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Rational Quality Manager 2.0.1: A quality trek

Quality, the final frontier. These are the blogs of Rational Quality Manager. Our current mission:  to explore strange new defects, to seek out quality objectives, measures, and metrics, and to boldly assist you in going where no quality organization has gone before. Product Managers log, Quality date 1551.91. The Rational Quality Manager team has just emerged from warp drive to bring forth a new version of Rational Quality Manager into the market – Rational Quality Manager 2.0.1.

What was the motivation for this release, coming right off the heels of the 2.0 release only a few months ago?

The Enterprise motivated this release, but not any of the NCC-1701 class vessels.  Instead, it was your enterprise. The feedback we heard from you is that Rational Quality Manager needs to be more consumable to minimize deployment time for your projects, to allow your organizations to accelerate adoption. Rational Quality Manager  needs to scale better to handle a large set of data and needs to be able to easily find records. Rational Quality Manager needs the ability to provide the concept of a test strategy or master test plans from which more detailed test plans can be defined. We need better reuse by duplicating artifacts as well as steps of manual tests. We heard you loud and clear.

Rational Quality Manager 2.0.1 is focused on becoming a solution that allows your enterprise to move forward in developing quality applications. The objectives of the release were to focus on usability, consumability, governance, and performance. Overall we closed 882 work items from jazz.net, including defects and enhancements. Most of these were items created by you, our users. As stated before, the team has been busy and focused on our customers’ needs.

Let’s start with the Master Test Plan. The Master Test Plan allows a test strategy to be defined and then utilized to drive child test plans. For instance, a Master Test Plan would define a set of quality objectives, entrance/exit criteria, requirements that need to be validate. From there you may decide different techniques for testing – perhaps strategies for functional testing, performance testing, user acceptance testing, etc. You could then create a test plan for each technique as a child of the master. Information from the master is copied to the child test plan (inheritance) and as the child test plans are advanced the results of each child are rolled up to the master, allowing for an easier reporting model. As always, our objectives with Quality Manager is to help you determine when you are done testing.

Another improvement to consumability is project templates. When creating a project area you define many configurations such as the different categories and values, this could be time consuming and when you get it just right you organization wants you to create new project area just like that one, a standard adoption model. Previously you had to recreate all that work. This project template contains all project information including categories, categories values, Test Plan and Test Case Templates, tool integration set up, test environment information, users, workflow customizations, etc. Basically, anything that was defined for a test project. Now you can utilize this template when creating new projects and ensure the exact usage model for all projects within your enterprise with very little effort.

As we look more closely at the usability improvements we see that all test artifacts can now be duplicated. They can be duplicated within a single project area as well as across project areas. Within a project area we do what is called a shallow copy, meaning that if a test case is realized by Test Script A, the new test case that was copied is associated with the same Test Script A. You can also duplicate information across projects areas, but when you do this any associated artifact is also included. Thus, in the example above, a clone is made for Test Case A in the project area being copied to. This is called a deep copy. Other usability improvements include the view builder being taken directly to the table columns so any filter can be applied to any column in order for you to find that needle in the haystack – or that one test case out of the 100,000 in the system

We could go on and on with all the different capabilities that were added to Rational Quality Manager 2.0.1. That is the beauty of jazz.net: you can examine all of these yourself. Rest assured that Rational Quality Manager is moving forward aggressively. Rational Quality Manager will not be the solution wearing the red shirt that is beamed down to your site. We are pointing toward the second star to the right and moving onward till morning at warp speed with an everlasting supply of dilithium crystals.

Now we want to hear more from you. If you have opinions on how we should evolve Rational Quality Manager, please submit an enhancement request! Let’s take advantage of the transparency of jazz.net and take Rational Quality Manager where no solution has gone before.

Brian Massey
Product Manager Team Lead, Rational Quality Manager