Polarion 2013 - Just Released

By walekJ

It’s always fun and exciting to announce a new Polarion release and show off the work of our world-class R&D team. The new 2013 release is no exception, and there are a number of things I’d like to highlight here.

In addition to the new features and enhancements, which you can read about below, you may also be interested in our newest product: Polarion^® CLOUD™. It has all the features most teams will ever need, it’s hosted on the state-of-the-art Amazon Web Services™ cloud, installed, maintained, and supported by Polarion experts, and pricing starts at just $99 per user per month. For more info, visit http://www.polarion.com/products/cloud/.

Polarion 2013 Top New Features

Diagraming
Create and edit many types of diagrams right in your LiveDoc™ specification documents, or in any type of Work Item.

Formal Testing Procedures
Define test steps tables within your Test Cases to capture explicitly how to conduct tests. Import and round-trip using Excel^®; execute online, or offline with results re-imported and logged in Polarion.

Test Planning
Enhanced flexibility for when planning tests: plan via live query results or hand pick the test cases that should be executed. Select any option from 5 possible choices.

OLE Support
We made some significant improvements in connecting Polarion 2013 technology with proprietary Microsoft OLE^® objects. To ensure that OLE objects (including the new version of OLE objects with EMF thumbnails) can be converted well, we require the conversion to be done on the Windows Server platform only.

Easier than Ever for Users
Features that have been in Polarion since version 1.0 revisited: Query Building and Work Item Linking. New in-place Query Builder helps users construct simple to complex queries visually, with project-specific elements and options. New Easy Linking leverages the latest web technology enabling visual linking across any number of browser windows.

Connectors
Widely accepted ALM definitions all agree that a collaborative environment in which different disciplines and teams work together is a vital necessity. Polarion’s solution makes sure you can have exactly that in a single solution. However, we know that in the real world beyond the definitions, there are reasons to keep using some existing tools. That’s why we have introduced the Polarion Connector for HP Quality Center™ (HP QC), and the Polarion Connector for Atlassian JIRA™ as part of our ALM solution.

Mobile Access
You asked… we delivered. The new ALM2GO app delivers all the functionality of Polarion® REVIEWER™ on your Apple iPhone. The app is free on the Apple App Store. (You will need at least one low-cost REVIEWER license present on your Polarion Server.)

Plus…

While these are the top features, the release also incorporates many other smaller improvements, requested by our customers, that we implemented in service releases during the past year, and which lead via our iterative development process to major releases like version 2013. I’ll just mention one from each of the past 3 Service Releases:

SR1 – Robust handling of concurrent LiveDoc modifications: concurrent non-overlapping granular changes are automatically merged and people can easily review the result (and of course the history).

SR2 – Work Items Table presentation: vertical/horizontal pane layout, an optional compact mode, and text wrapping in table cells.

SR3 – Additional Custom Fields types: user role, project,project group, build, document, wiki page.

SR4 – Good! You’re still with me and realized that “SR4” is actually the Polarion 2013 release, with everything for the services release plus some New and Noteworthy features implemented since 2012-SR3. Be sure to check those out HERE.