As we eagerly anticipate the upcoming release of IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management, I am excited to share with you some of the highlights you can look forward to in IBM Engineering Workflow Management (EWM) 7.0.3. 

Agile Engineering 

1. Quick Planner 
   • Configure the States filter, including the <All State Groups>, on the lane settings page as an additional options to scope work items shown in the lane
   • Save preferences of pinned lanes in the system to ensure that the lanes appear in the order as pinned by the previous user. 

2. Program Board 
   • Select the Proposed attribute available in SAFe templates to display data for use during program iteration planning in the Program Board. 
   • Filter work items based on states, including Rejected or Invalid states to scope the work items shown on the board

3. SAFe 6.0 templates are available for download on jazz.net. Some of the highlights of the updates in the support are: 
   • Support for Objective and Key Results (OKRs) for establishing clear goals and measurable outcomes.
   • Updates to Strategic Themes for improved business context and portfolio strategy.
   • New Flow Metrics reports for accelerating and measuring the flow of business value through all the activities of a value stream. 

     For more details, read my blog Say Hello to SAFe 6.0! 

User Productivity 

1. Simplified linking: Use drag-drop or copy-and-paste to create 
   • Non-OSLC links such as parent-child and depends-blocks between work items 
   • OSLC links to link a development plan to any of the following target artifacts: 
     • An EWM plan to another EWM plan
     • An EWM plan to a test plan in ETM
     • An EWM plan to a requirement collection in DOORS Next
     • An EWM work item to a Rhapsody® Model Manager (RMM) architecture element.

2. Some other notable enhancements to improve user productivity are: 
   • Preview PDF work item attachments without downloading the attachment 
   • Paste the image from the clipboard to create a work item attachment 
   • Users can opt out of automatic subscription to a work item 
   • Option to copy the Parent link when you create a work item copy 

Source Control & Configuration Management 

1. The TRS feed for EWM SCM configuration resources (TRS 2.0), which was a beta release in 7.0.2 is available for reporting on SCM artifacts. Source control streams, snapshots, and baselines can be included in this TRS feed with their files. Users can use the data in this field to create reports in Report Builder through the lifecycle query engine (LQE) by configuration data source–including traceability to requirements and other lifecycle artifacts.  

2. A new behavior provides more user control over work item linking/navigation in the context of global configurations by allowing global configurations for outgoing OSLC links to be inferred from the work item attribute values when “<Default configurations>” is selected. 

3. Other noteworthy SCM related improvements and enhancements are: 
   • Filter by component names in the workspace, stream, and snapshot editors in the Eclipse and web clients. 
   • View baselines with the change sets of a component in the order in which they enter the workspace in Component History 
   • Improved search for files, streams, and workspaces in the EWM web UI 
   • Show, set, or unset custom attributes for a file in the Web UI
   • Improved look and feel of SCM Code Review UI with a dedicated landing page for Code Reviews in web UI 

Integrations 

For 7.0.3 integrations, we improved functionality, performance and security, and updated support to recent versions of tools like Jenkins and Git. 

1. Jenkins 
   Between the releases of EWM 7.0.2 and 7.0.3, we released two versions of the TC-Jenkins and TC-Git Jenkins plugins. The latest version of the TC-Jenkins plugin and TC-Git-Jenkins plugin work with Java 11 and support Jenkins v2.41, v2.361.1, and future fix packs.
   
   The most notable functional enhancement is the new pipeline step to allow running EWM builds from Jenkins and making the result, logs, and artifacts available to the pipeline users. This allows teams to implement their fully automated CI/CD pipeline in Jenkins with EWM as the source control (for some or all components of the build) and still maintain complete traceability.

2. Git Hub, GitLab, Git and others 
   At the time we release EWM 7.0.3 we support the active versions of GitHub Enterprise (v3.9.2, v3.8.1), GitLab (v16.1, v15.3.1), Git (v2.4), and Gerrit (v3.8) using Node.js v20.0. 
   
   There are several enhancements in the EWM – Git integration to improve end-user productivity. They include the following: 
   • Work item pickers to add work item IDs to the GitLab merge request description 
   • Add a comment to the EWM work item from the command line or webhook when linking a work item to a Git commit
   • Git commit link and rich hover show additional details like commit ID, comment, name of the committer, and commit creation date (and the details are better formatted)
   • Administrators of the EWM-Git integration can view the Git diagnostics table by project area to see any EWM-Git integration issues that need their attention. 

Updated System Requirements 

1. EWM 7.0.3 uses Java 11. If your team use any custom EWM server extensions they will need to be tested to confirm they work with 7.0.3.  

2. EWM 7.0.3 supports the following rich clients: 
   • Eclipse 4.27 via p2 install only and Eclipse 4.23 via Installation Manager and p2 install
     • EWM Eclipse clients will support both Java 11 and Java 17
     • Other EWM clients like CLI, JBE, etc. only work with Java 11
     • Use the Eclipse p2 capability to install the EWM Eclipse client on MacOS. 
   • Visual Studio 2022. 

3. The 7.0.3 SDK is shipped as a p2 install that includes both the server and client. Working with the SDK is not impacted by this change and will work like the previous releases. 

Deprecations & Removals 

We are announcing the deprecation of the following integrations: 

• IBM Rational® ClearCase® via Bridge, Synchronizer, and Importers 
• IBM Rational ClearQuest® via Bridge, Synchronizer, and Importer 
• IBM Rational Change 
• IBM Rational Synergy 
• IBM Sametime® 
• Subversion and SVNKit 
• Atlassian BitBucket (Refer to Workarounds and limitations: Known issues in IBM Engineering Workflow Management 7.0.3)

These integrations will be supported for this version, but we no longer plan to enhance them, and we are likely to remove them in a future release.

For additional details on what’s new and noteworthy in EWM 7.0.3, you can read the article in IBM Documentation. 

As always, we welcome and appreciate your feedback! 

Bhawana Gupta 
Senior Product Manager, IBM Engineering