We know many of you are planning to upgrade from V6 to V7.0.2 this quarter or next, and to make this as smooth as possible we have put extra effort into our latest ELM 7.0.2 iFix (iFix008), which is now available. It’s the minimum level we recommend for all deployments: those already on 7.0.2 and those that have not yet upgraded to 7.0.2. You can download iFix008 today from the 7.0.2 product downloads pages here on jazz.net, for example: the DOORS Next 7.0.2. All Downloads page, or in the next few days before it’s publicly available on Fix Central, ask the IBM Support team to share it with you via a support case. Rhapsody and Publishing are releasing a new fixpack/iFix this week too.

DOORS Next performance

The biggest news in V7.0 was the changes we made in DOORS Next to support much larger data scale. Working with early adopters, we found some additional scenarios to optimize. For iFix008 we expanded our performance test data in these dimensions and optimized a number of queries, which significantly improves upgrade and runtime performance over earlier V7 releases and 7.0.2 iFixes. The upgrade from V6 to V7 remains a significant upgrade, especially for DOORS Next, and we continue to recommend everyone follow the guidance in Planning your ELM upgrade to V7.0.x.

If you use Microsoft® SQL Server

DOORS Next V7 shifted more of the “heavy lifting” to the database. Now, with DOORS Next repositories backed by SQL Server, we are not seeing the same ability to scale as with Oracle and Db2. So we recently published Thresholds for determining whether your DOORS Next instance has exceeded the capacity of Microsoft® SQL Server. If you are using SQL Server, we recommend you run these simple queries to determine whether you need to make plans to move to Oracle or Db2 before upgrading to V7.

Defect fixes and additional improvements in 7.0.2 iFix008

While the DOORS Next performance optimization work was going on, all teams put a lot of effort into fixing defects. In addition we made improvements that I summarize below. See the 7.0.2 iFix008 readme and 7.0.2 docs for more details.

• Workflow Management: Web-based UIs in Visual Studio, Shell, and MSSCCI clients now use the Microsoft Edge Chromium-based runtime, removing a dependency on embedded Internet Explorer and adding a dependency on the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime
• Workflow Management: Work item linking and navigation in a GC context (optionally reinstates V6-V7.0.1 behavior using EWM release and OSLC administrative mappings)
• Workflow Management Enterprise Extensions: Dependency Build allow third-party validation before committing build maps, for example the EE Dependency Build can launch and synchronize with SonarQube to do a deeper quality analysis to validate the build.
• Engineering Insights: Associated style is imported and exported along with the view
• DOORS Next: Data purge has been reinstated. This is a rarely used administrative feature designed to expunge data from the database after a “data spill”.
• DOORS Next: In the module UI, the expand and collapse capability is now active for filtered modules that are not sorted
• Test Management: Observant administrators will notice that the OSLC Link/Attribute Mapping section in ETM Project Area administration has been removed. This section was never relevant to Test Management–even when using legacy embedded work items. This removes some potential confusion for new admins.
• Global Configuration Management and EWM SCM: arguably a defect but mentioned here since it’s a minor change in behavior, whitespace is now normalized in GCM and SCM artifact titles. For example, two spaces between words will be reduced to one when saving the artifact.
• Publishing: Optionally integrate workstation-based Document Studio with server-based Document Builder configured with Jazz Team Server (JTS) authentication to simplify creating, modifying, or update reporting assets
• Publishing: A new predefined data source schema for Global Configuration Management (GCM) provides an example you can customize to include your configuration data in report templates
• Publishing: Enhanced job details log for Document Builder
• Method Composer 7.6.2 iFix6 recently added support for web-based authoring of Work Breakdown Structures (WBS – delivery processes and capability patterns) using DOORS Next. You can read more here (and as usual, you should adopt the latest iFix).

Supporting updated versions of related software

Additionally, 7.0.2 iFix008 adds support for GitHub Enterprise V3.1.7, since the previous versions we support with EWM now go out of support this quarter.

And last, as I mentioned recently, in CLM V6.0.6 and V6.0.6.1 we added support for Microsoft Windows Server 2019, Oracle 19c, and Microsoft SQL Server 2019, so you can upgrade to those versions before upgrading your CLM/ELM version to 7.0.2 iFix008.