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Rational® Integration Tester
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.
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.
Visualizing bottlenecks
If your test environment consists of complex message-based interactions between components, performance testing will validate that these messages flow through the system at the required rate. To get a better understanding of this concept, it is important to visualize how the components process these messages.

Rational® Integration Tester
- Release Notes
  This document contains information about What's new, installation, known issues, and contact information of IBM Support.
- System Requirements
  This document includes information about hardware and software requirements for IBM® Rational® Integration Tester.
- 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.
        Low-intensity performance testing
        During the assessment phase, when you are running small-scale functional tests (unit or component integration tests), low-intensity performance testing is helpful to track the response times of individual transactions.
        High-intensity performance testing
        High-intensity performance testing can be thought of as orchestrated performance testing. This phase of testing is concerned with full scenarios, such as stress tests and soak tests across end-to-end business processes.
        Visualizing bottlenecks
        If your test environment consists of complex message-based interactions between components, performance testing will validate that these messages flow through the system at the required rate. To get a better understanding of this concept, it is important to visualize how the components process these messages.
    - 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.
- Administrator Guide
  This guide describes how to install Rational® Integration Tester. After you install the software, you can perform administration tasks such as configuration and integration of the product. This guide is intended for administrators.
- Tester Guide
  This guide describes the tasks that you can perform for testing various domains, technologies, and applications. To enable testing, you must configure and enable the environment for testing.
- Test Manager Guide
  This guide describes the tasks that you can perform for tracking the quality of the application. This guide is intended for Test Managers.
- Troubleshooting Rational® Integration Tester
  While working with Rational® Integration Tester, you might encounter some problems that you can easily troubleshoot.
- Rational® Integration Tester reference
  Rational® Integration Tester is a scripting-free environment for developing tests for service-oriented architecture (SOA) messaging and business process integration projects. Tests can be built by recording existing system behaviors or from requirements, by entering the data to send and the data that is expected in return.
- Security Considerations
  You can take certain actions 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 product documentation.

Visualizing bottlenecks

If your test environment consists of complex message-based interactions between components, performance testing will validate that these messages flow through the system at the required rate. To get a better understanding of this concept, it is important to visualize how the components process these messages.

Queue lengths and slow response times can be the result of bottlenecks in the system that might simply be a result of architectural design. Simply put, if more messages are being produced onto a queue than are being consumed then this results in queuing. The greater the difference in consumption to production, the quicker that queue will grow. Queuing results in system bottlenecks that impair response times.