IBM Engineering Workflow Management (EWM) V7.0.2 brings additional capabilities in various areas: tracking and planning, SCM, reporting, and Git integration. Below are some of the key enhancements for this release.

UX Modernization:

Simplified Linking

Simplified linking lowers the overhead for practitioners. In V7.0.2, drag and drop along with copy and paste linking is available for all OSLC link types. Linking is a key aspect of dependency management in ELM. It’s easy to drag a work item from a work item editor, plan editor or even the quick planner view and drop it in the work item editor or link to other types of artifacts in ELM. Once dropping the artifact on the drop target, a Create links dialog appears so you can properly specify your link type.

Additionally, we have introduced simplified linking when using global configurations. It’s now possible to associate more than one global configuration with an EWM release, and practitioners will see a fuller set of links between work items and versioned requirement, test, or work items. There is some administrative setup; see the New & Noteworthy and Knowledge Center for details.

Now available as a beta: you can now report on files managed by the Jazz SCM, including traceability between files and requirements or other artifacts in the engineering lifecycle.

People picker

A new people picker reduces users’ overheads in finding and selecting people to set as owners or subscribers. It adds new functionality to scope users based on access control, remembers your 10 most recently selected users and helps manage preset users. The People Picker is one of our first common React-based components being adopted in other ELM applications for UI/UX consistency.

Git Integration:

Enhancements in 7.0.2 support our strategy of making it easier for developers using Git to contribute to larger programs using ELM.

Chrome Plug-In

The new Chrome browser plug-in makes it easier to link between EWM work items and GitHub commit or pull requests using a graphical picker. This extension works with GitHub Enterprise servers.

Work Item Picker

Link GitHub pull requests and GitLab merge requests to EWM items.

Diagnostics Page

V7.0.2 brings a new diagnostics page that provides guidance to help administrators resolve issues. This page is available in the CCM admin section.

Performance and Data Scale Improvements:

Optimized incremental loads

Developers doing rebuilds with minimal or no changes need fast turn-around. Improved incremental loads are now possible using load rules.

Reduce the growth of your EWM database

Many teams have large attachments to work items. Storing them in an external repository will reduce the growth rate of EWM repository size. Store large work item attachments in a filesystem or via WebDAV like Artifactory. These are the same external repositories you can use for large files managed by the SCM.

These are just some of the highlights of the Engineering Workflow Management V7.0.2 release. For a complete list of enhancements for this release, please see https://jazz.net/pub/new-noteworthy/ewm/7.0.2/7.0.2/index.html.

Kate Draper

Offering Management