve ever documented, so accordingly, here is how we suggest you get to know, learn and love Rational Quality Manager.
Step 1: Learn the basics of quality management. Some great resources to get started with are:
Video: Quality Management in 3 Minutes explains the basics of Quality Management at a high level. No big words, so this one is safe for managers.
The Rational Quality Manager Tidbits series on our YouTube channel drills one level deeper on some of the key features of Quality Manager. Each tidbit is only a few minutes long, and explains one interesting feature about the tool
Step 3: Now that you’ve got the basics down, dig a little deeper on Rational Quality Manager
There is a series of articles on Using Rational Quality Manager for the First Timeon developerWorks. This series will guide you though all the major phases of managing a quality assurance project with Rational Quality Manager
Step 4: Now that you have a good understand Quality Management and Rational Quality Manager, the following will help you go even deeper in the topic and our portfolio
Additional Rational Podcasts. A general site with various Rational podcasts – including one about this blog entry!
Keep up to date with the development team. jazz.net is the development site for the Rational Jazz initiative, the foundation upon which RQM is built. Follow development projects and milestones, interact with development teams, get the latest product betas, and join the community discussions.
There you have it – everything you need to know about Rational Quality Manager in 4 steps!
The Rational Software Conference Spring Fever discount ends today! If you’re thinking about attending the conference this year – this is your last chance to get the discount. You won’t get a better offer than this. Now is the time.
