Ibm Rational Testing Tools

[Egisto Chancellor]

Rationalis now part of IBM, which is leader in the invention, development and manufacture of the industry'smost advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, storage systems and microelectronics.Rational offers the most complete lifecycle toolset (including testing).

When it comes to Object Oriented development they are the acknowledged leaders with most of the leading OO experts workingfor them. Some of their products are worldwide leaders e.g. Rational Rose, Clearcase, RequistePro, etc.

Rational Functional Tester - An advanced, automated functional and regression testing tool for testers andGUI developers who need superior control for testing Java, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, and Web-based applications.

Rational Manual Tester - A manual test authoring and execution tool for testers and business analysts who wantto improve the speed, breadth, and reliability of their manual testing efforts.Promotes test step reuse to reduce the impact of software change on manual test maintenance activities.

Rational Performance Tester - IBM Rational Performance Tester is a load and performance testing solutionfor teams concerned about the scalability of their Web-based applications. Combining ease of use with deep analysis capabilities, Rational Performance Tester simplifies test creation, load generation, and data collection to help ensure that applications can scale to thousands of concurrent users.

Rational Test RealTime - Cross-platform solution for component testing and runtime analysis. Designed specifically for those who write code for embedded and other types of pervasive computing products.

What do you recommend for testing purposes in Java environment (Selenium or Rational Functional Tester)? Could you write some pros and cons? I heard about MicroFocus TestPartner, do you have experience with it?

Both automated test tools offer some of the basic capabilities of automation. However there is a massive difference between Rational Functional Tester (RFT) and Selenium. IF your aim is basic testing, where the outcome is short term -1-3 months and you don't mind that the scripts will need a high level of maintenance, then Selenium is fine. RFT provides a number of critical differences from Selenium that impact your ability to have a long term automation solution. These are:

If Java environment == a web based application delivered through a browser, then you have tons of choices at your disposal, not just Selenium, Rational Functional Tester and TestPartner. There are a number of open source and commercial tools for testing web apps.

If, however, Java environment == standalone Java application, that runs on your desktop, then your choices are more limited. Selenium will not work, as Selenium only supports browser-based web apps. Functional Tester and TestPartner are both good tools, I have worked extensively with both, and both support the Java platform. There are other tools, such as HP QuickTest Pro, and there are probably some Java-specific open source tools.

I'd recommend mixing the two: When there are things that you cannot do in RFT, you can get help from Selenium, which is simply a Java API which can be used in RFT. Writing cross-browser script can be a good point to use this mixed approach.

Since you mentioned TestPartner which is a commercial tool.

QTP and TestPartner have a comparable pricing level. So you should consider other important factors: integrity of the tool, learning curve, level and quality of commercial support, level of community support.

You may also want to look at TestComplete, which is also very powerful, and incorporates support for Load Testing, and Unit Testing, but has significantly lower price.

Generally, I would say, automation success is much more dependant on automation skills of a person rather than on capacities of a specific tool.

Take a look at TestMaker by PushToTest.com . It's written in Java and runs Java and Selenium scripts as well as soapUI, Groovy, Ruby, Python, PHP, VB and .Net. TestMaker allows you to take the Selenium scripts and run them as automated regression tests, load or performance tests and production SLA monitoring scripts without having to write the tests in multiple languages or for multiple tools. You can also run them in clouds such as EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace and CollabNet.

There is a free community version and a commercial Enterprise Version. When you purchase the Enterprise version, you get support for the tools including support on Selenium. You can download TestMaker from the website.

If you are targeting only web based application with UI having HTML , we can use selenium. If you want to use commerical tool you can go ahead with RFT and it supports different UI interfaces when compared to selenium

Traditionally, you had to have programming skills to automate regression testing because the only tool available was Selenium, a framework for writing coded test scripts. But now there are a variety of no-code and low-code tools that let you create Selenium test scripts without writing the code directly. Most of these tools let you record yourself interacting with an app and then translate your actions into test scripts.

Rainforest automatically records a video of every test it runs, whether the test passes or fails. With these videos, you can see the actual point of failure and everything leading up to it. When a test fails, you can compare it to a successful test run to quickly see if anything in the UI changed between runs.

To help make sure a test can still pass even if there was a minor change in the UI, you can use text-matching rather than pixel-matching to find some elements. Text matching examines the text content of an element rather than the appearance.

Another common scenario that causes false failures is slow load times in the testing environment. If a test tries to locate an element before the page has fully loaded, the test may fail. To help prevent this type of failure, Rainforest QA lets you:

Selenium is one of the oldest platforms for automating browsers, and Selenium IDE is the record and playback feature. Many other tools are built on Selenium, so how Selenium handles each factor will be relevant for those tools as well.

Watir (Web Application Testing In Ruby) is an open-source platform built on Ruby (one of the libraries connected to the Selenium WebDriver) but with a more user-friendly user interface than Selenium. Like Appium, Watir runs into many of the same shortcomings as Selenium.

TestComplete by SmartBear offers record-and-playback and object recognition features for writing test scripts in JavaScript, Python, and VBScript. They support testing on most desktop, web, and mobile platforms (including both iOS and Android OS).

In Scrum, progress is measured by delivering tested capabilities into the product. This ensures that real progress is taking place. Rational Team Concert can be used with many different test environments and tools. The value of Rational Team Concert is tracking the progress of work, specifically which stories are ready for testing, and which stories have been successfully tested. You can also link to test cases and/or scripts for traceability.

When selecting testing tools, you may wish to consider IBM Rational Quality Manager, as it integrates with Rational Team Concert to provide various test management capabilities, including test planning, execution, and reporting. In turn Rational Quality Manager integrates with other Rational and 3rd party tools.

However, this tool mentor assumes you are just using Rational Team Concert to manage your testing. Some work items may be assigned specifically for testing, but most of the testing work is an ongoing activity with no work item assignment performed in the tool. Progress is reported on the individual story work item:

Use the Rational Team Concert Eclipse client to view your assigned work items. They will appear in the Current Work section of your My Work view. See Managing work items in My Work view.

Click the Acceptance tab on a user story to view the criteria of acceptance. Click the Links tab and click Links > Add > Related Artifacts to link test cases or other artifacts to the user story.

Gitlab provides some out of the box testing tools like the ones mentioned above. These are good enough for some teams. But, if teams are looking at more advanced continuous testing capabilities like the following, IBM Rational Test provides them

* Service Virtualization of a wide range of complex Protocols

* Performance testing and service virtualization on Z mainframes

* Scriptless low code, no code authoring of testcases and many more

These features will be supplemented by IBM Rational Test's powerful and industry leading Rational Test Workbench, Rational Test Virtualization Server and Rational Test Automation Server. This would strengthen the Testing portfolio and would cater to various personas like (but not restricted to)

* Business User

* Test Manager

* Test Director

* Agile Scrum Master

* Product Owner

* Developers, testers, Agile team members

* Functional IDs

IBM TechXchange Community offers a constant stream of freshly updated content including featured blogs and forums for discussion and collaboration; access to the latest white papers, webcasts, presentations, and research uniquely for members, by members.

The history of software testing dates back to the 1940s and 1950s when programmers used ad-hoc methods to manually check their code for errors. However, the first dedicated software testing team was formed in the late 1950s at IBM. This team, led by computer scientist Gerald M. Weinberg, a pioneer in system testing, was responsible for testing the operating system for the IBM 704 computer, one of the first commercial mainframe computers.

The concept of test automation can be traced back to the early days of computing, but the first practical implementation occurred in the 1970s. One of the earliest examples of test automation is the Automated Test Engineer (ATE) system developed by IBM. The ATE system, designed to automate the testing of mainframe software applications, represented a significant breakthrough and set a precedent for future test automation systems.

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