6.6 Release Notes
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:
| Link | |
LDAP Improvements | Improved LDAP support on two areas:
| Link | |
Added full API token management for Zephyr, including:
| 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:
| Link |
Customizable Parser | Re-architected the Zephyr automation parsers to achieve three goals:
| 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:
| Link | |
Email Notifications | Added a brand new feature for email notifications, including email notifications for two use-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. |
This allows Admins to disable specific users (and free up their license usage) directly from the Zephyr UI. | |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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:
Bug Fixes
To view the list of bug fixes, please refer to the Bug Fixes page:
Upgrading to 6.6
For more information on upgrading, please refer to Upgrading Zephyr Standalone.
Starting Release 8.2, Zephyr Enterprise documentation is moving from its current location on Atlassian to a dedicated, standalone Zephyr Enterprise Documentation page. https://support.smartbear.com/zephyr-enterprise/docs/en/welcome-to-zephyr-enterprise.html