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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.
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.
Options for creating test resources
Rational® Integration Tester includes a number of options for automated resource creation, including topology discovery, synchronization, and recording.

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.
    - 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.
    - 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.
      - Options for creating test resources
        Rational® Integration Tester includes a number of options for automated resource creation, including topology discovery, synchronization, and recording.
      - Building system models by using synchronization
        When design-time assets are available, building by using synchronization is the preferred technique. Synchronization builds the system under test for you, which simplifies your testing work.
      - Building a system model manually
        Manual system modeling can be done where synchronization or recording is not possible or there are no service components when synchronized.
      - Test asset creation and recording
        Rational® Integration Tester enables you to record events in the system under test and recorded messages can be used to create tests and stubs more quickly and accurately. This can act as base message and test data for creating ongoing test assets.
      - Test execution
        In Rational® Integration Tester, tests generally consist of one or more inputs into the systems under test (SUT), and then validation of results and side effects. Data from one step of a test can be used to feed the next step. Rational Integration Tester is built for testing, so every test step can be validated without scripting.
    - 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
  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.

Options for creating test resources

Rational® Integration Tester includes a number of options for automated resource creation, including topology discovery, synchronization, and recording.

The resources used in testing are shown in the following table, along with the methods you can use to create them.

Table 1. Methods of creating assets
	Manual	Topology discovery	Synchronization	Recording Studio wizard
Logical and physical transports
Operations
Schemas
Tests
Virtual services (stubs)

Synchronization with an external application or file is the most common method of modeling a system under test. The process automatically adds logical and physical components, dependencies, and interactions. After you have completed synchronization, you can record from any of the transports or operations that it created. For more information, see Building system models by using synchronization.

You can use the Recording Studio wizard to inspect the messages sent to and from a service, as well to create operations, tests, and virtual services. The wizard can create operations and tests at the same time, or operations and stubs at the same time. If the operation already exists, it can create tests only, or stubs only. The wizard always requires a transport, as shown in the first row of the table. For more information, see Using the Recording Studio.

Topology discovery provides an alternative method of creating operations. In addition to creating operations, it can also create logical and physical transports, so it is particularly useful in situations such as those in the following examples:

You do not know in advance the information needed to set up the transport, such as hostname and port.
You have many hosts available to record and do not want to configure them all manually.

For more information about topology discovery, see Topology Discovery overview.