Introducing Polarion 2015: What's New and Noteworthy

This is the last addition to our Polarion 2015 release cycle. As you might be aware, Polarion R&D follows the principles of enterprise agile methodology, which enables us to release frequently, faster, and with better customer satisfaction.

We have a “service release” (SR) each quarter, and as the name suggests, it contains issue fixes and feature enhancements. But service releases also include complete new features if they are fully implemented, tested, and documented, and they do not significantly change the way people have been trained to use the last Polarion major version.

All the new features released in the SRs roll up into our next major version, which when released, also includes new features and functionality. So what you will see here are the enhancements published since our last service release Polarion 2014 SR3.

If you want to get a quick overview about our brand new release, check out my release announcement post: Polarion 2015 Delivers Visual Reporting, Variant Management, Enhanced Security and More.

So now let’s go through the final additions to Polarion 2015…

Visual Live Reporting

Until now, Polarion’s robust reporting has been primarily the domain of programmers. We felt that it is time to innovate in the reporting component and provide a solution that is as flexible as current Wiki-based reporting, but also very easy for non-programmers to design reports visually. You can now truly design reports without coding. Just drop Live Report “widgets” into a LiveReport page and visually set options and parameters to bring in the data you want, displayed the way you want it. (We haven’t forgotten the coders. There are special scripting widgets that let them bring their skills to bear.)

You can learn more about our Live Reporting on our Polarion 2015 micro-site.

Hyperlinks

The linking artifacts is a core feature of a Wiki, and as part of our work on LiveReports 2015, we have completely redesigned the way you add hyperlinks… not only to Reports, but also to LiveDoc documents and Work Items. Adding hyperlinks is now consistent across all rich text editors. Use the Link tool from the toolbar, or simply paste the URL into the content and select the preferred rendering (or just continue typing if you are fine with the default option).

Gantt Chart

Each Plan is a project that a team is working on. There might be hundreds of projects that your “team of teams” is working with. To help you meet the project schedule for a complex landscape of projects, it is important to quickly get the overview of the full break-down structure of all projects, with live status information. A Gantt Chart has always been a good tool for this.

Gantt is a nice example of the extensibility of the new Reporting component in Polarion 2015. We have released Gantt widget as a reference widget implementation, so you cannot only fully leverage the new visual LiveReport technology, but also extend the widget any way you like.

Cross Project Planning

If we speak about planning, it was one of the most requested enhancements to the Polarion 2014 feature set, to allow teams to include items from other projects into Plans.

One good practice that our customers like is to separate the component development into dedicated projects. Each component is fully specified (requirements, user stories, test cases, tasks) in a dedicated project.

But a single team is often responsible for implementation, engineering of multiple components. If this is needed, you no longer need to create proxy work packages in the team projects, or have a team working on multiple disconnected plans in parallel. In their team project – or in their team of teams project – the team Plans can now include items from all the component projects the coordinating team is responsible for.

Document Status Change Signatures

You can now set up the Document workflow configuration to require one or more user signatures, indicating agreement with the current state of the Document and its content. This prevents transition to a different status (e.g. from “In Review” to “Approved”) until the specified person or persons have taken action to sign off, indicating their agreement to allow transition to the next process step in the workflow.

You can learn more about our Document Workflow and Signatures on our Polarion 2015 micro-site.

Workflow Condition Messages

When workflow conditions block users from executing a workflow transition, clear messages explain why the action is not available. While implementing this for Document workflow, we also extended it to Work Item workflow.

 

LiveDoc Enhancements

Polarion’s exclusive LiveDoc documents are still unparalleled in the ALM solutions market. But we are never content to “rest on our laurels.” As one of our most used features, we keep looking for ways to improve LiveDocs.

Continuous Numbered Lists

It is now possible to continue the numbering of ordered lists when there are paragraphs or another list between the list items.

Change Work Item Type

Sometimes you needto change the type (or presentation) of a Work Item contained in a Document.It is super easy now – just select the option you need:

Work Item Field-based Permissions

It is often not enough to control the core artifact lifecycle (create, read, modify, delete). Sometimes it’s necessary to limit access to individual Work Item attributes. For example:

1. You want customers to access requirements, tasks, test cases online in Polarion, but you want to be sure they do not see how much time it was spent on the individual tasks, and/or what was the estimated effort.


2. You want to ensure that after Business Value is set for change requests, it cannot be modified except by the product owners.

There are literally tons of such scenarios, and that’s why we now make it highly flexible and enable you to grant or deny permissions for any Work Item attribute (i.e. field, including Custom Fields):

License Management

We know how important is it for you to have Polarion running 24×7. It is now possible to renew the license (if the product license was updated) or if you had to reinstall the server, without server restart… even without contacting Polarion. You can now enter a License Key and activate Polarion online:

Performance and Core Enhancements:

• Plans load faster due to heavy optimization in loading the burn-up / burn-down charts


• Conflicts are better recognized and merged even if they occur very late in commits to the data repository


• Database disk size is significantly smaller when using PKs for structures


• Polarion Scripting Extension is included out-of-the-box with Polarion


• Rendering API was introduced to greatly simplify the custom development of reports

See Polarion SDK > Rendering API

Polarion^® VARIANTS™

Last but far from least – we introduce a broad set of functionality to cover Product Line Engineering, to help you manage your large set of product variants. Polarion VARIANTS transparently integrates industry-leading pure::variants technology, thanks to our partnership with pure-systems. Licensed as an Add-on product, it leverages your existing Polarion ALM, Polarion REQUIREMENTS, or Polarion QA system into a true PLE solution.

You can learn more about our Polarion VARIANTS on our Polarion 2015 micro-site.