6.4 Release Notes

Owned by Kevin Pham (Deactivated)
Aug 05, 2019
3 min read

July 2019

Zephyr is excited to announce the release of Zephyr 6.4 (Standalone Edition)! This is our first release using direct customer feedback from our Trello board, and we’re excited to introduce a series of improvements around test planning, dashboard maintenance, and test automation support. We also spent significant effort improving our internal processes, including higher test automation coverage and upgraded dependencies to ensure delivery at the highest possible quality. Finally, we maintained a relentless focus on fixing any bugs that impacted our customers.


Table of Contents:

Key Highlights

  • Automation Improvements

We kicked off our focus on automation by making improvements to the Vortex setup process, adding support for multiple job executors, providing official support for TestComplete and SOAP UI Pro, and upgrading our Jenkins plugin to make it more flexible and address a security vulnerability.

  • Customer Focus

This is the first release for which we focused on features selected by our customers via the Trello board. We made UX improvements on Test Cycle & Phase creation, added the ability to bulk update test steps across multiple test cases, and we now also allow customizing the names of the test cases priority fields.

  • Improved Maintenance for Dashboards

We improved the maintenance process for dashboards, by allowing the addition of multiple dashboard owners who can manage the dashboards in parallel, as well as the ability to easily clone a dashboard from release to release, making the creation process much faster.

Product Features

Below is a brief summary of the new 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

DescriptionTrello Board link
Test PlanningImproved UX for Test Cycle start and end dates
  • Improved the UX when creating new Test Phases and Cycles, by automatically filling in Start and End dates to match the Release dates, and by blocking users from creating Cycles/Phases that go beyond the Release dates
Link
Test ExecutionAbility to perform bulk status updates to Test Steps
  • Added the ability to bulk update the test step statuses when updating the status of a test case or several test cases
Link
Automation



Vortex Support for TestComplete and SOAP UI Pro

Link, Link

Allow multiple automation users to report results into the same Test Cycle/Phase
  • Vortex jobs now support multiple automation engineers running the same automation jobs in different machines and publishing results to the same Test Cycle/Phase in Zephyr.
Link
Address Jenkins plugin vulnerability issue
  • Upgraded the Jenkins plugin to address a security vulnerability
Link
Upgrade Jenkins plugin to add support for updating only a subset of test cases in subsequent automation runs
  • With this update, the Jenkins plugin now allows the CI pipeline to trigger only a subset of test cases, updating the status for those test cases only. This addresses a specific use-case where the statuses for test cases not executed in a subsequent run would be reset.
Link
Vortex Setup Process Enhancements
  • Improved the setup process for selecting the Test Repository Folder: We now allow users to search for folders as well as select any sub-folder for the automation test cases
  • Improved the behavior and default options for reusing the same Test Cycle for all automation results based on the expected behavior (from customer feedback)
Link
Jira IntegrationImprove handling of Epics for real-time sync with Jira
  • Improved handling of Epics when automatically creating the folder structure for requirements in Zephyr based on real-time changes when sync'ed with Jira
Link
ReportsAbility to clone Dashboards
  • Added the ability to clone a dashboard, making it easier to reuse a complex dashboard with multiple gadgets for a new release
Link
Allow multiple dashboard owners
  • Now it's possible to assign multiple owners to a dashboard, which allows multiple users to work on updating and maintaining gadgets in parallel, and avoids having a single user as the bottleneck
Link
CustomizationAbility to customize priority field
  • Added the ability to customize the names of the priority fields, for example to use 'Critical, High, Medium, Low' instead of 'P1, P2, P3, P4'.
Link
AdminAbility to remove a user and their personal information (GDPR)
  • For our customers' GDPR compliance, we now provide a method (available upon request) to completely remove/anonymize a user's PII (Personally Identifiable Information) from the database, while still keeping historical execution and audit data.
Link

Other Enhancements and Changes:

Type of EnhancementDescription
Warning for Test Case Fields with Mandatory Custom Fields
  • Improved handling of mandatory custom fields for test cases, adding a message to warn user to fill out mandatory custom fields. This fixes an issue where users could navigate away from a test case and lose information previously typed
Auto-Updating Test Case Execution Status Enhancements
  • Improved rules for auto-updating the test case execution status based on updates to test step execution status
  • To view the enhancements and improved rules for auto-updating the test case execution status, please navigate here

Known Issues

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

Upgrading to 6.4

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