IBM® Rational® Test Workbench overview

You can use Rational® Test Workbench to create, modify, and run different kinds of tests and to organize test assets.

Before you can use the products in Rational® Test Workbench, you must install the products and configure the licenses.

The product components that are available in the Rational® Test Workbench package are as follows:
  • IBM® Rational® Integration Tester
  • IBM® Rational® Functional Tester
  • IBM® Rational® Performance Tester
  • IBM® Rational® Test Control Panel
You can also use the following products along with the components in Rational® Test Workbench. You must have purchased the licenses to download and use these products.
  • Rational® Performance Test Server
  • Rational® Test Virtualization Server
Note: The components in Rational® Test Workbench can be combined with Rational® Performance Test Server and Rational® Test Virtualization Server into a solution called Rational® Solution for Test Automation.

You can find a brief description of each of the product components as follows:

IBM® Rational® Integration Tester

Use Rational® Integration Tester to help you create, modify, and run service tests and performance tests against the integration interfaces. You can build tests by recording existing system behaviors or from requirements, by entering the data to send and the data that is expected in return. You can also create virtual services to remove test dependencies and enable earlier testing. These techniques can be built into a continuous delivery pipeline to ensure each component is tested fully prior to delivery.

For more information about Rational® Integration Tester, see Rational Integration Tester overview.

IBM® Rational® Functional Tester

Use the Functional Test perspective in Rational® Functional Tester to automate functional tests of HTML, Java™, Windows™, .NET, Visual Basic, Silverlight, Eclipse, SAP, Siebel, Flex, Ajax, Dojo, GEF and PowerBuilder applications.

Use the UI Test perspective in Rational® Functional Tester to test the user interface of HTML 5-based Web applications on the desktop or on mobile devices. In addition, you can manage Selenium Java™ tests, and create compound tests.

For more information about Rational® Functional Tester, see Rational Functional Tester overview.

IBM® Rational® Performance Tester

Use Rational® Performance Tester to help you to automate load and scalability testing of web, ERP, Citrix,and server-based software applications. Tests are generated automatically by recording the network traffic that is generated when the client interacts with the application under test running on the server. This network traffic is then emulated on multiple virtual users to create realistic workloads that exercise the key business transactions. Test assets are automatically deployed to as many load generation agents as are needed to achieve the required scalability.

The load generation capacity in Rational® Performance Tester can easily be extended with the Rational® Performance Tester on Cloud Pay per Use service, running on the SoftLayer® public cloud. A similar capability on the VMware private cloud is available as a trial.

For more information about Rational® Performance Tester, see Product overview.

IBM® Rational® Test Control Panel

Use IBM® Rational® Test Control Panel to help you centralize a repository for virtualized services. With Rational® Test Control Panel, virtualized services that are published with Rational® Integration Tester can be created, shared, and deployed by using environments in Rational® Test Virtualization Server.

Rational® Test Control Panel also contains components that are designed to assist with the testing and virtualization of services that are based on specific technologies. The components enable the recording of services and virtualization with a minimum of client configuration.

For more information about Rational® Test Control Panel, see Rational Test Control Panel overview.

IBM® Rational® Performance Test Server

Rational® Performance Test Server provides the ability to create large-scale, multiuser workloads with service-level or application-level performance tests that are created in Rational® Test Workbench.

Rational® Performance Test Server includes the following installable components:
  • Rational® Performance Test Server
  • Rational® Integration Tester Agent

For more information about Rational® Performance Test Server, see Rational Performance Test Server overview.

IBM® Rational® Test Virtualization Server

Rational® Test Virtualization Server is software that is used for creating, maintaining, publishing, and running message-based stubs or database stubs.

Stubs are used to simulate services within an environment for the purposes of software development and testing. Simulating parts of an environment can often be necessary if the real services are not yet available or because they are difficult or expensive to use.

For more information about Rational® Test Virtualization Server, see Rational Test Virtualization Server overview.