Getting started roadmap for Rational Quality Manager
A roadmap for an introduction to Rational Quality Manager
Maintaining software quality means ensuring that your software product works as planned. To achieve quality goals, a complex product might need hundreds of test cases and scores of testers. To track progress against a schedule and to identify problems, project managers need a quick view of everything that’s happening. Managing quality requires a sophisticated tool.
IBM Rational Quality Manager, also known as the Quality Management (QM) application, can help you manage software quality, improve operational efficiency, and increase test accuracy in a continuous delivery environment.
Note: The following resources were created for a specific release, but also apply to later releases.
Product overview
Learn about the product in the formats that you prefer: short videos, help topics, tutorials, or online at Jazz.net.
Videos: IBM Rational Quality Manager Overview and Lifecycle quality management enabled by Rational Quality Manager
Help topic: Overview of Rational Quality Manager
Jazz.net overview: Rational Quality Manager
Feature overview
- Planning accurately and flexibly: Successful quality management tasks start with a test plan. Learn more about planning with Rational Quality Manager:
Video: Aligning development and test plans
Help topic: Test plan overview
- Customizing process models: The structure and contents of a test plan depend on the process model that you adopt. You might use an agile development process, a conventional waterfall model, or something in between. Whichever method you use, Rational Quality Manager provides support. You choose the process template that aligns with your process, and the tool sets up the artifacts and workflow that you need. Learn more about process models:
Help topic: Configuring quality management project areas
Jazz.net article: Process customization in Rational Quality Manager
- Designing tests: After you adopt a process model and create a plan, you can start creating test artifacts. With Rational Quality Manager, you can create test cases and test scripts. Learn how to work with tests:
Tutorial: Create and run test cases
Tutorial: Work with test suites
- Automating the testing environment: You can create test scripts to automate testing or run automated test scripts that were created with other test tools. Learn more about these features:
Help topic: Developing and managing test scripts
Help topic: Referencing automated test scripts
- Linking requirements with tests: You can connect test cases and test scripts to requirement specifications in Rational DOORS Next Generation. Learn more about this option:
Video: Integrating Quality Management with Requirements Management
Help topic: Linking to requirements and development artifacts
- Executing tests: Rational Quality Manager provides comprehensive test execution in a central location. You can perform manual testing through a web interface and run offline testing in a dedicated mobile application. Learn how to use test case execution records (TCERs) to plan, run, and report on tests:
Videos: Test case execution records in Rational Quality Manager
- Seeing test status and reports at a glance: Learn more about reports: Reports provide both real-time views and historical trends of test cases, test executions, defects, and other artifacts that your team works with. Rational Quality Manager provides consolidated reporting for all types and levels of testing.
Video: Following the test effort with reports and queries in Rational Quality Manager
The dashboard provides a real-time, at-a-glance view of test artifacts, work item queries, event feeds, reports, and other items that are critical to understanding your progress. Learn how dashboard widgets and customized metrics can help you report and see everything in one place:
Help topic: Quality dashboard overview
- Managing test projects: With Rational Quality Manager, you can divide your test plan into iterations, test suites, and test cases, and assign owners to them. You can also create work items that specify actions for team members to perform. Learn more about managing projects and teams:
Help topic: Managing the team with work items
Video: Defect tracking best practices and workflow
- Managing configurations in the QM application: You can use configuration management features in the QM application to version test artifacts with streams and baselines, create local configurations, contribute to global configurations, and compare artifacts between two configurations. Learn more about configurations:
Help topic: Managing artifacts by using configurations
Video: Managing change in test artifacts
Video: Delivering test artifacts changes across streams
- Using Rational Quality Manager effectively: Learn how to use Rational Quality Manager effectively to manage the testing process:
Video: Rational Quality Manager best practices (Part 1)
Video: Rational Quality Manager best practices (Part 2)
Getting started
- By task
Getting started with quality management - By role
Tester: Getting started with testing systems and software
Test lead or manager: Getting started with managing the test effort
Lab manager: Getting started with managing lab resources
Administrator: Getting started with administering project and team areas
Next steps
Learning Circle: Advanced usage
About the author
Vidhya is an advisory software engineer. An evangelist and practitioner of agile methodologies, continuous delivery and documentation, she has about 10 years of experience in the IT industry. She is a subject matter expert in DevOps, application lifecycle management and search methodologies. She can be contacted at vidhyavkumar@in.ibm.com.
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