Home
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.
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.
Test asset creation and recording
Rational® Integration Tester enables you to record events in the system under test and recorded messages can be used to create tests and stubs more quickly and accurately. This can act as base message and test data for creating ongoing test assets.
Message exchange pattern
An operation is defined by a message exchange pattern (MEP) that describes the message pattern (publish or request and reply) required by the operations transport to establish communications. MEP can be the approach if recording is unavailable to create initial tests and stubs.

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, 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.
  - 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.
    - Options for creating test resources
      Rational® Integration Tester includes a number of options for automated resource creation, including topology discovery, synchronization, and recording.
    - Building system models by using synchronization
      When design-time assets are available, building by using synchronization is the preferred technique. Synchronization builds the system under test for you, which simplifies your testing work.
    - Building a system model manually
      Manual system modeling can be done where synchronization or recording is not possible or there are no service components when synchronized.
    - Test asset creation and recording
      Rational® Integration Tester enables you to record events in the system under test and recorded messages can be used to create tests and stubs more quickly and accurately. This can act as base message and test data for creating ongoing test assets.
      - Message exchange pattern
        An operation is defined by a message exchange pattern (MEP) that describes the message pattern (publish or request and reply) required by the operations transport to establish communications. MEP can be the approach if recording is unavailable to create initial tests and stubs.
    - Test execution
      In Rational® Integration Tester, tests generally consist of one or more inputs into the systems under test (SUT), and then validation of results and side effects. Data from one step of a test can be used to feed the next step. Rational Integration Tester is built for testing, so every test step can be validated without scripting.
  - 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.

Message exchange pattern

An operation is defined by a message exchange pattern (MEP) that describes the message pattern (publish or request and reply) required by the operations transport to establish communications. MEP can be the approach if recording is unavailable to create initial tests and stubs.

In many cases, services contain enumerations. Enumerations are valid inputs for fields within message schemas. For example, the schema can prescribe that a certain field can contain only male or female. It is likely that you need to create many tests that are based on the list of items in the enumerations. For example, if field A is of type enumeration and the service has 20 items, you need to create 20 tests, even though this takes time and is tedious. Rational® Integration Tester can automatically create multiple tests form enumerations. Using the MEP wizard takes you through this process.

Note: Click Minimum number of combinations in the MEP wizard to prevent the generation of an unmanageable number of tests.

During the entire testing lifecycle, you can create similar tests, which require more effort. Using the Test Template feature, you can reuse the same template to create different tests. The template acts as a base test from which many tests can be derived.

While you are performing integration, system, or system integration tests you might need to call more than one test to create a business process. In such cases, if you pass tag values from one test to the next, make sure to correctly designate the tags for input and output in individual tests. Correct designation will lead to values being passed appropriately. The output values of one test can be the input value of another test.