Major New Features
- Brings new widgets to the program home page, letting you see meaningful information about capabilities and program milestones in SpiraPlan
- Improves program-level reporting with the ability to filter and sort standard reports and show program-specific custom graphs on the program reporting page in SpiraPlan
- Adds tagging support to a range of artifacts, including improvements to how you can see and work with tags on the document details page (tags are now supported on documents, requirements, releases, tasks, and incidents - more to come next year)
- Let users leverage the power of ChatGPT in Spira with a new SpiraApp that auto-generates test cases, requirement steps, or tasks from a requirement.
Artifact Tags
In the previous versions of Spira, there was a very basic version of freetext meta-tags available in the Documents module only. This included a simple text field that lets you enter a comma-separated set of tags. The field could also be displayed as a column, with the tag field used for filtering the list of documents. In this completely revamped update, we have added tagging support to a range of artifacts (tags are now supported on documents, requirements, releases, tasks, and incidents - more to come next year) and added improvements to how you can see and work with tags on the various details pages.
For example, on the requirements artifact detail page, you will see the new Tags field right away:
When you click on the field, instead of it being a simple text box, it now displays a menu of all the previously entered tags in the product. This makes it easier to reuse existing tags and avoid creating multiple tags that are synonymous but not exactly the same:
When you enter in text or choose one from the list, it will be displayed as a tag in the field:
Clicking on the "X" icon for any of the tags will quickly remove it from the list of tags for that artifact.
The new Tags field can then be displayed on the appropriate artifact list page as well:
This allows you to easily filter on the tags to find matches:
Currently, the new Tags functionality is only available for the following artifacts:
- Documents
- Requirements
- Releases
- Tasks
- Incidents
But in 2024, we'll be adding it to the remaining artifacts, including:
- Test Cases
- Test Sets
- Risks
Program Reporting
For SpiraPlan customers, the new version improves program-level reporting with the ability to filter and sort standard reports and show program-specific custom graphs on the program reporting page.
When you go to the Reporting page for a Program:
You now have the ability to filter and sort Program Standard Reports just like you already could with Product Standard Reports:
With this new functionality, you can filter/sort a program report by both standard (built-in) fields and custom properties (user-defined fields).
In addition, you can now create and add program-level custom graphs to the Program Reports dashboard itself. When you create a custom graph, you can now specify the appropriate workspace (product vs. program):
Once you have created several custom graphs, the program users can then use the [+] button on the dashboard to add them to their program reporting dashboard:
Once added, they will display similar to those on the Product Reporting dashboard:
Program Dashboard Widgets
In addition to the major new functionality available for program-level reporting in SpiraPlan, we have also added a whole new program homepage view dedicated specifically to the new Scaled Agile capabilities and milestones functionality introduced in v7.7. When you view program, there is a new Capabilities view (in addition to the General and Quality views):
This new dashboard includes the following new reporting widgets:
Capability Open Count
This chart shows the proportion of capabilities that are open, as well as the breakdown of all open capabilities in the program by priority. The bar chart's bars are colored to match the configured color of each priority. (Works with the program milestone filter at the top of the page).
Capability Summary
This widget shows a table of capabilities split by their status (on the y-axis) and their priority (on the x-axis). It provides a count of capabilities with each status/priority combination (for instance, how many capabilities are high priority with a status of to do). Clicking on any of the counts for a given status/priority will open the capability list page filtered to that combination of status and priority. (Works with the program milestone filter at the top of the page).
Program Milestone Capability Progress
This widget shows a list of all open program milestones. For each program milestone, it shows the name (click to see more), the number of associated capabilities (click to see more), and its overall progress. (Works with the program milestone filter at the top of the page).
Program Milestone Completion
This chart shows the proportion of planned days remaining as well as the proportion of all active capabilities that have been completed across currently open milestones in this program. It highlights the data in different colors depending on the proportion of capabilities and days remaining to give an idea of how well program milestones are sticking to their planned timeframes. (Works with the program milestone filter at the top of the page).
ChatGPT GenerativeAI Plugin
As we announced in October to much fanfare, we have added a new SpiraApp that lets you use the power of GenerativeAI to auto-generate test cases, risks, BDD scenarios, and tasks from simple requirement names inside Spira.
This new ChatGPT SpiraApp runs inside the Spira application and provides a set of dropdown menus with options to auto-generate derived Spira artifacts from the current requirement. It does this by connecting to the OpenAI LLM model using its REST API and sending specific prompts to generate items based on the name of a requirement inside Spira.
As a simple example, let's say we create the following requirement to "reserve a hotel room for multiple nights."
The AI model will generate the following test cases automatically:
Similarly, it will identify the following risks:
It was able to suggest the following development tasks:
And finally, it could generate the following BDD scenarios:
This functionality will save business analysts, testers, project managers, and quality engineers an incredible amount of time (vs. doing it manually), estimated to be at least a 600% time saving (10 minutes vs. 1 hour).
Bug Fixes & Enhancements
In addition to the major features listed above, the following bug fixes and minor enhancements were also included in this release:
-
Add more space between columns on the Report Edit page so that the Program Milestone report titles don't appear too close [IN:8496]
- Create temporary web.config.old and DataSyncService.exe.config files during upgrades using the installer to protect against corruption during upgrades [IN:8371]
- Do not automatically add "WHERE R.PROJECT_ID = ${projectId}" when adding queries for custom graphs for tables that do not have a PROJECT_ID column [IN:8534]
- Do not automatically add "WHERE R.PROJECT_ID = ${projectId}" when adding queries for custom reports for tables that do not have a PROJECT_ID column [IN:7704]
- Fix adding a task to a "Tested" requirement and then completing that task, not rolling that requirement's completion up correctly to a parent release [IN:5805]
- Fix assigning requirements to child sprints not updating the requirement count of the parent release (without using data tools) [IN:6041]
- Fix potential database concurrency issues when upgrading from 5.4 to the latest version [IN:8610]
- Fix exporting a test case to a product not recording the exported test steps in the product history [IN:8848]
- Fix exporting a test case to a product using the same template, not exporting its test steps' or linked test steps' custom property values [IN:6286]
- Fix inconsistent authorization checks when an admin attempts to preview a custom report [IN:8824]
- Fix not always seeing an error message when trying to add a new child capability to an existing child [IN:8355]
- Fix product-level custom reports with a ${ProjectGroupID} token to show data for the product's program [IN:8935]
- Fix projected effort for incidents not being calculated correctly - it should work the same as tasks currently does [IN:5806]
- Fix report administrators not being able to preview custom graphs on the report admin pages [IN:7645]
- Fix requirement completion from a canceled release so that it does rollup to any parent release [IN:5760]
- Fix test coverage for releases getting out of sync in edge case scenarios when indenting, outdenting, or moving releases [IN:8004]
- Fix the default sort order for the 'IsAutoScheduled' column for test sets [IN:8939]
- Fix the parent requirement status not moving to "Tested" if all its children have a status of tested [IN:7315]
- Fix the report admin graph editing page from throwing an error when a user tries to display the data grid [IN:8646]
- Fix the workspace dropdown always showing loading if a user is not a member of any workspaces or on a system with no workspaces [IN:8018]
- Fix users not being able to show the "Last Updated" field on the program milestone list page [IN:8621]
- Fix users of SpiraTest or SpiraTeam seeing the program-level artifacts menu when viewing a program and never having viewed a product [IN:8644]
- Fix widgets a user added to their product reporting page from showing on the program reporting page [IN:8626]
- Fully localize the report configuration page's report element names [IN:8508]
- Improve the performance of association tabs by removing duplicate SQL code from the relevant stored procedure [IN:8436]
- Improve the on-premise installer to be more fault tolerant when creating the database [IN:8600]
- Improve the on-premise installer to log out more information from SQL Server to aid in troubleshooting [IN:8612]
- Improve usability of the HTML report view by making the report spacing wider and easy to scroll horizontally [IN:8530]
- Prevent users from being able to paste a screenshot into rich text fields of program milestones and capabilities [IN:8618]
- Remove the tag cloud product home page widget and the document list page tag cloud sidebar graph [IN:8882]
- Update JiraDataSync explanation notes in Spira to match updates to the data sync [IN:8942]
- Update the field name from "ModifiedDate" to "Last Updated" on the capability list page [IN:8620]
How Do I Get the New Version?
Download customers can get the latest version right away by going to the secure Customer Area of our website. Cloud customers will have already been updated during the December maintenance window. If you have any questions about the new version, please contact support@inflectra.com. The full release notes can be found on SpiraDocs.