Polarion Software Weblog

The Polarion POP Challenge 2010 is over, and the winner has been selected from among the 10 extensions submitted:

• Traceability Report by Giuseppe Pitzalis (Selex Communications)
• Bulk Perform Workflow Action by : Giuseppe Pitzalis (Selex Communications)
• FreeMind Integration by Mika Karaila (Metso Automation Inc.)
• RoleBasedSVNAccess by Manuel Sprock (Phoenix Contact)
• MySQL Support Tutorial Source by Matti Kiviharju (i4ware Software)
• Polarion Due Notification Service (PDNS) by Christian Raschka (SOPTIM AG)
• Default Approvals and Reset Approvals Status by Daniel Putz (Sony DADC Austria AG)
• Test linked Workitems by Roman Kellner (Bombardier)
• T-Polls by Sebastian Bejga (T-Systems / DHBW Stuttgart)
• Scalable, nested, graphical Gantt project plan by Marc Dzaebel (H&D)

We would like to thank all the entrants for their great work. We appreciate not only the extensions themselves, which are so valuable for the benefit and help they provide to Polarion users, but we also honor also your participation in building the Polarion community. The growth of the Polarion POP portal definitively proves the power and viability of our Polarion platform.

Winners

Picking a winner proved extremely difficult. Voting by the panel of judges resulted in a decision to add a third place winner and prize. So without further ado… the winners of Polarion POP Challenge 2010 are:

Scalable, nested, graphical Gantt projectplan by Marc Dzaebel (H&D)

A WiKi page showing the Polarion Live Plan as a common Gantt diagram. Tasks are sorted by parent relations and start date. They are hierarchically nested and the depth can be dynamically changed. The planned duration from the Live Plan is used to show scaled graphical bars so that one page fills the complete project plan. Summary tasks are rendered black/italic. Date ranges and time points can be set via the UI and you can change the scale dynamically.

Keywords from the jury comments: sweet job, very useful, wow, generates nice ideas, nice piece of code, door opener…

Second place : T-Polls by Sebastian Bejga (T-Systems / DHBW Stuttgart)

Project configuration defining the work item type “poll” and web application embedded on Polarion Wiki where users can vote on these polls.

Third place : Role Based SVN Access by Manuel Sprock (Phoenix Contact)

Manage SVN repository access according to Polarion roles. You don’t want to grant any user access to the entire SVN repository? And you don’t want to modify the access file manually? Role Based SVN Access is what you need!

Congratulations to all of you!

Finally, we would like to encourage everyone to share their extensions with all Polarion users as an active member in the Polarion ecosystem. We hope you can benefit not only from the support we provide to write the extensions but also from the feedback that comes from all Polarion Community users.

See you soon on Polarion POP Portal!

Service Release 1 (SR-1) for Polarion 2010 is now available. The release delivers some new features and significant improvements in additions to bug fixes and general improvements:

• Polarion installs as a service on Windows
• Work item tree view supports multiple link roles in queries (ALM and Requirements only)
  
• New “Load All” action for work item tables

  

• Update scripts check license validity
• Polarion waits if the repository is not available
• Possibility to create work records via Web Services
• Support for Mozilla Firefox 3.6
• Bundled Apache is now version 2.2.15 (was 2.2.13)
• Bundled Subversion is now version 1.6.6 (was 1.6.5)

Details can be found in the release notes in the Version History file included in distributions.

DOWNLOAD UPDATE DISTRIBUTIONS

Update bundles work with all supported operating systems.

• Update for Polarion Requirements
• Update for Polarion Track & Wiki
• Update for Polarion ALM

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By Nick Entin

1 Introduction

1.1 Objective and Target User

The MS Office Word Importer for Polarion (“Importer” ) migrates existing Requirements or other types of work items, described in a MS Word document format to Polarion. The Importer is targeted at Administrators, Business Analysts, and Requirements Engineers with Polarion user training as a pre-requisite.

The Importer allows requirements data currently in MS Office Word format to be imported into Polarion for reuse without needing to recreate them in the Polarion portal. The Importer follows these basic process steps:

1. Recognizes MS Word document parts representing the work items (i.e. Requirements), and associated attributes such as descriptions, content, graphics, etc. to be imported.
2. Establishes the mapping properties of the MS Word document artifact data to be imported to Polarion, mapping properties of the artifact to the Polarion model – e.g. setting the title of the work item, description and other attributes.
3. Enables recognition of the MS Word document structure and reproduction of the same hierarchy in Polarion.

1.2 How this works

The principle of the Importer is relatively simple – each paragraph in the document represents potential work item or its attribute. Styles, applied to the paragraphs, allow recognition and mapping to the desired model.

This way, heading-formatted paragraphs could be mapped to titles of corresponding work items, and all text in between should go to description. Heading levels describe the parent-child relationship of the data objects. For instance, Heading 2-formatted text may be mapped to a child work item of the corresponding Heading 1.

It is also possible that style-highlighted parts of the text will be mapped to attributes of work item. For example, the name of a person is highlighted as “Author” style in document, and the name will be used as assignee of the work item during the import.

Naturally, every author likes to format his/her document with nice styling, applying company-branding and so forth. Therefore, before the Importer can process a document, it should be taught the applied styles and their semantics.

Importer is a Java application, connecting over Web Services to Polarion server. This means that the application will connect via HTTP/HTTPS protocol to the server, so the user must have a LAN/Internet connection to Polarion server during entire import, and must also have a user account in Polarion and be able to supply a valid user ID and password.

Parsing capabilities of the Importer are based on the open source project Apache POI (http://poi.apache.org/), and is itself an open source project. More details as well as link to the sources may be found here:

• http://extensions.polarion.com/polarion/extensions/extension.jsp?extension=PE-2
• http://community.polarion.org/polarion/#/project/Word/home
• http://community.polarion.org/polarion/#/project/Word/repository/browser (you have to be a registered Polarion user to authenticate – please follow the previous link and register yourself if you don’t have credentials yet.)

1.3 Prerequisites

The Importer can import binary documents, saved in MS Word 97-2003 format. If you use later versions of MS Office, you should use Save as > Word 97-2003 Document to convert it to an importable format.

The user who is going to import document should have an active account in Polarion an be able to supply a valid user name and password. Also, the account should be associated with a Polarion Requirements or Polarion ALM license.

As Importer runs as a batch application, the user should be have the necessary permissions to call programs from command line, and be able to create and update configuration files in a simple text editor such as Windows Notepad.

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At Polarion Software, we believe that excellent usability in our products is essential for satisfaction of our users. Usability plays a crucial role in our development process. Beginning with user research, through constant mapping of your requirements, up through usability testing, we constantly strive for your satisfaction.

Because we think it’s important to constantly promote activities around usability techniques, we are proud to announce that we have joined as corporate members of the Prague Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI Prague), a local branch of the worldwide organization of ACM SIGCHI dedicated to raising awareness in the field of usability and computer-human interaction.

What would your boss say if you handed over $10,000 worth of Polarion licenses? Would you get to keep the spiffy new Apple iPad that goes with it? You’ll never know unless you enter the

Win an Apple iPad and $10K in Polarion Licenses

There’s no time to lose: get cracking on the slickest, most electrifying Polarion extension you can think of  (maybe it’s time to share that one you’ve already written?) and enter it in the Polarion POP Challenge 2010.  It’s the first-ever event of its kind, so there’s every chance you could come out Top Dog. Even if you come out Second Dog you’ll take home an Apple iPod Touch for you, and $5000 in Polarion software licenses for your company.

Read the Rules and Download Entry Form »

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