What is ClearQuest?
IBM’s Rational ClearQuest is a customizable defect and change tracking system designed to deal with the dynamic nature of software development. The tool simplifies the process of managing every type of change activity associated with software development, including enhancement requests, defect reports and documentation modifications.

Advantages
One of the most noticeable advantages of ClearQuest is its flexibility where local, remote and Web interfaces enable access virtually anytime, anywhere. ClearQuest shortens the development cycles by unifying your entire team in the process of managing software change. With the automatic email notification feature that comes with this tool, every team member could keep up to date with the status of the project and any changes that have been made almost instantly and with relative ease. Other members in the software development team also are bound to benefit from the use of ClearQuest. For instance, the development engineers can identify and prioritize action items that pertain to their section of code, test engineers can track the status and resolution of change requests to verify software quality while project managers could get information at a glance to help them allocate development resources.

Integration with Other Rational Tools
With its predefined schemas, Rational ClearQuest provides a ready-to-use change and defect tracking processes and integration with various other Rational Software products such as Rational ClearCase, Rational PurifyPlus package and Rational TeamTest. On the whole, ClearQuest is an excellent tool to manage the dynamic environment of software development which enables you to build better quality software, more efficiently.