Release Notes
This document includes information about What’s new, installation and upgrade instructions, known issues, and contact information of IBM Customer Support.
Known issues
You can find information about the known issues identified in this release of Rational® Test Automation Server.
System Requirements
This document includes information about hardware and software requirements for IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server.
Getting Started Guide
This guide provides an overview and describes the task flows to get you started with Rational® Test Automation Server. This guide is intended for new users.
Server overview
IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server brings together test data, test environments, and test runs and reports into a single, web-based browser for testers and non-testers.
Task flow: Test runs and results
You can use the task flow diagram to get started with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server. After you install the software, you can complete the tasks in sequence to run test assets in Rational Test Automation Server and view and analyze the test results.
Accessibility features
Accessibility features help users who have physical disabilities, such as visual and, hearing impairment, or limited mobility, to use the software products successfully.
Administrator Guide
This guide describes how to install IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server software. After you install the software, you can perform administration tasks such as license configuration, user management, security, memory, and disk usage management, back up and restore user data. This guide is intended for administrators.
Installation of the server software
To get started with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server, you must first install the server software.
Server software upgrade methods
When you want to use the enhanced functionalities of Rational® Test Automation Server, you must upgrade to the latest version of the server software.
Backing up and restoring the user data
You might want to restore an earlier environment state if you install a new version of Rational® Test Automation Server, move environments to different systems (both real and virtual), or set up a test environment ready for testing. To address any of these needs, you can back up and restore Rational Test Automation Server user data installed either on Ubuntu or on Red Hat OpenShift platform.
Uninstallation of the server software
When you no longer require Rational® Test Automation Server, you can uninstall the server software. You can uninstall the server software depending on the platform on which you installed the server software.
Configuration of the server software
You can find information about the tasks that you must perform after you installed the server software to configure Rational® Test Automation Server.
License management
You can manage and administer licensing for your installed server software through the Configure Licenses window in Rational® Test Automation Server.
This guide describes how to create test assets in Rational® Test Automation Server and publish test assets to the Git repository that you have configured. This guide is intended for testers and test managers.
Datasets overview
A dataset provides tests with variable data during a run. The test that uses a dataset at run time replaces a value in the recorded test with variable test data that is stored in the dataset.
Test Execution Specialist Guide
This guide describes tasks that you must complete before you can configure and run tests in Rational® Test Automation Server. You can find information about other tasks that you can perform on the Resource Monitoring Service, Virtualization, and Integrations with third-party applications. This guide is intended for testers or test execution specialists.
Prerequisites to running tests
Before you can configure and run a test in a project on Rational® Test Automation Server, you must read the information about the different tests. You might want to add a remote static agent or a remote Docker host to the project as an alternate location to run the tests.
Agents overview
You can find information about the agents that you must install on remote computers and configure the agents with the offline user token so that the agents register with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server. After the agents are registered, you can add them to your projects and then select them as locations to run tests.
Managing Docker hosts
You can set up dedicated external Docker hosts to run large tests or run tests remotely to free up the dependency of running tests on the default cluster of IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server.
Test run configurations
You can configure and run tests in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server after you add the test resources to your project.
Management of running tests
Find information about the tasks that you can perform on a test that you configured for a run either while it runs or after it completes the run.
Management of virtualized services
You can find information about the tasks that you can perform on and manage the virtualized services that run on Rational® Test Automation Server. You can start or stop the stubs connected to Rational Test Automation Server. You can view the stub usage statistics and the routing rules configured for the stubs, agents, or proxies that are connected to Rational Test Automation Server.
Test results
After the tests or schedules are run and completed, you can view the results and reports in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to analyze the verdict, the performance, and statistics. You can also re-execute tests and schedules from the Result page with the same commit id.
Resource Monitoring service
When you apply load to a system under test, the amount of resources consumed by your system is increasing. If the capacity of the resources does not match the load, you can see performance issues in the results. The Resource Monitoring service in Rational® Test Automation Server helps you monitoring the resources of a system and establish the performance metrics of the system. Thus, you can observe the health of these resources while a schedule is running.
Integration with Jira as a defect management system
You can integrate Jira as a defect management system with your project on IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to create defects for the tests that are available in the project after the test run is complete.
Integrating with other applications
You can integrate certain applications with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to run tests, view the test results, and create defects.
Managing access to the server
Desktop clients and third-party integrations use offline user tokens to connect to Rational® Test Automation Server.
Test Manager Guide
This guide describes how to manage and track your overall test effort. This guide is intended for test managers.
Test assets and a server project
Rational® Test Automation Server projects manage access to your test assets, which are stored in a Git repository. Projects are either public by default or private. Private projects are not discoverable by other users. You can either add your own project or you can request to be a member of another public project.
Working with Git repositories
You can add another repository in addition to the existing repositories in your project or edit the repository settings, by updating the credentials, or by removing references to the repository.
Protecting API test assets by using secrets
Secrets are key-value pairs that are created for your project in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server under a secrets collection. You can create secrets collections for your project that enable you or members in your project to use secrets at test runtime either in Rational Test Automation Server or in desktop clients.
Managing an encrypted dataset
You can use encrypted datasets to limit access to confidential information such as account number or passwords. You can arrange data by an appropriate category so that project members can use datasets more effectively in certain tests and protect them.
Managing notifications
IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server provides a feature to display notifications for different events within the user interface (UI) of Rational Test Automation Server. You can configure an SMTP server on Rational Test Automation Server when you want Rational Test Automation Server to send out notifications about the different events as emails to the subscribed users.
Troubleshooting Guide
This guide describes how to analyze and resolve some of the common problems that you might encounter while you work with Rational® Test Automation Server.
Troubleshooting issues
You can find information about the issues or problems that you might encounter while working with Rational® Test Automation Server. Details about issues, their causes and the resolutions that you can apply to fix the issues are described.
All Guides (PDF)
You can find the link to view or download the content of the release notes, system requirements, and persona guides of Rational® Test Automation Server as a PDF file.
Security Considerations
This document describes the actions that you can take to ensure that your installation is secure, customize your security settings, and set up user access controls.
Notices
This document provides information about copyright, trademarks, terms and conditions for the product documentation.