Spotlight on Spira 6.3 - Saved Views, Saved Filter Enhancements and More

7-Jan-2020 by Inflectra Product News

As we get ready for the release of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, and SpiraPlan 6.3 later this week, we'd like to introduce some of the new functionality that will be available in this release. This release includes many important 'quality of life' enhancements that have been requested by many of our customers. These ideas came from our customer visits in 2019 as well as feedback we received online and during the InflectraCon 2019 conference. If you have ideas of how we could improve our products, please let us know, or better still - come to InflectraCon 2020.

Saved Views and Saved Filter Enhancements

One of the most requested feature in the past couple of years is finally here! We have added support for 'saved views' in Spira that extend the existing saved filters and sorts functionality to include the column selection. Now when you choose to save a filter, you have the option (enabled by default) to include the column selection.

This means when you select this saved filter, Spira will change the displayed columns (including their relative ordering and width) to match those in the filter. This means that you can Show/Hide different columns, filter on them, and save the entire combination as a saved view. When you switch between saved views, the system will show/hide and reposition the columns associated with the view.

Updating Existing Shared Filters

Furthermore, when you want to make a change to a saved view (or simple saved filter) you can now choose to update the existing filter, rather than having to save a new copy and delete the original (as was previously the case).

This means you can create shared favorites and update them frequently as your needs change.

Saved Filters Available for Documents

In addition,we have added saved filters and saved views for the first time to the Spira document management system:

Shareable URLs for Artifact Folders

Another feature that has been frequently requested is the ability to share the URLs of specific test case, test set, task, or document folders. You can already share the URL to the list pages and the individual artifacts, but not to a specific folder selection. With this latest version, each folder now has a unique, sharable URL that you can give to someone to display the list of artifacts with the appropriate folder selected.

In addition, this now means that you can open up multiple folders in different browser tabs and easily toggle between them. This is in addition to the current functionality that lets you have multiple artifact details pages open in different browser tabs.

This is available for all artifacts that support folders: test cases, test sets, tasks, and documents.

Clickable Breadcrumbs on Artifact Pages

Now that we have unique URLs for all artifacts and artifact folders, we have added clickable breadcrumb links to all artifact detailed pages:

Clicking on the breadcrumb hyperlink will either take you to that folder (if the artifact supports folders) or to the parent requirement / release if the item is a hierarchical artifact type.

Improvements to Convert Incident to Requirement

Finally, one subtle but important enhancement was to the Create Requirement from Incident feature. This is often used when you have enhancement ideas in the issue tracker that you want to add to your product backlog as a new requirement / user story. The feature has been available in Spira for a while, but the new template features introduced in v6.0 mean that we can enhance the feature further.

Now when you create a requirement from an incident, in addition to fields copied across in earlier version of Spira, the conversion will now:

  • auto-link any attachment linked to the incident to the requirement
  • Map across the priority field to importance using an intelligent name match.
  • Map across any custom fields that are of type list or MultiList (similar to what we do for test sets and test runs).
  • Make components copy over if there is exactly one set on the incident

Where Can I See All The Enhancements?

To see a full list of all the new features, enhancements and bug fixes in Spira 6.3, please take a look at the Spira 6.3 Release Notes.