Spira v7.13 Released: New Product Onboarding Widget and My Page Updates

22-Apr-2024 by Adam Sandman Product News

We are pleased to announce the release of the latest version (v7.13) of our award-winning test management SpiraTest system, application lifecycle management SpiraTeam platform, and enterprise agile planning platform - SpiraPlan. This new version includes a streamlined My Page and a new integrated on-boarding checklist that helps new demo users quickly acclimate to the platform.

Streamlined My Page

When you login to Spira, unless you have customized your choice of Start Page, you will be taken to the My Page. This page is designed to be your go-to place to find all the work you need to do and see all of the items that are assigned to you (across all projects and artifacts). When this page was originally designed, Spira did not have as many artifacts and therefore the design worked well. However, as we have added Risks, Documents, Tasks, not all users will be working on all types of artifact, and the page was starting to get cluttered, with lots of empty widgets getting in the way. For example, a user might see the following:

My Page with all widgets displayed

Although you can manually hide or minimize any of the widgets, that takes time for users, and means they might miss something if they are assigned an item of a type they don't usually work on. So, in v7.13 we have modified the default behavior of the My Page to automatically only show items that contain data. The same user would now see the following:

My Page with only active widgets displayed

Which is much better!! However since we know that not all users will want this automated visibility, we have added a setting to the My Page where you can opt-out of this feature:

Toggle to show all widgets or not

Since we believe that most users will prefer the new display, we have defaulted this setting to being enabled for all users.

On-boarding Checklist

In addition to the streamlining of the My Page, we have added a new 'on-boarding checklist' widget for new customers. This widget will only display for the default 'administrator' user when they first sign up for a Spira account. This new widget helps orient them in the application, walking them through the basics of using Spira for the first time:

  • Logging in, choosing light/dark mode, and updating your avatar
  • Opening a product and following the quick start guide
  • Inviting other team members to join the instance of Spira
  • Creating a new product and viewing the key customization options and settings

The on-boarding widget comes in two parts:

My Page onboarding widget

and as users complete the various tasks, the system tracks the completion so they know what is left.

My Page onboarding widget part 2

If you are an existing, experienced user, you can of course just hide this widget in the dashboard layout settings!!

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 April 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.