The Pros and Cons of RTC
First and foremost I’m gonna elaborate on exactly what this sexy thing is.
RTC stands for Rational Team Concert. On the website that link on the left refers to; it calls it an “Agile Application Lifecycle Management Solution”. Which I guess kinda makes sense, in the sense that “Agile” seems to be very “in” in the world of Software Testing these days. (I did a bit of a Google search and Google agrees)
But then what do I call it, you might ask?
I call it a place where documentation gets stored (Source Control) and work items (like Defects, Issues, Change Requests and Risks) are put up. Mind you, I’ve only been using RTC as a Test Analyst since end of August so I’m sure I haven’t fully understood/embraced its intricacies yet. So gotta keep in mind that these Pros and Cons is from that sort of mindset.
Pros
My favourite pro would probably the nifty dashboards you can create.
Someone from the PMO in my project showed me what magic you can create when you know how to create widgets to add to your nifty dashboard. I made some to track the number of open defects by severity and area (of system), to track testing progress against various test plans in order to see how many tests were passing; failing; blocked and to track how long defects take to get fixed. It’s weird, but this dashboard business appealed to the part of me that misses organising my notes at uni while I was studying so I could be more efficient.
It’s not standalone.
On our project, RTC is linked with RQM (Rational Quality Manager) which is the testing tool we use to actually execute tests. That way you can do some nifty things; like create a widget (refer to my first pro) that informs you of testing progress. You can also refer to specific tests when you raise a defect by raising a defect (in RTC) from the test you execute (in RQM).
Cons
It’s very hard to find things in RTC.
Maybe I’m used to the very high standard Google has set when it comes to searching. But it’s very annoying. I usually have to ask people in my team whether or not a defect has been raised regarding a certain part of the functionality- I’m yet to find out what exactly the search thingy in RTC searches for (i.e. the title, or the body).
This con morely applies to RQM (than RTC) but I gotta say- I wouldn’t mind a screen recorder.
Sure a picture (a screenshot) can say a thousand words. But a visual recording of what exactly you did to create that defect would be super-dooper.
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