Release notes for IBM® Rational® Integration Tester, Rational® Test Virtualization Server, and Rational® Performance Test Server

This document contains information about What's new, installation, known issues, and contact information of IBM Support.

Contents

Product description

Rational® Integration Tester is an integration testing and virtualization tool that includes capabilities to automate and run tests earlier and more often to find problems sooner in the development cycle. See Rational Integration Tester overview.

What's new

You can find information about the features introduced in this release of IBM® Rational® Integration Tester, Rational® Test Virtualization Server, and Rational® Performance Test Server.
The following sections list the new features, enhancements, or other changes made in this release.
  • Rational® Test Automation Server

    For information about Rational® Test Automation Server, see Release notes.

  • Rational® Test Control Panel
    • Tools page

      The list of agents changed for a release was updated. Review the Tools page of Rational® Test Control Panel to see each tool and the version that it was last changed.

    • Removed installation of the WINPCAP feature when using IBM® Installation Manager

      The WINPCAP feature that you installed by using IBM® Installation Manager in earlier releases is now removed as an installable feature. If you intend to use the packet capture feature in Rational® Integration Tester 10.5 or later, you can install the Win10PCAP feature from the website (https://www.win10pcap.org/).

  • Technologies
    • Support for creating data-driven tests

      Previously, you created multiple tests with the same test structure for varying test data that were based on the MEP configured for an operation. Now, you can use the Fixed option during the test creation to create different tests for each of the variable test data.

      You can now use the Data Driven option to create multiple data-driven tests that depend on the structure of the schema that is defined for the messages and the content combinations that you specify with either of the following results:
      • A single test with multiple content iterations is created if the underlying schema had one structural choice. Also, the test data in an Excel worksheet is created that specifies the values for the iterations which are used at the test run time.
      • Multiple tests with different test structures and content iterations are created if the underlying schema had multiple structural choices. The test data are created in different files that are used by each of the data-driven tests during the test run time.

      Also, the text in UI options to create a single test and multiple tests are now truncated with the text using MEP removed from the options.

      See Creating multiple tests by using MEP.

    • Support for creating stub populated with data

      You can now create a stub based on the structure of the schema that is defined for the operation and have response payload populated with data.

      See Creating a stub populated with data.

    • Support for Contract testing

      You can now use Rational® Integration Tester to create and run consumer-driven Contract tests. Rational® Integration Tester requires that a schema be defined for the messages that are to be received by the consumers and then validates the contract by comparing the messages sent by the producer service in the system under test with the structure defined in the selected roots of the schema.

      You can create Contract tests for an operation from the Test Factory view. Rational® Integration Tester also supports the creation of Contract tests when you synchronize resources. You can create either a single Contract test or multiple Contract tests based on the number of structural choices or content combinations that are present in the schema defined for the incoming messages.

      See Contract testing.

    • Migrating Postman collections to Rational® Integration Tester

      You can now migrate the Postman collections to Rational® Integration Tester, if you use Postman for REST API testing and API virtualization. With the migration feature, Rational® Integration Tester automatically converts and creates equivalent Rational® Integration Tester test resources for the Postman collections, environments, variables, requests, tests, and other Postman entities. Thereafter, you can run the tests and stubs on Rational® Integration Tester without using Postman.

      See Testing the migrated Postman collections.

    • Chai scripting in test actions
      You can now use the Chai Assertion Styles of scripting in the Assert, Decision, and Function actions in tests. The Chai styles of assertions are the default scripting for these actions. With the introduction of the Chai scripting, the following features are changed:
      • You can select Chai as an option for scripting in actions where the legacy scripting and ECMA scripting are supported.
      • You do not have to use the named variables in the response objects in Integration Tester actions.
      • You do not have to explicitly tag or configure other actions to expose their data.

      See Chai scripting language.

  • Support for additional parameters in Kafka and Mongo transport configuration

    You can now provide additional parameters when you configure and use either the Kafka or MongoDB transports in Rational® Integration Tester.

    See Testing with Apache Kafka and Testing with MongoDB.

  • Synchronizing project resources in the results database

    You can now configure an option to automatically synchronize the details in the results database of the tests, suites, or stubs that were run whenever these project resources are moved or renamed.

    You can also manually synchronize the details in the results database with details in the project by using the command line.
    Note: This mainly affects navigation; data that is used to generate reports might still use the resource names as they were at test run time.

    See Server Settings and Renaming Suites or tests in the results database by using the command line.

  • Enhanced SQL Query Action

    When editing an SQL Query Action in Rational® Integration Tester, the test feature limits the number of fetched results from the server with a default value of 100 records that you can change. This enhancement aims to reduce processing of unwanted records from a poorly defined query.

    However, you can modify the number of records to process in the SQL Action UI based on the expected number of records in the database. Entering a value of 0 will enable Rational® Integration Tester to display all records in the database.

    See Adding an SQL Query action to a test.

  • Details of memory usage by an engine

    You can now view details of the memory used by an engine on the Infrastructure dashboard in Rational® Test Control Panel.

    See Viewing running agents.

  • Option to include optional fields in data-driven tests

    An option to include the optional fields is now provided when you want to create data-driven tests under an operation in Rational® Integration Tester.

  • Git folders in imported or exported files are ignored

    When you import or export resources from a projects including a .git folder Rational® Integration Tester now ignores any file present from the .git folder.

  • Support to save test report as a JUnit report

    When you configure a run of the IBM Rational Integration Tester Task that you want to run as a job in the Azure DevOps pipeline, you can now configure the location on your computer where the JUnit report of the test can be saved.

    See Running tests in an Azure DevOps pipeline.

  • Support for managing credentials

    If you have external resources that must be accessed by project or test resources in Rational® Integration Tester and you do not want to expose the credentials used to access the external resources, then you can implement user defined access to a credential management system.

    See Managing credentials.

Deprecated capabilities

You can find information about the capabilities that are deprecated in this release and are planned for a removal in a future release.
Note: You can contact the IBM Support team if you have any concerns.
  • The following operating systems or supported softwares are deprecated in this release:

    • AIX 7.1 TL5

    • AIX 7.2 TL5

Removed capabilities

Support for the following operating systems or supported software that were announced in previous releases as deprecated are removed in this release:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.5

Installing and upgrading

You can find information about the installation and upgrade instructions for IBM® Rational® Integration Tester, Rational® Test Virtualization Server, and Rational® Performance Test Server.

Installing Rational® Integration Tester and Rational® Test Control Panel

For information about installation, see the following topics:

Installing Rational® Performance Test Server

For information about installation, see Installing Rational Performance Test Server.

Installing Rational® Test Virtualization Server

For information about installation, see Installing Rational Test Virtualization Server.

For information about the upgrade requirements, see:

Known issues

You can find information about the known issues identified in this release of Rational® Test Automation Server.

Known problems are documented in the download document for each product and in the form of individual technotes in the Support Knowledge Base:

Table 1. Download documents and technotes
Product Download document Knowledge base
Rational® Integration Tester Release document Knowledge articles
Rational® Test Virtualization Server Release document Knowledge articles
Rational® Performance Test Server Release document Knowledge articles
Note: Starting from 9.5.0 a single fix list document and a single download document is used for all products.

The knowledge base is continually updated as problems are discovered and resolved. By searching the knowledge base, you can quickly find workarounds or solutions to problems.

Contacting IBM Rational Software Support

  • For contact information and guidelines or reference materials that you might need when you require support, read the IBM Support Guide.

  • For personalized support that includes notifications of significant upgrades, subscribe to Product notification.

  • Before you contact IBM Rational Software Support, you must gather the background information that you might need to describe your problem. When you describe a problem to an IBM software support specialist, be as specific as possible and include all relevant background information so that the specialist can help you solve the problem efficiently. To save time, know the answers to these questions:
    • What software versions were you running when the problem occurred?
    • Do you have logs, traces, or messages that are related to the problem?
    • Can you reproduce the problem? If so, what steps do you take to reproduce it?
    • Is there a workaround for the problem? If so, be prepared to describe the workaround.