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Contributed by IBM - Rational Software

Developer testing, user testing, outsourced testing, ad-hoc testing. However it works in your organization, testing plays a crucial role in the successful delivery of today’s complex, heterogeneous, business-critical software systems.

As software development is becoming more sophisticated, companies are discovering that when armed with the right tools, processes, and people - testing teams add tremendous value in solving the complex problem of delivering high quality enterprise software systems.

This realization comes at a critical time - when IT organizations and development teams are being asked to address a new set of challenges.

Predicting the ability of software systems to be self-managing and self-healing, rapid assembling and testing of services-based applications, managing outsourced testing projects, and using test and validation processes to support regulatory compliance audits; these are all new challenges that even the most savvy IT organizations struggle with. Faced with these new challenges, the focus on processes and tools to improve quality, customer satisfaction, and company agility has never been higher.

Injecting quality into a software system at the end of the life cycle tends to be a losing proposition. By then, architectural flaws, missed requirements, and an enormous backlog of defects are too much to recover from without missing that critical window of opportunity to bring new products to market. Implementing a more proactive approach that supports team communication and iterative and early testing allows you to avoid or detect flaws early in the software life cycle. With the escalating cost of fixing a defect as the development life cycle progresses, it’s clear that a prudent approach to delivering a high quality software system includes managing what you are building, along with how you are building it, from the beginning of the project. With this approach, all team members have a clear view of the business objectives, requirements, and key use cases of the software application at each phase of development and testing.

This critical sharing of development information can be achieved through the use of a common development and communication platform, upon which practitioner productivity tools can exchange data in real-time.

The benefit of this tight integration is two-fold. First, by tying test cases to software requirements, testers can identify and focus their testing on the most critical capabilities of the software system and can easily stay current with changing requirements. Second, development activities that are initiated from test results, such as defect repairs and enhancement requests are traceable to test results and requirements. This help to ensure that test teams can monitor the progress of engineering work that impacts the test cycle, and that software repairs can be evaluated in context of the business requirements that they impact.

Integrating workflows and sharing data among analysts, developers and testers are best practices for establishing an early focus on quality and preventing, rather than reacting to, breakdowns in communication.

Figure 2 - Automate identification of performance bottlenecks early

Effective test automation begins with implementing a team-based, test management solution. IBM Rational TestManager provides a central tool from which all test planning, test execution, and results analysis can be managed. Even teams using all manual testing techniques will find that a test management solution is critical for effective control and management of testing projects. Rational TestManager is the hub through which the integration of test and development artifacts, such as test plans, test cases, requirements, code, and defects are managed.

This integration ensures that test planning activities and test results are traceable to the software development project objectives and requirements. Test and validation results can be rolled up into an executive dashboard to provide insight into the quality metrics that are needed to make informed “go-live” decisions. Implementing a team-based test management solution will help the entire team to stay up-to-date with test plans and progress, thus minimizing last minute quality issues that can derail your projects on-time delivery.

Rational Functional Tester is not just for testers. Developers can benefit from Rational Functional Tester by leveraging its capabilities to develop and execute a suite of automated tests to validate each software build before it moves on to full system testing. For additional automation, the execution of these automated tests can be tied to the build process. This allows developers to leverage automation and off-hours cycles to test an application’s stability and functionality. Automating build validation testing will help eliminate the wasted man-hours that result from deploying faulty builds into the test-lab or system test environment.

IBM Rational Robot, also a component of Rational Functional Tester Plus, provides test automation for applications created with Microsoft Visual Basic, C/C++, Oracle® Forms, Borland® Delphi® and Sybase® PowerBuilder®. Both Rational Robot and Rational Functional Tester test scripts can execute from Rational TestManager’s centralized execution and management system.

This common management system helps to ensure tight integration of test results and plans, regardless of which test script development tool is used.

Since most testing teams employ a combination of manual and automated testing techniques, Rational Functional Tester also includes IBM Rational Manual Tester, a solution to document detailed, manual tests and to improve manual testing accuracy and speed through automation of common error prone tasks. Rational Manual Tester also helps teams with the transition from manual to automated testing by promoting automation best practices such as test modularity and reusability.

Business analysts and subject-matter experts who perform application testing can also leverage Rational Manual Tester to improve and integrate their testing with the broader testing efforts across the development team. To meet the needs of your team, Rational Manual Tester is offered as both a stand-alone tool and is included with Rational Functional Tester.

Ensuring that a software application can scale and perform to meet service level agreements and user expectations is one of the most difficult yet critical tasks in the testing process. A software application that meets all its functional requirements but not the end-user’s responsiveness expectations will ultimately be a failed software development project. IBM Rational Performance Tester provides a solution to perform load and scalability tests on J2EE, Web-based, Siebel®, and SAP® applications and their infrastructure. Rational Performance Tester is a highly scalable and easy-to-use solution for the development, execution, and analysis of performance and scalability tests. J2EE transaction breakdown capabilities and remote system resource monitoring allow testers to pinpoint the source of performance bottlenecks. Through integration with IBM Tivoli® composite application management solutions, performance data from a production environment can be captured and delivered to the developer’s desktop, creating a closed-loop performance problem isolation and repair process. Through integration with IBM Tivoli monitoring solutions, teams can capture extended system resource data for more granular problem isolation.

Rational Performance Tester can also help you to achieve a better return on your hardware investments by executing pre-deployment capacity planning tests to size the server resources needed to achieve the desired performance and throughput.

Meeting regulatory requirements is more than a legal obligation — it is an opportunity to improve your organization’s software development transparency, oversight and results. By adopting a business-driven approach to regulatory compliance management, your team will replace ad hoc or unstructured processes with a streamlined and self-documenting software development life cycle. With test management and automation solutions integrated with your development platform, your team will be better able to demonstrate traceability between tests and regulatory requirements, provide detailed reports on the steps taken to validate requirements, and help substantiate that automated processes and controls are operating as specified. For additional value, Rational Manual Tester can also be used by your compliance team to document and execute structured tests against non-software business and IT controls.

Almost all companies will rely on some level of outsourcing in their IT organizations. Whether your goal is to speed development, lower costs, or increase innovation, successful outsourcing requires careful planning of expectations, work partitioning, and adherence to your quality processes and standards. Rational solutions for test management and test automation can provide a standardized platform of tools to enforce your quality processes, develop sharable test assets, and enable your management team to stay apprised of the return on investment of outsourced testing projects.

Establishing test excellence as core competency in your development team can make a measurable impact on the success of application deployments. Whether your software applications drive revenue, provide the “face to your customers”, open new markets, or support core business functions, how well your software systems meet their business goals can be directly attributed to your ability to implement processes and tools to support high-quality development. The key is for organizations to adopt a more holistic approach, an approach that takes a top-down, end-to-end view of the IT life cycle. Ongoing optimization efforts must be coupled with a new perspective that breaks down the silos on either side of the operations and development divide. Tools, metrics, and processes must be normalized across the organization to ensure that all real and virtual lines of business are equally measured and equally accountable for the success or failure of the business. Rational’s full life cycle of quality solutions, coupled with their integration to rational development and IBM Tivoli application management tools, can be the catalyst for the changes needed to truly optimize the effectiveness of your IT organization.