Application Lifecycle Management
with Subversion
Polarion.org Community
HomePathfinder ProductsPathfinder ALM SolutionsPathfinder Release Spotlight

Release Spotlight: Polarion® ALM 3.2.0 for Subversion™

Thanks for your interest in the 3.2.0 release. Despite what you might think from the version number, this is a 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

  • New Wiki collaboration possibilities: Make it easy for non-technical stakeholders to get a quick handle on important sets of work items. Use Polarion's advanced Lucene-based querying capabilities and display query results as formatted, hyperlinked content in Wiki pages. Also, any Wiki page can be displayed as the Overview or Dashboard portlet, enabling stakeholders to see important Wiki content right up front.
  • New Requirements Designer in Multi-Edit view enables you to create hierarchical structures of requirements right on line in a document-like interface. Quickly create and edit child and sibling items, and jump quickly to linked items. Build similar structures with any type of work item. Direct-to-portal Requirements engineering is quick, efficient, and as easy as editing an office document.
  • New Enterprise SDK: open Polarion, Java™, and Web Services APIs, with documentation and examples, greatly expands the horizon of possibilities for extending and customizing Polarion ALM.
  • Support for 64-bit Linux lets your ALM system take advantage of 64-bit power and speed
  • Online Administration: edit XML configuration files right in the portal. Make changes faster - no need to download, edit offline, and upload back to the server (although you still can). New graphical editor for Enumerations makes this configuration much easier to perform.
  • Flexible work item storage: convert work items stored in Live Documents to regular portal XML format to improve efficiency for engineering once requirements are approved.
  • New export-to-document possibilities - Traceability Matrix-to-Excel for example, make it possible to share even more kinds of information with document-oriented stakeholders.

VIEW SOME SCREENSHOTS »

Significant Improvements and Enhancements

  • Projects portlet filtering: show just your projects or only certain selected projects in the portlet. Removes clutter and makes project switching faster and easier.
  • Incremental search in combo-box lists, with an enhancement that enables you to enter a string in a popup text box after typing the 2nd character. Find the desired value in a long list quickly without scrolling.
  • Option to toggle work item table between flat view, or hierarchical (Tree) view that shows relationship of linked work items. The Tree mode avoids duplicates and can apply the current query's filtering also on children
  • New planning constraint option Start no earlier than provides possibility to control the start date of a Work Item in Live Plan, thereby enabling true time-boxing of work items.
  • Overview filter for the Timesheet view to show only items with work records. See at a glance how working time has been allocated.
  • Customize dashboard queries to show overdue items or items due at some specific time (e.g. today, tomorrow). Spot potential problems and bottlenecks even earlier.
  • Control which perspectives are available for each user "Hat" (adjustable user interface) definition, and limit access to any "Hats" based on user's role. Provides a greater level of control over what is made available to end users in the portal web interface.
  • Query improvements:
    • New $today$ constant enables queries for Work Items based on, or relative to the current date provides yet more flexibility to query for exactly the data you need.
    • New linkedWorkItems and backlinkedWorkItems query elements enable searching for linked Work Items according to link role.
  • Optionally use an external, existing Maven installation for building making it faster to begin managing builds with Polarion ALM.
  • Optionally save the field selection in exported Work Item reports, and the report properties of Work Reports. Makes it faster and easier to generate updated versions of the same report.
  • CSV and Excel Table exporters include work item incoming links and derived revision links (via commit message). Export of these linked items for Word and Excel template formats is now optional.
  • Tooltips are expanded to display information about icons and list items in the Work Item form. Helpful for new users.
  • Progress logging and console display during a repository reindex operation, with estimation of reindex time after first reindex, plus possibility to tell if the process is deadlocked. Not often needed, but if needed then this will help your administrator understand what's going on.

The release also delivers significant performance improvements and improved usability in many areas too numerous to list.

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 onthe market with similar capabilities, it's definitely not a dead end!

When your organization is ready for more project planning, management, and team collaboration capabilities, you can move your development to Polarion ALM Pro. The path is smooth and completely seamless – just re-license and you're ready to roll. If you find you need still more capabilities like advanced requirements engineering or CMMI compliance support, Polarion ALM Enterprise is readily available. You can mix and match Pro and Enterprise licenses so that all stakeholders have just the level of ALM capabilities they need and no more.

What now?