Polarion Software Weblog

If you’ve seen my other post – “Polarion 2013 – Just Released” – you know we have just released version 2013 of the Polarion product line. That post summarizes the features we iteratively developed and released to our customers during the past year, but which are actually features of version 2013. (Yes, is a bit different from what you may be used to from other software companies… but it’s how we deliver new and enhanced functionality to our users on a regular, predictable basis.)

The purpose of this post is to highlight the new and noteworthy changes/features added to Polarion 2013 since Polarion 2012 SR3.  (A list of all the issues addressed in this release is provided in the Resolved Work Items file.) So let’s look now at the “latest-greatest” new things.

Diagraming

Create and edit many types of diagrams right in your LiveDoc™ specification documents.

Or attach them to work items.

 

And edit them in the online diagram editor

Searching Attachment Content

Work Item, Document, and/or Wiki attachment content is being indexed, so you can search for artefacts by searching the attachment content.

You can also search for attachments on the site search.

Duplicate Work Items

When duplicating work item, user can select what properties will be duplicated.

Document Attachments

It is possible to manage (add, remove, update…) document attachments in a same way as work item attachments.

System Engineering Project Template

New project template designed for system engineering, reflecting all the best practices of or Professional Services team

Connectors

Polarion Connector for HP Quality Center™ (HP QC)Platform Enhancements

Polarion Connector for Atlassian JIRA™

 

Platform Enhancements

External Repositories

The user-password in repositories.xml is encrypted

Custom Admin Changes

New API has been added to plug admin page for custom extension to Polarion Administration portal.

More…

For a summary of everything that has gone into the making of Polarion 2013 in the past year, see “Polarion 2013 – Just released”.

Or jump directly to:

•  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.

Where to Get Polarion 2013

Polarion 2013 is a free update for customers with a current maintenance subscription. You can download the update distribution at http://www.polarion.com/downloads/update.php.

 

 

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.

On behalf of the entire Polarion team, thanks once again for using Polarion solutions!

Jiri Walek
Product Manager
Polarion Application Lifecycle Solutions

 

Shortly before Christmas the Polarion R&D team released an update for all Polarion products: Polarion 2012 Service Release 3 (SR3).

As usual, this Service Release delivers important bug-fixes, but there are also some new features and significant enhancements, including Import and Export of Test Steps, support for additional custom field types, Import of OLE Objects from Word, as well as  many usability improvements and support for the latest browsers.

This is a free update for customers with a current maintenance subscription. You can download the update distribution at
http://www.polarion.com/downloads/update.php.

This page is a “log” of the new and noteworthy changes/features in Polarion 2012 SR3. A list of issues addressed in this release is provided in the Resolved Work Items file.

Test Steps

Import from Microsoft Excel^®

You can now import Excel Sheets that contain not only test cases, but which have additional rows containing discrete test steps. (Polarion ALM and Polarion QA only).

Execute Tests with Test Steps off-line

When you describe the steps of your manual tests as trackable “Test Steps”, you can now export test cases that have such Test Steps associated with them to Excel for offline execution. When testers execute the steps offline, they can record the result of each test step as well as the overall result of each test case in the Excel workbook. When that’s re-imported to Polarion, test records are automatically created which track the results, and Defect items are created to track failed test steps and/or test cases. Everything is automatically linked for traceability, of course.

Customize the Test Steps Table

New Test Steps topic in Testing administration enables you to customize the table of Test Steps rendered in the Test Steps field of Test Case type Work Items. You can add columns to track any information you need to track with each Test Step you define. You can also change default column heading labels to use your team’s customary terminology.

OLE Objects

If you need to import Microsoft Word documents that contain OLE Objects, you can now configure Polarion to automatically convert OLE objects into PNG images.

Import Multi-valued Fields

When you import Work Items from Excel spreadsheets, you can now configure the import to map multiple field values in Excel cells to Polarion multi-valued enumeration fields.

New Custom Field Types

By popular request, this release adds several new field types that you can use when configuring custom fields in your projects. The new type are:

• user
• timepoint
• project
• build
• test run

Usability Improvements

Rich Text Toolbar Always Visible

When editing a Work Item’s description, the field’s toolbar now remains static and no longer scrolls out of view when the field content increases.

Custom Logo for Each Polarion Instance

Do you have a Multi-instance setup? You can now visually differentiate each Polarion server instance by specifying the URL to an image file in a new system property: com.polarion.logoURL. The specified image replaces the Polarion logo in the Navigation panel on the configured server.

Internet Explorer Compatibility Mode Check

As you know Polarion follows the most recent developments in HTML technology, and so it should run in latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer. However, we advise users not to run Polarion in so-called “compatibility” mode in IE. If users run it in this mode, a warning appears on the login page.

Structure Operations

The LiveDoc document interface is the easiest way to modify a Document’s structure, but sometimes you review the content using a table interface and you need to move item in a structure, create a sibling …

Saved Configurations for the Work Items Table

Users can now define, save, and reuse multiple Work Items table configurations, so they can easily switch between different table layout and content without having to configure the columns for each different view they want.

PDF Export for LiveDoc Comparison View

When a user compares 2 LiveDoc documents, the Document view of the comparison result can now be exported to a PDF file. PDF header/footer customization support now recognizes 2 additional parameters:

Browser Support

Service Release 3 adds support for Firefox 17. See the README.html file in your SR3 distribution.

By Tim Ströbele

Polarion has actively supported the Subversion community since 2005. One major contribution has been a set of free Subversion tools, and in particular tools for migrating to Subversion from legacy third-party version control tools.

Among the SVN migration tools is one that will migrate data from MKS to Subversion: the mks2svn data migration utility. The Polarion Professional Services team  has just released a new version of this tool.

New Features and Changes

1. The new version adds support for the API method of interface to MKS (mksapi.jar required). So it now supports both CLI and API through a configuration option. This limits support to new versions of MKS a.k.a. “MKS 2009″.
2. The old MKS to SVN tool version was single-project, single-repository. It was monolithic (flattens) in its treatment of sub-projects of the project being migrated. MKS added support for shared projects since Polarion’s original MKS to SVN migration tool was developed.
3. The new version allows you to provide a list of projects to be migrated to their own SVN repositories ,and if they are shared, then it will provide external linking between SVN repositories at either file or project (SVN folder) level.
4. Project Lifecycle metadata are preserved on all projects.
5. Subproject Checkpoint data is uniquely preserved into tags and also coalesced within parent projects in tags to provide both parent and subproject unity which can be used as releases for either.
6. Change Package support was added to the new version. MKS Change Packages are replicated into the Subversion repository as a tag folder using the Change Package name.
7. Also new is Version pinning. Any file that was pinned to an older version from the current trunk version is now supported.
8. All MKS metadata is replicated into Subversion as properties of the artifact to which it was attached.
9. File types are not forced to a MIME type, but rather allow Subversion clients to provide native client handling.

Current Feature Overview

The mks2svn MKS to Subversion conversion tool now has these main features and capabilities:

• Supports MKS2009 and later
• Supports both API &/or CLI(si) to access the MKS repository (requires MKS client installation)
• Supports the generation of multiple subversion repositories from MKS projects with external linking.
• Supports the transformation of MKS “Change Packages” to SVN tags
• The transformation preserves revisions, authors, commit messages and dates of commits
• Transformation converts MKS branches to SVN branches
• Transformation converts MKS revision labels to SVN tags
• Logging (output to console, logging level) can be tuned in configuration file (using log4j configuration)

Known issues with the MKS to SVN migration tool

• Moved MKS Projects not predictable in all cases. MKS does not provide any details about to where to or from where a project might have been moved. In fact it provides no details that a project was moved at all. Enhance the issue.
• Very legacy MKS issues like old RCS paths and project naming changed over time and neither variant of the importer handles these issues very well.
• Performance statistics added but still needs more work for validation.

Info and Downloads

• MKS to SVN data migration tool info
• DOWNLOAD MKS to SVN MIGRATION TOOL (Registration is requested)
• Download free Subversion migration tools

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Many of our customers and prospects are still in the process of migrating their old repositories to Subversion. Polarion’s free Subversion migration tools and Professional Services assistance can help automate this process and address specific needs. If you need additional help with your Subversion migration please feel free to contact us here.

If you’re not yet familiar with Polarion Software, you might be interested to know that our application lifecycle solutions can help you get more from Subversion than you ever imagined possible.

I encourage you to spend a few minutes to see what our Subversion-based solutions can do for you in areas like:

• Requirements Management,
• Quality Assurance and Test Automation,
• Enterprise Application Lifecycle Management,
• Agile Software Development,
• Automotive Manufacturing and
• Medical Device Manufacturing.

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About the Author:
Tim Ströbele is Director of Professional Services at Polarion Software. He is based in Stuttgart, Germany.

Many verticals such as automotive, medical, and railway are given standards that are necessary for our daily life safety and security. Many of these standards were initially based on manufacturing necessities. However, as the technological world has increased in complexity, the importance of software has also grown.  As a result, industries have also seen the rising need to ensure and regulate the building of software. Examples include DO-178 B for aerospace, IEC 62304 for medical industries, and now ISO 26262 for automotive industries that covers more than just the development process.

The need for tools that support these standards is increasing.  Polarion has a long history in supporting verticals who are required to fulfill these standards and has proved its qualification based on the numerous successful customer certifications.
Now Polarion has taken the next step in the qualification process- the official certification body TÜV Nord has qualified Polarion as a trusted tool for developing along the IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 standards.

The qualification not only provides our customers the knowledge that many other users have successfully ran certification with Polarion, but it also provides official qualification to reduce individual certification work related to safety management. This is especially vital, as it is no longer allowed to develop software (in these areas) without proven tools.

We are proud and happy to be the first ALM Tool who delivers you an answer to this need!

Additionally, we are working with partners to deliver templates in the different parts to give you ideas on how to handle it practically, speed up your process, and maximize the value that Polarion has to offer – you find the first template here on POP: ISO 26262 Template – Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment according to ISO 26262 Part 3

Visit the Polarion Automotive Solutions page for a full list of benefits and an overview of the product. There you can also download our “Functional Safety white paper” to learn more about how to achieve functional safety with Polarion.