Engineering Workflow Management New & Noteworthy

IBM Engineering Workflow Management 7.0.1 SR1 New & Noteworthy

ELM 7.0.1 SR1 iFix018 is available with Log4j2 updates. This interim fix requires full installation and is the prerequisite for future interim fixes. For more information, see IBM Support portal.

Engineering Workflow Management is an integral part of the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) solution.

New in Engineering Workflow Management 7.0.1

For a complete list of new and noteworthy items in this release, see the New & Noteworthy Details.

For a summary of items in this release, see the following highlights:

Tracking and planning: Program Board enhancements

You can now create one or more Program Boards in a project. Board Name is a mandatory field for creating a board. In the left navigation pane, when you hover over the board name information icon, details of the iteration, parent, and child work-item type that is configured for that board are displayed. You can share boards with project members, team members, or individual users. If a board is shared, an icon is displayed next to the board name.

Any user with permission to Save Plan can modify the configuration of a shared board except sharing configuration, which can be modified only by the creator of the board.

In the left navigation pane, when you hover over the selected board, actions to open the preferences dialog box and delete the board are displayed. Any user with permission to Delete Plan can delete a board.

Tracking and planning: Delete attachments in the web client

You can now delete attachments in the web client.

By default, the Remove icon is not shown on the attachments. If you want to see the Remove icon on the attachments, set the Show 'Remove' action on attachments server property to true.

Tracking and planning: SAFe 5.0 process templates are available

This release adds two predefined process templates that support Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 5.0:

Essential SAFe 5.0: Use this template to establish a Program/Team tooling environment.
Full SAFe 5.0: Use this template to establish a Portfolio tooling environment with the Large Solution layer for the Full SAFe 5.0 configuration. This environment is associated with one or more Essential SAFe Program/Team tooling environments.

Client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE: All web URLs now open in an external web browser

Engineering Workflow Management (EWM) client for Microsoft Visual Studio now uses external web browsers to open any web UI artifacts other than the Work Items editor, Query editor, and Operation History.

The Work Items editor, Query editor, and Operation History view use an integrated web editor to interact with other views in EWM. The integrated web editor is based on the default browser engine embedded in the .NET framework, which is based on Internet Explorer.

Client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE: Ability to set up a sandbox from a stream URL

You can now set up a sandbox using a stream URL from IBM EWM > Jazz source control > Setup sandbox from stream. This action will create a new workspace from the stream and load all components from the workspace in the sandbox.

Build: Support for optimized incremental load in Jazz builds and EWM Jenkins builds

Jazz builds and EWM Jenkins builds that are configured with a build definition now support optimized incremental load. In a build configured with an optimized incremental load, only modified files are fetched from the repository; local changes are not reverted, and untracked files are not deleted. For a large workspace size, an optimized incremental load is much faster than a regular incremental load. To enable optimized incremental load, in the Eclipse client or the web client, in the Jazz Source Control tab of the Build Definition editor, select the Do an optimized incremental load option.

Note: Optimized incremental load is not supported when you use load rules to load the workspace.

The other two new options - Do a full load and Do an incremental load - replace the Delete the directory before loading option. When the Do a full load option is selected, the contents of the load directory are deleted and all the files from the workspace are fetched in every build. In older build definitions in which the Delete the directory before loading option was selected, now the Do a full load option is automatically selected. When the Do an incremental load option is selected, only modified files are fetched from the repository, local changes are reverted, and untracked files are deleted. In older build definitions in which the Delete the directory before loading option was not selected, now the Do an incremental load option is automatically selected.

Git integration: Ability to link GitHub Pull Requests and GitLab Merge Requests to EWM work items

You can now link GitHub Pull Requests to EWM work items by specifying the work item number in the pull request description. Also, you can link GitLab Merge Requests to EWM work items by specifying the work item number in the merge request description. On the Pull Requests tab, you can check the status of the pull requests and merge requests that are linked to the work item.

Enterprise Extensions: Provide REST API to allow promotion of packages

Enterprise Extensions' Promotion feature has now been enhanced. The feature enables coordination of the delivery of source change sets to a production-level source stream in EWM when their built objects are deployed to production outside of EWM. This feature is enabled for z/OS work item packages and optimally used with IBM UrbanCode Deploy.

A REST API that is introduced for Package Promotion validates or promotes change sets to a target stream in EWM. You can configure a full DevOps process so that work item packaging generates a UCD version that contains the source change set metadata. The metadata can be used as an input parameter for this Package Promotion API. The deployment system can run customized deployment processes that issue calls to this API to synchronously (or asynchronously) deliver the change sets while their version is being deployed. To validate whether the change sets are not in conflict with the production's source state before deployment, Package Promotion might be called in the preview mode.

Browser support

Chromium Edge is now a supported browser.

New in other applications

For new and noteworthy information about other applications, see these pages:

New in previous versions of Engineering Workflow Management

For details about new features and functionality in previous releases, see these pages: