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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.
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.

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, 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.
  - 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.
    - Rational® Integration Tester capabilities
      Rational® Integration Tester provides a wide range of features and functionality that give users the ability to test their integration and SOA projects successfully.
    - SOA test strategies
      SOA is more than simple web services that provide interfaces to existing applications. An SOA implementation is likely to involve multiple services and vendors and is considered a complex computing problem. Many companies try implementing automated testing for GUI solutions. Due to the changing nature of GUIs, they find it difficult to achieve ROI. That is not to say that GUI testing cannot be achieved, but it must be done during the project lifecycle by applying automated interface testing. Focusing on programmatic interfaces and services in automated testing offers significant ROI, as the design contracts for these interfaces change less often, changing business processes in a distributed environment is costly. When it comes to SOA, a different approach, skill-set, and mind-set are required for testing.
    - Rational® Integration Tester user profiles
      Users that can use Rational® Integration Tester to test an SOA fall into multiple categories.
    - SOA and Rational® Integration Tester
      Rational® Integration Tester primary intent is to simplify the process by which the user builds tests (that is, schema-driven message creation, test driven development, and so on).
  - 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
  While working with Rational® Integration Tester, you might encounter some problems that you can easily troubleshoot.
- Reference Guide
  This guide provides the topics to help the Integration tester use the product by using the user interface, commands or scripts. This guide is intended for Integration testers.
- 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.

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.

IBM® Rational® Integration Tester is based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA), which provides a programming model for building applications and systems based on an SOA. For more information about SCA, see Service Component Architecture (SCA)

Based on this concept, the three main components that are used in Rational® Integration Tester SOA design are:

Operations are transactions that represent single, logical units of work. The execution of an operation typically causes one or more persistent data records to be read, written, or modified. An Operation has a structured interface for invocation and response.
Services are granular, self-contained groupings of business operations. The focus on services is different from traditional GUI applications as a service is neither a complete application nor a single subsystem. Instead, a service is designed to maximize reuse and must be stateless. Additionally, a service will be able to accommodate multiple invocation patterns (for example, SOAP over HTTP for synchronous implementations or SOAP over JMS for asynchronous implementations).
A Business Process is long-running set of actions or activities that are performed with specific business goals in mind. Business processes typically encompass multiple service invocations.