Development Testing Platform

This release of DTP provides enhancements in several areas with a continued focus on managing the risk introduced due to changes in the code base:

• Addition of Static Analysis results in the Change Explorer
• Support for rule customization in the Test Configuration interface (i.e., Rule Maps)
• Enhancements to management of results and coverage data for different testing techniques
• Usability enhancements to DTP dashboards and administration interface
• Combined PIE and Policy Center into a single DTP Enterprise Pack for scalable deployment intelligent analytics.
• Introduction of new REST APIs for managing Filters and defining Resource Groups

Understanding the Context of Changes with the Change Explorer

The Change Explorer view (introduced in 5.3.1) enables developers to quickly review changes in the code base directly in DTP and independent of the source control system. In contrast to traditional peer-review systems, the Change Explorer provides greater insights about the evolution of your code by using additional data aggregated by DTP to provide context around change. The Change Explorer now overlays static analysis violations so you can quickly see violations in the context of the code changes. This enables you to pinpoint the introduction of new violations, identify when violations were fixed, or verify that there has been no change with regard to static analysis violations violations.

Flexible Rule Customization

Deploying static analysis to achieve compliance with internal or industry specific standards (e.g. MISRA C 2012) often requires reported violations to be mapped and categorized according to the appropriate standard. Rule maps enable you to change the properties of static analysis rules executed by DTP Engines, such as severity and category, and associate them with test configurations. The Test Configurations interface has been extended to support multiple rule maps, which provide a simple way to implement policies that are important to your organization. Additionally, the rule map configuration interface has been enhanced to make customizing static analysis reporting more intuitive. See Rule Maps for details.

Managing and Merging Test Results and Coverage

Merging and correlating coverage and test data across testing techniques is a key DTP capability. Merged correlated coverage provides a complete view of testing coverage, regardless of how the test was performed.

DTP uses the concept of "coverage images" to identify the coverage data associated with a test run. Coverage images are linked to a filter so that the coverage data can be viewed in a dashboard. DTP 5.3.2 enables you to associate multiple coverage images with a filter, giving greater flexibility to define the aggregation and segmentation of coverage data in different ways. For example, you can associate coverage from unit, functional, and regression tests with separate images within a filter and view the breakdown of the coverage in a single widget. See Associating Coverage Images with Filters for details.

In addition to supporting multiple coverage images, DTP include more granular test result categorization capabilities. The Test Explorer and each of the Test widgets can now differentiate unit, function, manual, and other testing types, as well as aggregate them into a single data set.

DTP Dashboard and Administration Enhancements

• Updated layout for the “MISRA C 2012” dashboard template
• New ‘MISRA Compliance Reports’ available in the Parasoft Marketplace as part of the MISRA C 2012 qualification kit.
• DTP Dashboard URLs have been updated to enable easier sharing and reuse--allowing you to set a filter selection directly with s query string (e.g., http://<dtp_server>/grs/dtp/dashboards/1006?filterId=78).
• The Report Center Administration interface has a new interface for managing and creating filters.

DTP Enterprise Pack (formerly PIE + Policy Center)*

DTP Enterprise Pack combines the Process Intelligence Engine (PIE), Policy Center, and custom DTP Workflows into a single framework. At the core of the Enterprise Pack is the Extension Designer (formerly PIE Slice Designer)), which provides a consolidated interface for creating and managing PIE Slices, DTP Workflows, and Policy Center Practices.

See DTP Enterprise Pack for details.

SDLC Analytics with Extension Designer

Extension Designer provides an interface for creating and managing standalone snippets of data processing logic, called “workflows” or “slices”, that provide visibility into potential problem areas within the code, as well as potential problematic processes. 

Extension Designer 5.3.2 leverages the latest Development Testing Platform APIs, as well as APIs from third-party systems (e.g., JIRA), to query data for processing and generate reports.

This release also features a consolidated interface for Enterprise Pack extensions (PIE Slices, DTP Workflows, and Policy Center practices) and simpler integration with Policy Center and DTP.

See Extension Designer for additional information.

New and Updated Extensions

This release includes updates to the following artifacts:

PIE Slices

• Change Based Testing: Enables organizations to efficiently reduce risk by focusing on the tests that need to be re-executed due to changes in the code base, rather than the whole test suite.
• Risky Code Changes: When code changes it represents risk, this slice analyzes the changes in the code by looking at how maintainable the code is versus how well it is tested. The slice then assigns a risk level and shows the end-user how much "quality debt" exists.
• Modified Coverage: Getting 100% coverage on the entire code base is impossible when you have a large legacy code base. But it is the new or modified code that represents the risk. By focusing on the changing code, this slice enables you to efficiently eliminate the risk associated with change.
• Test Stability Index: Test stability is an ongoing issue for many organizations. Developers and tester know that unstable tests are going to fail from time to time, so they are ignored. But when there are thousands of tests, determining a failure associated with a legitimate problem is difficult. This slice helps remove the noise by scoring each test to categorize it’s stability. This allows teams to focus in two ways:

• 1. Fix the "real failures" now, because this usually indicates you have an immediate problem/regression.
  2. Quantify which tests need to be stabilized.

• Key Performance Indicator: The volume of static analysis violations is not always the best indicator of team performance. The KPI slice enables you to define multiple custom profiles that weight static analysis rules differently and calculate an overall score for that KPI.

DTP Workflows

• Traceability Report: Provides a customizable Test Traceability widget and Requirement Traceability widget. Each widget drills down into interactive reports that help you understand how well requirements are being implemented and tested.
• Static Analysis Violation Reporter for Atlassian JIRA: Provides an example of how to use the Atlassian JIRA importer to create and manage JIRA bugs and/or tasks for problems (e.g., static analysis violations or unit test failures) found during test and analysis.

• Test Failures by Build: Creates a widget that lists DTP build IDs with dynamic analysis test failures.
• DTP Build Review Workflow: Provides an example of how to automate the creation of Change Reviews (see Change Explorer for more details), as well as specify a user who will receive automated email notifications about the reviews created.

• Export DTP Explorer Data to CSV: This workflow accepts any parameter URL from DTP's Test Explorer and Violations Explorer and generate a CSV output.
• DTP File Based Licensing Report: If you are using a file-based DTP license, this workflow provides detailed information about your Parasoft DTP license consumption/usage.

Policy Center Practices

• Code Coverage: Defines expectations around code coverage and ensures that an acceptable level of coverage is achieved.
• Defects for JIRA: Defines expectations around the number of Bugs present in a JIRA project to ensure that large numbers of bugs are not left unattended.
• Metrics: Allows you to monitor various code metric values by defining thresholds and aggregators.
• Regression Test: Ensures that the number of acceptable regression test failures is within the specified threshold for the project.
• Static Analysis: Ensures that static analysis violations that are considered high severity are remediated within an acceptable period of time.

See Extensions for DTP Enterprise Pack for additional information.

Additional Updates for Enterprise Pack

• Node Changes: See Migrating PIE Slices to Extension Designer for information about the Extension Designer nodes changed in this update.
• Creating Custom Widgets for DTP: The ready-to-deploy custom widgets shipped with PIE Slice Designer 1.3.x have been replaced in Extension Designer 5.3.2 with building blocks for creating your own custom widgets. See Creating Custom DTP Widgets Using Extension Designer for additional information.
• Policy Center Practice deployment is integrated with Extension Designer, providing a single framework to manage all DTP extensions (Policy Center Practices, DTP Workflows, and PIE Slices).
• Consolidated configuration UI for Policy Center and Extension Designer--no need to edit separate properties file to setup Policy Center
• Unified startup script for the embedded database, Policy Center, and Extension Designer.
• Extension Designer is now integrated into the common DTP UI framework, enabling easy access to the application from the DTP settings menu.
• Extension Designer now allows you to manage multiple instances of “services” (see Important Concepts and Terminology).

• New Event Broker to manage more robust events with multiple service instances. 

• Enhanced Artifact Manager (see Downloading and Installing Artifacts). Installing an artifact automatically runs the  install-addon command when DTP is installed on the same machine as the same user.
• New Endpoint, Components, Parameters node allow flows to provide custom widget and reports directly to DTP without copying files to DTP. 
• Upgraded Infrastructure: 
  • Updated Node.js to 6.10.0
  • Updated MongoDB to 3.4.2
  • Updated Node-Red to 0.16.2

Updates to the REST API

The following updates were made to the REST API (see the changlog for details):

• grs/api/v1.4/filters: A new set of APIs for creating and managing DTP filters.
• grs/api/v1.4/filters/{id}/resourceGroups (BETA): New APIs for configuring resource groups on a filter. A resource group is a collection of resources (i.e. files and/or folders) defined by a set of one or more ANT file patterns. Resource groups are introduced in beta for 5.3.2 and will be GA in 5.3.3 with new widgets for static analysis results and enhancements to the Violations Explorer.

Resolved Issues

*  An Enterprise license is required.