Announcing
codebeamer 21.04!

Product Line Configuration Management for PLE efficiency

To simplify the parallel development of multiple product variants, we’re introducing Product Line Configuration Management in codebeamer 21.04. This feature lets you define working sets to better oversee branches or the variety of work items (requirements, risks, or test cases) that make up those branches. To streamline Product Line Engineering, you can now custom-configure your own views to focus on relevant information without distractions.

Product Line Configuration Management enables you to:

• Create a separate branch of specifications and share specifications with other Working sets.
• Use baselined content or start from another working set, inheriting settings to save time and effort.

Product Line Configuration Management is optional and can be purchased separately – please contact us for a quote!

Configuration Data Deployment for enhanced project management

Complex product development often involves separate streams of hardware, software, and service innovation, with teams working on different module versions at the same time. Upon the integration of these streams, test systems are used to configure and test changes before pushing them to production. This often involves complex and error-prone manual work.

codebeamer’s new Configuration Data Deployment feature enables configuration managers to deploy connected project configurations between test, production, and other systems with ease.

Test Management updates for improved usability and simplified compliance

Product developers operating in regulated sectors will highly value codebeamer’s ability to display metadata (user name and timestamp) for each test step executed. This simplifies audits and helps improve efficiency in test documentation.

In addition to increased data granularity, the new version also helps save time and effort when defining or maintaining test cases. Starting with version 21.04, reusable test case pre and post-actions help avoid redundant work in test management. With extended rules, this latest version lets you set conditions to ensure that formal test runs only contain approved cases.

Faster and easier reviews with Review Templates & read-only reviews

Starting with version 21.04, you can now share review results with auditors and managers without exporting. Simply grant read-only access to reviews for stakeholders (users, roles, or groups) observing the approval process.

To make managing approvals faster and more convenient, codebeamer 21.04 now offers Review Templates. Define Review Templates and reuse these predefined settings any time you’re creating new reviews to save time and effort and to lower the risk of manual error.

Finally, Review Statistics now provides a convenient overview of Review results along with all their comments. This makes codebeamer a useful tool for managing the meetings required by formal inspection review processes.

Tracker View hierarchies, wildcard filtering, and more usability updates

For improved clarity in tracker management, codebeamer 21.04 introduces several usability enhancements. Conveniently filter items based on references using wildcards, and organize your Views into folders for easy accessibility. When editing an item to add references, you can have preconfigured views for that dialog, saving you time by only showing a filtered list of relevant items.

This version also introduces updates to the normal and intelligent Table View to simplify the management of complex projects.

Easier collaboration via export/import and integration updates

With version 21.04, we’ve made it easier to import and export data to and from codebeamer. Use MS Excel import mapping templates to simplify mass import, saving time and accurately executing imports.

The enhanced bulk update API helps synchronize huge amounts of data to codebeamer. Your exported documents will reflect the actual state of references, providing clarity and up-to-date information for all collaborators. What’s more, upon exporting Word documents, templates can now handle computations.

Integrations through the OSLC adapter enable lightweight connections to many tools including the Jazz Platform (DOORS, DOORS NG, Rational Team Concert / IBM Engineering Workflow Management) and other platforms like Polarion or PTC Windchill. New integrations include Ansys Medini, dSpace Synect, Piketec TPT, and SmartFacts. We’ve also enhanced our integration with Parasoft and the Enterprise Architect Connector.

PostgreSQL 12 porting

This latest version 21.04 introduces support for PostgreSQL (this update is currently in the beta testing phase!). Running PostgreSQL 12 warrants similar performance to MySQL and Oracle at lower costs. We’ve already migrated our development environment to PostgreSQL 12 and will offer migration services to customers preferring PostgreSQL over MySQL or Oracle starting in Q3.

The advantages of PostgreSQL are that it:

• can be run on both Windows and Linux (it’s supported by major Linux distributions)
• is open source and free
• makes deployment easier on Windows as it can be shipped together with codebeamer
• can be deployed on a virtual or physical machine with low / no latency time to the codebeamer application server, without commercial impact or IT policy restrictions
• is supported by the AWS and Azure clouds
• offers high-availability and clustering