The Physical Environment

The Custom Test Type environment consists of:

• The ALM application server
• The ALM clients
• The testing tool hosts. The tool the Custom Test Type supports runs on these computers.

More than one of these components can reside on the same machine.

The Software Components

The components in a Custom Test Type project are:

• a DCOM remote agent
  To handle communication between ALM and the testing tool, you need a DCOM server implementing the remote agent. This guide assumes you will create the remote agent in C# and expose it to DCOM.  It is also possible to create the remote agent with native COM languages, such as Visual Basic or C++.
  The testing tool host executes the remote agent. The remote agent must be installed on each host you use for running tests.
• the test type add-in
  To handle the testing tool data in ALM, you implement the custom test type logic in a .NET test type add-in. This consists of one or more assemblies residing on the ALM client.  This add-in is referred to as the test type or custom test type in this document.
• XMLs files containing the information needed to register the test type with ALM and enable versioning

Application Lifecycle Management uses the remote agent and the test type to run tests and display test scripts and execution results created with the testing tool.