IBM Rational ClearQuest

IBM ClearQuest was used as our defect management tool across the organization. It gives capabilities to query the data with multiple filters. The defect life cycle is clearly defined and you can assign defects to various projects. For project managers and Test Engineers, this tool comes in as a very handy tool to track project health.

Well Suited - If your project is running in waterfall model and other IBM tools are widely used for various purposes, Clear Quest is a good tool to have. It gives you seamless capability to create defeccts and query the defects for various scenarios. If you are a project manager or a test engineer trying to create defect metrics, this tool can help immensely.

Less Appropriate - In this Agile world, everyone uses Jira or some other agile tracking tool. All the agile tracking tools have already built in defect tracking capabilities and can integrate with the work very well. If your project is running on agile or don't use IBM tools that much, then Clear Quest doesn't always add value.

IBM Rational RequisitePro is leveraged as the Requirements Repository as well as the sole source for tracking User Stories and related Artifacts. Business Partners enter the user stories into the system, and then the are cataloged and go through our Agile Sprints and track through Quality Assurance. This allows everyone to have a real time view of requirements and how items are moving to production.

Better for larger teams, it doesn't provide the value as the cost may not have the ROI. You may want to look at some other tools that are available in the cloud to manage requirements. Due to the fact that the tool has the capability for customization, it is imperative that in large teams that the tool is used in a consistent manner.

We have many projects simultaneously. Project management is vital in our industry, and within this, we want to have well-drawn artifacts. From the conception stage, it is important to evolve the software requirements, and that is where RequisitePro becomes important in the management of the project and the team in terms of the visibility of documents.

If you are familiar with IBM Rational Suite products, RequisitePro will add up due to the synergy between other components. Beyond that, if your business is not structured to an adequate development methodology or lacks the degree of maturity or necessary resources, probably RequisitePro does not add much value. If you work with developers in the requirements analysis, they probably prefer to use an SVN repository.

IBM ClearQuest was a client provided software for our project as per the agreements. It was used in several other projects too on the client side but not across the whole organization. The decision to use IBM Clear Quest was done by the client project heads considering various parameters like budget, project size, and our input on the best software in the market for managing workflow through our past experience with the products.

The main business problem that it handled was managing workflow, creating and assigning service/task requests, logging bugs, defect tracking and monitoring, and automatically mailing the assignee and the assigner, a snapshot of the request status whenever an update happens.

Well Suited:

• Best suited for handling change management.
• Workflow management. Creating and assigning change requests for a particular product/service/business area and managing their workflows.
• Also handles bug tracking.

Less Suited:

• It is less appropriate for handling test management on a whole unlike HP Quality Center (HP QC) which is really useful for the testers in our project to integrate their test cases, automation test scripts and linking them with the bugs in a single tool/interface and hence not having to maintain tow different tools for tracking incidents and writing their tests.

IBM ClearQuest plays vital role in my previous organization. It is used throughout the IT section of the organization. We used ClearQuest for capturing signatures of the project team on various documentation required during the project lifecycle. Also change requests and defect management was mainly handled through ClearQuest tool only. I would say ClearQuest is one of the strongest tools in our organization.

To capture signatures for any document, IBM ClearQuest is a best tool.

IBM Rational ClearQuest is the tool we use for the software development life cycle workflow for the legacy products at our organization. We are tracking features, issues and bugs while integrated with source control via a connection to IBM Rational ClearCase. ClearQuest is used across the enterprise, but the latest release of our flagship product utilizes Team Foundation Server for application life cycle management.

IBM Rational ClearQuest is a competent issue tracking tool for our organization. ClearQuest users are able to manage their workflow effectively to assure releases are on time. We are in a highly regulated industry and ClearQuest records track and document all phases of the life cycle providing valuable and detailed information during audits.

IBM Rational ClearQuest is best suited for organizations using Rational ClearCase for source control, due to the out of the box integration. ClearQuest is also best suited for organizations that have custom software development methodologies and need to tailor the tool's workflow to the organization's methodology. As long as the company has a support contract with IBM Rational, IBM will support fully customized ClearQuest implementations. Companies that are using non-IBM source control solutions may want to see if there are workflow tools that integrate with their source control out of the box before looking into IBM Rational ClearQuest.