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Functional Safety

In this blog, we recap the “Managing Functional Safety in Development Efforts for Robotics Development” webinar.

Industrial manufacturing firms are undergoing rapid transformation as they navigate talent shortages, supply disruptions, digital adoption acceleration, and more. At the same time, they work diligently to accelerate time to market, streamline risk management, and keep accuracy and safety at the forefront.

In this webinar, learn about functional safety challenges during the development of complex robotics systems, and how to conform to IEC 61508. Also, learn about how Jama Software’s new robotics solution allows developers to quickly leverage a template and documentation to kickstart development efforts ensuring quicker time to market, and higher quality and safer products.

You’ll learn more about:

  • Functional safety development challenges
  • IEC 61508 best practices
  • Tips and tricks on certification
  • Jama Software’s new robotics solution offering and benefits

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

Managing Functional Safety in Development Efforts for Robotics Development

Steven Meadows: Hi everyone, and welcome to the webinar on Managing Functional Safety and Development Efforts for Robotics Development. In terms of the agenda today, this is what we’re going to be covering. We’re going to be starting off with speaker and company introductions. We’ll then look at functional safety and providing IEC 61508 overview, associated challenges, associated best practices. We’ll then switch gears and talk a little bit around live traceability followed by robotics development best practices. And then we’ll finally wrap up with Jama Software’s Robotics Solution. So let’s start with some speaker introductions. Go ahead, Nicole.

Nicole Pappler: Okay. Hey everybody. My name’s Nicole Pappler. I am a Senior Functional Safety Expert at AlektoMetis. I started working with safety critical systems more than 20 years ago, working with automation, working with automotive and other domains, and always moving around in the safety critical projects with safety critical systems, being a developer, being a tester, being on the complete system side. About 10 years ago, I started then to work as an assessor of for functional safety at TÜV SÜD. And about three years ago, started together with my business partner, AlektoMetis to provide independent consulting and assessment services using all our experiences that we had up to now. If you want to Google me, I’m also active in several open source for functional safety, so you should be able to follow me around. If you want to contact me, my social media handle is nicpappler, so you can find me on GitHub Discord and usually wherever you want want to look.

As AlektoMetis, our company, together we have more than 20 years of experience. We provide a network of experts for functional safety, for cybersecurity, for multiple domains, so automation, railway, automotive. And also, we can provide you with services regarding license compliances, processes, quality management. We have a set of trainings and workshops available for functional safety, for security, or with our network, also for other topics that you need to cover for critical systems and to keep up to date and to drive topics forward, we participate actively in international committees for standard digitization like the IEC, ISO or DIN or also industry networks like the Bitkom, or the Industry Business Network 4.0.

Steven Meadows: Great. Thanks for that, Nicole. So hi, everyone. Thanks again for joining the webinar. My name is Steven Meadows and I’m a Principal Solutions Lead here at Jama Software, primarily working with our customers in the industrial space, including robotics teams. So I’ve been at Jama for around about three years. I’m an expert in requirements management and before Jama, I worked extensively with the Atlassian tool stack as well as in various implementation functions. Excuse me. I do want to briefly provide some context on Jama Software and what we do. So our main purpose is to ensure that innovators succeeds with client success at the forefront of pretty much everything that we do.

For years of industry specific experience and thousands of client engagements, we bring best practices to bear to maximize the success rate of the product development process. So we work in a number of verticals that you can see at the bottom of the slide here, including medical device, automotive and semiconductor, aerospace and defense, software development. And last but certainly not least, industrial manufacturing and robotics automation. So we’re the largest requirements platform on the market today, and our Jama Connect platform is the number one requirements management software according to independent user reviews on G2 Crowd. We’re also the market share leader of all products, including those from bigger companies and the leader in user adoption and success. So with that, I will hand over to Nicole who’s going to be talking about functional safety and IEC 61508 in terms of an overview as well as challenges.

Nicole Pappler: So first of all, I’d like to give you an overview of what’s all this about with functional safety and with IEC 61508. So I’m sure you are here because you already heard about functional safety. Maybe you’re a pro, beginner with functional safety. So first of all, functional safety is the topic that’s associated with reducing risks that are associated with products that can be caused either by random faults, that means fault of a sense or faults by controller, just random things stop working or start working in a very inconsistent way. So one of the big topics in functional safety is really avoiding random faults, avoiding faults due to hardware components just dying on you. And the other big topic in functional safety is the avoidance of risk due to systematic faults.

So systematic faults are usually faults that happen during development, that happen during deployment or maintenance of a product that are due to topics that are not covered, that are due to hazards you have not considered. That are due to functions you haven’t implemented correctly or that haven’t been tested if they are correctly implemented, and then go into the field in an inconsistent or insufficient way. So functional safety can be achieved then by the methods of engineering and of process application. It means the random faults you avoid by systematically identifying what are the critical components, what are critical parts, what other critical functions within your system. And to then choose suitable and robust system architectures suitable and robust components and hardware parts to be integrated into your system.

Related: Jama Connect® for Robotics Datasheet

Nicole Pappler: So first of all, I’d like to give you an overview of what’s all this about with functional safety and with IEC 61508. So I’m sure you are here because you already heard about functional safety. Maybe you’re a pro, beginner with functional safety. So first of all, functional safety is the topic that’s associated with reducing risks that are associated with products that can be caused either by random faults, that means fault of a sense or faults by controller, just random things stop working or start working in a very inconsistent way. So one of the big topics in functional safety is really avoiding random faults, avoiding faults due to hardware components just dying on you. And the other big topic in functional safety is the avoidance of risk due to systematic faults.

So systematic faults are usually faults that happen during development, that happen during deployment or maintenance of a product that are due to topics that are not covered, that are due to hazards you have not considered. That are due to functions you haven’t implemented correctly or that haven’t been tested if they are correctly implemented, and then go into the field in an inconsistent or insufficient way. So functional safety can be achieved then by the methods of engineering and of process application. It means the random faults you avoid by systematically identifying what are the critical components, what are critical parts, what other critical functions within your system. And to then choose suitable and robust system architectures suitable and robust components and hardware parts to be integrated into your system.

And then to avoid systematic fault by applying a suitable development process, by applying suitable verification measures, by using a suitable deployment and maintenance process. And then also going into a suitable change management process for your system, so that you don’t add bugs and sufficiencies to your system that wouldn’t be there by definition. So easily, you don’t need to start thinking about how to do this on your own. So there are standards around. And the main functional safety standard is the IEC 61508. It’s a standard that talks about functional safety for electrical and electronic and in any kind of ways programmable safety related systems. And although there are a lot of other safety standards around, IEC 61508 is still not only the most generic, but also the most used and most applied standard, not only in other industries but specifically also in the automation industry.

Related: The Top Six Things You Should Know About TÜV SÜD 

Nicole Pappler: So what will IEC 61508 help you with? So what is defined there? Most of it really consists of methods and definitions and explanations, how to do engineering and how to do the planning of your engineering, of the safety relevant systems and equipment. Then with the process, how to reduce your development issues by planning ahead, by planning your resources, by deciding what kind of methods that are suitable for your kind of development. There are standard planning methods defined. You need to have a safety plan that’s more or less the project management plan thingy for your safety relevant tasks. You have the definition of processes, so everything will be done in a consistent and traceable way. You will have templates though that you won’t have to invent the structure of a document that invents the structure of your definitions every time. Again, the standard also talks, let’s say on a very high level, but on a very important level about safety architectural requirements.

It walks you through a few basic architectural topics like one channel systems, two channel systems, three channel systems. How do you need to set them up? What are the minimum requirements regarding diagnosis you want to do on live on these channels? So that already gives you a lot of help with the basic setup. What is the minimum requirement? And then you can go from there really deciding is this sufficient for my use case. IEC 61508 also is very strong in the definition on verification activities, be this on the one hand side for inspections, for analyzers, for reviews of your plant concept, of your requirements of your specifications. And also on how to do testing on multiple stages of your development or after deployment or during maintenance. It also gives you guidance then after development, after production of your system, how to mitigate the issues or to avoid issues that might be introduced during installation or during integration of your system into a bigger system.

The above has been a preview of this transcript. To watch the full webinar, visit: Managing Functional Safety Development Efforts for Robotics Development

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Write Better Requirements

In this blog, we recap the “Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™” webinar.

Successful product delivery starts with having the right user needs and requirements. Efficient, precise, and professionally written requirements form the foundation of the product development process so that various teams (design, software, and hardware systems) can all work together with a shared and clear understanding of the project goals.

Jama Connect Advisor™ is a state-of-the-art requirements authoring guide and optimizer powered by natural language processing for engineering that helps a system engineer or a product developer write effective, well-organized requirement specifications based on industry-accepted INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) rules and the EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation.

Learn more about leveraging Jama Connect Advisor to:

  • Improve the quality and usability of your requirements
  • Save time authoring, reviewing, and updating requirement statements
  • Continuously enhance team requirement authoring skills with regular use
  • Deliver programs and projects on time and on budget with long-term success
  • Plus, hear from Rockwell Automation on their experience with Jama Connect Advisor

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™

Jeremy Johnson: Great, thank you so much Juliet, and thank you so much to everybody that’s joining us today. This is a pretty special time for us, to be able to take a new capability to market from a product management and product development standpoint is just, it’s an extremely exciting time for us, so again, appreciate everybody’s time in joining us here today.

Before we transition into the main portion of the session here, I did want to provide a short introduction and short overview of our agenda. We’ll talk a little bit, for those that aren’t familiar with us, a little bit about Jama Software. We’ll talk a little bit about the trends in product development, some of the challenges that we see in requirements authoring. We’ll also, of course, introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor, who it’s for, how it works, we’ll get into a demonstration. We’ll also talk a little bit about our customer success program, specifically our customer success authoring workshop, and how we are now including and embedding the technology and the capabilities around Jama Connect Advisor into that consulting offering.

And then, as Juliet mentioned, our special guest, Sheila King, will go into the requirements quality focus that she’s helping implement at Rockwell Automation, and we’re super excited and happy to have her. And then we should have some time at the end of the session for some questions as well. But again, starting with and moving into Jama Software’s role in the product development ecosystem, our vision and our purpose, as an organization, is to ensure that innovators succeed. And as you’ll see from today’s discussion and demonstration, that’s really at the core of what drove our introduction of Jama Connect Advisor.

From a broader solution standpoint, Jama’s the number one requirements management provider in the marketplace, we help teams with requirement management and product development through Live Traceability that also spans not only requirements, but the verification and validation components on the test side, risk management, and other key data that drives those processes forward.

The value that we hope these innovative organizations our customers derive is really focused around things like cycle time reduction, helping speed time to market, enabling through Live Traceability the ability to gain visibility and control over the organization’s product development processes and really drive streamlining, really drive a tremendous amount of value, and ultimately ensure compliance and manage risk.

As far as organizations that we work with, we span medical device, automotive, industrial machinery, software, and this is just a sampling of the customers that we have the pleasure to partner with. We have over 800 customers globally, these organizations span from smaller startup organizations to large global enterprises. So with that very short intro to Jama Software, I now would like to bring in Joseph Pitarresi to review some of the complexity and challenges that we see today in product development, and of course to introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor. Joseph?

Related: Jama Connect Advisor™ Datasheet

Joseph Pitarresi: I’m really excited to talk about Jama Connect Advisor today, and some of the things that are happening in the environment that led us to the development of this solution is that today’s systems have become much more complex, and the emergence of the Systems of Systems architecture has become the dominant approach for devices in all sectors, whether it’s aerospace, automotive, medical, and even consumer products now.

The Systems of Systems is obviously a collection of independent subsystems that are integrated into larger systems and deliver the unique capabilities required by users. The challenge is that it’s difficult to produce accurate predictive models of all emergent behaviors, so global Systems of Systems performance is difficult to design. And that leads to testing and verification, verifying upgrades to existing Systems of Systems is difficult and expensive as well, so it’s hard to scale. So these are some of the factors that have led us to think about how can we help.

Another question we ask ourselves is why is requirements authoring so hard? So if we look at the industry approaches for requirements authoring, we looked at the International Council on Systems Engineering and their guide for requirements, there’s the need to exercise a core subset of over 40 rules in the INCOSE rules for writing requirements, and in addition to that, assess 49 requirement attributes. So just following INCOSE alone requires a substantial amount of training and understanding and then applying it, and that can take a lot of time.

And in addition, we’ve also found that the EARS, the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax, is being adopted by many organizations developing complex Systems of Systems. That includes Airbus, Bosch, Dyson, Honeywell, Intel, NASA, Siemens, and others, and what EARS does is gently constrains the textual requirements, the EARS patterns provide guidance while you’re writing a requirements sentence, and it provides syntax structure with an underlying rule set. Now, as I said, even these industry preferred approaches are challenging to apply, so we’re looking at how we might address that.

Related: How the EARS Notation Supports Effective Requirements Management and Live Traceability™ 

Joseph Pitarresi: So today, just as a brief example, product requirements quality drive fidelity and efficiency in the product development cycle, and if you just look at this automotive example, there’s many systems, it’s a complex System of Systems that are dependent on each other, and any of these systems can either lead to confusing the operator, or systems not operating optimally. And if you look at the traditional V model of approaching systems engineering, the requirements are fundamental at the very early phase. So immediately after your needs analysis you need to have really clear, crisp, accurate requirements definitions.

Now the negative outcomes of poorly written requirements have been well documented. It often leads to delayed time to market, late stage errors in the product, inaccurate translation of stakeholder needs into product attributes, and the lack of development team synergy, as teams are very organic today and the requirements need to be documented clearly and in an understandable way so that the team can execute with high performance. And then ultimately failure to verification and validation can happen without the high quality requirements.

A secondary challenge is the training and reinforcement of requirements offering skills. The lack of proper requirements can lead to product issues, and it’s a significant challenge in today’s environment. So 30% of engineering degree holders are nearing retirement, that’s globally, and in the US 79% of American workers agree that to retain or increase their future employability they need to continue their learning and development. So computer scientists, 47.5% participate in work related training to maintain and extend their skills, and engineers, almost 60% participate in work related training. So onboarding, retraining, and training system engineers remains a significant challenge.

So with those items as a background I’d like to introduce Jama Connect Advisor. Jama Connect Advisor is an add-on for Jama Connect Cloud. It’s an intelligent natural language advisor that improves the quality of requirements. It allows you to author intricate product requirements quickly, easily, and with precision. It’s powered by engineering-based natural language processing, so this is not a general purpose aid, it’s engineering language-based, and the advice is based on the recommended practice, as I mentioned before, the INCOSE rules and the EARS notation. It has a very significant side benefit that while you use it, it augments skills and reinforces organizational preferences while authoring. So not only is it doing the pragmatic work of improving requirements quality, you learn how to do that more quickly and efficiently over time with its use.
So when we look at Jama Connect Advisor’s capabilities, its features are the analysis from industry leading practices, as we’d mentioned in INCOSE, the International Council on Systems Engineering, the EARS notation, and also the unique thing is that the application is designed to work, it’s crafted to use INCOSE rules and EARS notation together to increase the quality and accuracy, and the efficacy of requirement statements, and that’s really its unique value, it’s very quick and efficient, and combines both those attributes. And we’ll talk about that more in a minute. The guidance is provided seamlessly while you’re editing in Jama Connect single item view, and we’ll demonstrate that.

The above has been a preview of this transcript. To watch the full webinar, visit: Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™

CLICK HERE TO GET A FREE TRIAL OF JAMA CONNECT ADVISOR!

 

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Customer Success Programs

In this blog, we recap the “Driving Business Outcomes with Jama Software’s Success Programs” webinar.

When you buy Jama Connect, you’re not just buying the #1 requirements management solution on the market. Our Customer Success team stands behind you, delivering the expertise, guidance, and resources you need to see a quick return on your investment and achieve your business goals.

Our adoption-oriented approach balances industry best practices with the practicalities of how you plan, build, and test your products.

In this webinar, we discuss how Jama Software has created specific diagnostic tools and customer success offerings to achieve higher value with Jama Connect. We also explore how Jama Connect can enable transformational value to positively impact your business, and how our specific customer success offerings can help your team increase traceability compliance and requirement quality.

Learn more about our new customer success programs, and how they lead to better outcomes such as:

  • Higher percentage of passing tests
  • Lower product defect rates
  • Faster time to market

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

Driving Business Outcomes with Jama Software’s Success Programs

John D’Addario: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I’m John D’Addario, senior director of customer success here at Jama Software. I’m responsible for our global customer success team here, and we are so excited to share with you some of insights around how our new success program can help you and your company drive business outcomes with Jama Connect. I’ve asked my colleague Preston to join me today. Preston, can you give a brief introduction of yourself?

Preston Mitchell: Yeah. Thanks John. Hey everybody. It’s great to be here. As John mentioned, I’m really excited to share with you some of the things we’ve been working on here to make the success programs even better. For those of you that don’t know me, I am the director of the global solutions team. I’ve been with Jama for about 10 years. My background is kind of in requirements management. I’ve been a business analyst, I’ve been an Agile program manager. So I’m really excited about all of the best practices when it comes to system development and requirements authoring. So yeah, I’ll pass it back to John and we’ll dive in.

Related: G2 Again Names Jama Connect® the Leader in Requirements Management Software

John D’Addario: Thanks Preston. So as the number one in requirements management software, our purpose is to ensure that innovators succeed with customer success at the forefront of everything we do. Through years of industry specific experience and thousands of customer engagements, we bring the best practices to bear, to maximize the success rate of the product development process. There are six core business outcomes we focus on helping you drive with Jama Connect. They are reduced cycle time, increased process efficiency, streamline and accelerate reviews, speed time to market, gain visibility and control, ensure compliance and manage risk. We do this across our five key verticals, medical device, automotives and semiconductor, space, airborne and defense systems, software development, and industrial manufacturing.

We have a really exciting agenda for you today. We’re going to go through four topics. We’re going to give an overview of our success program. Preston’s going to go on and talk about measurements and outcomes. We’re going to do a double click on the success programs and then leave some time at the end for some Q and A. So let’s get into it. We are the experts when it comes to requirements management and traceability. We have years of experience between our customer success managers, solution consultants, and technical support engineers. Through our success program, we help our customers achieve faster time to value with Jama Connect.

Preston Mitchell: Hey John, maybe for some of the folks we could give a breakdown of the different team roles here. I’m not sure if everyone has actually interacted with their entire success team at Jama Software. So maybe we could give a background of each of the roles and what their goals are at Jama.

John D’Addario: Sure, sure. So starting with our customer success manager, really think of your customer success manager as you’re trusted advisor, focusing on understanding your business outcomes. We work together to build what we call a success plan. We use that success plan to help marshal resources across the genre enterprise. We also help you with all your commercial needs, like renewals, buying more licenses, adding a success program subscription, adding services, things like that. Our technical support engineers are there to help you with any technical questions that come up during your time with Jama Connect. They are well versed in the ins and outs of all things technical. Preston, why don’t you give a little bit more detail around the solution consultants?

Related: Jama Software® and Sparx Systems Enhance Best-of-breed Tools Integration to Strengthen Live Traceability™ Across Systems Development 

Preston Mitchell: Yeah, definitely. The solution consultants are part of my team. They really bring a lot of industry experience to bear. So a lot of them have been product managers, system engineers, quality managers in their prior roles. So they bring industry experience like requirements authoring experience, quality management, specific industry experience. Then they also of course have a lot of deep practical experience using Jama Connect the product. So they combine those to really recommend best practice uses of the tool. They very much understand the pain points and the outcomes that you all are trying to drive with your products every day. So any kind of deep product questions, or asks of how to use Jama Connect in order to achieve their goals, that’s really what their purpose is.

John D’Addario: Great. Great. When I look at this team and the resources we have here at Jama, I’m a little partial to think that, not only do we have the best team and the requirements management industry, I think we have the best team of any team that I’ve worked in over the last 10, 15 years. It’s really exciting to have this level of engagement between these three teams with this one mission of driving customer success. Let’s do a little bit of a deep dive into our success program. So through this continual engagement with your teams, we really focus on measurable improvements to your process. We do that by forming focus areas, helping you drive adoption and usage of Jama Connect, helping eliminate trace debt, and increasing your Traceability Score™, improving requirements quality score, increasing verification compliance. When you think about the success program, one of the main benefits of the success program is what we call the success catalog.

John D’Addario: This success catalog brings together four great resources for our customers to use. The first one being training resources. The second one being benchmark assessments. The third one being solution consulting. And lastly, fourth, our technical services. When you think about your journey with Jama Connect, think about it in three stages, implement, measure, and optimize. The success program is at the foundation of helping you achieve those business outcomes. We do that by mixing different services in our success catalog together, and what we call a success path. In these three examples, you can see here, we have three different success path that brings this prescriptive use of these services in the catalog to help you achieve business outcomes during the different phases of your journey with Jama Connect.

To watch the full webinar, visit: Driving Business Outcomes with Jama Software’s Success Programs

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