24 October March 2018

The Xray team is proud to announce the release of Xray 3.2.0.

This version is focused on performance improvements in several areas, Test Run notifications, better navigability and enhanced UX.

Xray v3.1 also further improves the Test Repository and the Test Plan Board, introduced with Xray v3.0.

The main feature of this version is the Automated Steps Library, the central place to easily manage and refactor all the Cucumber steps used in the context of a given project. In addition, autocomplete and filtering on the steps make editing of Cucumber Scenarios/Backgrounds easier.

We also included integration with Apwide Golive, an app that leverages the power of Test Environments.

As people use more and more the hierarchical test organization using the Test Repository and the Test Plan Board, a new flattened view facilitates the visualization and selection of Tests.

There are also improvements in the HP ALM/QC migration tool, several architectural changes for increased performance and much moreBut there is much more, including great improvements for automation with the additional support for TestNG along with some enhancements for Cucumber.

Discover the key features below 

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Upgrading to Xray 3.2.0

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From Xray 3.2.0, the amount of information indexed by Jira's Lucene framework has increased. In order to not increase the index time, Xray is now pre-calculating this data so when re-indexing there is less calculation to be done.

Whenever installing Xray 3.2.0 the first time, this implies that an upgrade task must run to pre-calculate historical data. This action is a one time action and it will run in the background, so that Xray is still available during upgrade. However, this process may be long and heavy depending on the Jira instance size and thus we recommend to perform the upgrade at off peak times.

In order to manage this calculation, Xray provides a panel inside "Custom Field" preferences page from where you can stop, start and follow progress of it.

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After installing version 3.2.0 of Xray, a re-index operation of your Jira instance is required

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so that the internal data becomes searchable and usable by Xray.

Downgrading from Xray 3.

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2.x

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title	Re-indexing JIRA

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Downgrading from Xray 3.2.x implies that you must perform a re-index afterwards. This is because from Xray 3.2.0 onwards, the content and format of what Xray indexes has changed.

Release highlights 

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Section Automated Steps Library and enhanced editing of Cucumber Tests/Pre-Conditions Column width 50% 60% If you've adopted BDD and Cucumber, the number of Cucumber Scenarios/Backgrounds will increase as your project grows. Since Cucumber steps can, and shall, be used across different test specifications, you may need to do some refactoring on your existing steps to avoid duplicates and foster reusability. The Automated Steps Library provides a central place to view and manage all the Cucumber steps used in the context of a given project. This will allow you to classify/label steps, refactor them (update, merge), and quickly identify the entities that use them. Steps are added automatically to the Automated Steps Library when Tests or Pre-Conditions are created or updated. Once in the library, they can be used to create/update Cucumber Tests/Pre-Conditions, using autocomplete and filtering steps based on labels. You can now be much more efficient using the enhanced editor for Cucumber based Tests/Pre-Conditions right inside Jira. Learn more here. Column width 40% Image Added Image Added Performance improvements Xray v3.1 introduces several performance improvements in several reports, including the Traceability Report and the Test Plans Report, and also in some gadgets. Besides this, some measures were taken in order to avoid "messy", by default settings in the Test Runs Summary and Test Runs List gadgets that could cause some performance hits. Thus, gadgets now require that you specify a filter with the issues that should be considered for its source data. Improving performance is an on-going effort, so expect additional enhancements to come in future versions. Column width 50% Image Removed

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Section Better navigability, enhanced UX Integration with Apwide Golive (previously "Apwide Test Environment Manager") Column width 40% Image Added Image Added Image RemovedImage Removed Image Removed Image Removed Image Removed Column width 60% Xray provides you with powerful capabilities to analyze test results and coverage on a per Test Environment basis. You can easily understand how tests and requirements are faring on specific target environments. To answer the needs of our customers dealing with many Applications and Test Environments, we have built an integration with Apwide Golive, a Jira app with advanced Environment and Release Management functionalities. On Xray screens, the QA team knows as soon as an Environment becomes unstable or when the wrong version of an application is deployed. Efficiency increases with clickable links to access the Environments and the possibility to book dedicated Environments for test campaigns. Test Executions and Test Plans are now planned on a Timeline with drag-and-drop and Xray issues dates are automatically updated. Jira filters can be used to obtain a real-time list of bugs that can be tested on a specific environment, taking into consideration the deployed version and the environment status. You can easily understand how tests and requirements are faring on specific target environments. > Watch the video Within Test Execution and Test Plan issues, now you can jump to a filtered list of the related Test issues right from the Overall Execution Status bar. You just need to click on the numbers specific to each status. Most of the numbers shown in "Test Executions Report", "Test Plans Report" and in the "Overall Requirement Coverage Report" (in the drill-down of a bar chart) are now links to the related issues. Test Runs shown in the "Test Runs List" gadget, in the Test Runs Report and in the Traceability Report now provide a link to the details page (i.e. the execution screen). The execution screen provides also links to the related Test Plan(s), so you quickly jump to it. In the Test Execution issue screen, you can now select all Test Runs or several of them, independently of the page that you're looking at. This enhances a lot bulk operations. Learn more here.

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Section Test Run email notifications New gadgets: Requirements List and Overall Test Results Column width 60% Two new gadgets to track QA progress in your Jira dashboards: Requirements List Gadget and the Overall Test Results Gadget. The Requirements List Gadget provides an enhanced list of requirements, including hierarchical information (e.g., Epic > Story), along with completeness information and respective number of Tests, analyzed in the context of some version or Test Plan. This information is similar to the one seen at the end of the page in the Overall Requirement Coverage Report whenever drilling-down on some requirements. The Overall Test Results Gadget provides an overview of the status of Tests, in the context of a version or Test Plan. Thus, you can see the number of Tests that passed or failed, displayed in a pie chart or in a table layout. Learn more about these and all other gadgets A long-awaited feature are Test Run email notifications. Now you can get notified or notify any relevant stakeholders whenever a Test Run is assigned, when its status is changed or even if the precedent Test Run has been "finished". Test Run notifications reuse Jira's notifications mechanism, using events and notification schemes. This makes the notification mechanism quite powerful and seamless to setup for Jira administrators. Learn more here. Column width 40% Image Added Image AddedImage Removed

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Section A bunch of hierarchical related improvements Flat View for Test Repository and Test Plan Board Column width 50%40% Image RemovedImage RemovedImage Added Column width 50% 60% As more and more people use the hierarchical test organization via the In the Test Repository and in the the Test Plan Board it's now possible to use a context action over a selected folder, or over some selected Tests, to view the related Test issues in the Issues search page, therefore enabling you to obtain the relevant Tests and do operations with them, if needed. By the way, moving Tests to the Orphans meta-folder is as simple as using drag&drop. You can now create Test Executions from the Test Plan Board and inherit, by default, the planning dates. Also in the Board, creating Test Executions for Tests currently in some status, for a specific Test Environment, can now be done using the "Create Test Execution" over some folder. Cloning Tests and Test Plans will also clone the related hierarchical information with them: whenever cloning and/or moving a Test to some other project, the folder is also created in the destination Test Repository. whenever cloning Test Plans, the Board information (i.e. the folder structure) is also cloned. , we introduce a new flattened view for easy visualization and selection. While the default hierarchical view provides a way to see how Tests are organized, the new "Flat View" provides the means to obtain all Tests within a given folder, eventually filter them using some criteria, select a subset of those and then do operations with them, regardless of the folder they're stored in. Learn more Learn more here.

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Section TestNG support Performance improvements A long awaited feature by Java teams was adding support for TestNG. Now you can submit results from TestNG tests and get visibility of them in JIRA and in the related requirements. Similar to what is provided for other formats, two REST API endpoints for TestNG are now provided. We also provide a tutorial, Testing using TestNG in Java, so you can see how it works with a real example. Learn more here. Column width 50% We're doing ongoing architectural changes that will provide performance benefits across several different areas in future versions. Version 3.2.0 adds some improvements, including the calculation of the Test Plans overall status/progress bar, global and per-folder (in the Board). Improving performance is an ongoing effort, so expect additional enhancements to come. Column width 50% Image AddedImage Removed

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Section Email Notifications for changes on the specifications of Tests and Pre-Conditions Column width 50% Image Added Enhanced Traceability Report Column width 100% 50% We know that the editing of Tests is quite dynamic. Some users want to get notified upon every change in the Test/Pre-Condition specification, while others don't. Since Test cases are abstracted as Jira issues, you can also have changes on all the standard fields at the issue level. On the other hand, Jira's notification schemes don't allow you to define notifications on a per-issue-type basis, and you may want to get updates on Stories and Bugs but not on Tests, or vice-versa. Thus, we have created a specific event that will be triggered whenever the specification of a Test/Pre-Condition is changed, giving you the ability to define notifications for it. It will be triggered upon: adding/removing/updating steps in Manual Tests updating the "Generic Test Definition" of Generic Tests updating the "Cucumber Scenario" of Cucumber Tests updating the "Conditions" of Pre-Conditions. Learn more here.

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Section New documentation: Tutorials, Tips and Tricks Column width 50% Welcome to our new area of the triple T: Tutorials, Tips & Tricks  We have created a specific section in our documentation with tutorials, tips, recommendations and some articles so that you deepen your knowledge of Xray. All available from within one place, easing the task of finding useful information to you. Learn more here. Besides performance improvements on this report, you may now see the hierachical information of parent and sub-requirements (up to two levels). So, if you have an Epic some related Story issues, you will be able to see their relation in the report and evaluate the traceability information for the Epic and also for each individual Story. Besides this, we added built-in capabilities to make the Traceability Report now exportable to CSV, and include this hierarchical information of course. Image Removed

And more...

New Features and Bug Fixes in this release

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