Published Release Notes

Enabling historical compliance score data

Project stakeholders can now track the compliance score for an application over time to better understand and manage ongoing development adherence to Pega 7 Platform guardrails. The compliance score history can be displayed on a line graph on the Compliance Score tab of the Application Guardrails landing page. The data is collected daily and displayed in weekly increments, up to four weeks prior to the current date.

For more information, see Guardrails compliance score, Enabling compliance score history, and Compliance score trend reporting.

Application Sizing Wizard worksheet template now includes business impact

A column for business impact has been added to the project sizing template used by the Application Sizing Wizard. Project owners can now incorporate this assessment into their project sizing.

New Business impact optimization dashboard

On the Analysis tab of the Application Profile landing page, you can now enable historical specification count and implementation progress by complexity and business impact. On the Business impact optimization dashboard, you can view counts of specifications by complexity and business impact. You can also view counts, by business objective, of specifications that have been implemented and for those not yet implemented. You can filter specifications by release and iteration.

For more information, see Viewing specifications by complexity, impact, and business objective, and Associating project specifications with business impact and complexity.

New field types in Form Builder

You can create forms in Form Builder that include the following field types:

• Data reference – Prompts users with a list of data records or instances of a specific data type.
• User reference – Prompts users to select or search for an existing user in the application.

For more information, see Data references in Form Builder and User references in Form Builder.

Reusable components in Form Builder

You can reuse an existing form or data reference when creating a form. By referencing the existing fields in your application, you save time and build forms that are easier to maintain. Refer to the Reuse fields panel in Form Builder to view all of the fields, forms, and data references in your application.

For more information, see Reuse fields panel in Form Builder.

Search field type is deprecated

The search field type in Form Builder is deprecated. Use a data reference or user reference instead, both of which prompt users with an autocomplete field at run time.

For the full list of supported field types in Form Builder, see Supported display modes by field type.

Support for enterprise and express applications

When you run the New Application wizard, you can create two types of applications:

• Enterprise – A full-scale application that has access to all the capabilities in the Pega 7 Platform.
  
  By default, enterprise applications are developed in Designer Studio, but users have access to express mode.
• Express – A small-scale application that has access to a subset of the capabilities in the Pega 7 Platform.
  
  Express applications are developed in express mode, and are ideal for new users or for quickly testing functionality.

For more information, see Express applications.

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

Support for advanced validation of embedded and referenced data

To help you define validation conditions for a broader range of use case scenarios, Pega Platform™ now supports stage entry validation for embedded fields in the form of a validation matrix. You can now define validation conditions for both field groups and field group lists, and easily navigate between them. You can also select any fields and when conditions while building a condition for both field-level and stage-level validation.

For more information, see Validating field values for stage entry.

Complete email and notification approval in App Studio

App Studio now supports complete email approval configuration directly in the Case Designer. Email approval settings now include composing a new message or selecting a template, saving templates to a library for future reuse, and adding attachments to an email. Additionally, you can now send the approval as a push notification to mobile users. With full configuration of email approval in App Studio, you save time and create unique and personalized email messages and push notifications in a no-code, intuitive way. 

For more information, see Obtain approvals from email and push notifications from App Studio (8.5), Requesting approval by email and push notification.