Here we are, five months after the first release of Rational Quality Manager and Rational Test Lab Manager.  We have received great feedback from our early adopters and customers, but we want more.  We want to hear from you and what better way to do it than to open the flood gates and let everyone in.  Thus, we are taking the plunge — opening up RQM and RTLM at Jazz.net! We’re giving you the ability to get access to early releases, to understand our plans, and to provide input.  We will start by utilizing Jazz.net for RQM 2.0.  We heard you loud and clear and now you can interact directly with us about bugs, enhancement requests, and general feedback.

At the same time, we’ve also made a trial of our current release, Rational Quality Manager and Rational Test Lab Manager 1.0.1, available for download on Jazz.net.  Be sure to check back in a few of weeks when some adapters to interface Rational Quality Manager with HP Quick Test Professional and HP LoadRunner will be made available for download.

Here’s what we’ve done so far:

• Made our Rational Quality Manager 2.0 Beta 1 available for download
• Published our draft 2.0 release plan
• Created an RQM forum in the Jazz.net forums where you can submit feedback and ask questions
• Started an rqm-dev mailing list for development team communication

We’re in the process of migrating our Rational Team Concert repository to Jazz.net, but we wanted to get this much going ASAP to start getting community involvement. So let’s get this party started.

What can Rational Quality Manager and Rational Test Lab Manager do for me?

Rational Quality Manager dashboard

Very simply: bring world peace.  OK, maybe not.  But it can bring project peace in terms of improving quality.  IBM Rational Quality Manager is a web-based, centralized test management environment.  As we leverage the Jazz Foundation, collaboration is a key aspect of Rational Quality Manager.  Now, Quality professionals can ensure their test plans and test objectives are aligned with business objectives.  Instead of the monolithic 60 page test plan that is created before any work is done in the hope that the objectives defined in the plan are met, we can capture the right information, at the right time, keeping the quality objectives and business objectives aligned.  How do you know when you are done testing?  Tracking yourselves against your objectives will provide the insight needed to answer that question more easily.

What will we see in 2.0?

While we laid a solid foundation in 1.0, the work is far from done.  We know Quality Manager is meeting the market need because the questions coming in are now different.  While some questions are feature oriented, many are focused on real business value.  We get questions such as:

• How will you help me create the test plan, so I don’t have to type everything?
• When will you incorporate risk-based testing?
• Can you provide me metrics to help me establish the ROI of my test Projects?
• Do I get any guidance to help me decide when and if to automate my manual tests?
• Can a finished build trigger a deployment of a test environment, execute tests, and give me results telling me if this build is good enough to test?

Your feedback has driven the major themes of this release, which you can see in the release plan.

We hope that you’re as excited as we are about our more transparent approach on Jazz.net!

Brian Massey
RQM Product Manager