Gemini 4.0 has been released and is now available for download!
For those of you who want to see it now, we have already rolled it out on our live Gemini instance:http://gemini.countersoft.com
Testing, Testing, Testing
This is the headline item in v4 and the #1 requested feature in recent times. Testing capability is now part of Gemini alongside your issues, tickets, bugs and requirements. We have taken a nimble, lite-touch approach to the definition and subsequent management of Testing within Gemini. We’ll let the screenshot speak for itself:
How does Gemini approach Testing?
Everything is organized around folders – you decide how you need to organize your testing team and their activities. Inside folders the Test Plans. A Test Plan describes a set of testing cycle and contain Test Cases. Each Test Case represents a discrete test activity and contains the steps that need to be performed in order to either PASS or FAIL the test case. Finally Test Runs represent what was tested, by whom, when and the final result of the testing cycle.
You control which fields are displayed for Test Plans, Cases, and Runs by building up the screens using the re-vamped Custom Fields support. Your testing UI, your way.
The bottom line is that you don’t need to read the manual to figure out how to manage you testing.
Custom Fields Re-vamp
Custom Fields within Gemini have been re-vamped and provide huge possibilities for you to define and use new Custom Fields to capture data. These apply to either Issues or Tests: re-use all the way.
Several new types of Custom Fields have been introduced: Component Picker, User Picker, Version Picker, Rich Text, Attachment and Numeric only input.
Custom fields can now be inline edited! Point, click, update, making for a super easy way to update your custom attributes.
You can now position your custom fields when viewing an issue including to the left alongside regular issue attributes. Sorting and Filtering enhancements to Custom Fields include date and numeric ranges, multiple custom field filtering.
Issue/Item Hierarchy
Another common request was support for full item hierarchy: this is now supported and workflow transition is automatically enforced.
Rinse and Repeat: It’s Recurrence
Another top request (you see the theme here? We listen!), was recurrence and the ability for an item to be repeated at user-defined intervals.
Optional or Required
Issue descriptions can now be marked as optional and have a default value allowing for end users to just specify a Title. You can now mark a Custom Field as required thus forcing end users to provide a value.
Even Faster
Further improvements to performance under heavy load have been made including the introduction of scenario-specific tuning options.
Email Alert Improvements
Users have even more control over when and which communications they receive from Gemini.
Project Patterns Integration
Sharing is best practice. No doubt. So Gemini can now pull down best practice task lists from ProjectPatterns.org and put them straight into your project plan. You can choose to package and share your very own best practice so that other people around the world may benefit.
Finally, New UI and Terminology
We have re-organized the UI to make your projects flow even better by introducing action panes, tabbed interface and other small yet subtle changes that improve user experience.
Keeping in line with our philosophy for Gemini as a project platform for different projects and varied participants, we have shifted the terminology used within Gemini. So an Issue is now labeled as an Item. But worry not as you can customize all words and can even go “old school” back to our previous terminology.