I've excited to announce a significant amount of progress in product development since our last May written update. This email documents our first full release demonstrating Grouping, Activity Feeds, and the Review Workflow, alongside bugfixes and performance improvements. Please read on for details!
If you’d like detailed release notes since the last deployment pushed out on July 6, please scroll down to the Release Notes section.
Please forward to interested folks, and be sure to reach out to us directly on how we can make engineering safer and easier for you!
-Steve
Approvals are now specifically requested on entire groups of items, replacing the earlier functionality of a simple per-user toggle in the system editor. Users needing a review by their peers will navigate to a group in the System Editor and choose “Send for review”. There this user will select which individuals are needed to approve an item. Those requested users will then be informed of their requested feedback next time they log into Verve.
We’ve implemented a dedicated approval pane where users will provide their feedback when an approval is requested. To know they have an approval, users will see a red indicator on top of the Review option on the left navigation pane. Users will then be guided to
Furthermore, if an item is already approved and a user tries to edit it in the System Editor, then that user is warned that their action will invalidate the previous approvals, automatically indicating to the reviewers that their approval has been revoked.
On login, users are taken to the Home page, which provides a list of activities that have recently occurred on this project, including comments, edits, and approvals. The activity feed tracks all actions that occur to a Requirement, Verification Event, or other Item type. See from one spot who last approved, reviewed, or edited an item, or provided a comment for feedback.
The NASA-style verification matrix dashboard lets you group all verification activities into the four standard types: Inspection, Test, Simulation, and Analysis.
Groups are how individual teams work on subcomponents and sets of requirements, verification events, and other system drivers. We now support organizing any single group in a document-style tree structure for better organization, which is a change from only offering a flat list sorted by type (a flat list sorted by type is still available). We’ve also improved our MSWord exporter to export a MSWord version of any chosen group (the previous functionality of the Default View of all items is still available).
For our Python API, we’ve drastically streamlined the login flow. Simply call `verve.config.header.login()` at the start of your script and you’ll see your browser open a page to access the login page. This replaces API tokens, and is more secure since this sets a JWT and will auto-negotiate a new one whenever the JWT expires or prompts for a re-login.
For our Excel interface, we now clearly indicate the approval status of any atomic used, as well as indicate if the remote atomic has been updated since it was last used and cached within the Excel file.
Lastly, we’ve made a number of improvements in the core product that don’t fit into any specific category. Deep linking to items and screens within the product is now supported, meaning you can share a link to an Item in the System Editor, or to the Verification Matrix, or to other locations. This also includes additional context needed to fix a bug where the desired item’s project was not properly loaded when using a URL deeplink. We also improved Firefox support by fixing a number of bugs specific to that rendering engine, and have improved performance by refactoring our frontend’s API controller, improving some connection pooling settings on the backend, and refactored the Item Editor component.
For our current customers, we have a number of specific changes to announce since the last update pushed to their deployments. These are deployed on all Cloud instances, and are available in our container repository for our Self Hosted customers.
Approvals
Graph Editor
Bugfixes and Technical Debt