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Getting Started
This guide provides an overview and describes the tasks to get you started with Rational® Integration Tester.
Testing methodology
By following four basic guidelines, you can incorporate Rational® Integration Tester into your testing methodology. These guidelines drive efficient and expedient integration testing, and they can be applied to your testing process and infrastructure requirements.
Test phases
Apart from being used for driving early test plans, Rational® Integration Tester can be used to shift testing earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) than is traditionally possible with standard test tools that test at the UI level. Soon after you have a local build, you can use Rational Integration Tester to do service unit testing.

Getting Started
This guide provides an overview and describes the tasks to get you started with Rational® Integration Tester.
- Rational® Integration Tester overview
  You can use Rational® Integration Tester to create, modify, and run service tests, and performance tests.
- Testing methodology
  By following four basic guidelines, you can incorporate Rational® Integration Tester into your testing methodology. These guidelines drive efficient and expedient integration testing, and they can be applied to your testing process and infrastructure requirements.
  - Test approach
    The IBM® Rational® Test Workbench product suite fits easily into a V-Model approach. The classic V-Model demonstrates each phase in predevelopment and its associated phase in test planning. For example, when the system design is delivered, begin planning for system testing. Testing activities such as design, analysis, planning and execution must happen throughout the entire project life cycle.
  - Test phases
    Apart from being used for driving early test plans, Rational® Integration Tester can be used to shift testing earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) than is traditionally possible with standard test tools that test at the UI level. Soon after you have a local build, you can use Rational Integration Tester to do service unit testing.
    - Compliance testing before running tests
      You can implement compliance testing when necessary in the project lifecycle to ensure that industry standards such as W3C and policies such as WS-I are enforced correctly.
    - Unit testing
      You can do unit testing to validate individual components.
    - Integration testing
      You can do integration testing to validate the integration interfaces or points between individual functions or components.
    - System testing
      You can do system testing to determine that services are able to produce the required functions when they are integrated to create a business process within a system.
    - System integration testing
      You can do system integration testing (SIT) to verify services functions when integrated to create an end-to-end business process that spans across multiple systems.
    - Performance testing
      The goal of performance testing is to determine the system performance under a defined workload using different types of performance testing such as load, stress, and soak testing.
  - Building tests
    Rational® Integration Tester separates the task of learning about the system from the tasks of creating test resources, designing (building models), creating and recording test assets, and running tests.
  - Project structure
    When an Rational® Integration Tester project is created for the first time, the project folder structure is created on a disk.
- Service-oriented architecture (SOA) testing
  A SOA consists of business processes that are implemented by linking individual services. The linking can be done programmatically or with tools based on Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). SOA testing can be challenging because there is no GUI; the focus is on testing interfaces and services.
- Getting started with testing
  You can start using Rational® Integration Tester by completing the preliminary tasks such as creating and running a test, creating and running a stub, recording an HTTP proxy, and running a stub in a Docker container.
- Rational® Test Control Panel overview
  Rational® Test Virtualization Server stubs designed in Rational Integration Tester are published to Rational Test Control Panel, which holds them in a repository.
- Rational® Integration Tester accessibility features
  Users who have a physical disability, such as limited vision, can review the available accessibility features to use Rational® Integration Tester.

Test phases

Apart from being used for driving early test plans, Rational® Integration Tester can be used to shift testing earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) than is traditionally possible with standard test tools that test at the UI level. Soon after you have a local build, you can use Rational® Integration Tester to do service unit testing.

The related links do not provide the details of each test phase, but provide high-level considerations when you use the IBM® Rational® Test Workbench product suite.

Test phases	Summary	Guiding documents	Functional	Low-intensity performance	High-intensity performance	Backwards compatibility	Compliance
Unit and integration testing	Testing individual components and interactions between them	Technical design, program specification, and standards	X	X		X	X
System testing	Testing a complete business process for a system	Business requirements, technical design and governance standards, and policies	X	X		X	X
System integration testing	Testing end-to-end scenarios, which includes integration of several systems	Business requirements, technical design and governance standards, and policies	X		X	X	X