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What’s new in IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management 7.0.2

Good engineering practices, tools and people give organizations a competitive edge, enabling teams to be more productive with fewer errors while developing increasingly complex products and systems. Our focus for 7.0.2 has been increasing the productivity of practitioners using the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management solution. Below are some of the high points.

Making use of traceability for change impact analysis and reporting

  • Simplified linking: drag-drop or copy-paste links within and between requirements, tests, and work items
  • Simplified linking: more intuitive work item linking and navigation in the context of global configurations; by mapping relationships from the Global Config to a release defined in Engineering Workflow Management (EWM), and asserting release-to-release relationships in EWM, practitioners now see all relevant work items in a particular GC context, navigation from a work item to a versioned requirement, test or model element, and practitioners can report on these relationships using Report Builder and Engineering Insights.
  • Report on models managed by Rhapsody Model Manager (RMM) and traceability with other artifacts in the engineering lifecycle (beta).
  • Report on files managed by the Jazz SCM (part of EWM) and traceability with other artifacts in the engineering lifecycle (beta).

New efficiencies for teams adopting IBM Engineering to improve Automotive SPICE maturity and functional safety (ISO 26262)

  • New ISO 26262 content in IBM Automotive Compliance.
  • New token license enforcement, simplifying license compliance.

Awareness of change for requirements engineers

  • A new requirements comparison report is available for practitioners in the configuration compare/deliver workflows. The Reportable REST API was enhanced to include change information, and a PUB template provided, which you can use to create your own reports that make use of change information.
  • Module audit history is visible in the web.

New efficiencies for V&V test teams

  • Make use of custom execution states in test step results, new options to include more information when duplicating execution records, and improved offline text execution, including use of execution variables.
  • Try out the technical preview of ETM multi-component support, which provides easier test reuse (a test plan can include test assets from multiple components) and also simplifies creating affinity between requirements and tests in similarly-scoped components.
  • We tested Engineering Test Management with 20M artifacts and 2500 global configuration contributions managed by one ETM server. Details will be in the usual place on the Deployment wiki.

New efficiencies for team members using work items to plan and track their work

  • Beyond the simplified linking mentioned above, large attachments can be stored in an external content registry, including a file system or WebDAV server like Artifactory.

New efficiencies for developers using the Jazz SCM

  • Massive speed-up when updating the sandbox in Jazz and Jenkins builds using optimized incremental loads when there are no significant changes, now also possible when using load rules (we saw 96% speed-up in our development environment: from 27 minutes to less than one minute in one test; your mileage may vary).

New efficiencies for teams using EWM and Git

  • When using GitHub and a Chrome browser, it’s easier to link a commit or pull request with a work item using a new graphical picker.
  • A new Git diagnostic page makes integration issues visible and provides guidance for EWM administrators to resolve them.

New efficiencies in reporting and document generation

  • Report Builder terminology changes make it easier for practitioners to develop their own mental model about how reporting works.
  • It’s now easier to find the report you’re looking for in Report Builder using different report groupings.
  • Column headings do not scroll with the data, making it easier to relate columns of data and their meaning when working with tables that have many rows.
  • For Publishing Document Builder report administrators, creating connections are easier, and it’s easier to find connections when associating them with data sources.

New efficiencies when setting an owner or subscriber

  • In most places the people picker dialog box uses heuristics to anticipate the people you are likely to pick, reducing users’ overheads.

New efficiencies monitoring, starting and stopping applications

  • New REST APIs provide readiness and liveness probes, simplifying startup and heartbeat monitoring.
  • We did work to streamline application startup and shutdown. Additionally, if you are still using traditional WebSphere Application Server, you likely can get even faster startup and shutdown by moving to WebSphere Liberty, which we are now recommending for all deployments.

Complying with your corporate security & identity management policies

  • You can use application passwords for authenticating when using non-web clients; this provides a way to implement multi-factor authentication for these clients (it’s already available for web clients).
  • Delegate to your corporate third-party identity provider over OpenID Connect (OIDC) or SAML.
  • Distributed logout: when a user logs out of one ELM application, other ELM applications using the same browser session are notified and will log the user out.

Keeping things fresh: updates to the specified operating environment (a.k.a. system requirements)

  • Added RHEL 8.2 on all supported hardware platforms and SUSE 15 on x86-64
  • EWM workstation support includes Ubuntu LTS 20.04
  • Added Eclipse 4.16 (separate Eclipse p2 install), including optionally running Eclipse on OpenJDK 11
  • Updated GitHub, GitLab, and Gerrit versions

For more information on Engineering Lifecycle Management 7.0.2, see the more detailed “What’s New” posts and the various “New & Noteworthy” documents, for example, starting with Workflow Management. A Release Candidate 2 (RC) is available now, and the generally available (GA) version is coming soon.

 

Daniel Moul
Offering Management