Overview

IBM Rational Quality Manager is a collaborative, web-based, quality management solution that offers comprehensive test planning and test asset management from requirements to defects. The Jazz platform enables teams to seamlessly share information. It uses automation to speed project schedules and report on metrics for informed release decisions. It can also be purchased as part of the Collaborative Lifecycle Management solution—a set of seamlessly integrated tools: IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM Rational Quality Manager, and IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation.

Rational Quality Manager works with requirements in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation to keep test cases in sync whenever requirements evolve. Rational Quality Manager also integrates with a wide range of test automation tools like IBM Rational Functional Tester, enabling you to run tests and collect results, all from a central location.

But when we will take a look at embedded software development, we will find big specifics because it's used on machines and devices that are not typically thought of as computers. Usually, this kind of software is specialized for the particular hardware that it runs on and has time and memory constraints. It can be exactly described that no or not all functions of such software are initiated/controlled via a human interface, but through machine-interfaces instead. We can point to such similar devices as cars, phones, modems, robots, toys, security systems, pacemakers, TV sets, digital watches, various medical devices, etc. This software can be very simple, such as lighting controls running on an 8-bit microcontroller with a few kilobytes of memory, or can become very sophisticated in solutions such as airplanes, missiles, and process control systems.

IBM Rational Quality Manager supports reliable and flexible integration with testing systems from National Instruments specially designed for use in embedded software development. National Instruments (NI) Test Integration Adapter for IBM Rational Quality Manager software enhances test engineer teams' efficiency by automating NI TestStand sequence execution and reporting from Rational Quality Manager.

Engineering departments create increasingly complex products, and as a result, automobiles, aircraft, medical devices, consumer electronics, and more depend on software driving the hardware components. IBM Rational software and National Instruments integrate development and test environments to help clients with their most important goals:

• Test the code of smart products, which might have hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code, for defects.
• Reduce the cost of code defects by identifying them earlier in the development process.
• Mitigate increasing product complexity by tackling quality challenges earlier in the development process.
• Improve efficiency by breaking down the tasks between engineering departments.

Combining Rational Quality Manager software and National Instruments (NI) TestStand provides comprehensive test case traceability, test case results management, and automated test scheduling and execution. Test results are made available to all teams so that applications can be validated at virtually every point along the development path, from simulation and prototyping, through deployment onto hardware, and integration into the end system. Both operational efficiency and test accuracy can be improved through the ability to reuse test components throughout multiple project phases and even on different projects.

A specially designed piece of software - the NI Test Integration Adapter for Rational Quality Manager software - provides integration between NI TestStand and Rational Quality Manager. This integration product includes the following main features and functions:

The requirement to test traceability: Test engineers can use the integration to link automated tests to test cases and to requirements. NI TestStand applications (and by extension all the code modules called) and parameter files on the test machine are linked to a Rational Quality Manager test case that provides traceability to other project aspects including requirements, overall quality plan, project plan, change-defect management system, and so on.

Test automation: From the web-based interface of Rational Quality Manager, test engineers can invoke the execution of the NI TestStand applications that are linked to the Rational Quality Manager test case. The execution status reported by the NI TestStand sequence is displayed in the Rational Quality Manager web interface as part of the test case execution results. Test engineers can then optionally create defects linked to the test case results to keep track of noncompliance detected by running the test.

Test case results management: Upon completion of the NI TestStand sequence, various outputs from the sequence are automatically published to Rational Quality Manager storage and an HTML report is linked to the Rational Quality Manager test case execution result page. The HTML report is created by this software product on the local machine and the details of the report content as well as what is stored in IBM JazzTM are configured by the user.

Videos

Excellent video about the integration of modeling, requirements, and testing software development areas into the whole software development process with solutions from IBM and National Instruments.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine (RPE) is a tool used for automated generation of documents. It generates documents from other Rational products and applications from other vendors that use XML and REST interfaces. Published data is extracted from external systems called data sources.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine can extract the data from various data sources. The tool supports such external systems as Jazz CLM applications (IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation, IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM Rational Quality Manager), Rational DOORS classic, Rational Rhapsody, etc. The tool can work with many external tools that can be accessed through REST API. For example, Atlassian JIRA is among those tools.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine makes the data in reported systems transparent. The data is presented in a clear way giving comfortable and understandable presentation of it.

To use an external data source, you need only import a special XML description of available elements called data source schema. By the way, you can improve the schema creating additional elements there which is very useful if an external system can be customised and enhanced by user in some way. Imagine, if user created custom attributes in system and want add this data into final reports.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine supports various formats to generate documents. User can choose format of generated documents on start. It can be used such supported formats as HTML, Word, Excel, PDF, XSL-FO.

Designing a template is very easy. You can construct a template visually with a special blocks called elements located on Palette view. All you need is to find a needed element, drag it to template's layout and drop at the desired place.

One of the very interested elements on the palette is “JavaScript Code”. It adds a lot of flexibility into designing process. Essentially, a template will become a Javascript application that can do almost everything you want. You can define internal variables, save temporary data and use this for setting necessary behaviour during report generation.

Providing additional updates in properties of elements, you can define which data is extracted, how it's filtered and formatted. After a template is designed, you can use it for generation of required documents. Usually, you start to design a template for some specific data (for example, for module in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation). But this is doesn't mean that your template can work with this data only. You can be confident that if you apply the same template for other data of similar kind (for example, for another module in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation), it will build the documents in the same style and based on predefined rules but with another data.

Generally, there are two ways of designing a template. First, you can build template from scratch creating a blank layout and putting any reporting elements to it.
Another way is to enhance an existing template. For example, if you work in Jazz, take a published template and customise it on your own. Add custom headers and footers, styles, company's logo, change locations of elements, and so on.

You can build IBM Rational Publishing Engine templates for Jazz tools and use it within Jazz itself. After deploying a template in Jazz, you will see it in the list of available templates, and can run the document generation based on it.

IBM Rational Publishing Engine can build reports based on multiple data sources in one report. For example, you can build a template that will report about tests passed last week in IBM Rational Quality Manager, and provide lists of blocking defects registered in IBM Rational Team Concert for those tests. Later, you can add references to requirements from IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation which are covered by executed tests and included in some test plan.

To design a template in IBM Rational Publishing Engine, you have to purchase a license for this tool. But if you work in Jazz and use one of licenses there, you can use any templates designed by somebody and published in Jazz for generation of documents without any additional fees. Another word, Jazz license is enough to build documents in Jazz based on templates created in IBM Rational Publishing Engine.