Published Release Notes

More display options for charts

Display properties have been expanded for charts that you add to a report harness or section. In addition to setting general display properties, you can set visibility and color options, control hover highlight behavior for data points and legends, and define more presentation options for grids and tooltips. The additional presentation options enhance your chart design and provide a way for you to effectively highlight important data.

For more information about configuring charts, see Harness and section forms - Adding a chart.

Better navigation between pages

The navigation between landing pages and configuration pages in App Studio has changed so that only one tab at a time is displayed in the work area. This change eliminates the maximum tab limit message. Navigate to previous pages by clicking the back arrow at the top of the work area or click the Back to preview button in the workspace header to open a page in the selected device preview.

Progress gauge and double donut charts

To better visualize data, use the new progress gauge chart and double donut pie charts. The progress gauge chart measures the progress made against a goal. The double donut pie chart shows two layers of data in a single chart. The progress gauge chart can be included in reports and dashboard widgets. The double donut chart can be added to dashboard widgets.

For more information about including charts in reports, see Harness and section forms - Adding a chart.

For more information about adding charts to dashboard widgets, see Adding a widget to your dashboard.

Updates to creating and cleaning the test data for automated tests

Creating test data for automated tests is now easier and more customizable. During test case or suite creation, you can now create objects, load work and data objects, and add user pages from the clipboard. These objects and pages can be further configured and will be available in the clipboard when you run the test.

For test cases, you can now define a separate set of actions to perform after the tested rule is run, such as applying a data transform, loading a data page or object, or running an activity,

You can also prevent test data from being removed from the clipboard after a test is run so that subsequent tests can use the same test data.

For more information, see Setting up your test environment and Cleaning up your test environment.

BIX ruleset is now included with Pega Platform

The Pega Business Intelligence Exchange™ (BIX) ruleset is now included with Pega Platform™, which eliminates the need for additional provisioning for Pega Cloud customers and for a separate BIX installation for on-premises customers. To add BIX to your application, add the Pega-BIX:<version> ruleset to your application rulesets.

For more information, see Data extraction.

Upgrade impact

After a successful upgrade, the BIX ruleset is available within Pega Platform. You should synchronize the BIX ruleset and Pega rules to avoid extraction errors.

What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

After the upgrade is complete, change the ruleset version for Pega Platform and BIX to use the same, latest version.

Test coverage support for more rule types

Test coverage has been expanded to include the following rule types. Test coverage support for these rule types enables developers to more accurately measure the effectiveness of their tests.

• Collection
• Declare trigger
• Map value
• Navigation 
• Report definition
• Scorecard

For more information about test coverage, see Test coverage.

Upgrade impact

The new rule types may impact the test coverage metrics for your applications. Due to the increased number of supported rules, the reported test coverage percentage will decrease.

What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

Run your coverage reports after upgrading to see the latest metrics.

Simulation of data pages and third-party connections

When configuring your unit test case environment, you can now set up simulated data for connector and data page rules, instead of connecting to external sources.

By simulating such data calls, you are not dependent on any third-party server when running your tests.

This feature supports the following rules:

• Data page
• Connect-Cassandra
• Connect-CMIS
• Connect-dotNet
• Connect-EJB
• Connect-HBase
• Connect-HTTP
• Connect-Java
• Connect-JMS
• Connect-MQ
• Connect-REST
• Connect-SAP
• Connect-SAPJCo
• Connect-SOAP

For more information about simulating third-party connections, see Simulating data pages and third-party connections.

New branch quality dashboard

Pega Platform™ 8.4 introduces a new branch quality dashboard that shows the following metrics:

• The branch’s guardrail compliance score and the number of guardrail violations
• The percentage and number of unit tests that passed for the branch
• The percentage and number of rules that the tests cover
• Potential merge conflicts that can be addressed directly from the branch quality dashboard

For more information about the new branch quality dashboard, see Viewing branch quality and branch contents.

Enhanced reliability and stability of scenario tests

Several enhancements have been made to scenario tests to increase their stability and reliability. With enhanced improvements, you can now:

• Delay the execution of a step within a scenario test to add latency to a web browser and actions on a web page. This prevents tests from failing when a dynamic web page does not load all page element at once, but the test finds page elements that are immediately rendered.
• Automatically rerun failed scenario tests, which might fail because there are temporal stability issues on the environment or because the application UI is slowly renders.
• View the run history of scenario tests so that you can analyze the history of a test over time.

For more information, see the following:

• Delay the execution of a step within a test and rerun failed scenario tests for enhanced scenario test stability (8.5)
• Changing application quality metrics
• Automatically rerunning failed scenario tests
• Creating scenario tests

Scenario tests now honor application stack settings

The application stack defined on the Application Quality Settings page of Dev Studio now serves as a foundation for creating, viewing, and running scenario tests. 

Dev Studio will now:

• Display scenario tests based on the application stack settings on the Dev Studio landing page.
• Store scenario tests with the configured stack settings.
• Report metrics in the application quality dashboard with respect to the configured stack settings.  

For more information, see Creating UI-based tests with scenario testing.