Offerings announced Tuesday are to be built on the open source Eclipse tools platform. "What we're doing is continuing to invest in our automated software quality solutions," said Jeff Schuster, product manager at IBM software quality products.

IBM Rational Functional Tester, which has provided functional and regression testing for Java and Web applications, will offer functional testing of applications built with the new Visual Studio 2005 toolset from Microsoft. Version 6.1.1 of the IBM tool will use Visual Basic .Net as its scripting language and is hosted in Visual Studio 2005 shell. The improvement lets testers choose between Eclipse and .Net as their test script development environment.

"What we're announcing is that Rational Functional Tester is now supporting executions in that shell," Schuster said.

The planned 6.1.2 Version of IBM Rational Performance Tester, meanwhile, features integration with planned Tivoli composite application management and monitoring products to provide load- and performance-testing.

"Tivoli is coming out with a new set of technologies around composite application management and what we're announcing here is we're integrating support so that Rational Performance Tester is directly tied to those data collectors," Schuster said.