Tool Mentor: Structuring the Test Environment using IBM Rational Quality Manager
This tool mentor describes how to employ the Lab Management features of RQM when structuring the test environment.
Tool: IBM Rational Quality Manager
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Main Description

Overview

Rational Quality Manager comes with a complete set of Lab Management capabilities to help you structure your test environment. The next section presents the steps that you need to perform in RQM to document and create the appropriate environment related artifacts.

Tool Steps

1. Identify and Record Environments

In order to start structuring your test environment, all the environmental needs (OS, CPU, Browsers, and so on) gathered from the architecture and deployment documents need to be captured in the Test Environments section of the test plan.

  1. While you are in the Test Environments section, click the Platform Coverage tab.
  2. Click on the Edit test environments icon.
  3. For each Environment Type, select from the available items list, the platforms needed for this test plan.

 For more information on how to perform this task, prefer to the following RQM online topic: Testing > Planning the test effort > Preparing for test execution > Listing the environments to be tested.

2. Create Test Environments

When all the environmental needs are listed in the Test Environments section, you need to create the corresponding lab resource test environments. You can generate automatically the test environments from the previously created environmental needs.

  1. While you are in the Test Environments section, click the Test Environment tab.
  2. Click on the Generate test environment icon.
  3. Follow the instructions on the pop-up window to generate specific test environments.

You can also manually create the required test environments.  For more information on how to manually create the test environment(s), please refer to the following RQM online topic: Tutorial: Getting started with Lab Management > Lesson 4: Creating a lab resource test environment.

3. Consolidate List of Necessary Environments

All the created test environments can now be viewed and/or modified in the Lab Management > All test environments list. To perform this task,  please refer to the following RQM online topic: Testing > Managing lab resources > Viewing configurations.

In order to consolidate as much as possible the number of lab resources needed, in each test environment, click on the Coverage summary section to see, at a glance, common properties for each lab resource configuration.

4. Create Lab Resources

Given your physical and/or virtual machine(s) configurations (hardware and/or software), create the corresponding lab resources. To create a machine,  please refer to the following RQM online topic: Testing > Managing lab resources > Creating physical machines. The previously created test environments will be used as search criteria to find the appropriate lab resource(s) (physical and/or virtual machine).

You optionally pre-configure and deploy virtual images on supported virtual machine engine. To pre-configure and deploy a virtual image,  please refer to the following RQM online topic: Testing > Managing lab resources > Creating virtual images.