Hot on the heels of our announcement that RAD Studio 12.1 is now available we have some more good news; the new Quality Portal is now live and ready for you to use!
Table of Contents
What Is The Embarcadero Quality Portal?
The Quality Portal, usually more simply referred to as QP, is a dedicated web site that allows our user community to enter “request tickets”. These tickets take a couple of forms: bug reports, suggestions, and change requests. It’s a reality that all software contains bugs, or unintended behavior, which need the software’s developers to test, verify, and fix (if possible) or mitigate if it’s not possible to fix.
Alongside this our users have a very personal relationship with the development tools we create and when people think something could work differently to make their experience better, or they simply have a great idea that would benefit others then we encourage them to use the QP to share those ideas with us too. A great idea is Great Idea and where we can we try to incorporate not just fixes but also those suggestions which are practical enough and attainable within our resources. We never forget that RAD Studio is a part of your daily working life and anything we can do to make that better is a win for you but also a win for us.
Where Can I Find The New Embarcadero Quality Portal (QP)?
The new Quality Portal site is at https://qp.embarcadero.com The first time you enter the URL, you’ll be redirected to the login/sign up page.
How Do I Sign Up For The New Embarcadero Quality Portal?
If you enter a new email address, you’ll have a request to sign up with a password:
When you click on the “next” button (it may ask “sign up with a password” – say yes to that). The system generates an email to the address you entered, with a signup link:
You should receive an email similar to this one:
Following the link you get to a page where you can enter your full name and a password.
Note: There is an alternative signup process. We can specifically invite you to join the portal, in which case you don’t need to do the initial steps – you just follow the link in the invitation email we send to you.
How Do I Use The New Embarcadero Quality Portal (QP)?
Please ignore the “search for help resources” which is currently not active.
In the new Embarcadero Quality Portal (QP) homepage you have links to make a new feature request, report a bug, or report a documentation issue. In the top right corner, you also have a “Requests” link to browse existing requests you – or other Embarcadero customers – have made in the past. There is also a personal image link with sub options to edit your account information and logout.
The account information includes the display name, a link to change your password, your language and timezone preferences.
How Do I Create A Ticket On The New Embarcadero Quality Portal (QP)?
The process for creating tickets for any of the different types is similar. Below is the complete form (at low resolution) for reporting bugs:
The Summary Section
A title explaining the issue in short. Try to be specific, indicating the feature, function, class, UI element affected by the bug. A good summary helps us tracking the issue.
The Components Section
Indicates which area of the product is affected. You can select more than one, in case of doubts or in case of an issue across product areas. This is a list of available options, which is slightly different from the one we have been using on the other old portal:
- 3rd Party
- CompilerC++
- CompilerDelphi
- Data
- Debugger
- Demos
- FireMonkey
- Help and Doc
- IDE
- Install
- Linker
- RTLC++
- RTLDelphi
- Translation
- VCL
Affects Versions
Here you should indicate the version of the product affected by the problem. The list includes all the releases since 10.1 Berlin. Also in this case, you can select more than one version.
Build No
Here you should enter the build number of the version you are using (this is not required, but it can help make sure of the affected version, and it’s also relevant in case of versions with multiple public builds).
Edition
Indicates if you are using a Professional, Enterprise or Community edition of the product. You can select All in case you think the issue doesn’t depend on a specific edition
Language Version
This allows you specify if you are using the English version of the product or a localized one, for example, German.
Platform
This is another multiple selection field, in which you can let us know on which operating system you are seeing the issue. It’s important for mobile apps or apps that are specific to one platform, although we recommend also explaining that in the description.
Description
This is the main field for a long and detailed description of the issue. The field allows basic formatting, the inclusion of links and code snippets. For images, you can use the Attachments area below. If you paste an image while editing, the form will automatically add it as an attachment. Note that in the previous version of QP you could include images in the description. Atlassian do not allow images in the description in this version of their portal software. Screenshots are pretty important so please do add them as attachments after you have entered the initial bug report’s description.
Attachment
Allows you to include multiple attachments with images, code projects and files which illustrate an issue or suggestion, short videos, and similar content.
Share With
In case your account has been configured (by the site admins) to allow sharing, this is enabled by default. It means that other users with the same configuration can read and comment on your reports. This was the only option in the old Quality Portal. In case your code or screenshot includes information you don’t want to share with other Embarcadero customers, you can select “No one” in this field. Of course, you are still sharing the information with Embarcadero and its Quality Assurance team.
The other two forms, for Feature Requests and Documentation Bugs, have a subset of the same fields.
How Do I Browse Existing Tickets On The New Embarcadero Quality Portal (QP)?
Once you have reported a ticket, you can go back and browse all of your reports, including issues in reported state, issues that have been validated internally and now in the open state, and issues that have been addressed and resolved.
Depending on the account configuration, you can also browse reports by other Embarcadero customers. You can also add other customers to your reports or be added by others on their reports.
The toolbar at the top of the page allows filtering by status, by creator and by request type. Notice that some of the filters are already set initially, so that as you open this page you don’t generally see all of the available tickets.
If in the Status field you clear all selections, this is equivalent to disable filtering and seeing all reports. Same for the request type, where no selection means all request types. For the creator filter, instead, there is a specific “All” option.
How Do I Comment On Existing Tickets In The New Embarcadero Quality Portal (QP)?
Once you have selected a ticket you have reported or that someone else has reported, you can add comments. Comments also include attachments (in the comment itself).
Notice that even if you reported the ticket, you cannot edit the original title or description, and you cannot change its status. In case you see an incorrect title, leave a comment and someone at Embarcadero can follow up and change it.
The New Embarcadero Quality Portal (QP) – FAQ
- If the old QP is now read-only, will I still be able to comment on the reports in there?
- Yes. You will not be able to create new issues though. New issues and requests need to be raised in the New Embarcadero Quality Portal (QP).
- Will I be able to see the old QP issues on the new Quality Portal?
- No. The systems are synchronized internally and we refer to both but there is no current way of surfacing a link between the old and new systems.
- I liked the old QP, why did you change?
- Atlassian, our service provider for the issue tracking software, deprecated and retired some of their systems. This new portal is based on the latest offering they have for this kind of customer ticketing system.
- Is the new QP running on the old servers? How reliable is it going to be?
- This new Quality Portal (QP) uses cloud-based hosting from Atlassian. It should be robust and early usage seems to indicate it’s pretty fast too.
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That inability to alter the title would have been my first question.
But how does one navigate a subset of issues, many times in the past a search would return a subset and the ability to navigate those was key?
Yes, I am not sure why the title is restricted like that but unfortunately we’re currently stuck with that behavior.
With regard to searching, once you’ve added a report for the first time you can search on items and use the search capability to narrow things down. I am planning on writing a follow-up article soon to try and provide some tips on searching and similar items of interest. The truth be told it’s a new system to me too and I’m still getting to grips with how best to use it. There are some advantages (speed and reliability being not the least of these) but it’s quite different to what we’ve all been used to and it’s going to be a while before we work out some ‘power user’ tricks to get to things with optimal efficiency.
Great to have the new system up and running.
It seems like the new system generally has fewer “advanced” features. For example, you can no longer edit your comments or the fields of your own issue and you can no longer vote on issues.
Apparently, you can sort on some columns by clicking the column header, but what is the default sort order? It may be “last updated” or something, but since such a column doesn’t exist, it is unclear how you get the default order back after you have sorted on some other column.
Similarly, the available filtering options are rather limited.
It does feel very “modern”, though. I suppose the trend is that UIs are becoming simpler (and therefore less powerful).
But these annoyances are fairly small, and I am sure we’ll get used to the new system.
“This is a list of available options” – maybe add a separate option for the QP itself, then can pass on user feedback to atlassian I guess and/or customize stuff to address user concerns (to the extend that you can)
…speaking of atlassian, have to be careful to avoid mispellings (there are some related malicious sites) of their name if one types the url directly (maybe for visitors to the homepage of the portal should have some qp.embarcadero.com or embarcadero.com/qp redirect to and publish that redirector in your communication [permanently masking the atlassian url might be even better, but if atlassian doesn’t support custom dns it might be tricky to correctly implement throughout])
Excellent point George. Thanks. (I have only just managed to train my brain to spell Atlassian properly without looking it up!)
Question: What happens to my existing and open tickets in the old system? Did Embarcadero migrate them to the new system or do we have to migrate them manually to the new system?
No you do not need to migrate them. They still exist on the old QP and you can comment on them. They are synced to an internal Jira instance and always have been. There is not need (and indeed it’s undesirable) to duplicate the old tickets on the new system. This would result in two tickets on our internal system – one for the old QP ticket and one for the new QP ticket. It will not increase your chances of a particular issue getting resolved, and actually, if done often enough by sufficient people, might result in slowing us down responding since we’d have an extra amount of work to do trying to deal with all the duplicates.
Don’t worry – the old tickets are still there and will get looked at!
After registering to the new portal without apparent error, everything is empty. I can’t see neither the bug I have already filed in the old system, nor any bug at all. It’s just empty. Is that a correct behaviour ?
The old and new systems are completely independent of each other. To view issues you filed on the old system you need to go to the old QP and look. Sorry, we can’t make them merge at the moment (and might not ever do that).
Although the old QP is discussed in this post’s FAQ, the following remarks should be considered:
1. Should old QP issues be duplicated in the new QP, with reference to the old QP ?
2. If not, how to search efficiently for an issue ? searching first in the old QP and, if nothing found, searching in the new QP ?
3. How to guarantee that old QP issues are still being actively worked by the Embarcadero team ?
4. Any plans to merge, eventually, these two old and new QP databases ?
Good and important questions.
The mails from [email protected] are blacklisted by HOSTKARMA DNS. That’s why login is not possible for me. After I tryed the first login I no more can repeat this procedure (I have not received the signing mail because the mail is blacklisted). What now?
Hi Andreas, we have no control over Hostkarma or the Atlassian.net domains/listing. What I can tell you is that lots (several hundred) of other people have been able to successfully register and use the system. I am assuming that the blacklisting is an error by Hostkarma since Atlassian is a very widely known company with a significant user base numbering in the many hundreds of thousands worldwide.
Things you could try:
1. Register on the system using a different email address and/or provider.
2. Or approach Hostkarma and ask for technical support from them.
Looking through this problem I notice that someone else has already reported this with Atlassian/Jira directly. Atlassian have reached out to Hostkarma to try and resolve the issue between themselves. See this thread: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Jira-email-servers-are-blacklisted-on-hostkarma-junkemailfilter/qaq-p/2337504
Right now, there’s nothing we (Embarcadero) can do apart from report it to Atlassian.
Hello,
why don’t I see anything in the new QP, if I want to see all the entries, do I need to apply for some authorizations?
See the above comments. You will be able to see other tickets but this process is not always immediately available after you register for the first time.
Unfortunately we can’t browse requests from other users. This was useful to check if an issue was already reported to avoid duplicates and to follow other users requests that were relevant for me.
Once you have registered you will get added to a virtual user group for Embarcadero customers. This will then allow you to see other people’s non-private issues and tickets. This process is currently partially manual and carried out in batches so it’s not immediate. This process is a work-around for the default behavior of the Atlassian tool which doesn’t normally allow this kind of activity.