IBM Rational is a probably one of few organization, which touches entire life cycle of software development with its tool set. There are different tools from Rational right from Requirements management to Change Management, Testing and Project/ Portfolio Management.

Rational Test Suite is the entire test suite by Rational for supporting automated software quality. This test Suite Consists of different tools:

• Rational Test Manager
• Rational Robot
• Rational Functional Tester
• Rational Manual Tester
• Rational Administrator

Purpose of this page is to make you familiar with the Rational Test Suite and not with the individual products. There will be plenty of information about the individual tools as well in some time. Rational Administrator is the basic tool for managing the authentication for the different repositories of Rational Test Suite. It allows you to create different users with different levels of access. Main purpose of Rational Administrator is to manage authentication and authorization for different Rational Projects.

Rational Test Manager is the backbone for managing all your Test Assets. It is central console for

• Managing test activity
• Executing
• Reporting

Test manager acts as baton for guiding all your testing efforts. It allows you to store all the test cases. These test cases may be linked to the requirements in the Requisite Pro and Automated Scripts in Rational Robot. If test cases are connected to the Automated Test Scripts, they are organized in the form of test suites which can be triggered for execution either on the same machine or the different machines for remote executions with the help of Test Agent. After the execution of the Scripts the results are reported in the form of error logs and graphs for the suites depicting the percentage VP’s passed and failed.

Rational Robot can be used for automating the test cases. It uses SQABasic scripting language which is similar to VBScript. Robot has the concept of header files and library files. It allows modularization of your automation by breaking it into different functions, which can be stored in the .sbl or .sbh files. Robot allows you to access the windows API by registering their dlls. You can also create your custom dlls and make calls to them from within the scripts. It has support for command line invocation and web/load testing in the form VU Scripting.

Rational Manual Tester allows you to organize your manual testing. In manual Tester you can create different steps and specify some Verification Steps. All these steps are saved and you can execute these test cases, mark them for completion. Results of execution are stored and logged in the Test Manager. It also has integration with Rational ClearQuest. ClearQuest can be launched from within the tool and file defects if found. It also fills some of the field of ClearQuest, based on the knowledge of test cases it has.