Polarion 2012 Release Announcement

In case you have not yet heard via the grapevine, we have in fact released version 2012 of our Application Lifecycle Management solutions. After several days of installation and checking in some customers’ environments I’m pleased to make the official release announcement here on the Polarion Blog.

First of all, here’s where you can get your hands on the new version (followed by info on what’s new in version 2012):

Test Drive Servers:

• Polarion REQUIREMENTS Test Drive Server (log in there, or sign up here)


• Polarion QA Test Drive Server (log in there, or sign up here)


• Polarion ALM Test Drive Server (log in there, or sign up here)

• Polarion REQUIREMENTS


• Polarion QA


• Polarion ALM

WHAT’S NEW IN VERSION 2012

Polarion 2012 represents a major release for Polarion, with significant new features, improvements and enhancements,  including:

• New product: Polarion QA: Web-based collaborative Test Management with support for manual and automated testing, and easy results tracking for most third-party test automation tools. (More info)


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  Quality Assurance and Test Management: New technology to support test specification, planning, execution and reporting. Test specification and execution are now separated in the data model, and automated testing is supported for the native build system and all third-party test automation tools that can export results to xUnit format. Exclusive round-trip for Microsoft Excel® supports offline testing by external testers.


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  Polarion Live-Branch™ Variant Management: Exclusive new technology for managing document variants enables common specification artifacts to be maintained in one master document and referenced in “branched” documents, which can also contain variant-specific specification artifacts. Variants can be branched from the current state, or any historical state of the master to easily satisfy audit demand for time-specific information. Users control when and how master changes are propagated to referencing documents, and the granularity of propagated changes.


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  Polarion Time-Machine™ Navigable Baselines
  
  
  Another innovative new technology, the Time-Machine feature enables users to literally go back in time to browse and search the historical state of a project, captured in a baseline, just as they can the current project state. Reports generated from inside the time-machine contain only data that was current at the time… another huge headache reliever for audits.


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  Embedded SQL Database Layer: This behind-the-scenes “geek” feature makes many types of queries much faster and more efficient, especially those for artifact searching for dynamic reports on wiki pages and for traceability reports. Primary artifact storage and history remains in Subversion, and users’ existing Lucene queries still work. But users creating complex join type queries now have the option to tap the SQL layer for improved power and speed.


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  Fresh, Easy-to-use User Interface: Inspired by social media portals, designed for collaboration and efficiency, focused on users, and supported by several rounds of usability tests. (Quick Video Tour)

P.S. Small but important errata:

Installation guides and version history file in distributions incorrectly states required Java version as Java 7. The correct version is Java 6. The corrected documents are available in the Documents section of product download pages.

THANKS…

On behalf of the entire Polarion team I would like to send special thanks to the customers, partners, and others who helped us with the release through our Early Access Program. Your input and suggestions really helped us make this very ambitious, feature-laden release possible.