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Release Spotlight: Polarion® ALM for Subversion™

Thanks for your interest in the release. This is the latest major release with significant new features, improvements, and enhancements. We think you will find it well worth looking at, and, if you are a current customer, updating your system.

New Features

  • Rich Text Editor in Wiki
  • Calculated fields, with values derived from aggregated values of other fields
  • New project templates:
    • SCRUM Projects
    • Extreme Programming (XP)
    • Test Case Management
  • Module work item structure comparison
  • Move work items out of a Module
  • Export work items to XML
  • Hyperlinks to other work items in work item Description field
  • New UI control to copy work item ID, ID + Title, or URL to clipboard

Significant Improvements and Enhancements

New LiveDoc Engine

The LiveDoc subsystem has been completely rewritten for this release, and now utilizes a different XML parser. Memory consumption is significantly reduced and processing is significantly faster and enables more and bigger Live Documents to be handled by Polarion.

Notifications

Greater control over who received notifications when. Information is integrated into Help topic Administrator's Guide: Configuring Notifications.

  • Possibility to exclude targets for a specific event
  • Possibility to specify field(s) for updated work item event, limiting notification to only changes in the specified field(s)
  • Possibility to restrict notifications on work item status change event to specified beginning ending states
  • Possibility to configure custom notification email subjects for different events

New events around approvals: workitem-approval-added, workitem-approval-removed, workitem-approval-changed

New notification targets:

  • comment-thread-participant: Users that commented in thread discussion
  • new-assignee: When assignee field is changed then only new assignees will be notified
  • old-assignee: When assignee field is changed then only old assignees will be notified
  • affected-approvees: When approval field is changed then only affected approvees (added, removed, changed state) will be notified.

Module Reuse with Derived Modules

In previous releases, reuse of modules was limited to simple duplication. Now it is also possible to create a derived copy with specified work item fields marked as derived (and therefore read-only). Changes in the derived fields of the source Module will be reflected in the equivalent fields in the new derived module.

Moving Projects

It is now possible to move projects from one location to another from within the Polarion portal. See new Administrator's Guide topic: Moving Projects.

Conflict Detection

Polarion now detects potential conflicting access to work items and wiki pages and notifies users.

Watched Items on Demand

Users with many watched items previously could experience slow performance in the user profile viewer/editor because all the watched items were loaded. Now the user form does not contain users' watched items, providing rather a button which will load the items into the work items Table view on demand.

Work Item Designer and Wiki Page Usability

  • In Designer/Multi-Edit the last edited work item is still selected after save (exact cursor position is not kept)
  • In Wiki there are 2 buttons: Save, which saves without closing the editor, and Save & Close
  • Attachments are hidden by default on wiki pages. New attachments button shows the number of attachments and on click displays the Attachments portlet from which attachments can be accessed.
  • New Backlinks button displays hidden by default Backlinks portlet which provided a hyperlinked list of other wiki pages that link to the currently viewed page.

At-a-glance status of child work items

In tree view mode, child work items that are resolved appear in strike through font. This can optionally be disabled with a new system property: disableTableIdDecoration.

Enhanced module work item query in wiki pages

It is now possible to reference an item root in wiki AND add a query AND be able to specify to filter all levels. For example:

{module-workitems:moduleName=Business Requirements|project=library|display=table|root=WI-57|expand=yes|query=status:open AND customfield:x}

Work Report and Time Reporting Enhancements

  • Work Record locking date: Work Records on/before the configured date cannot be modified.
  • Possibility to report negative time values for Work Records and other time fields (can be used to balance time reporting in next reporting period after Work Records are locked)
  • New Comment and Type fields in Work Records, with administration option to make them required fields.
  • New system property useDecimalHoursDurationFormat enables display and input of decimal time values (e.g. .50 instead of 1/2 h).

Project roles for "My Hats" feature

This feature (a.k.a. role-based or user-configurable user interface) now supports project-scope roles. E.g. project_developer, project_user

Improved Wiki page export

Wiki pages exported to PDF now have informational page headers and footers with project-specific header/footer content.

Get as much ALM as you need

Our new Polarion Track & Wiki product is a great way to get started using Subversion and ALM best practices. For smaller distributed teams that just need a solid bug tracking tool, team collaboration, and version control, it may well deliver everything they will ever need. But unlike other solutions on the market with similar capabilities, it's definitely not a dead end!

If you have teams focused on Requirements Engineering, then you might want to look into Polarion Requirements™ – the next-generation solution for requirements management that delivers all the familiarity of office documents (in fact, you can still use office documents) together with the power and efficiency of a data-driven environment, all with just a web browser.

When your organization is ready for more project planning, management, and team collaboration capabilities, you can move your development to Polarion ALM. The path is smooth and completely seamless – just re-license and you're ready to roll. There are licensing options that focus on just the change management aspects of ALM, and comprehensive ALM capabilities like advanced requirements engineering, CMMI compliance support, quality assurance, and more. You can mix and match licenses so that all stakeholders have just the level of ALM capabilities they need and no more. See Licensing information for more.

What now?