6.5 Release Notes

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

October 2019

Zephyr is excited to announce the release of Zephyr 6.5 (Standalone Edition)! In this release, we’ve significantly improved our Enterprise features to enable easier scaling across multiple teams, continued our focus on test automation by making Zephyr more customizable for third-party automation frameworks, and carried on with roadmap transparency and customer feedback by prioritizing the features with the most votes from our customers.

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

Table of Contents:

Key Highlights

  • Enterprise Admin & Scaling

For our larger customers scaling their Zephyr deployments, we’ve tackled significant improvements to our audit logging and LDAP/Crowd group handling, as well as releasing a new feature for performing on-demand or scheduled backups for individual projects.

  • Automation Improvements

We’ve continued our focus on automation, releasing several improvements to our parsers as well as support for Jenkins Pipeline. By using our new XML tags, you’re now able to upload any type of evidence of execution into Zephyr, as well as automatically map automated test cases to Jira requirements for improved traceability.

  • Usability Feedback from our Trello Board

We focused our usability improvements on the highest voted requests from our Trello board: to allow editing and reassigning test cases during execution - one of the biggest pain points from our customers. You’ll now be able to make changes (large or small), and even create new versions, then have changes automatically synced into the current execution!

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

DescriptionTrello Board link
Enterprise Admin & ScalingBackup and Restore for ProjectsAbility to perform on-demand or scheduled backups for individual Zephyr projects, allowing individual teams within larger enterprises to manage their own projects and restore a project without creating downtime to other teams.Link
Audit Log Enhancements

Added comprehensive data for events across the application for requirements, test case management, admin and configuration setting changes, re-indexing attempts and results, etc. This is available now via editing the Zephyr instance URL to include "/flex/assets/html/auditlog.html", allowing users to filter by entities, operations, users, and date ranges.

Link
Ability to truncate audit log sizeAdded the ability to truncate the audit log by deleting all entries on and prior to a selected date. This is limited to administrators, and gives the ability to reduce the size of the audit table.Link
Improved LDAP/Crowd group search and managementRevamped the UI to import LDAP/Crowd groups, including improved search functionality (for customers with thousands of groups) and performance improvements for quickly importing a large number of users.Link
AutomationAttach any type of file as evidence for automation executions from jUnit XML results

Added a generic method to upload any type of test execution evidence (image, Word, PDF, HTML, etc) into Zephyr from any automation framework.

Link
Map test cases to requirements automatically from jUnit XML resultsAdded a generic method to automatically link automated test cases to Jira requirements.Link
Attach execution evidence to passed test casesFor customers with strict auditing requirements, we now automatically include an attachment for "Passed" test executions with data from the jUnit XML report as evidence that the test case was executed properly.Link
Jenkins Pipeline-compatible CI pluginReleased a new version of the Jenkins plugin with support for Jenkins PipelineLink
UsabilityAbility to edit a Test Case during Execution

Our highest voted request (and biggest customer pain point), now it’s possible to edit any details of a test case right at the time of execution - of course forcing the creation of a new version if the current version has been executed already or shared with other projects.
This is a significant improvement in usability, allowing managers to make changes without having to exit Execution and going back into Test Repository. This feature also allows easily reassigning the execution to other project members.

Link

Other Enhancements and Fixes:

Type of EnhancementDescription
Improved DataCenter Auto Scaling
  • Improved autoscaler algorithm to up- or down-scale faster and more reliably, improving performance and minimizing downtime for our DataCenter customers.
Upgraded Tomcat Version
  • Upgraded Tomcat version from 9.0.17 to 9.0.26 to address security vulnerabilities.
Fixed Post-Upgrade Caching
  • Fixed an issue where some users experience cached pages after upgrades. Some users may still experience this while upgrading to 6.5, but the issue will be completely resolved for future upgrades.
Creating Defects using Wiki Markup
  • Fixed an issue where wiki markup entered while filing a defect was not displayed correctly in Jira.
Field Selection for Excel exports
  • Added the ability to select which fields to export when creating an Excel report.

Known Issues

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

Upgrading to 6.5

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