Release Date EU/US: 2022/03/16
Release Date AU: 2022/03/17

Performance Improvements 

This release features performance and scale improvements in our continuous efforts to align usability and capability in Jama Connect with our customers' growing adoption and usage. 

Experience significant improvements when you:

• Open an existing review in Review Center -- while users will experience appreciable improvements in reviews of any size, larger reviews of 250+ items will see remarkable improvements in load times  
  
  
• Batch update or batch workflow transition multiple items
  
  
• Enable workflow at the organization or project level

Introducing the Categories Feature

We are excited to introduce the first iteration of the cross-project feature Categories. Use the Categories feature to organize and view items based on classifications like configurations, allocations, releases, or features. This feature offers a view into how items and components can build a final product. 

Use the Categories Feature To:

• Allocate requirements to a hierarchy of items in a system of systems context where the items might exist in multiple projects
  
  
• Manage releases for multiple items that live in multiple projects
  
  
• Identify variants of products
  
  
• Organize and view items in a cross-project hierarchy

The Categories Feature is Available in These Areas of Jama Connect:

• Admin
  
  
• Single Item View, List View, and Reading View
  
  
• Categories tab, when enabled, in the Explorer Tree
  
  
• Labs API:
  • Associate categories with an item
  • Retrieve categories that are associated with an item

In Future Releases, Categories Will Be Supported in These Features: 

• Trace View
  
  
• Filters
  
  
• Exports
  • Word/PDF
• Velocity reports
  
  
• Baselines
  
  
• Review Center
  
  
• Item version history
  
  
• Item activity
  
  
• Project activity stream
  
  
• Imports

Enabling the Categories Option

The Categories option is disabled by default. The organization admin must enable it for the option to appear in Jama Connect and be available for users.

When enabled, users with read/write permissions can interact with:

 

1. Categories tab in the Explorer Tree
2. Categories table in Single Item View
3. Manage categories button in Single Item View, Reading View, and List View 

When enabled, organization admins can interact with: 

  

1. Categories admin tree

2. Selected category path option 

3. Variations of selected category option
 

Roles for the Categories Feature  

Your role determines which tasks you can perform when you use the Categories feature. 

Categories in List View, Reading View, and Coverage Explorer 

List View

 

Reading View 

 

Coverage Explorer

 

Redesigned Relationship Settings 

This release introduces a new design, which now clearly indicates the direction of the relationship created between two items. 

@mention Feature in Review Comments

In a review, you can now use the @mention feature to direct comments to a specific reviewer. This is useful when you have several reviewers and need to direct a question to a specific subject matter expert.

• Only users participating in the review appear in the list of possible reviewers who can be tagged with @mention
  
  
• Anyone participating in the review can use the @mention feature to tag other participants
  
  
• Comments that include @mention are highlighted by color.
  • Light yellow = comment for you.
  • Light blue = comment for another reviewer. 

To Use the @mention Feature:

1. In a review, select the comment icon and type @ followed by the name of the reviewer. 

2. Type your message, then click Comment.

3. (Optional) To display only items where you are mentioned, select Filters > My mentions. 

Do you have feedback on the @mention feature? Join our Community where you can comment on this Ideation card.
  

Admin-Configurable Infotips for Field Labels and Pick List Values

Admins can now configure infotips for field labels and pick list values.

Because field labels and pick list values are concise by design, infotips can provide clarity on their meaning. This can reduce time to train new users and time spent by occasional users looking at help docs and wiki pages. It also reduces the risk of users misinterpreting field labels and pick list values.  

Infotips:

• Are an optional configuration — Off by default when no text is present in the infotip; on automatically when text is present.
  
  
• Can be configured by organization admins for both field labels (while configuring fields in item types) and pick list values (while configuring values in pick lists).
  
  
• Are visible to any user with project access when they hover their mouse over a field label or pick list value, or when expanding a pick list selector.

  

Extended Capability for Calculated Fields for Risk Scoring

Admins can now use a calculated field as input to another calculated field within the same item (not across related items).

When you are configuring a calculate field, additional calculated fields only appear as an input option if they haven't already been used in any other calculations. Once a calculated field is used in another calculated field, it is automatically filtered out of future calculated input options. 

For example:

If field 3 = [field 1 * field 2], then field 5 can = [field 3 * field 4], so long as field 4 is not also a calculated field.

Additionally:

If field 5 = [field 3 * field 4] then field 7 can't = [field 3 * field 6] because field 3 was already used in another calculated field and won't show up as a calculation input option while you configure field 7. 

This feature is generically available for all calculated fields, but the intention is to better support our customers using Jama Connect for risk scoring activities. Having the ability to extend calculations means likelihood and probability scoring calculations can function as an input into overall risk and severity scoring calculations. 

In the future we will expand our support for formatted and logic-based results for calculated fields, adding methods to automate translation of risk scoring for end user. Watch for more improvements in future releases.
 

Remove and Recover Items From a Review 

With this release, review moderators can remove and recover items from active reviews without altering the project source.  

• When you pair these actions with the Approval workflow, those items remain in their original state and aren't updated when the review is finalized. 
  
  
• When an item is removed from the review and the review is republished, the item in the corresponding baseline is also removed. 

When items are removed, you can't:

• Access Single Item View from the review
  
  
• Approve, reject, or add comments
  
  
• Edit the item 

To Remove Items From a Review: 

1. In the review, select the triangle drop-down menu next to the items you want to remove, then select Remove.

 The "Tagged for removal label" appears.  

2. Publish a new revision to remove the items from the review.

A label appears with the version the item was removed in. 

To Recover Items in a Review: 

1. In the review, select Recover to recover the item you removed. The "Tagged for recovery" label appears.
   
   
2. Click Publish new revision to recover the item. 

New Report Role for Admins

For self-hosted customers, this release introduces a new report administrator role. Users who are assigned this role can configure reports from the Reports page in the Admin area of Jama Connect.

Note: Users must be a project administrator to modify project-specific reports on this page.

Report administrators can also share uploaded report templates with particular projects or the whole organization from here: Export > View All Templates > Upload a Template.

To assign the report administrator role to a user or group, select Report from the list of administrator options in the Edit permissions window. 

 

New Performance and Usability Guidance 

With this release, several new guidance messages have been added throughout Jama Connect. These messages are informational only and won't prevent you from completing the intended action. Additional messages will be added in a future release of Jama Connect. 

These messages are designed to:

• Notify you when an action might have an unintended performance or usability impact
  
  
• Provide insights into how the application can be used more efficiently

These messages now appear when you:

• Create a review with more than 500 items
  
  
• Send a review to more than 30 recipients
  
  
• Copy a project with more than 10,000 items
  
  
• Create a baseline with more than 1,000 items
  
  
• Delete more than 500 items at a time
  
  
• Send a notification to a large group of recipients
  
  

Updates From Customer Feedback 

New Option for Exporting Velocity Reports to Excel

As a root user, you can configure settings that allow users to export a Velocity report to Excel in XLSX format.

Users can now export directly to Excel rather than using the legacy format. 

  

• In some cases, custom reports written in support of XLS format (legacy), might require minor formatting corrections.
  
  
• This new option is available only for Velocity reports; for other report types, the XLS format (legacy) option is still available. 
  
  
• This option is not enabled by default. You must manually configure this option for each report. 

New Community Report: "Baseline Diff One Column" Report

This release adds a new Visual Comparison Report. You can use a visually enhanced version of the Baseline Comparison Report to measure progress in your requirements from baseline to baseline. Similar to a Jama Connect version comparison view, you can configure, run, and export this new report.

You can also analyze requirement changes by looking for these indicators: 

• Additions to text — Green text with green dotted underline
  
  
• Deletions to text — Red text with red highlight
  
  
• Deleted images — Border highlighted in red
  
  
• Resized Images — Dotted-line border highlighted in blue
  
  
• New images — Border highlighted in green
  
  
• Changes to relationships — Appear the same as the original Baseline Compare report 

  

You will be able to access the reports to install from here: Baseline to Baseline Diff Community Reports GitHub repo

Do you have feedback? Join our Community where you can comment on this Idea card in our Customer Ideation Community.

New Quick-Add Option

You Can Now Access the Quick-Add Option From a Subset of Items: 

• From Single Item View, select Sub-item widget > Arrow icon > Quick add

  

"Restore Defaults" Button Now Available in List View and in Reading View

You can now quickly reset your project List View and Reading View to the original administrator defaults in the Show/hide fields configuration panel. Enabled only for lists with single item types.  

  

Do you have feedback on this "Restore defaults" button? Join the conversation in this Jama Community Ideation card.

Report Type Identifier Added to Report Detail View

Report type is revealed in a newly added Report Detail area in the Run Reports module. 

Test Center Customization Options

For the Test Run Item Type, You Can Now Use Editor Templates in Custom Rich Text Fields:

• Organization admins can configure the default Editor Templates for the Test Run item type in the Admin panel
  
  
• Templates can be edited in the Test Execution window
  
  
• To export the Editor Template information for a Test Run item: From Single Item View, select Export > View all templates > All Item Details, then click Run

Additional Updates

• The Diagram Editor was upgraded to enhance usability and provide further support for character diagram rendering, including for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. 
  
  
• With this release, exporting using Velocity PDFs now supports additional languages. Prior to this release, if users authored content in Jama Connect in Japanese, Chinese, and/or Korean, it was not exportable to Velocity PDF.
  • The following languages are now verified as supported: Chinese, Albanian, Polish, Hindi, Portuguese, Punjabi, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Russian, Igbo, Serbian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Thai, Vietnamese, Georgian, Marathi, Greek, and Norwegian.

       *Velocity PDF exports cannot translate languages.

Usability Improvements

• Updates to the Select items to baseline window, the Duplicate projects window, and the List View last saved information in the main header to make the data more consistent with current Jama Connect UI standards.

• New slide-over panels are now enabled by default system-wide. Updated slide-over panels include Baselines item preview, Trace view item preview, Admin activity history, Attachments preview, and Links preview. Enhancements include a more consistent UI, all slide-overs are now resizable, and linked items in other projects now open in a new browser tab.

• The Export drop-down menu and window references "Export options" to be more accurate when referencing export types. Test runs and the Items with attachments widget now have updated UI and language on their Export drop-down menus. 

 

• The inactive Collapse button has been removed from the tree’s temporary preview panel display.
  
  

 

• Category type, project count, and item count have been added to the Selected category path header in the organization admin area of Jama Connect.

• The Export drop-down menu has a new design and language pattern.

• The Add drop-down menu now includes a plus icon. 

 

• In List View or Reading View, the text for the "number of selected items" has been updated. 

 

• Tooltips now appear when you expand and collapse the Explorer Tree. 

 

• Item type names with more than 30 characters are now shortened to avoid text wrapping in the header. 

• The Details option is now displayed at the top of the organization admin navigation panel.
  
  

 

• In List View, Reading View, and Single Item View, labels on the action buttons now display the icon only (depending on the size of your screen).
  
  

 

• The Admin panel is now resizable.
  
  

Updates to the Admin Workflow

• A warning message now appears when you enable or disable the workflow for your organization.

 

• A warning message now appears when a project manager enables or disables the project workflow override option for a project.
  
  

 

• Drop-down menus are now searchable.
  
  

• Workflow page layout has been updated for a better user experience. 

Additional Usability Improvements

• Comments no longer allow "blank spaces only" in Reviews, Stream, and Single Item View comment streams.
  
  
• You can now select a location with reused items and hover over an item with multiple permission restrictions.
  
  
• You can now expand images in a review. 
  
  
• In Reading View, certain fonts are no longer reduced in size. 
  
  
• When a user with read-only permissions selects an item from List View or Reading View, they no longer see the Reuse button. 
  
  
• When you reopen a saved and released Trace View, previously selected items are now saved. 

Notes for System Administrators

For MySQL Customers Only

Before upgrading Jama Connect, MySQL must be upgraded to version 8 to optimize performance. For more information, see "Performance Improvements" in these release notes. Known issues in earlier versions of MySQL with Jama Connect 8.71.1 might produce significant issues.      

Coming Soon - New Replicated KOTS-Based Tooling

Our partner Replicated is a leader in deploying cloud-ready infrastructure into self-hosted environments, including Airgap and customer-managed clouds. In keeping pace with best practices in tooling, Replicated has developed KOTS, which retains the simple installation, monitoring and updating options provided in previous Replicated versions, but updated to leverage KOTS. KOTS is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

As part of their Jama Connect 8.71.1 upgrade, early-adopter customers will transition to KOTS. This functionality will be available to all self-hosted customers with the Jama Connect 8.74 release. More information will be available as we approach the June 2022 target release date for Jama Connect 8.74.

Incremental Step Upgrade and New Database Schemas

If You Haven't Yet Upgraded to Jama Connect 8.62.x or Later

• Before you install or upgrade to Jama Connect 8.71.1, you must first create two new database schemas to support the new options for SAML and OAuth authentication introduced in Jama Connect 8.62.0 and revised in Jama Connect 8.62.3. 
  
  
• For the upgrade to succeed, organizations using Microsoft SQL Server must enter database users in Replicated. Without these entries, the installation or upgrade will fail. 

For more information, see Incremental Step Upgrade and Jama Connect 8.62.3 Release Notes.

Supported Software

For this current release (and for all self-hosted releases), we encourage system administrators to review the Supported Software information on the Jama Software User Community before upgrading.  

Container Artifacts

We regression-tested using Replicated 2.53.2 and recommend the use of the following script for the initial installation of Jama Connect. This will install Replicated 2.53.2: 
 

curl -sSL "https://get.replicated.com/docker?replicated_tag=2.53.2&replicated_ui_tag=2.53.2&replicated_operator_tag=2.53.2" | sudo bash -s no-auto

Airgap Environments

Airgap customers can download the required version of Replicated via https://s3.amazonaws.com/replicated-airgap-work/stable/replicated-2.53.2%2B2.53.2%2B2.53.2.tar.gz before installing the 8.71.1 Airgap file available in your portal. 

Resolved Issues

Known Issues