What's new in 15.1.40

The following new features and enhancements are introduced in the ALM Octane 15.1.40 release.

SaaS: This topic aggregates all the new features included in this and the previous update.

Release highlights

Following are some of the highlights of this release:

Developer license (on-premises)
Dashboard templates
Data access control for manual tests
Microsoft Teams integration
Flag rules on anomalies
Pipeline runs with parameters
Tabular display for dashboard widgets

Backlog

The following Backlog enhancements are now available:

Area	Enhancement
Remove list items via the bulk update	When updating fields using Bulk Update, you can now remove existing values of multi-selection fields. For details, see Build the product backlog.
Track anomalies	ALM Octane can automatically alert you about anomalies in work items. Examples of anomalies are defects stuck at Dev or QA for an extended amount of time, or an item whose ownership was reassigned multiple times. For details, see Set up anomaly flags and Track anomalies. For details, see Track anomalies and Set up anomaly flags.
Microsoft Teams channel integration	You can share an entity and comment on it via a Microsoft Teams channel. For details, see Discuss on Microsoft Teams.
Filtering	When filtering on Application Modules, Backlog, and Requirements, you can now select "Does not contain child of."

Dashboard templates

ALM Octane now provides a built-in dashboard template with pre-configured widgets. The following templates are now available:

Dashboard template	Description
Agile Quality	Designed for QA managers.
Release Management	Ideal for project managers who need to understand how things are progressing and if the projected dates are correct.
Cross Release Trends and Analytics	Ideal for managers who need to understand trends and evaluate the development costs.

For details, see Dashboard templates.

Data access controls for manual tests

We have applied data access controls to manual tests. This is in addition to data access already applied to defects. For details, see Data access control (Enterprise Edition).

Important note regarding manual tests that were created before 15.1.40:

To assure that existing tests can initially still be accessed by all users, manual tests that were in the system before the 15.1.40 upgrade are assigned all the current and new data access categories.

To begin setting up data access controls for manual tests, we recommend first assigning a default category to all existing tests.

Here's a recommended procedure:

Create an additional data access category called default.
Assign the default category to the roles in the system that have data access control enabled.
Filter the manual tests by items whose Access granted field is not empty.
Perform a bulk update on all the filtered manual tests, replacing the current Access granted values with Public.

For more details, see What's new in 15.1.40 .

Until you update the Access granted value of the existing manual tests, the tests will continue to be visible to all users. Until that point, new data access categories will also be assigned automatically to the tests.

Dashboard

The following dashboard enhancements are available:

Accessibility. ALM Octane now enables you to display graph data in the form of tables with rows and columns.

In the top banner, click Settings . Under Accessibility, toggle the setting Show tabular format as default.
Export. You can now export the top 100 insights from your Dashboard widgets to Excel. For details, see ALM Octane insights.
Demo data. The demo data generator now includes full demo data for the Analytics widgets. For more details, see Populate your system with demo data

Quality

The following quality enhancements are available:

Area	Description
UDFs for automated Gherkin runs	We’ve added support for custom fields in automated Gherkin runs. You can now customize all automated test runs equally.
Markdown notation	When composing a manual test using the markdown notation, you can now display special characters in the test script as normal characters. For details, see Manual test syntax.
Export data tables and sets	You can export data tables and data sets to Excel. You can update the Excel file and then import it back to your manual test. For details, see Export and import data tables or data sets.
Export tests	We have streamlined exporting testing items to Excel. For details, see Import from Excel.

Pipelines and integrations

The following SCM and CI enhancements are available:

Area	Enhancement
Parameter sets in pipelines	If your CI server job is parameterized, you can define different sets of parameter values that can be used when running the pipeline job. Each pipeline can have multiple sets of parameter values. For details, see Use parameter sets when creating a pipeline.
Run history widget	The Run History widget was added to the pipeline test's Preview pane, allowing you to see the status of other runs at a quick glance. For details, see Expand your test failure analysis.
IDE integrations	The IDE integrations now support BDD scenarios.

Developer License (on-premises)

Within on-premises Enterprise or Pro Edition, you can now install Developer licenses for your developer team members. Dev users have access to the particular areas of ALM Octane that are relevant to developers, but not to the full set of ALM Octane functionality.

Developer licenses enable backlog management, defect management, DevOps pipeline management, and manual testing execution. For details, see Developer license (add-on).

Administration

The following administration enhancements are available:

Area	Details
Offline database password update tool	If you change your database password, you can now use our new database password update tool to update the database password in ALM Octane’s site schema, and in the octane.conf configuration files. For details, see "Update database password in ALM Octane site schema and configuration files" in the ALM Octane Installation Guide.
OData support	ALM Octane supports OData version 4.0. Support for OData version 2.0 is now deprecated.