February 2020

The Zephyr team is excited to announce the release of Zephyr 6.6 (Standalone Edition)!

In this release, we’ve continued to improve our Enterprise features to enable easier scaling across multiple teams, accelerated our focus on test automation by revamping our automation parsers and making our zBots easier to install and use, and implemented important usability improvements for Jira defect filing, email notifications, test planning, as well as a complete UI revamp.

We hope you'll upgrade soon and continue your close engagement with our team to make Zephyr even better in future releases.

Table of Contents:

Key Highlights

Enterprise Admin & Scaling

For our larger customers scaling their Zephyr deployments, we’ve made significant improvements to our SSO and LDAP support, added the ability to provide read-only access to test assets, created a new API token management page and updated our REST APIs, zBots and plugins to accept tokens instead of user credentials, and continued our improvements for audit logging. These improvements will provide immediate benefits while expanding across multiple departments and adding non-QA members to Zephyr.

Automation Improvements

For automation, we focused on two major improvements that will provide immediate benefits for customers: we have significantly simplified installation and setup for zBots by providing a single downloadable version that is also auto-configured for the user; and we’ve also rearchitected our automation parsers, enabling customizations for homegrown and custom frameworks as well as consistent behavior across of tools that work with Zephyr (Vortex, Folder Watcher, zBots, and CI plugins). These changes will also enable us to deliver significant improvements in integrations and zBot management throughout 2020.

Usability Improvements

On the usability front, we tackled two of the highest voted customer requests in Trello for easier test planning and email notifications, improved our Jira defecting filing page for better performance and support for pre-populated fields, and underwent a major overhaul of the Zephyr look-n-feel.

Product Features

Below is a brief summary of the features. Please click on the link to be taken to the feature-specific help page. The column to the right shows the link to our Trello board.

Category	Feature	Description	Trello Board link
Enterprise Admin & Scaling	Ability to give read-only permission to Zephyr	Added the ability to give certain users read-only permissions to the Test Repository and Global Repository. This restricts the ability to create, modify, and delete records, while still allowing team members to review test assets.	Link
	SSO Improvements	Improved SSO support on two areas: Added support for auto-provisioning: this simplifies the work of provisioning (and de-provisioning) users into Zephyr, and allows mapping IDP properties to Zephyr to automatically include and update user details. Newly provisioned users receive Dashboard access and do not consume a license. Improved the SSO login user experience for a smoother and seamless login process.	Link
	LDAP Improvements	Improved LDAP support on two areas: Introduced support for LDAP anonymous binding. Included the ability to update advanced configurations settings for user and group search, providing more flexibility during LDAP setup.	Link
	Support for API tokens	Added full API token management for Zephyr, including: Ability to create, manage, and revoke API tokens from the UI. Ability to use API tokens with the REST API, zBots, and plugins.	Link
	Audit Log Improvements	Improved the Audit Log to include more audited events, and redesigned the audit log page which may now be accessed from the About Zephyr page.	Link
Automation	Improved zBot installation & setup	Refactored the zBot architecture to achieve a few goals: Provide a single version of zBot that works across all environments (Windows, Linux, and Mac). Minimize the number of steps to download and setup zBots, completely auto-configuring the zBot for the user. Add the ability to name zBots for easier identification while setting up automation jobs.	Link
Automation	Customizable Parser	Re-architected the Zephyr automation parsers to achieve three goals: To allow customers to customize and/or create new parsers for their needs, to support homegrown and customized automation frameworks. To enable support for new (and a wider breadth of) automation frameworks in the future. To provide consistent behavior across all Zephyr tools for capturing automation results (Vortex, Folder Watcher, zBots, and CI plugins).	Link
Usability	Ability to copy or move an entire folder from one Test Cycle to another	Added the ability to copy or move a Test Cycle Folder from one Test Cycle to another Test Cycle, making it significantly easier to re-use test cases across different Test Cycles.	Link
	Improved Jira Defect filing	Improved the Jira Defect Filing page on two areas: Added caching for pre-populated fields to improve performance when filing defects. Added the ability to pre-populate the values for the Epics and Linked Issues fields from Jira, as well as support for any custom Jira fields with pre-populated values.	Link
	Email Notifications	Added a brand new feature for email notifications, including email notifications for two use-cases: When a test case is assigned to me. When someone modifies, comments, moves, deletes, or creates a new version of my test cases For bulk operations, only a single email is sent with the list of assigned/modified test cases.	Link
	User Experience (UX) update	Kicked-off a User Experience revamp for Zephyr, including a major UI overhaul to update the color scheme and fix alignments, and several UX improvements throughout the application for a better experience.	Link

Other Enhancements and Fixes:

Type of Enhancement	Description
OpenJDK support for zBots	This has simplified zBot installation, avoiding the need for end-users to install Oracle Java on their computers.
Ability to disable external users	This allows Admins to disable specific users (and free up their license usage) directly from the Zephyr UI.
Update to editing test cases behavior	Updated behavior when a user edits and creates a new version of a test case that has already been executed (or partially executed). In earlier versions of Zephyr, the execution status would remain unchanged for the new version creating confusion. In version 6.6, upon creating a new version, the user will have an option to maintain the execution status or to reset the status to Unexecuted.
Cap application log files	Zephyr logs are now capped every 24 hours, creating new files for each day for easier debugging and cleaning up old log data.
Installer improvements	Improved security with password masking, encryption for DB password, and license simplification (only a single license is needed for all of Zephyr).
Upgrader improvements	Fixed an issue where the Tomcat temp folder was filled with .gz files, consuming a large amount of hard drive space.
Updated default configuration for Jira integration	By default, Zephyr will now create remote links in Jira when test cases are mapped to requirements, which is the expected behavior.
Added Tag Column Option for Grids	Added the option to include a ‘Tag’ column for all grid views for the Test Repository, Global Test Repository, and Text Execution for easier sorting by tags.
Defect button for executed test cases	Small update to remove the ‘D’ button (to file a defect) when the test case has passed, avoiding user confusion.
Test Execution grid count	Fixed an issue where the test cases in the Test Execution grid were being counted by the number of defects associated to them.
Test Execution status update	Fixed an issue where any updates made to the test case execution status to and from “Not Executed” were not being recorded and reflected in the Execution History for the test case.

Known Issues

To view any known issues within this release, please navigate to the following known issues page:

Zephyr 6.6 Known Issues

Bug Fixes

To view the list of bug fixes, please refer to the Bug Fixes page:

Zephyr 6.6 Bug Fixes

Upgrading to 6.6

For more information on upgrading, please refer to Upgrading Zephyr Standalone.

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