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Sprint alignment for developers and testers

With the release of Rational Team Concert 2.0 and Rational Quality Manager 2.0, our vision for Collaborative ALM begins to come to fruition. This blog post and video demo focus on one scenario that helps testers and developers align on the work involved in completing iterations.

One of the biggest challenges for testers is staying in sync with the development plan. Agile teams look to integrate testers as an integral part of the team. What testers and development teams need is the ability to link their efforts within the context of a sprint.

Rational Team Concert enables agile teams to manage their Iteration (or Sprint) using a backlog of prioritized work-items. At the same time, Rational Quality Manager provides a collaborative environment for test planning, construction, and execution. Testers can create, manage and measure their effectiveness using Test Plans, Test Cases, Test Scripts, Execution Records and Results.

In the 2.0 versions of Rational Team Concert and Rational Quality Manager, testers can link test cases to development work-items. What’s particularly interesting in this integration is that testers can create these links without leaving the Quality Manager user interface. Developers interacting with the work-item in Rational Team Concert can see the link to the test case, and run queries to determine test coverage or test status.

In addition, this demonstration highlights the power of the Jazz Foundation and an implementation of the OSLC change management service. Some things to note:

  • The web page banner for both products is new and uses the framework provided by the Jazz Foundation.
  • You will see the tester interact with a ‘link picker’ that is used to locate a work-item in Team Concert and create the link between the test case and the selected work-item. The link picker is a dialog hosted in Quality Manager that ‘consumes’ the Team Concert change management service. All semantics in the dialog are ‘provided’ by Team Concert. The integration between Rational Quality Manager and Rational Team Concert is as simple as a single URL to call Team Concert’s link picker. This is an implementation of the OSLC change management service. The integration is simple, resilient, flexible, and open (by supporting the OSLC specification).
  • The Rational Team Concert repository essentially ‘disappears.’ Because the Team Concert user interface comes to the tester, the tester doesn’t have to know the details about the repository. They don’t even have to leave their tool of choice! The number of context switches between products is drastically reduced (there aren’t any), and the creation of links between artifacts is reduced to the click of an “OK” button.
  • The ability to provide a rich hover when the mouse ‘hovers’ over a link is provided by the foundation and each product adopts and provides rich hover support. In the demonstration, Team Concert adopted the rich hover for work-items. When a Quality Manager user hovers over a link to a Team Concert work-item, detailed information about that work-item is presented to the tester.
  • Link types are used to describe the link between artifacts. Test case tests plan work-item. Plan work-item is tested by test case. These link types are used to provide interesting queries such as “All plan items with failing test cases”

This style of linking between repositories helps to break the silos between developers and testers by giving them insight into the status of each other’s work. Teams that adhere to the Agile policy that the work is not complete until the tests have passed can leverage these links to ensure coverage, understand the quality of the work-items and determine when they are done, done, done.

This is the first of several demonstrations that we’ll provide to showcase the new wave of Collaborative ALM integrations. And if you can’t wait for the next recording, you can read more about our Collaborative ALM solution by downloading the eBook, titled Scaling Agile with Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management from Infoq.com. (http://www.infoq.com/articles/scaling-agile-with-calm)