Published Release Notes

DCO

This release focused on improving the user experience of creating new rules and tightening up the use of specifications in the Case Designer.  The layout of the New and Save As forms were made more intuitive and intelligent.  Specification actions were made to be more consistent across various aspects of the Case Designer.

• After removing specification references, users can create and save a new specification.
• Developers may now choose either an existing specification or create a new one for subflows and Split-For-Each shapes.
• If a specification is not associated with flow shapes such as sub flows, Utilities, or Split-For-Each, it is possible to import speciications with the same names, and the flow shapes will default to using those imported specs.
• In the outline view, specification changes will be preserved when switching from tab to tab.
• The View Full Details functionality from either Configure Step or the Outline View will display all details, including the specification requirement links.

Generate documents in the background

When you generate system documentation by using the Document Application wizard (Designer Studio > Application > Tools > Document), the process now runs on a server and not on your local client system. This change not only generates your document more quickly, but also allows you to multi-task within Pega 7 while your document is generating in the background. When the generation is completed, download the document to your computer.

For more information, see:

Updating customized Application Document templates with server-side document generation

Screenshot generation still runs on local client

Warning message when opening server-generated documents

Screenshot generation runs on local client

If you generate screenshots to include in your application document, this process still runs on your local client. Additionally, you are still required to use Internet Explorer to use this feature.

Warning message when opening server-generated documents

Depending on your system configuration, the following warning message might be displayed when you open a document that was generated on the server.

If you click No, certain content (for example, Table of Contents) is not populated in the document. Instead, click Yes and save the document.

The warning message that displays

Link URLs to applications, requirements, and specifications

In addition to files, you can now attach URLs to applications, requirements, and specifications by using the Add/Edit Attachment modal dialog box in Pega 7. This change allows you to link directly to dynamic content in other URL-based systems rather than link to a static file of that content.

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. 

Run PegaUnit tests by using an API call

A new REST API is now available to create and run PegaUnit tests from an external continuous improvement (CI) tool. This synchronous method allows for the processing of large quantities of tests while reducing the possibility of time-out issues. This additional method of performing PegaUnit testing does not impact users who want to continue using their current testing workflow. 

For more information about setting up your environment and making API calls with Deployment Manager, see the Documentation/readme-for-swagger.md file in the DeploymentManager04_08_0x.zip file, found in the Deployment Manager download package.