Rational TestManager
Release Notes


Release 2002.05.00

Copyright © 2001 Rational Software and its subsidiaries. All rights reserved.
November 2001

About These Release Notes

Trademarks and Copyrights

Scope-Product Definition

Getting Started

Installation Information and System Requirements
Installation Issues
Creating the Rational Test Data Store
Message about required Internet Explorer (IE) upgrade
Upgrading from the previous release of TestManager
Evaluation artifacts
Upgrading from earlier Rational Testing Products Releases

New and Changed Features

General Enhancements
Test impact analysis
Enhanced filtering of test input sources
New built-in test input type: Microsoft Excel
Defining test script options
New Test Scripts View
Defining test tool options
Support for Red Hat Linux Version 7.1 Agents
New actions in the test script console and test input adapters
Test Asset Management and Reporting Enhancements
Importing and exporting test assets
Changes to the test case reports
Performance Testing Enhancements
New reports
Improved license allocation of virtual testers

Guidelines and Restrictions

Using Excel Test Inputs
Submitting defects in Test Log
Updating suspicion from TestManager
Embedded quotation marks in datapool columns
Test Script Playback
General
VU
Command Line
Manual
Visual Basic
Generated Visual Basic and Java Test Scripts
Supported Agents
Playback Restrictions on UNIX Agents
TSS ApplicationWait Call
F5 (Refresh All) Does Not Work in Test Asset Workspace
Resource Monitoring
Report Generation
SAP Limitations
XML Files
SQL Anywhere Server
Rational Administrator
Unified Change Management (UCM)
Associating a Rose Test Input Source with a Project
Editing Reports with Long Path Names
Performance Testing
Response vs. Time Reports
Suspended Users in Transactors
ODBC Limitations
Testing CORBA Applications
Rational TestManager Help

Contacting Rational Technical Support

About These Release Notes

These Release Notes provide information that is not available in the printed documentation or the Help for Rational TestManager.

Trademarks and Copyrights

A complete online trademark and copyright information page for all Rational products resides in the /doc subfolder of your installation folder. The file is called copyright.html, and its default location is C:/Program Files/Rational/doc.

Scope-Product Definition

This release incorporates several enhancements to the Rational TestManager product.

Getting Started

Installation Information and System Requirements

You will find complete installation instructions and system requirements in Rational Testing Products Installation Guide, which is available as a printed book and electronically as a PDF file on the Rational Solutions for Windows Online Documentation CD, which also includes a version of the Acrobat Reader.

Installation Issues

Creating the Rational Test Data Store

After installation, when creating the Rational test data store from Rational Administrator, do not specify a path containing non-ASCII characters. Also, do not use non-ASCII characters when naming any projects or log folders. If your test data store path contains non-ASCII characters, you will experience problems of varying severity, including abnormal test script termination, datapool access anomalies, and problems with verification points.

This is a particular issue when installing and using Rational products in non-English environments. This problem will be fixed in a patch.

Message about required Internet Explorer (IE) upgrade

You may see a message that indicates that you must upgrade to IE 5.0 Service Pack 2 before you can install the Rational testing products. This message is incorrect. The testing products support IE versions 5.0 and 4.0. Click on Ignore, and you will not be prevented from installing.

Upgrading from the previous release of TestManager

If you are upgrading to this release (2002.05) from the previous release of TestManager, you must remove the Nutcracker executable and restart your computer before installing the current version.

To remove the Nutcracker executable:

  1. Click Start > Settings > Control Panel.
  2. Click Add/Remove Programs.
  3. Select Nutcracker, and click Remove.
  4. Click OK.
  5. Restart your computer before installing the current version.

Evaluation artifacts

Evaluation artifacts are not included as a part of this installation procedure. As a result, when you select the Evaluator option on the Software Use page of the Rational Software Setup program, sample data will not be installed.

To obtain the sample data, download the Rational Suite Tutorial from http://www.rational.com/documentation.

Upgrading from earlier Rational Testing Products Releases

Datastores created in Rational Test Releases 2001A.04 or 2001.03 are not compatible with the latest version, 2002.05. Before TestManager or Robot Versions 2002.05 can connect to and operate against the test assets contained in the datastores, you must first use Rational Administrator to upgrade them as follows:

In the Administrator, select File > Upgrade Project Assets.

Select the .RSP file to upgrade the datastores associated with the project.

The program displays a progress dialog. When the process is complete, you can view the log generated during the upgrade.

After the datastore has been upgraded, it cannot be used with earlier versions of TestManager or Robot.

New and Changed Features

The following new features have been added to Rational TestManager. For details, click Help > Contents and Index > What's New in Rational TestManager 2002.05.00.

General Enhancements

Test impact analysis

If a test input changes, TestManager now informs you of the impact of that change on your test plan. For example, if a requirement changes in some meaningful way, you need to know which test cases in your test plans are affected so that you can update them to reflect requirement changes. TestManager automatically identifies and marks the affected test cases as "suspect" for ReqPro and Excel Test Input sources.

Enhanced filtering of test input sources

The Test Input Adapter Extensibility feature of TestManager now supports the ability to save test input source filters and Test Case Coverage report filters. Test input sources and Test Case Coverage reports are unfiltered by default. When you set a filter for a test input source, the last filter that you set persists in the Test Inputs window and Test Input Select dialog box. When you set a filter for a Test Input source, TestManager saves the filter with the test input source. When you set a filter for a Test Case Coverage report, TestManager saves the filter with the report.

New built-in test input type: Microsoft Excel

You can now use one or more Excel spreadsheets as test input sources. This test input adapter can be useful in many ways. Many teams use Excel to manage information in their projects. For example, some teams may document requirements or capture project planning information in an Excel spreadsheet. In either case, the new Excel test input adapter allows teams to track the testing effort with respect to their information in an Excel spreadsheet. Specifically, they could associate test cases with tasks defined in rows of a spreadsheet so that a coverage report could be generated to show progress or completion of those tasks.

Defining test script options

You can now define additional test script options controlling how test script execution adapters execute test scripts.

New Test Scripts View

You can now view all your test scripts sorted by type from the Test Scripts View. From this window you can perform test management operations on test scripts. You can also perform basic version control operations (check-in, checkout, etc.) on registered test scripts that support these operations.

Defining test tool options

You can now set test tool options to control how a particular test tool plays back a test script. You can define a test tool option in the test script execution adapter that you have written for a particular test tool.

Support for Red Hat Linux Version 7.1 Agents

You can now play back VU, Java, and Command Line, and custom test scripts on Red Hat Linux version 7.1 agents, as well as on version 6.x agents supported in earlier versions of TestManager.

New actions in the test script console and test input adapters

Test script console adapter and test input adapter developers can now add their own custom actions, or commands. You can run these custom actions or commands in TestManager.

Test Asset Management and Reporting Enhancements

Importing and exporting test assets

You can move or copy existing test assets between and within Rational projects, use third party tools to create importable versions of test assets, or use third party tools to analyze exported test assets. Importing and exporting Test Assets are subject to the following restrictions:

Changes to the test case reports

You can now run test case reports that display test case suspicion status as presented by the test impact analysis capability. Using the test case suspicion feature you can track meaningful changes to test inputs so that you can update the associated test cases or their implementations.

Also, TestManager now has several new pre-defined test case coverage reports.

Performance Testing Enhancements

New reports

There are two new performance testing reports in TestManager: Command Data and Command Trace. Command Data reports let you identify the differences between expected and actual responses in a test run. They show the commands sent and the response data that is written to the test log. The Command Trace report lists the activity of a suite run and enables you to examine in detail unusual or unexpected events. This report formats raw data from the suite run without performing statistical analysis.

Improved license allocation of virtual testers

You can now combine multiple non-pooled virtual tester packs. Thus, if you had a 100 virtual tester pack and a 500 virtual tester pack, you could execute a single run of as many as 600 virtual testers.

Guidelines and Restrictions

Using Excel Test Inputs

In TestManager you can view test inputs that have been defined in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. If, while viewing those test inputs, you or another user creates a new test input or modifies an existing test input in Excel, you must refresh the TestManager test input view to see those changes in TestManager.

If you are changing the "Date Modified" column in an Excel spreadsheet and the TestManager datastore and spreadsheet are in different time zones, the "Update Suspicion" feature does not work properly.

Submitting defects in Test Log

If after submitting a defect in the Test Log Window, you want to log into a different datastore or project, or log in as a different user, TestManager may not display the login dialog after restart. In this case you must either log off the operating system and log back in (if you are running on Windows NT or later), or bring up Task Manager, and terminate the CQINTSRV11.EXE process. You can then log in to another datastore or project, or log in as a different user.

Updating suspicion from TestManager

Requisite Pro projects that use a Microsoft Access database may experience a delay between the entry of the data and the display of the modified data. This delay is caused by a defect in the Microsoft MDAC component. A similar delay is apparent from TestManager when Requisite Pro test inputs are involved. The most noticible case is when suspicion is updated and cleared frequently in the Test Input View.

Embedded quotation marks in datapool columns

The TSSDatapool.DatapoolValue (Visual Basic) and TSSDatapool.datapoolValue() (Java) methods take a datapool column argument. If the value of the column specified by this argument contains double quotes (for example, "Name"), you must manually edit the datpool column and add a second pair of double quotes around the value (""Name"").

Test Script Playback

General

VU

Command Line

Manual

When playing back manual test scripts from TestManager, be sure to exit Rational ManualTest to terminate the script. The alternative, terminating the user from the TestManager console, is not necessary and may lead to unexpected results.

Visual Basic

Test Script Services (TSS) support test script playback from a proxy TSS server. However, TestManager does not provide Visual Basic bindings to those proxy TSS servers.

Generated Visual Basic and Java Test Scripts

Visual Basic and Java test scripts that are automatically generated (by the Robot Session Recorder or by QualityArchitect) do not record script line numbers. As a result, the TestManager Script view feature (the Script check box under Tools > Options) does not work with these test scripts. If you manually add method calls to your Visual Basic and Java test scripts that pass test script line numbers to TestManager, the Script view will work. The relevant methods are TSSMonitor.PositionSet (Visual Basic) and TSSMonitor.positionSet (Java).

Supported Agents

The following table lists supported agent operating systems and indicates which built-in test script types can be played back on each. Important note: effective with this release, Windows 95 is no longer a supported platform for the Rational Test Agent.

Agent OS VU SQABasic Java Visual Basic Command Line
Windows NT y y y y y
Windows XP y y y y y
Windows 2000 y y y y y
Windows 98 n y y y y
Solaris y n y n y
AIX y n n n y
HP-UX y n n n y
DYNIX/ptx y n n n y
Linux y n y n y

Playback Restrictions on UNIX Agents

TSS ApplicationWait Call

The test script service ApplicationWait includes an exitStatus argument. All versions of this call fail with a segmentation fault if a value of NULL is entered for exitStatus. The calls are:

TSSApplicationWait() [C]
ApplicationWait [tsscmd]
TSSUtility.applicationWait() [Java. Note that this means the override method, which has no exitStatus argument, cannot be used.]
TSSUtility.ApplicationWait [Visual Basic]

F5 (Refresh All) Does Not Work in Test Asset Workspace

You can press the F5 key to refresh all in the Test Plan window and in the Test Input window. This key does not work in the Test Asset Workspace. You must right-click a folder in each Test Asset Workspace tab or click View > Refresh Workspace from the main menu to refresh all the Test Asset Workspace.

Resource Monitoring

Report Generation

TestManager provides a "previous" button allowing you to change the test log selection after you have selected the virtual tester, script, and commandID filters to be used in generating a report. This causes a problem because the previous test log is not closed and conflicts with the new test log. Workaround: if you need to change the test log selection after you've selected filters, start over rather than use the "previous" button.

SAP Limitations

The following list gives SAP testing limitations in TestManager:

XML Files

The XML parser used with TestManager cannot parse XML files encoded in UTF-8 and with byte order marks. To work around this limitation, you can save the files choosing a different encoding (for example, ANSI, Unicode, and Unicode BE).

SQL Anywhere Server

During the installation of a SQL Anywhere Server, select Replace these files with English equivalents independent of the language environment in which you are working. Microsoft recommends this because selected files must be replaced with their English equivalents.

Rational Administrator

Unified Change Management (UCM)

If you use Unified Change Management (UCM) with Rational Suite under these conditions:

Make sure that you do not set the UCM policy, "Check Assignment Before Work On". (The default is for the policy not to be set.)

If you set the policy, you cannot work on an activity unless you are the owner of that activity. However, in the current implementation of UCM for RequisitePro and Rational Test, an entire team of workers share the same activity. Therefore, if the policy is set, only one person, not the entire team, can work in a RequisitePro project or in a Rational Test datastore.

If the policy is mistakenly set, the error message "Source control could not set activity." appears. To work around this error:

For further details, see the Rational Suite Administrator's Guide.

Associating a Rose Test Input Source with a Project

The Rational Administrator includes a Configure Project dialog box. When associating a Rational Rose modle with a Rational project, it is not automatically defined as a test input source for TestManager.

To register a Rational Rose model as a test input, use the Manage Test Input Types dialog box from TestManager. To reach this dialog, click Tools > Manage > Test Input Types.

Editing Reports with Long Path Names

Crystal Reports is used to generate or edit Listing reports. You can run a report regardless of the length of its pathname. However, if you attempt to edit a report whose pathname is longer than 80 characters, the message "Dictionary not found" appears. This is a Crystal Reports restriction. If you create a new or customize an existing design layout, keep the root path to the test datastore as short as possible (less than 80 characters).

Performance Testing

The issues described in this section are specific to performance testing.

Response vs. Time Reports

The Show Resource dialog box for data points in the Response vs. Time report for a Performance Testing Report, refers to the MASTER computer. This should read Local computer.

Suspended Users in Transactors

When you monitor a TestManager suite and suspend a virtual tester in an independent transactor, upon restarting, the tester will try to catch up on the missed transactions. If you suspend a virtual tester in a coordinated transactor, the remaining testers will compensate by attempting to maintain the desired transactor rate. If the rate cannot be maintained, as testers are restarted, they will try to catch up on the missed transactions.

ODBC Limitations

When playing back a SQL statement that generates multiple result sets, TestManager logs only the data for the first fetch. The other fetches show the number of rows returned, but does not log the data actually returned.

If a sqlfetch_cursor is run multiple times in succession with ALL_ROWS and EXPECT_ROWS 0, an error for the second sqlfetch_cursor is generated stating:

 ERROR -1: {error} STATE=S1010, CODE=0, MSG=[Microsoft][ODBC Driver 
Manager] Function sequence error

When logging data returned from sqlfetch_cursor, sometimes the data is truncated and the next SQL command appears on the same line as a row of data. This is a logging problem only; the test script is executing correctly.

Testing CORBA Applications

To test CORBA applications with TestManager, you must have the following software installed:

CORBA Playback

Before playback, you must import into the project the IDL for each interface referenced in a test script.

TestManager provides special IIOP monitoring states in the state histogram monitor window.

TestManager does not support playback of ASCII hex (opaque) data between computers of differing byte ordering. Byte ordering specification is marked in the IIOP protocol. It is possible that data may be transferred with big-endian byte order, even on Windows NT systems. This case is more likely to occur if the application is Java. The result is that data specified opaquely in these cases may not play back correctly, even though the recording computer and the playback computer have the same byte order.

Supported and Unsupported CORBA Data Types for VU Test Scripts

TestManager supports playing back the following CORBA data types:

The following data types are not supported, and will result in methods being scripted opaquely if they occur as a parameter data type in a method:

UNIX Agents

Only Solaris is supported for UNIX Agent playback of VU language CORBA/IIOP scripts recorded by Rational Robot. The VisiBroker bind modus is not supported for playback.This limitation means that "VisiBroker" cannot be used to locate object references at play back. Therefore, another method, such as reading IORs (Inter-operable Object Reference) from a file, or specifying them explicitly in VU test scripts, must be used to locate objects when playing back test scripts from a Solaris Agent.

Rational TestManager Help

A paragraph in the Help topic, What's New in Rational TestManager 2002.05.00, contains a typographical error. A corrected version of the paragraph follows.

Enhanced filtering - The Test Input Adapter Extensibility feature of TestManager now supports the ability to save test input source filters and Test Case Coverage report filters. When you set a filter for a test input source, the last filter that you set affects test inputs that appear in the Test Inputs window and Test Input Select dialog box until you change the filter. When you set a filter for a Test Input source, TestManager saves the filter with the test input source. When you set a filter for a Test Case Coverage report, TestManager saves the filter with the report.

Contacting Rational Technical Support

If you have questions about installing, using, or maintaining this product, contact Rational Technical Support as follows:

Your Location Telephone Facsimile E-mail
North America (800) 433-5444(toll free) (408) 863-4000Cupertino, CA (781) 676-2460Lexington, MA support@rational.com
Europe, Middle East, Africa +31 (0) 20-4546-200Netherlands +31 (0) 20-4545-201Netherlands support@europe.rational.com
Asia Pacific +61-2-9419-0111Australia +61-2-9419-0123Australia support@apac.rational.com

Note: When you contact Rational Technical Support, please be prepared to supply the following information:



Rational Software Corporation
http://www.rational.com
sales@rational.com
info@rational.com