Announcing the Release of Our Latest Testing Products – v9.2

We have recently released version 9.2 of our Testing Portfolio with a number of features and fixes that you don’t want to miss. Here’s the highlights, but you can find more details in our release notes.

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSBLQQ_9.2.0/com.ibm.rational.test.lt.rtw.nav.doc/rtw_version_welcome.html

Convergence of Functional Tester and WebUI Tester
Bringing together the two powerhouses of Functional Testing into a single package, the convergence of Functional Tester with Web UI Tester enables our customers to take functional testing all the way from mainframe terminals through 3270 interfaces to HTML5 based responsive web applications in the latest versions of the world’s top browsers.
 
Perhaps the greatest news is that for our loyal Functional Tester users, this converged product expands their capabilities with no additional cost. Now everyone can test, regardless of their technology platform.
 
Guided Healing
Knowing what has changed in an application and how that affects your testing process is a difficult endeavor. As UIs change, understanding the impact is crucial to maintaining an effective testing cycle. Guided Healing helps testers identify parts of a UI that have changed and quickly apply modifications to the test script. This means that tests can be easily corrected to compensate for any changes and then continue to provide value.
 
Rate Schedule
Performance Tester's typically think in a couple of ways – how many virtual users do I need to apply to the system to ensure it meets requirements, and how many transactions per second should I apply to validate the backend services? To better address the latter mindset, the new Rate Schedule test asset provides Performance Testers with a completely new way to easily and naturally specify workloads in terms of transaction rates, bypassing the concept of virtual users.  This allows Performance Tester to dynamically manage the parallelism needed to generate the target transaction rates. Using Rate Schedules benefits both our existing performance testing users and also those taking advantage of the integration with Integration Tester that may be using Performance Tester for the first time.
 
Auto-maintenance of HTTP Performance Tests by leveraging Functional Tests
As applications move through their lifecycle it is not uncommon for the services that they depend on to change – small things like moving an XML element, or adding a new field to a JSON based microservice, these can have side effects on the behavior of performance tests, requiring extra maintenance which detracts from building new tests. Utilizing new innovations in our integration between Functional Tester and Performance Tester you can now easily re-generate an HTTP performance test from a WebUI functional test “master”, taking on board the backend changes, whilst preserving most customizations the user may have made to the existing performance test. By avoiding the need to manually re-record and redo various test edits and customizations, this feature dramatically shortens the time spent managing and maintaining performance tests as new deployments happen.
 
BDD Style Functional Testing
Business analysts know exactly how the application you're building is supposed to work, but they typically know very little about how to test it. What if you could get that knowledge out of their heads in an executable form? Enter BDD testing with Cucumber integration: this enables business analysts to express the test requirements in a language and format they are comfortable with, whilst offering the power to the tester to ensure the implementation performs as intended.
 
Test and Virtualize File Based Interfaces
Do you have an application that needs to operate over file based integration points? SFTP servers, NFS shares, etc. Testing business processes that rely on files for input/output can be time consuming and complex to get set up. The new File base interface capability in Integration Tester enables teams to both trigger and validate file based business processes, as well as simulate processes that would traditionally be started on receipt of a file. Now it’s easier than ever to validate that EDI based interaction with your trading partner, through Integration Tester.
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Let us know what you think about the latest release in the comments section.

Matt Tarnawsky
Offering Manager
​Service Virtualization, HCL Technologies

Chris Haggan
Product Manager
Functional & Performance Test, HCL Technologies
Connect with me on LinkedIn

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Matt Tarnawsky has been working for a number of years to improve software quality by helping his clients shift their testing to the left through the use of service virtualization and API testing. He is currently the product manager for API testing & service virtualization at HCL, providing the direction for IBM and HCL's Integration Tester and Test Virtualization Server products.

Chris Haggan is the HCL Product Manager, Functional & Performance Test Automation and a member of the World Wide Testing team with over 14 years in the integration testing and service virtualization space. He has worked with numerous clients ensuring that when they modernize and connect their disparate IT systems be it through EAI, SOA or API's, they are successful and efficient.