During test execution it is critical to understand testing coverage. While typical approaches of tracing requirements to test cases are good, they are very time consuming and require frequent manual maintenance. Nicman's approach to test coverage is to scan deployed system's during various test cycles and capture functions being executed inside the applications. This non-invasive approach (no requirement to include any hooks within the application source code) and automated process produces a report with statistics on functions executed vs. all functions available within any given application.

Complex and distributed systems make development, testing and deployments more challenging. While the expectation of faster, better cheaper never changes, unavailability of certain sub-systems during SDLC doesn't help. Fortunately, there are way's to virtualize sub-systems and allow teams to deliver project on time. It is a common practice for developers to create stubs that mimic a behavior of sub-system without the sub-system being active. Nicman takes stubbing to a next level through utilization of IBM Rational Integration Tester (RIT) that allows a rapid virtualization of sub-system components. The benefit of utilizing RIT is that stub development time is significantly reduced and developers can focus on project critical items.