Listen to this article
Real-time collaboration between Business Analysts and Quality Assurance team is of utmost importance. An analyst not only needs to define and capture business requirements but also keep track of all the requirements getting implemented, tested, passed and delivered on a regular basis throughout the product lifecycle. A tester also needs to ensure that all requirements have gone through the test cycles and the subsequent defects have been properly identified before the issues are tracked for further corrective actions. Therefore, it is crucial that both the teams communicate with each other; share their tool data across the development lifecycle and get a unified view of how a requirement traverses through the tool sets.
Business analysts may use IBM Rational Requirements Composer (or some other tool) to define, collect, manage requirements and develop business-driven applications. Testers use HP Quality Center to do automated and manual testing; submit defects and thus manage quality of applications being developed. If the tools are not connected to each other through a common pluggable system, achieving transparency in data flow is not possible. It is important that both the team can view the artifacts and their interrelationships across the toolsets and work on actionable items.
Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform allows full visibility of IBM Rational Requirements Composer Requirements within HP Quality Center Requirements including the Requirements, Folders, Modules and their hierarchies. The Kovair RRC Adapter and QC Adapter enable bidirectional information exchange between IBM RRC and HP QC/ALM Requirements via the Omnibus Engine Service. It allows admin users to create customizable business rules to define field mappings and manage integration schedules, rules, and field mappings. The integrity report allows users to validate the field definitions, data types, and workflow business rules. The platform enables a true collaboration between users of IBM Rational and HP Quality Center through its bus-like architecture and thus helps them implement the SOA.
Fig: Synchronizing IBM RRC with HP QC
Kovair Omnibus platform provides seamless integration solutions in the following ways.
- Synchronization of RRC Requirements along with folder structure with QC Requirement folders.
- Tracking HP QC Requirements in RRC through synchronization and OSLC linking.
- Synchronization of interrelationships between Requirements in both the tools.
- Higher visibility into project activities and team progress with multilevel dashboards and reporting features.
- Synchronization between desired individual fields
- Automatic update of tool data in customized workflow
- Support for Attachments and Comments.
Working Scenario
Kovair Omnibus integration platform includes Kovair RRC Adapter and Kovair QC Adapter. Together with the adapters the Omnibus platform allows users to establish and follow links between resources. Once Requirements from RRC are integrated with HP QC Test Folders to ensure Test coverage of all Requirements, the failed Test Runs automatically link to work items in HP QC.
- In a development scenario a business analyst uploads Requirements in IBM RRC which are replicated to HP QC. Tester creates Test Case and Test Run in HP QC for each of the Requirements. Developer creates source code as per the Requirements, check-in the code and then update the status in HP QC.
- In HP QC, concepts for planning and execution are clearly defined. In Test Plan one can define Test Cases with Test Steps and group them into folders. In the Test Lab one can create Test Sets which link to a number of Test Cases from the Test Plan area. With this concept one can then link the folders that contain the sets.
- Tester can execute Manual or Automatic Test Case in HP QC
- Defects are raised after Test Case execution in HP QC and are fixed by Developers. Once fixed the developer can update the testers about the status of the defect and can simultaneously test each of the other Requirements.
- Once all the Requirements are implemented, tested and passed, the delivery process starts. The Requirement status as Implemented is synchronized back to IBM RRC where Business analyst checks it and updates the customers.
Thus Kovair Omnibus combines the power of both the best-of-breed tools and provides unified ALM environment.
Get Started with Kovair Omnibus, mention your requirements
