Platform Academy 9/25 | What's new in Zurich - Upgrades and ATF

[Oluyinkaoginni]

 

A Centralized, Guided Upgrade Process

Zurich enhances Guided Upgrade, a new feature in Yokohama that provides a step-by-step console to manage your entire upgrade journey. This new experience centralizes all the necessary tools, eliminating the need to navigate between different browser tabs and windows. The process is broken down into three logical phases:

• Pre-upgrade: Prepare your instance, review release notes, preview predicted skipped records, and even auto-generate tests.
  
  
• Scheduled upgrade: Monitor the progress of your scheduled upgrade in real time and reschedule if necessary.
  
  
• Post-upgrade: Resolve any new skips, verify store app updates, and review test results all from the same interface.
  
  

Beyond the new interface, Zurich also includes engine improvements that have resulted in a 28% overall upgrade improvement and 35% faster plugin loading thanks to multi-threading support and the ability to schedule database schema alterations outside of the main upgrade window.

Supercharging the Automated Test Framework (ATF)

The Zurich release also delivers significant enhancements for ATF, focusing on broader test coverage and faster debugging.

New Authoring Experience and Additional Component Support for Configurable Workspaces

A frequent request from customers has been addressed with the ability to automate testing of Configurable Workspace components. Platform owners can now validate end-to-end flows across both traditional and workspace-based experiences, improving test coverage and significantly reducing manual QA effort. The new authoring experience supports testing for a wide range of components, including standard UI actions, list operations, activity streams, and basic navigation.

Failure Insights for Faster Debugging

Zurich introduces Failure Insights, a new tool designed to accelerate root cause analysis for failed tests. When a test fails that had previously succeeded, this feature allows you to:

• Find Changes Since Last Success: Automatically see metadata records that changed between the successful and failed executions.
  
• Compare Side-by-Side: View a detailed, side-by-side comparison showing the exact changes made to files between the successful and failed states.
• Create Tasks Instantly: Generate an incident task directly from the analysis with auto-filled details to assign the fix to the right developer.

Why It Matters

These innovations mean platform teams can spend less time managing the mechanics of an upgrade and more time delivering value. The new Guided Upgrade console simplifies a complex process, while the ATF enhancements enable more robust, automated testing for modern workspaces and dramatically shorten the time it takes to debug failures.  If you are on Zurich (or upgrading soon), these features are ready to make your next upgrade the smoothest one yet.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction & Logistics

2:07 - Meet the Speaker: Olayinka Oginni

2:20 - Upgrades in Zurich Overview

3:41 - Guided Upgrade Explained

5:32 - Demo: Guided Upgrade Console

8:32 - Other Upgrade Improvements: Schema Alters & Engine Improvements

19:51 - ATF for Configurable Workspaces Explained

26:18 - Demo: ATF Workspace Testing

28:56 - Failure Insights Explained

33:05 - Demo: Failure Insights in Action

42:31 - Tools for Upgrading from Xanadu to Zurich

44:12 - Q&A and Wrap-Up