As you have heard in Vatsalkumar’s “IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management v7.1 is available today!” blog post, ELM 7.1 is now available. There are many important reporting updates in this release, and I will highlight a few of them from the practitioner’s and administrators’ perspectives for Jazz Reporting Service, Publishing, and Engineering Insights.

Jazz Reporting Service (JRS) v7.1 enhancements for practitioners

JRS v7.1 brings several important practitioner enhancements, and I will focus on the top three areas.

Report on additional LQE historical metrics

You can report on additional work item dimensions using Lifecycle Query Engine historical metrics. This closes the gap compared to the data warehouse for pre-defined Engineering Workflow Management attributes and dimensions to allow you to create all necessary trending reports.

• Work Item Closure attribute for Filed Against, Resolved, Resolution, and Team Area
• Work Item Creation attribute Found In, Resolved, and Resolution
• Work Item Totals attribute Found in, Priority, Resolved, Resolution, Severity, and Team Area.

The new dimensions examples in the pick list of the “Add condition” dialog box:

Report Builder Type explorer documents data schemas

You can view data source schema details for all data sources (LQE rs, LQE Jena, and DW) and use it to develop reports in Report Builder (RB). From the Help menu in RB, click Type explorer to view data source schema details. Filter the details based on data source, data type, categories, and artifacts. Use this information to understand the structure and dependencies of the data source schema to create custom SQL queries and develop reports in RB.

Create simpler reports across subtypes

When reporting across multiple child types that shared a common parent type such as Work Item or Requirement using an LQE data source, you would previously create a report using the merge or append of multiple report branches, that could lead to repeating traceability paths in each branch making the report more complex to maintain and slower to perform.

Now you can use external URIs to promote them into the parent type and create single branch reports with LQE data source that can return and filter on those promoted properties including common filtering across sub-types from the same parent type. This avoids the need to create a separate traceability path for each type of artifact that you want to report on.

We understand this might be confusing for customers with a large number of subtypes and therefore, we provide an option to uncheck including attributes from subtypes. In addition, to distinguish subtype attributes, after the attribute in the brackets, the word Promoted is added. The end result should be simplified report creation and most likely improved report performance when there is a large number of subtypes.

JRS v7.1 enhancements for administrators

Improvements to simplify JRS for administrators offer even more extensive enhancements, and similarly, I will focus on the top three areas.

Lifecycle Query Engine relational store (LQE rs)

LQE rs offers significantly better performance and availability than LQE Jena. Generally faster queries, higher concurrency, and less RAM are required. We have seen significantly better performance, availability, and scaling compared to the LQE Jena. This comes with generally faster queries, higher concurrency, less RAM required, and long-running queries do not block other users. This convinces us that now is the time to make LQE rs default installation for all new deployments and to announce that ELM 7.1 is the last version that includes LQE Jena. Customers with mixed LQE rs and LQE Jena deployment will need to make a decision on which is their default deployment in 7.1. In any case, use the period of your 7.1 deployment to convert all custom reports from using LQE Jena to LQE rs.

Combined LQE + LDX rs is the default for 7.1

LQE rs support is extended to the Link Index Provider (LDX). Improvements are so good that we now recommend using federated LQE and LDX for all customers. LDX via LQE rs provides better performance than separate applications in 7.0.3, and combining them means one less server to administer and pay for. Detailed performance results from our tests in the ELM lab can be found at the LDX rs 7.1 performance report.

Automated LQE server rename for LQE rs

LQE server rename for LQE rs is now automated in Report Builder: no need to reindex! To rename the LQE server, all you need to do is generate and replace the mapping.txt file into the JTS LQE location and restart the Jazz Team Server like other ELM applications.

Publishing (PUB) v7.1 enhancements for practitioners

You can now preserve the original image quality from source documents when generating a PDF. Previously, you could select from several image qualities in pixel per inch (ppi) for their PDF format report. However, if the original image quality is higher than the listed image sizes and you zoom the image in the PDF, the image in the PDF is blurred. With the Keep as original image quality option, the image quality in the generated PDF report is the same as the source document.

PUB honors the vertical alignment of the table cells that are passed by IBM® DOORS® Next or Engineering Test Management. Previously, the template designers were not able to use configured vertical alignment of table cells. The following is an image displaying a PDF output with the various vertical alignment options.

Engineering Insights (ENI) v7.1 enhancements for practitioners

ENI development in 7.1 primarily focused on adopting LQE rs to increase the overall scalability. This support is available for both System and Custom Artifact Elements view and Impact Analysis. For more information, see Creating a custom artifact element using SQL query and Creating impact analysis diagrams using SQL.

ENI fetches the details of the relational store if enabled, directly from LQE (no extra action required). If both relational store (rs) and Apache Jena triple store are enabled in LQE, ENI provides options to work with either of the query languages, SQL or SPARQL.

For a complete list of all IBM Engineering Reporting 7.1 improvements, see new & noteworthy posts: JRS 7.1, PUB 7.1, and ENI 7.1.

Let us know what you think about our latest release and share this blog post with your peers.

Fariz Saracevic
Senior Product Manager, IBM Engineering