Posts

New Quick Start: Method Composer

  New Quick Start: Getting Started with Method Composer IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Method Composer (MEC) is a tool platform that enables process engineers and managers to implement, deploy, and maintain processes for organizations or individual projects.  MEC provides a knowledge base of intellectual capital which you can browse, manage and deploy. MEC is designed to be a content management system that provides a common management structure and look and feel for all of your content, rather than being a document management system in which you would store and access hard to maintain legacy documents all in their own shapes and formats. MEC also provides powerful automation to enact practice content by deploying it as a set of work items in IBM Engineering Workflow Management so that tasks may be assigned to engineers. This helps project leads by speeding up deployment of complex projects. Such deployed tasks automatically have links back to the practice content, providing i

Combining Manual and Automated Test Scripts in Engineering Test Management

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 Overview You probably already know that in IBM Engineering Test Management (ETM) you can create:  Manual test scripts - where the tester manually walks through a set of steps, and Automated test scripts - Where the test invokes some external testing tool that executes and then returns a result and (optionally) files / URLs But did you know that you can combine them by using Keywords ?  Keywords Despite the rather odd name, Keywords are a way of re-using test scripts.  A Keyword has a related test script - which can be manual or automated. Keywords can then be inserted as a step into any other test script, effectively re-using the test script associated with that Keyword. We can even see where Keywords (and their associated test scripts) have been used:  This Keyword for example, is associated with a test script that uses the command line to invoke an external test (in this case its a simple batch file) We can insert that Keyword as a step inside a manual test script, like this: Exec

Engineering Test Management Project Alias

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When running queries against the Engineering Test Management REST API, you need to know the project alias - which may not be the same as the project name. If you use any other tool that uses that same API - for example Rhapsody Test Conductor - you also need to know the project alias.  To obtain it you used to have to run a specific REST call (on reportingURL/projects) but now you can get the alias far more easily. How ? Open a web browser and navigate to yourETMserver/qm/projectAreaMetadata (e.g. https://ibmjazz:9443/qm/projectAreaMetadata) That will give you a list of all of the projects along with their alias (and wether or not they are GC enabled)

New Quick Starts for January

What are Quick Starts ? Everyone has demands on their time, so learning new things, especially potentially complex tools. It's not easy to fit learning new things into our busy schedules. Quick Starts are short, focused, introductory hands-on labs that cover the entire Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) suite. Deploy a pre-configured environment with all of the tools and data you need in just a few minutes. Quick Starts are designed to take less than two hours to complete so whether you want to rapidly get up to speed on a topic or simply kick the tires of a particular offering or capability, Quick Starts are the place to come. There are currently 31 Quick Starts - you can find them all here:  https://demo.innovationcloud.info/ELMQuickStarts.html New Quick Starts for January: Getting Started with Rhapsody and Simulink Automating Model Based Systems Engineering with Rhapsody and Harmony Getting Started with Engineering Lifecycle Management and Jira Getting Started with the Rhaps

Custom Expressions in JRS Report Builder

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On the format results tab in JRS Report Builder there is a button to add a Custom Expression: But what does it do and how do you use it ?  The first thing to understand is that custom expressions are written in the language of the data source: Data Warehouse: SQL Lifecycle Query Engine: SPARQL They are a great way of adding data to your report that isn't directly reportable. The easiest way to understand it is by example. Let's say you are reporting on requirements in DOORS Next and those requirements have two attributes:  Let's say that in the report you want a sum of those attributes. Sure you could add a third custom attribute into the requirements module and then write some java script to populate it, but instead calculating it dynamically as part of the report is surprisingly easy. First create the report as normal and add the two custom attributes as columns. Then click Add Custom Expression to add another column that will be populated by your expression.  In this ca