IBM Rational ClearQuest

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.