We are thrilled to introduce the newest version of Polarion, Polarion 2506. At Polarion, our commitment to ongoing enhancement motivates us to innovate and incorporate user feedback into each update. Here’s a sneak peek at the latest features:

• LiveReports in Collections – Easily create LiveReports Pages for reporting in the Collection Context.
• Scheduled Scripts – Automate critical steps in your processes and workflows.
• More Efficient Upgrades – Accelerating upgrades and minimizing downtime for extra-large repository  

Let’s explore all the new features and improvements in detail and highlight the latest enhancements in security, performance, and quality included in this release.

Easily create LiveReports in Collections

In Polarion 2506, we continued our work on our popular Collections feature. Collections provide numerous capabilities to work with Polarion lifecycle artifacts (both head and revisions) within a pre-defined context, scope, or configuration. It’s not uncommon to want to create Polarion LiveReport Pages based on that Collection context so that the correct lifecycle artifact revisions, their associated links, and field values are presented in a consumable layout for all relevant stakeholders.

We extended the Collections feature, and you can now include LiveReport Pages directly within a Collection and keep a report and its data all in one place. These reports can be opened within the Collection itself, so it’s no longer necessary to switch in and out of the Collection to view them.

We also integrated reports into the Collection baselines. Now, when you baseline a Collection, any LiveReports associated with the Collection are also baselined. This is crucial for industries where it’s essential to carefully track and view the appropriate versions of lifecycle artifacts managed by Polarion. It lets you easily ensure that your data is correct and that the report version that displayed it is also accurate. 

We also significantly simplified the creation of reports you want to operate within the context of a Collection:

• A public API now lets you recognize that a LiveReport Page is opened in a Collection context.
• There’s also an independent API that allows you to run SQL queries in that context.

When you add a LiveReport Page that utilizes this new API to a Collection, the report will automatically show results based on the context of that Collection when opened. If needed, it will also take into account the entire hierarchy of the Collection. One of the benefits of this approach is that the report can be used again in another Collection, or Collection hierarchy without needing to modify it further. You no longer need complex and ineffective homemade scripts that iterate through individual Documents, or use Collection as an explicit Page parameter. 

See the Collection reports topic in Polarion’s Help for details.

Note: Existing LiveReport Pages are still Collection-unaware, even if they are opened from within a Collection, but you can power them up with the new API to make them context-sensitive. 

Related Collection enhancements

• When looking at a Collection’s historical revision or baseline, Documents that were not frozen at the time of the revision or baseline are now better labelled showing the revision or baseline. In past releases, the revision column would show HEAD, even though the link to open the Document would point to the correct revision (at the time the Collection was baselined). This could lead to confusion.

• When you click “Leave Collection,” you now look at the same baseline of the Document, Collection, Work Item, or LiveReport Page that appeared before you left the Collection context, making your workflow smoother with less manual navigation.
• REST API: We added the possibility to read and modify new relationships between Collections and LiveReport Pages (“richPages”) and polished some response codes and validations when setting relationships in general.

Polarion Scripting for process automation

Polarion Scripting, a significant addition to our Polarion 2410 release, has transformed how you can automate and tailor your business processes with Workflow and Save Hook Scripts. 

Building on this success, we are adding capabilities that further enhance your ability to automate critical steps in your processes and workflows and give your teams even greater efficiency and flexibility with Scheduled Scripts.

Scheduled Scripts take automation to the next level by letting you run scripts automatically based on configurable CRON schedules. You can automate routine processes to clean or validate your data, automatically generate daily, weekly or monthly reports and more.

For example, let’s say that you want to set the status of all Task Work Items to a final Verified state if they are in the Done state and have not been updated in 30 days.  Now you can write a Polarion Script and configure it as a Scheduled Script to run every Monday at 9:15 to search for these Work Items. 

(See Polarion’s Help for detailed instructions for this example.)

A script’s scheduling configuration can also contain a list of its parameters, so you can use a single script to run with different parameters on varying schedules.

From the example above, you could parametrize the following:

• A query that searches for Work Items and changes their Status automatically.
• The Work Item Type to search for.

Like for our Workflow and Save Hooks scripts, you can monitor Scheduled Scripts in Polarion’s UI in the Administration section, letting your teams track script performance, troubleshoot issues and refine automation.

We remain committed to maintaining the highest security standards with any new Polarion release, and 2506 is no exception.

To ensure your Schedule Scripts remain secure, we’ve implemented the following important safeguards:

• Only administrators with Global Administration access can author and configure Scheduled Scripts.
• Polarion tracks and displays whoever last edited a script and runs the scripts based on their permission levels.
  Any time users edit a script, they are reminded that it will be run on their behalf.  

Related Polarion Scripting Enhancements

We also introduced the following user experience improvements to Polarion Scripting:

• Save Hook configurations are now more granular, allowing you to independently set up specific Save Hooks for specific Document and Work Item type. This feature allows script authors to restrict the execution of scripts solely to the types they are intended for.

• To improve script creation and ensure consistency, we automated the population of the Reference Name field. The values are now automatically generated and comply with the permitted character rules to ensure naming convention compliance and speed up script creation.
• To prevent potential problems and ensure system stability, you can no longer modify a script’s Type after you create it.
• We made the permission model for script execution more intuitive. Users no longer need specific script READ permissions to trigger actions that execute workflow or save hook scripts. Script READ permissions are now only required for configuration purposes in Polarion Administration.
• Script Monitor now displays the user name of the person who triggered a script instead of their ID for better readability. You can still see their ID via a tooltip.

Upgrading Polarion is quicker than ever for very large repositories

Reindexing has traditionally been a key step during upgrades, involving the process of rebuilding search indexes like Lucene and PostgreSQL from the underlying Subversion (SVN) repository. While crucial for ensuring consistent search results and reporting, this step often introduced complexity and delays for extra large repositories.

With this release, reindexing the secondary database is no longer required if you’re upgrading from version 2304 or later. Both head and historical data remain instantly available, with no delays in reporting, making upgrades faster and less disruptive.

By removing this step, we’ve simplified the upgrade process, allowing you to stay up to date with the latest features and improvements without interruption.

See Update a single instance, Update a Cluster or Multi-instance  or Update a Cluster or Multi-instance (22 R2 or older) for details.

Agile test execution with flexible defect creation and reuse

Select an existing Defect when Test Case fails

Sometimes, you don’t want to create a new defect when a Test Case fails. Instead, you want to link the Test Record to a defect that already exists. In Polarion 2506, you can do exactly that! Testers can now choose whether to autocreate a new defect or select an existing one when a Test Case fails. 

Administrators can configure whether their users can have this option and even define the default query that appears in the Work Item picker when their testers search for existing defects.

Test Case type <-> Defect type mapping

We also introduced even greater flexibility when creating or selecting defects if a Test Case fails during test execution because different companies or even different segments of the same company may require different approaches.

You can now map multiple defect configurations to each Test Case Type, and your testers can select from them while executing tests. It works for automatically created defects, where testers can select the Work Item Type to create, and when selecting an existing defect, where testers can choose from all configured Work Item Types.

Strengthened our Integration Capabilities

Polarion connector for Rhapsody update

In our new Polarion Connector for IBM Rhapsody update, we added a number of exciting and useful productivity improvements. Here’s a summary of what’s new: 

• New Clean-Up Wizard.
• New “Update All Backlinks” option.
• New recursive publish option.
• A new hide/show navigation pane option for the embedded Polarion browser in Rhapsody.
• A new option in the mapping configuration for using a “main diagram” or “all linked diagrams” during backlink processing.
• Support for self-signed certificates.
• General bug fixes and overall compatibility improvements..

New Clean up wizard

After you’ve either created Rhapsody surrogates inside Polarion through backlink processing or through the publish operation, it’s not uncommon to edit the Rhapsody model further. These changes might include deleting previously linked model elements or changing the link relationships to Polarion Work Items, and these changes need to be reflected back inside Polarion.

With this new release, we’ve added a new clean-up option that will automatically delete Rhapsody surrogates inside Polarion if a user deleted those model elements from the model, or the new clean-up wizard can delete Rhapsody surrogate outgoing links inside Polarion and, if necessary, remove any stereotype information from the model.

The clean-up wizard has two different operating modes: Basic and Advanced.

• By default, Basic mode is available at startup.
• You can choose Advanced mode by editing the system properties.
  (Advanced mode performs the clean-up over several phases and can also work with published items that need to be treated as special cases.)

When using the new clean-up wizard, users now see a new dialog box informing them of what clean-up needs to be done. They can opt to continue with the clean-up or cancel the operation, and no changes will be made to Polarion.

New “Update backlinks” option

It’s not uncommon to have multiple source Documents imported from Polarion into Rhapsody as packages. The Work Items in those Documents can, of course, be linked to Rhapsody model elements. At the same time, you may have direct links from model elements to Polarion Work Items. Previously, you needed to select the container or specific element to update the backlinks inside Polarion. With this new Connector update, you can now choose to update all the backlinks in the model at once. We believe this makes working with the Connector and backlinks much easier than before.

New “Recursive Link” option

Although you could multi-select elements to publish in the previous version of the Connector, it wasn’t possible to simply select a top-level container (e.g., package) and then publish everything beneath it to Polarion. With this new release, users can now publish all model elements inside a Rhapsody package to Polarion simultaneously. Again, we believe this will make working with the Connector much easier and faster.

New hide/show navigation pane option for the embedded Polarion browser in Rhapsody

A new option has been added to the Connector taskbar to hide the Polarion navigation pane on the left to maximize screen real estate.

New option in the mapping configuration for using “main diagram” or “all linked diagrams” during backlink processing

We added a new option to make working with Rhapsody diagrams more flexible. Since a model element can exist in multiple Rhapsody diagrams, we added a new configuration option to allow you to choose how the Connector processes these diagrams. You can now choose to use the main diagram associated with it or any diagram where the model element exists.

Better reporting of ReqIF import results

We refined the way ReqIF import results are reported to users to bring more clarity:

• An import job now only appears as Failed if there are errors.
• The job displays a “Completed with warnings” message if there are only warnings.

Enhanced ReqIF export capabilities

We also enhanced some of our ReqIF export capabilities: 

• ReqIF export now supports Work Items with several attachments with the same name.
• You can now export formulas to ReqIF. Formula source code is exported as a .tex attachment with a preview as a PNG file.
  Note: You must explicitly enable this feature via a configuration property. Currently, you can only export formulas.

Support for 3rd-party JWT and TcSSO tokens when authenticating with REST API

JSON Web Token (JWT) is a widely used mechanism for authentication and authorization. Polarion now supports JWT as an authentication method  for the REST API layer, in addition to Personal Access Tokens (PAT). You can configure Polarion to accept JWTs issued by various Identity Providers (IDPs), providing greater flexibility, particularly for integrations.

Teamcenter SSO (TCSSO) tokens are also now supported for authentication with Polarion’s REST API. To use TCSSO-based authentication, you must configure the authentication.xml file by adding a tcss authenticator element, along with the usual TCSSO configuration steps.

Usability Enhancements

In the Elevated Experience stream, we addressed a total of 19 functional enhancements requested by our customers, closing almost 150 customer enhancement requests (ERs)!

We are making significant efforts to address these small usability gaps and elevate Polarion’s user experience to align with modern web-based applications. Here are some enhancements you can expect in 2506.

Improved Work Item table layout customization

We know many of you use different Work Item types for different processes, and the columns you want visible in the Work Items table vary depending on the use case.

In Polarion 2506, you can now customize the columns for each Work Item Type in Table, Tree, and Road Map views.

Specifically, you can:

• Customize the table columns for your current session.
• Create and switch between multiple saved column configurations.
• Apply specific column layouts automatically based on Work Item Type.

Setting up custom columns for each Work Item Type will save your users time, boost productivity and ensure they can focus on the data that matters most to their specific needs. 

Easily identify and filter a Work Item’s linked Work Items with Lucene queries

The new Linked Workitems of query is a powerful way to search for Work Items that are linked together, not just directly but also through multiple levels of links.

The query retrieves all Work Items linked to a given Work Item and is able to follow the links recursively — meaning it digs through the Work Item link hierarchy to find all related Work Items, even if they are several steps away.

For example, let’s say you have Work Items linked like this:

And let’s say that you want to query for all the Work Items linked via the specified linked types (implements and refines) recursively up to a depth of 2 levels.

In the past, you would have used SQL to create this query. With Polarion 2506, you can simply use our Graphical Lucene Query builder for it:

Which will yield the expected result: DP-393, DP-478, DP-358, DP-351, DP-345

Alternatively, you can also type the query in plain text in the following structured JSON format:

linkedWorkItemsOf:([{“filter”:” “,”follows”:[” “],”steps”: }, {“filter”:” “,”follows”:[” “],”steps”: },..])

In our example, the plain text query would be:  

linkedWorkItemsOf:([{“filter”:”id:DP\\-337 AND type:systemrequirement”,”steps”:2,”follows”:[“implements”,”refines”]}])

With this new query capability, you will improve your ability to do complex impact analysis and help you track project progress more easily.

Enhanced Content Reuse for LiveReport Pages

Our customers highly appreciate our LiveReport capability. This feature enables the creation of custom dashboards and reports to view Polarion data in formats that best meet your requirements.

We recognize that managing multiple LiveReport Pages can be challenging, so we’ve introduced two new report widgets to simplify content reuse. The first widget enables report authors to incorporate a full page from one LiveReport into another, ensuring consistency across reports.

We also added Excerpts, which allow you to mark any section of a Page as an Excerpt and assign a unique name to it. Another new widget lets you include these Excerpts in other LiveReport pages, giving you greater flexibility on how you choose to reuse report content.

Once included as a full Page or an Excerpt, any updates made to the source material are automatically reflected in the references within your LiveReport Pages, and the structure and access control of the source Page are preserved.

New Title field for Hyperlinks in Work Items

While you always could add hyperlinks to Work Items, we’ve now introduced a new Title field. This feature allows you to summarize URL content, enabling your users to understand what’s there without needing to click on the link.

Support PlantUML in Diagram Editor using a locally deployed image generator

Polarion offers a number of different ways you can leverage model based-design. From full-blown model integrations (e.g. Rhapsody ) to less sophisticated solutions. If you are looking for a more lightweight but powerful way to build UML diagrams inside Polarion, you can take advantage of the internal diagram tool’s PlantUML feature. This feature makes it possible to import UML graphical diagrams that have been defined textually in the PlantUML format.

This feature was originally supported but had to be removed due to the native PlantUML generation server being blocked by draw.io.

Now, you can host your own PlantUML web server to generate PlantUML diagrams in Polarion’s Diagram editor. All you have to do is set up a PlantUML server and add a link to it in a polarion.property.

See Polarion’s Help to learn what property to configure and how to create PlantUML diagrams in Documents  and Work Items.

Easier License Management in Administration

We’ve introduced significant enhancements to User and License Management in Polarion Administration to provide better control, visibility, and ease of use for administrators.

Key Improvements :

• Contextual License Assignment: License management is now integrated directly into individual user profiles, allowing administrators to assign or modify licenses in context. You no longer need to use the text-based configuration editor. You can now assign licenses to single or multiple users using a streamlined, user-friendly interface.

• Bulk License Operations: Administrators can now bulk assign, reassign, or remove licenses with just a few clicks. Whether updating a group of users or performing cleanup tasks, bulk actions save time and reduce the potential for errors.

Create rich Polarion Document Sidebars with JavaScript

The Document Properties and Work Item Properties sidebars for LiveDocs have been extendable for several years.  Many customers use our Velocity Form Extension to create custom views in these sidebars.  To further empower our Velocity Form writers, we enabled the use of JavaScript within these sidebars, providing even greater customization options.

Added customizable links to navigation in the Settings panel

We extended the Settings Pane in Polarion’s Navigation by adding some useful, customizable links.
You can configure where users should look for support, send them to tailor-made training material or add your organization’s custom links that are always visible.

(See Help to learn how to add your organization’s own custom links.)

Security updates

Granular permission schema for advanced script options in Documents and Pages

In previous releases, users with general MODIFY permissions for Documents and Pages were also able to manage script-based content. Although an average user might still require MODIFY permissions to perform their daily tasks, such as configuring widget-based reports, our Polarion Administrators sought a way to limit the ability to modify the script content of LiveReports and Wiki Content to only experienced users.

With this in mind, we introduced new permissions that give administrators the following control over script content in Documents and Pages:

• The MANAGE WIKI CONTENT permission controls whether a user can add, modify, or delete Wiki Content blocks in Documents.
• The MODIFY RESTRICTED WIDGETS permission controls whether users can update content in Pages, Plans or Test Runs for the following widgets:
  
  • Scripting Widgets
  • Generic Button 
  • Kanban Board
  • Page Script sidebar
  • Any custom widget marked as restricted. 

These permissions are now granted to project admins by default.

New Permission to access the Monitor topic and Job logs

Polarion’s Monitor topic provides access to information about currently running and scheduled jobs and allows users to execute scheduled jobs immediately.  

In order to give Polarion Administrators more control over who can access the Monitor topic, we have added a new MANAGE JOBS global permission

To ensure continuity, we’ve granted this permission to any user with the global_user role by default.

We plan to enhance this further in the next release by automatically allowing users who initiated a job automatic access to the job’s logs without explicit permissions.

Restrict File Types that can be attached to Work Items and Documents

In response to customer requests for greater control over the types of files that can be attached to Polarion Work Items and Documents, Polarion now incorporates a check against an allowlist and a denylist for attachment file types. By default, only a limited selection of common file types is included in the allowlist.

See Attachments in Polarion’s Help for details.

Administrators can extend the allowlist with the following configuration property:
attachments.fileTypesAdditionalAllowList  

The denylist is empty by default, but you can define it with the following configuration property:
attachments.fileTypesDenyList 

Review which file types you need and tweak your Polarion configuration accordingly.

Performance and Scalability

In Polarion 2506, we tackled several performance issues to deliver a smoother and faster user experience.
Here are some of the key improvements:

• The SVN access file has been relocated from disk storage to the SVN repository, resulting in approximately a 15% reduction in CPU utilization for the Subversion node. This change has improved response times for access modification operations and ensures an audit trail for any alterations made to the access file.
• We improved the Database History creator algorithm when accessing different revisions of the same object in Object maps, increasing the efficiency of cache use and reducing the number of Object Map and SVN calls. Depending on the data structure, this can increase the speed of historical indexing by up to 10%.  
• The Pulling job is responsible for processing runtime changes in the SVN made by other nodes in a cluster or via external tools. We improved the robustness of the Pulling Job’s data processing to ensure more efficient parallel processing of changes. We also reduced the job’s polling time from 3 seconds to 0.5 seconds to speed up the changes in other nodes in the cluster.
• We enhanced the loading of Index page data for Spaces, making it up to 80% faster.  When selecting an index page, its content, Documents, and Pages for the current Space appear much quicker.  
• We improved the Database History Creator algorithm when starting Polarion with a PostgreSQL database restored from backup. It now only indexes new historical revisions of objects, not their complete history. This can speed up the historical indexing process of data delta by up to 80%.

Notable Issue Fixes and Enhancements

At Polarion, we are dedicated to providing the best experience to our users. With each new release, we diligently address bugs, boost performance, and refine the user interface. Whether you’re utilizing Polarion on-premise or Polarion X in the cloud, our mission is to ensure your experience is both smooth and efficient.

Explore the list of bug fixes, performance improvements, and enhancements we’ve delivered in Polarion 2506.

Deprecations

In our commitment to keeping Polarion current, we periodically evaluate and clean up outdated features and embrace new technologies.  See our Deprecation and Removal Plan for details.

Update Information

Polarion 2506 is an update of Polarion ALM, available to all customers with a current maintenance subscription. This update is your gateway to the latest enhancements and security fixes. Staying up to date with our latest release ensures you benefit from new features, enhanced security, improved usability, and better performance.

To download the update distribution package, please visit this link.

For comprehensive details on the update process, read the bundled 2_How_to_update_Polarion.txt file in the update package.

Conclusion

With Polarion 2506, we are dedicated to providing you with the best experience possible. This release includes features that enhance your development workflow and ensure that Polarion integrates effectively into your ecosystem.

We continually listen to your feedback and work to incorporate it into our updates, maintaining Polarion’s position as a leader in collaborative software development and project management.

If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out via blog comments, the Polarion Community Portal, or your Polarion technical support contact.

Thank you for choosing Polarion. We hope you enjoy the new features and improvements in this release, and we look forward to bringing you more updates and enhancements in the future!

Regards,
Jean-François Thibeault,
Polarion ALM Product Management