Polarion 2012 SR3 – New and Noteworthy

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 asmany 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.