Any organization that relies on its own application development to serve the needs of internal clients or customers recognizes that application quality is a prerequisite for success, not an option. A crucial ingredient for this success is an efficient, disciplined testing process to verify that applications have achieved a level of fitness that either meets or exceeds project expectations. Slipping schedules, frequently changing application user interfaces, and recurrent feature regression introduce variables that ad-hoc testing practices are unable to handle. IBM Rational Functional tester was built to address these issues.

IBM Rational Functional Tester is an advanced, automated functional and regression testing tool for testers and GUI developers who need superior control for testing Java, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Web-based applications.

How does it work? Rational Functional Tester records user interactions with Java, Web, and Visual Studio .NET WinForm-based applications, creating a test script that - when executed - reproduces those actions. During recording, the user can insert verification points that extract specified data or properties from the application under test. During playback, these verification points are used to compare recorded information with live information to ensure consistency. Following any test recording activity, testers have the option of adding custom code to the test script to perform an unlimited array of tasks, including the data manipulation and environment configuration activities that are often necessary to ensure the test lab is properly constituted for the test run. Following test execution, Rational Functional Tester generates a report listing the results of the verification point comparisons. With Rational Functional Tester, teams are able to more reliably and efficiently expose problems in even the most complex applications, increasing the opportunity for defect capture and repair before product release.