codeBeamer

What's New in codeBeamer?

codeBeamer RM 6.0 Released: Requirements Management for Innovators

In the recent years, we have seen industries making traditional engineering products transforming into producers of information-powered consumer goods. Existing markets are disrupted, new markets are created every day.

Cars are not simply about getting from point A to B anymore. They are about doing it safely, economically, comfortably and staying environment friendly.

Similarly, phones are not just about making voice calls anymore. They are about being informed effortlessly, being able to work location independently, and being entertained socially.

All these new generation items are powered by large volumes of immensely complex software. Car makers became software companies, electronic makers produce tens of millions of lines of embedded code, technology companies are facing the problems that were only known to hardcore software companies until now.

To succeed, engineering teams need tools that are designed to cope with these challenges, whether new or old. The latest version of Intland’s codeBeamer was built with the goal of prodiving a holistic solution to these problems, from requirements definition, through design, implementation, testing, release and operations. codeBeamer implements all core principles of Requirements Management, Application Lifecycle Management and Test Management.

The next section gives an overview about the highlights of codeBeamer version 6.0.

codeBeamer RM 6.0 Version Highlights

Requirement Workflows: Process Enforcement

Well defined processes that fit your organization and efficient communication are crucial to succeed. codeBeamer offers the most flexible workflow implementation available on the market since 2006. In version 6.0, the already proven workflow engine was extended with flexible pre-conditions and post-functions for transitions. Leverage it to support and control the process your team implements, whether it is V-Modell, Waterfall or some flavour of agile.

Visual Requirement Authoring

Author requirements as easily as in your favourite word processor. Use rich formatting, standard and custom requirement attributes, hierarchical requirements, references (dependencies, associations), diagrams, screen shots or anything else that might be of use in defining requirements. Handling of the M3 meets the performance of a turbo-charged V12.

Requirement Discussions

Defining and analysing requirements is always a collaborative effort that involves customers, engineers, system analysts, domain experts and business people. Efficient communication is key to success. codeBeamer RM keeps all your stakeholders up-to-date with changes automatically, and allows following changes on information that is relevant to them. Receiving feedback, comments, votes and incorporating contributions is as easy as keyless go.

Baselining for Requirements and Other Artifacts

Baselines enable capturing the state of a set of requirements, test cases, documents, wiki content, links and other artifacts at specific versions or at a specific point in time, and adding an expressive label to that state. Efficiently reviewing change history and comparing baselines is the key to trace the evolution of your projects. And when you think your project is ready to hit the Nordschleife, you can express it by adding electronic signatures to the approved baselines.

End-to-end Traceability

No relationships between requirements, implementation tasks, tests and code changes remain hidden when codeBeamer illuminates their sharp contours with the intensity of a xenon headlight. Requirement workflows, traceability matrix, suspected links and intelligent references guarantee the internal consistency of requirements.

Import Requirement Specifications from Word and Other Documents

We offer a smooth migration path to move from your legacy requirement management system to codeBeamer RM. Legacy documentation, meeting notes, prototypes and specifications produced by your partners and suppliers can be effortlessly imported and then further refined.

Export Requirement Specifications to Word Documents

codeBeamer RM generates clear, complete, accurate and unambiguous requirement documents, that are ready for verification, to distributed and to be implemented.

Git Repositories for Modular Projects

Complex software is often built from reusable modules. Versioning modules, though, tracking their dependencies and knowing what modules are built into what final product have traditionally been hard Configuration Management problems. Not anymore. codeBeamer offers a pragmatic solution to map large codebases to Git supermodules and submodules. It’s like the Karakuri seats of source code: maximum functionality with minimum force.

Git Workflows for Distributed Teams

By 2012, industry leaders have accepted that Distributed Version Control with Git starts a new era in Change and Configuration Management. Intland talks to teams that converted from Subversion or other Centralized Version Control to Git every day. Overall experience? They enjoy the inherent process control, flexibility and agility, and never looked back. codeBeamer enables your teams to adopt the Integration Manager Workflow to manage source code changes, and to collaborate so elegantly that even Pininfarina’d love it.

Version 5.7 Focus: Pull Requests and Integrator Workflows Behind Your Firewall

Version highlights

• Any number of source code repositories per project can be made in the new version of codeBeamer. You can even mix the version control types: you can have a project with two Git and one Subversion repositories. This enables smooth transition from the Centralized Version Control model to Distributed Version Control, gradually converting your projects and teams from Subversion to Git or from CVS to Mercurial, for instance.
  Individual repositories can have different access control configurations and can be subscribed separately.
• Pull requests (also known as the Integrator Workflow): flexible, yet well-controlled method to review and integrate source code changes. This is how it works in a nutshell: project members create their own forks (copies) of the reference source code and work on these forks. When they have completed a unit of work (implemented a feature or fixed a bug) and want to propagate their changes back to the reference code, they will ask the maintainers of the reference code (the so-called integrators) to merge a commit range from their repository to the reference one. They do it by sending a “pull request”, which encapsulates what to merge and why to merge it. Integrators will then review and discuss the proposed changes, and decide whether to accept or reject them. It’s fast, efficient and secure.
  You may be rightly asking: who will benefit from using the integrator workflow?
  Simply put, everyone who has a supply chain for source code, or receives source code changes from an “untrusted source”. Automotive companies, consumer electronic makers, mobile device makers, telecommunication companies, just to name a few. Don’t forget: (embedded) software is everywhere! More generally speaking, any company with junior employees, with contract workers, companies using outsourcing, or relying on external suppliers will secure their processes and increase their productivity adopting the integrator workflow.
• Inexpensive forking, easy merging with Git and Mercurial. codeBeamer promotes the practice of using feature forks and feature branches, and following story-based development. You can implement features on separate forks of the code, and merge them only when they reach a certain quality. Also, before codeBeamer 5.7 it has never been so easy to start a repository for experimental development, then drop it if it didn’t work out as expected. It ensures quality and consistency, improves project agility and fosters innovation.
• Improvements in submitting issues via email. Despite many people talk about the death of email, it is still the most widely medium for electronic communications. codeBeamer has been able to receive bug reports in email for ages. In 5.7, we reimplemented the functionality from scratch to support sending really rich issue descriptions.
• Lots of bugfixes and smaller improvements. Please read the original release announcement and the complete list of issues resolved in codeBeamer 5.7.

New in codeBeamer Version 5.6 Focus: codeBeamer Goes International

Version highlights

• International versions: New version of code beamer is now available in German, in two Chinese dialects (traditional and Taiwanese) and in Korean! codeBeamer finally went international, and it is now available in 4 more languages in addition to English. (Korean is currently a preliminary language version.)
  All codeBeamer distributions include all language packs, thus there is nothing extra to install. Even better, each invididual user can choose the language he and she wants to use, independently on the language settings of other users on the same site. In other words, this is now possible to support mixed language user audiences.
  It is important to note that this change applies only the user interface language. Managing international content has always been supported: codeBeamer supports all character sets of the world since version 1.0, ranging from Western through Asian to Arabic languages, and more.
• Git Smart HTTP – Cloning and pushing over HTTP and HTTPS for Git: no more headache with SSH keys Authentication is key when using Distributed Version Control in enterprise environment. Until 5.6, codeBeamer supported Git authentication via SSH, using SSH public and private keys to identify users. While this approach is highly secure and encrypted, it makes a little cumbersome for new users to adopt Git, because they are required to generate and upload those keys for codeBeamer.
  From 5.6, this is possible to authenticate over the HTTP(S) protocol using your codeBeamer user name and password. The nightmare for many is over! You can find the details of setting up Git Smart HTTP in the codeBeamer Administrator Guide
  Our suggestion: Intland still recommends using SSH or at least HTTPS in secure environments. Using HTTP is not recommended, as it is vulnerable by the technique called "HTTP sniffing".
• codeBeamer installer is preconfigured for using Git, Mercurial and Subversion via Apache Many Git, Mercurial and Subversion teams prefer using Apache in front of their version control systems. Launching an environment like that is not always trivial, but the default codeBeamer distribution package is now prepared to ease the initial setup.
  Learn more about configuring Apache for Git, Apache for Mercurial and Apache for Subversion in the codeBeamer Administrator Guide.
• Document Management and Wiki Knowledge Management improvements for ISO 9001:2008 compliance codeBeamer 5.6 fully satisfies all requirements of the ISO 9001:2008 standard, from content management point of view. codeBeamer enables accurate versioning of content, periodic document reviews, approval workflows, complete trace of changes, full text searchibility and content consistency via baselining, among others.
• Compatible with EGit 0.11.3 We are confident to say that EGit with codeBeamer (via Smart HTTP conncetions) is currently the fastest route to the world of effective Git on Windows. Highly recommended!
• Compatible with MercurialEclipse 1.8 We have thoroughly tested this setup as well. Works as expected, ready for production!
• Tons of bugfixes You are welcome to read the complete codeBeamer 5.6 Release Notes to see what has been fixed in this release.

New in codeBeamer Version 5.5 Focus: Increased Awareness Leads to More Informed Decisions

One of the fundamental problems we addressed in codeBeamer version 5.5 is extracting more knowledge out of the information available in your codeBeamer system, thus supporting more informed decisions. We provide the following tools for that: visualizing current project state and project health using real-time charts, following project events via activity streams and monitoring project progress with fast milestone status reports.
Cross-project Release Management helps you to easily track the realtime status of unfinished issues in your upcoming milestones and view the issues of your completed milestones.

Baselining, which makes codeBeamer the only ALM product with this capability, is a unique feature to take, maintain, analyze and compare snapshots of your digital content (documents and wiki pages).
Version 5.5 introduces support for the two most practiced agile methodologies, Scrum and Kanban. This functionality is provided optionally in any codeBeamer issue tracker.
codeBeamer 5.5 is also a major step forward in terms of integrating ALM with the best-of-breed software tools available on the market. Most notably, codeBeamer now supports Microsoft Project, the de-facto Project Management tool, HP Quality Center, one of the most widely used Test Management software, and MAC OSX, Apple’s popular operating system.

• Milestone- / Version- / Release Management
• Wiki Dashboards
• Baselining
• Scrum and Kanban
• Two-man rule
• Integration MS Project and HP Quality Center
• Installer for MAC OS X

New in codeBeamer Version 5.4 Focus: Listening to the Community

codeBeamer version 5.4 is our answer to recent changes in the software development market and to customer requests.

We believe that some of the new features, like improved support for the popular distributed version control systems or our shiny new issue escalation mechanism, make this codeBeamer version unique in the market. Besides that, we brought our source code management to the enterprise scale by performing all long running tasks in background processes. Today’s challenge is to tackle Android sized projects with 2GB of code and hundreds of thousands of change sets, and codeBeamer 5.4 is capable of processing these repositories.

• Issue escalation with hierarchic working calendars
• Calculated tracker fields with rich formula
• Wiki page editing directly in Microsoft Word
• Scalable version control management
• Major enhancements in supporting Git and Mercurial
• Revised search: more relevancy, richer query syntax, friendlier interface

New in codeBeamer Version 5.3 Focus: Overall Performance, Scalability and Emerging Technologies

We couldn’t agree more with the Google no. 3 principle: “Fast is better than slow.” With codeBeamer version 5.3, our purpose was to provide improved response times when handling a massive amount of tracker items, wiki pages and documents. To achieve that goal we also used emerging technologies like distributed version control systems and cloud computing besides the regular tool set of architectural changes and code optimization.

• New ITIL / CMDB module
• Approval workflows for wiki pages and documents
• Rating, voting, ranking of content
• Unlimited depth parent-child relations for issues
• Integration with SAP
• Wiki plugins source is open

New in codeBeamer Version 5.1 and 5.2 Focus: Social Tools to Enhance Collaboration

This version enhances creativity and information sharing among users, enhances the use of the wisdom of crowds and improves the quality of your decisions by introducing new social tools like peer reviews, rating, voting and ranking based on ratings and votes. You can rate, rank and review ideas and catalyse innovation.

• New ITIL / CMDB module
• Approval workflows for wiki pages and documents
• Rating, voting, ranking of content
• Unlimited depth parent-child relations for issues
• Integration with SAP
• Wiki plugins source is open

New in codeBeamer Version 5.0 Focus: Usability, Productivity and User Experience

We have learned the lessons of having many features in place, but being difficult for users to find what they look for. This version introduces our revamped AJAXified user interface that comes with improved interaction design.

• Wikitized dashboards with tons of new plugins
• Hi quality PDF export for all wiki content
• Fine grained access control for Subversion repositories
• Support for Oracle 9 and 10
• Remote API client library for .NET