Published Release Notes

Generate an XSD file for XML format output

You can now use Business Intelligence Exchange (BIX) to generate an XSD file for existing XML output when the Get all properties check box is selected on the Definition tab of the Extract rule form. You can now validate the XML output and generate DDL statements by using the generated XSD file. Some tags might not be included in the generated XSD file because of missing values in the XML output.

For more information, see Generating an XSD file for XML output.

Project sizing supports real-time feedback

You can now size a project based on the stories that you create in the Agile Workbench tool. By capturing feedback from your stakeholders in stories, you can improve the accuracy of your estimated timeline and costs in real time.
For more information about project sizing, see Sizing an application development project.

Improved usability for feature management

You can now manage your features more effectively by implementing the following changes in your application:

• Move features to different levels to change the structure of your feature hierarchy.
• Provide descriptions that are longer than 256 characters to improve the readability of features.
• Quickly remove irrelevant features without having to manage dependencies on built-on applications or previous application versions.
• Consolidate features into one application layer when you are ready to ship your application.

For more information about feature management, see Managing the features in your application.

Real-time statistics added to application overviews

You can now use the Application Overview landing page to get information about the number, type, and status of work items that are associated with your features. By referring to the statistics and progress bars that update as your team creates and resolves work items, you can track feature development in real time without interrupting your development team for status updates.

For more information, see Real-time statistics for feature development.

Agile Workbench supports bulk actions

You can now create stories in bulk by importing a story template to Agile Workbench. By defining stories in bulk before you start development, you can size your project more quickly.

For more information, see Bulk actions in Agile Workbench.

Guided tours and online help added to application guides

You can now create application guides that display content from a Pega^® Platform help topic or a sequence of tour stops in a guided tour. By providing supporting information in an interactive format, you can help users complete tasks more quickly.

For more information about displaying help topics, tour stops, and other types of information in a task, see Interactive tasks in an application guide.

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. 

Run an application test suite from a CI/CD pipeline

Deployment Manager, as well as the existing REST service used to call scenario tests, now accepts a test suite ID when running scenario tests from an application pipeline. By using test suites, you can customize a set of select scenario tests to run as a group, instead of running all the scenario tests that are applied to a particular application.

Only the tests that belong to the suite are run as part of the task. 

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

Access PegaUnit compliance metrics from a centralized location

PegaUnit compliance metrics and execution rate have been added to the PegaUnit metrics tile of the Application Quality dashboard. This dashboard provides a centralized location for all PegaUnit data for a specific application. 

The dashboard also supports granular PegaUnit test information for each case type and data type, similar to the process currently available on the branch quality dashboard. 

For more information, see Analyzing application quality metrics.