Rational® Quality Manager overview

Comprehensive test planning

A test plan that you define in Rational® Quality Manager drives activity for distributed teams through all phases of the project life cycle. The test plan defines the objectives and scope of the test effort and contains criteria to help teams determine the answer to the 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 and all 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 be tested 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

Test script construction, execution, and reuse

Rational® Quality Manager provides a full-featured manual test editor. You can also import manual test scripts from IBM® Rational® Manual Tester. You can add reuse and automation capabilities to your manual tests by using keywords.

With Rational® Quality Manager, you can manage and execute test scripts that are created with tools such as HCL OneTest™ Performance, IBM® Rational® Service Tester for SOA Quality, and IBM® Security AppScan® Tester Edition.

You can also import test artifacts from external test management solutions, such as IBM® Rational® ClearQuest® Test Manager and IBM® Rational® TestManager.

Test analysis and reporting

Rational® Quality Manager includes several standard test reports to help you evaluate test results. Reports are available during all phases of the test process.

You can use reports to perform these tasks:

• Determine the validity of a test run.
• Check feature coverage against test plans, test inputs, configurations, and so on. This can also be used to measure test progress and to analyze trends.
• Run a gap analysis to measure the resources needed to do your testing versus the resources that are available

Team collaboration

Rational® Quality Manager makes it easy to share information with other members of your team. With the Jazz-based work-item system, team members can assign tasks and defects to each other and to view everyone's status. Test plan authors and test case designers can distribute their work for review and track the status of each reviewer. New and changed requirements are visible to the team, as are the test cases that are needed to satisfy those requirements. Team members are notified automatically of any changes and milestones that impact their work.

Lab management

With Rational® Quality Manager lab management capabilities, you can create requests for the test environments that your test plan specifies. 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 fulfill requests from the test team.

Web application security

Rational® Quality Manager helps IT and security professionals protect against the threat of attacks and security 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.

Governance

Rational® Quality Manager helps ensure that your business processes comply with industry, corporate, and departmental standards and regulations. Throughout the testing life cycle, Rational® Quality Manager provides you with the tools to obtain an up-to-the-minute measurement of software quality and project metrics. With its comprehensive test plan 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.