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Countdown to CLM 2011: Part 5 – New features in quality management

The new release of Rational Quality Manager (RQM) 3.0.1 will be available on June 14. We have added many new features and capabilities to make you more effective in managing, organizing, and tracking test activities as part of your development cycle. As a part of the  collaborative lifecycle management solution, RQM also delivers the capabilities that Adrian Cho’s post describes, including simpler packaging and licensing, improved setup configuration, flexible deployment options, and cross application reporting. We are especially excited about the ability to report across CLM applications using our new common reporting capability. You can read more about these improvements in  Countdown to CLM 2Q11: Part 2 – Reporting.

We’re excited to have greatly improved test requirement management capabilities. RQM users can leverage the new RRC capabilities for defining and viewing test requirements. This allows you to have a single requirement repository for testers, developers and your organization’s business analysts.

We’ve revamped our integration with Rational RequisitePro to take advantage of its organizational capabilities.  You can now associate RequsitePro views or packages with test plans. The requirements contained within the view or package are then automatically associated with the test plan. Because requirements tend to change, we have a tool to reconcile requirement changes with their associated test plans and assist in updating test cases by adding, deleting, or marking requirements as suspect.

RQM now uses common work item support for its out-of-the-box defects and task quality work items. This allows you to have a single work item repository for all three CLM applications. The My Task viewlet in RQM has been updated to support this.

To help you capture additional testing information, we’ve added support for custom attributes. You can now create custom attributes on test plans, test cases, test scripts, test suites, as well as test case and test suite result artifacts. Of course, we also support reporting on all these new attributes using the new custom reporting solution.

To help you organize your test assets in “folders”, we’ve extended RQM’s category support. There is a category explorer in each of the RQM views that allows you to navigate through the artifacts based on the category values. You can define relationships between categories, which will be displayed in a folder-like structure. From this new view, you can open the artifact to see more details (see the right image below). Additionally we’ve added the ability to define categories as required fields and support multi-value categories.

In RQM today you have the ability to sort and filter each column in each of the artifact views. We’ve now added the ability to save these sort and filter preferences as a query. These queries can be stored for your use, the team’s use, or even promoted into RQM menus.

For those times when you need to run a manual test, but don’t have access to the RQM server, we’ve added offline execution capability. Just select the test execution records you want to run, and a file will be created that you can import into Microsoft Excel. You can enter test results in Excel and import data back into RQM.

We’re really excited about the enhanced test suites capability in this release. Test suites now support templates, states, review, and approval, similar to other RQM artifacts. You can also include a test suite as part of a test plan. We’ve also added a test suite execution record to help you track and plan executing test suites.

RQM supports auditing changes to each artifact. In 3.0.1, we’ve introduced a history view which allows you to easily see audit details.

To better enable re-use of test scripts, we’ve added support for execution variables. This allows you to pass a parameter into manual test scripts, keywords, and command line tests. Manual test scripts also support user prompts to set the value of the parameter during execution. This can be used to dynamically pass values from one script to another during test script execution.

These are just a few highlights in a long list of new features in RQM 3.0.1.  The whole team is very excited about this release. Please test drive our new release and give us your feedback. The RQM 3.0.1 downloads will be available June 14 and will include a 60 day trial license.

Paul Tasillo

(This is part of a series of blog posts where we describe enhancements and changes planned for the upcoming release of our Collaborative Lifecycle Management solution, comprising: Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, and Rational Requirements Composer.)