What's New and Noteworthy in Polarion 2015 SR1

By walekJ

I’m pleased to announce the first planned service release for Polarion version 2015. In this post I’ll share with you the most important new functionality and fixes. Let’s get started.

Pages

Pages, the next generation of Polarion’s built-in wiki component released in Polarion 2015, provides an easy to use intuitive interface to create live reports. Following your feedback from the first release, we added some great enhancements.

Page script Widget

Allows you to pre-process the data once, and refer to those values from multiple Widgets.

Need a use case? Suppose you have a page parameter “Release”, of type enumlan, and you want charts to show two trends:

One that shows the number of open issues from start of the plan to the end.

Another that shows number of planned items.

You want to be sure that the start and end dates are pre-defined just once. You can do it with this new Widget.

1. Create a Page Script

Page Script

2. Refer to Scripted Page Parameters from Widgets

3. Or access the Shared Context variables from script blocks:

The Widget SDK was also enhanced with some more practical examples.

Outline Numbered Headings

You now have an option to outline number the headings in Pages.

Widget Organization and Tags

Both the default built-in Widgets and custom Widgets are now grouped by tags. This helps you to find the right widget.

Licensing

As those of you who already updated to version 2015 know, we changed the way we do product licensing, centered on the possibility to activate licenses online. While generally well received, we got some feedback that has resulted in a couple of changes to the new licensing mechanism.

Online Activation

We have understood that some of our customers have an environment where there is no direct connection to the internet from the server where Polarion is installed.

Consequently, online activation is now being handled in a different way:

You open the activation page in your browser

You enter your activation key

[NEW] – through the secure HTTPS protocol the browser (not the server!) connects to our license server and downloads the license

The license is then applied to the server.

So if you delayed updating to version 2015 because of this issue, your way should now be clear. You can read some additional details on this FAQ page: http://www.polarion.com/resources/activation.php

Default Add-On Licensing

A new setting in the License topic of Administration now allows customers to control not only what is the default primary license for users, but also to set which add-on licenses the users get by default.

Currently this is applied only for the Polarion VARIANTS Add-on license, so with following system property you can control whether or not users get the VARIANTS add-on license by default:

defaultAddonLicenses=Variants

Start-up

A small note: once you activate Polarion, you can start assigning the licenses immediately, not waiting 30 minutes. The 30 min. limit is applied only if you reconfigure the licenses through the user license assignments page of Administration.

Variant Management

We are truly surprised how many customers are contacting us to learn more about Variant Management and Product Line Engineering. Based on the feedback, already in this SR1 release we have added some enhancements (and fixed a number of those inevitable first-release problems as well).

Sorting of Feature Model by Outline Number

Through a new system property, you can now control if the primary sorting of the Feature Model is by outline number or Variation type:

com.polarion.variants.featureSelection.sortByOutlineNumber=true

Reinitialize Variants Model

You may need to use this action in some rare situations to recover from unexpected VARIANTS Server data corruption (caused by a power supply problem, for example).

Hopefully you will never need it, but now you have it available should it ever become necessary.

Searching

Perhaps the most popular improvement we have ever implemented was the visual search panel for querying Work Items. We know how much you were looking for the same capabilities in Test Runs and Plans, and we’re happy to be able to deliver it in this release.

Visual Search Panel to query Plans

Visual Search Panel to query Test Runs

Other Enhancements

Configure default fields shown in Work Item Properties sidebar

You can now configure which fields are presented by default in the Work Item Properties sidebar of a Document. The setting is stored in the Document, so different Documents can have different settings. Of course, different Work Item types can also have different configurations.

Generated Test Run IDs

Some of you reported that you don’t like the idea that users need to enter a Test Run ID manually. Understandable, so we now provide a new option in the Testing Configuration of Administration that enables you to have Test Runs IDs generated automatically. The test run ID in this case has a prefix (defined in test run template) and time-stamp like ID.

1. Turn On Generated IDs

2. Configure Optional ID Prefix (Template Properties)

Test Run - Generated IDs - Prefix

3. Auto-generated Test Runs IDs

Reset Password Link

In case you have Polarion linked with a corporate user registry such as Active Directory / LDAP you might like to add a “Reset Password” link to the login page that points to your corporate “lost password” administration page.

Just add following system properties to your polarion.properties file:

com.polarion.ui.login.resetPasswordLinkURL=http://www.yourdomain.com/recoverpage.php

com.polarion.ui.login.resetPasswordLinkLabel=Reset Password

Support for Java 8

Although we still bundle Java 7 in Polarion distributions (we don’t want to change the component defaults in service releases), Polarion fully supports Java 8.

Significant Fixes

Classic Wiki Macro Loading

Previously, it was possible to use a custom macro in Classic Wiki source before it was defined, because it was cached from the first rendering of the page. This is now changed. Each rendering of the Wiki page now uses its own Velocity instance. Consequently, some of your existing pages may rely on this incorrect behavior and stop working until they are fixed.

Refined Locks in Subversion

We have refined the usage of Subversion locks so the system support concurrent usage even better, with less calls to review merged changes.

Enumeration Drop-downs

We have improved the way that extra-large enumerations are exposed to users in drop-down pick lists, so we can smoothly support enumerations with several thousands of options, including dependent enumerations.

Improved memory consumption

Last but not least, we have optimized the memory consumption of Document caches so the memory that is assigned is leveraged better, resulting in better performance.

Finally…

As always, this service release is free to customers who have a current maintenance subscription.

To update an existing installation, get the Update Package (same for all products, all operating systems).

If you would like to evaluate this release before putting it into production, download the installer for the desired product ( each one comes with a built-in 30-day evaluation license):

You may have noticed that a number of things delivered in this release are the direct result of input and feedback from customers who are using our solutions every day in real-world production. “Listen to your customers” is more than just a sound byte with us. It’s in our DNA, and we try to deliver on it every release. So feel free to get in touch with your support contact or Polarion account manager with your feedback any time. Thanks for using Polarion solutions!