Project Quality Management Software: Rational Quality Manager

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eric.shaw

IBM Rational Quality Manager helps organizations optimize project quality with a single, shared test management hub that provides integrated lifecycle support across virtually any platform and type of testing. It provides a customizable, role-driven solution for test planning, creation, and execution as well as workflow control, tracking, and end-to-end traceability. With the help of IBM Rational Quality Manager, you can cut the risk and cost of product and software delivery with transparent, role-based collaboration and speed time to market by automating labor-intensive, error-prone tasks. It can also help improve the quality of your applications by proactively managing with real-time, fact-based insights and reporting, ensuring that project decisions and deliverables remain aligned with your business objectives– helping product and software delivery teams confidently answer the question: “Are we ready to release?”

Rational Quality Manager Key Artifacts

Requirements
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.

Test Plan
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
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 Assets
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.

Defects
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.

Reports
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.

Dashboard
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.
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