Tag Archive for: Jama Connect Platform

Total Cost of Ownership

Jama Connect® vs. IBM®DOORS®: Total Cost of Ownership: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.

In the 10th and final episode of our Roundtable Chat series, Preston Mitchell – Sr Director, Global Business Consulting at Jama Software® – and Susan Manupelli – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – discuss the total cost of ownership in product management.

To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Preston Mitchell: All right. Welcome everybody, to episode 10 in our vlog series. Today, we’re going to be talking about total cost of ownership. I’m Preston Mitchell, the senior director of solutions at Jama Software, and I’m joined by my colleague, Susan Manupelli. Susan, do you want to introduce yourself?

Susan Manupelli: Sure. My name’s Susan Manupelli. I’m a senior solutions architect here at Jama Software, but I came from IBM, where I was a test architect for the last 20 years on some of their requirements management tools, so primarily Rational DOORS Next Generation and RequisitePro actually, before that.

Preston Mitchell: Excellent. Like Susan, I was a former IBM-er as well, so a user of many of those tools. Today, as you can see, we want to talk about kind of three main categories of total cost of ownership, IT infrastructure, so these are things like the actual physical hardware, the FTE administration costs, so like upgrades, maintenance, and then also the opportunity costs of when you do not adopt best-in-breed tools and processes. Why don’t we first start it off with the IT infrastructure costs? You know, Susan, in your experience with other RN tools, what have you found to be the challenges in this area?

Susan Manupelli: Sure. I’ll talk first about DOORS Next Generation. You know, DNG’s part of the ELM suite of products, that’s based on the Jazz architecture. It’s a very complex architecture. There’s a large number of servers you need, or VMs, to be able to stand up the solution. There’s an app server or some version of WebSphere. There’s a DB server for every application. So at a minimum with DNG, in addition to the app and DB server, you also would need a JTS server, an additional reporting server, [inaudible 00:02:08] or Data Warehouse. And if you have configuration management enabled, then there’s two additional servers that come with that, so for the global configuration manager and the LDX server. So-

Preston Mitchell: Interesting.

Susan Manupelli: And then of course, if you use any of the other applications of the ELM suite, there’s a server and database for those.

RELATED: Traceability Score™ – An Empirical Way to Reduce the Risk of Late Requirements

Preston Mitchell: Yeah, that’s quite a contrast to Jama, where we just require one application server and then a database server, which could be shared, actually, with other applications. Of course, that’s as far as self-host customers. Cloud customers really have no IT infrastructure costs at all, and I think that’s one of the biggest benefits of adopting a tool like Jama Connect. Okay, great. Next, I’d love to talk about the human or FTE maintenance costs that go along with tools. Susan, what’s your experience with other requirements management tools around the FTE costs?

Susan Manupelli: Sure. I’ll start off with DOORS Classic, which is an older client-server technology, and what I mean by that is that every user had to have software installed on their computer that was compatible with the server, so it was what we referred to as a thick client. An upgrade or maintenance of that would mean pushing out updates to however many users you have in your organization, potentially could be hundreds. So there was a lot of logistics involved with trying to get that upgrade done.

Preston Mitchell: Got it, and yeah, I imagine that’s downtime for the users, and a lot different than just a web-based tool that I sign in with my browser. The other thing that I know in working with customers that have migrated from DOORS Classic is DXL scripts and customization. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the hidden costs with those things.

Susan Manupelli: Yeah. Basically, any kind of customization that you want to do in DOORS Classic, you had to have somebody that could write a DXL script for it, that’s kind of a specialized skill, so there were costs with maintaining those, and particularly if they were used by across the organization.

Preston Mitchell: Is that any better with DOORS Next Generation?

Susan Manupelli:With DOORS Next Generation, there’s no DXL scripting or anything like that, but the thing that’s challenging with DOORS Next Generation is the upgrades and maintenance. Upgrades were often very complex and time-consuming. There was pretty high risk of failure, and then of course you have the time involved in roll back and trying it again. There’s also the ongoing maintenance of the middleware, would require a highly technical admin with some specialized skills in maybe database optimization, so Oracle or Db2. Also, keeping the system running optimally requires a full-time, highly skilled administrator for the ELM suite.

Preston Mitchell: Really? Full-time just for the backend? Wow.

Susan Manupelli: Yeah.

RELATED: Eight Ways Requirements Management Software Will Save You Significant Money

Preston Mitchell: Yeah, that’s definitely different than kind of what our self-hosted customers experience. I mean, we try to make the self-hosted upgrades very easy and straightforward. It’s a button click in the admin console. And then obviously, for the majority of our customers who use our cloud solution, there’s really no upgrade or maintenance that they have to do at all. We push the upgrades for them. We handle that for them in an automated process, that’s validated and verified. So yeah, definitely different. Well, let’s transition to talk about adoption costs, and I want to bring my screen share up again, because you and I have spoken about really the opportunity costs of not using best-in-breed tools or processes, and it kind of really comes down to measurement. We really believe using Jama Connect, we can reduce the negative product outcomes, because we can help you measure your process performance. As management guru, Peter Drucker, said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improvement.” So Susan, maybe you could touch on what I find are the three primary ways that we can help our customers measure their performance.

Susan Manupelli: Sure. First of all, we can measure the quality of the requirements. This means properly define… making sure the requirements are properly defined, that they’re complete and consistent. And we actually have a new product, Jama Connect Advisor, that helps in this area. As far as the digital engineering, we can measure the level of collaboration that’s happening in the tool, the number of reviews, and the output from those reviews. And then also for live traceability. Traceability is one of the key reasons why people use a requirements management tool, and Jama does it better than any other tool that I’ve used. And in addition, we can measure how well you’re actually capturing that traceability.

Preston Mitchell: Yeah. And speaking to that, especially on the live traceability, we have for our cloud customers, this great benchmark, where we anonymize all the data, and you can actually see how you stack up against your peers in the industry with regards to the traceability completeness of your projects. So some really great return on investment by utilizing our cloud offering and being able to see the actual performance compared to your peers in the industry. Ultimately, I think everyone realizes the later you are in a product development lifecycle, it’s much more expensive to actually fix any errors that are found. So our whole goal at Jama Connect is really to lower the total cost of ownership, but really actually make your product development less costly by finding and fixing those errors way earlier in the cycle, in the requirements definition phase. Well Susan, thanks again for the quick chat, and sharing your perspective on cost of ownership. Appreciate it.

Susan Manupelli: Great. Thanks, Preston.

Preston Mitchell: Bye, everybody.

Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.

Download our Jama Software® Data Model Diagnostic to learn more!

Thank you for watching our 10th and final episode in this series, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Total Cost of Ownership. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Empower Your Team and Improve Your Requirements Management Process


requirements-driven testing

Jama Connect® vs. IBM®DOORS®: Requirements-Driven Testing: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.

In Episode 9 of our Roundtable Chat series, Mario Maldari – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software® – and Susan Manupelli – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – discuss requirements validation, verification, and testing in addition to demonstrating test management in Jama Connect.

To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Mario Maldari: Hello, welcome to the ninth edition of our vlog series. Today, we’re going to be talking about something that’s very important in requirements management, something that I’m particularly passionate about, and that’s requirements validation, verification, and testing. And I’m joined by my friend and colleague once again, Susan Manupelli. Susan and I have worked together for a long time, 15 years plus testing various requirements management tools using various techniques, and various software. I believe the most recent software you were using was IBM’s enterprise test management tool, something we used to call RQM. Looking back on all those years and all those tools you feel as though have been your biggest challenge.

Susan Manupelli: So talking about the ELM suite where we were talking about rational quality manager and also we were using that to test DNG. Really the issue, the biggest challenge is that they were two separate tools. So even though they were part of the same tool set, the UIs were completely different. They were very inconsistent in how you would use them. The review and approval aspect of RQM wasn’t that great. And again, it was completely different from the review and approval that you would get when you were working with DNG. And also because they were from two separate tools, in order to really get the traceability, that would be a challenge. You’d have to do reports that were outside of the individual tool tools. And then one of the biggest things too was the comparison. Things changed in RQM. It was not easy to find out what changed, even if you compared one test case to another.

Mario Maldari: Yeah, I recall some of those challenges. I think for me, the biggest challenge I had was the UI inconsistencies like you mentioned. Obviously, I was in one tool, I’d go to another. It’s completely different experience, completely different nomenclature. And then having to integrate between the tools and just frankly having to go to a separate tool to do the testing was problematic and challenging sometimes. So I think you hit an important topic in terms of having everything in one tool. And I’d like to show you how Jama does that. Okay. So in Jama, the fact that we have testing integrated into the tool allows you to do some pretty neat things. So as you can see here on my desktop, we have this dashboard, and I can define a relationship rule diagram in Jama where I can define that I want specific requirements to have validation points and test cases associated with them.

And so what that gives me is I can create some dashboard views for requirements, lacking test coverage, or I can even look at test case summaries. Right on the dashboard, I can look at test case progress, the priority of my tests. Jama even allows you when you’re testing to log defects. So I can track my defects here. And so for you and I, we always have to provide test case reports and summaries up through management, up through the development team. And so this allows you to have it all in one spot, which is really nice to have. So the testing itself in Jama, you basically enter it on the test plan tab and very similar to the way you and I worked, we have a concept of a test plan where you can define your test intent, the things you’re going to be testing, your approach, your schedule on your team, your entry criteria, your exit criteria.

And from there, as you pointed out, you can send this for a review and you can get an official sign-off from your development team or whomever you need to sign off on your test plan. And then once that’s in place, you can go to your test cases and you can start to group your tests according to functionality or whatever makes sense for your grouping and your organization of your suites of tests. And once they’re grouped, you can come to the test runs and this is where you actually will be doing your execution of your test. So I can click on one of these here and can start an execution and I can start to go through each step and pass or fail as I go through. And the nice thing about Jama, as I mentioned, is that you can actually go ahead and log a defect in real time and I can go ahead and log this defect.

And now when I’m saving this defect, it’s associated with this test execution run, which is associated with my test case, which is associated with multiple levels of requirements upstream. So now if I look at a traceability view, I will see my high level requirements traced all the way down to the defects. When I have logged a defect, I can actually go in and I can take a look at this test run and I can see the defects. And if I have something like an integration to another product like Jira for example, maybe my development team and is working in Jira and they love Jira, it automatically populates the defect in the defect tool like Jira. So a developer can come in here, they can make some changes, they can put in some comments, they can change the priority, the status, and all of that gets reflected back in Jama.

RELATED: Traceability Score™ – An Empirical Way to Reduce the Risk of Late Requirements

Mario Maldari: So really nice integration if you’re using something like Jira. From my perspective too, what would’ve been nice in my past test background is to have this concept of suspect trigger. And so if I look at the relationships for this particular requirement and I see that downstream there’s a validation of a test case, which is validated by length type, I can see that it’s flagged as suspect. So that means that something upstream has changed and my downstream test case is now suspect. And what does that mean? Maybe I need to change it, maybe I don’t. How do I know? I can come to the versions and I can say, “Well, the last time I tested this requirement was in our release candidate one, and what’s different now?” So I can compare our version three to version seven, run our compare tool, and I can see exactly what changed.

So as a tester, this is great to me, it’s not enough to know that something’s changed. I can actually see exactly what changed and maybe it’s just a spelling update and I don’t need to really change it. Or maybe it’s something more substantial like you see here. And at this point I can come in and I can make my change to my test and I can go ahead and I can clear the suspect flag.

So really nice level of granular control. What’s also good with the Jama’s we have these out of the box, and you’ll like this, Sue, out-of-the-box canned reports that have summaries of your tests, how many blocked, how many failed, how many passed executions. So these are canned reports that come with Jama. If you needed any customized reporting for your specific needs of the organization, we have that available as well. So really nice back to your point about having everything in one tool, this is it, and this is the benefit. Now, I know you’ve been at Jama for just about six months now. I’d love to hear your impression of the test management built-in, what your thoughts are there?

RELATED: Telesat Evolves Engineering Requirements Management & Product Development

Susan Manupelli: Oh, sure. Yeah, I do. I definitely love how everything’s in one tool and the ease with which you can just trace, actually verify the testing of your requirements. You can just go from requirements straight down to multiple levels of decomposition to your test cases. So you can see, answer the question, did your requirement are your requirements passing, which is great. And also the ability to display related queries right on the dashboard. I think that’s a huge plus the consistency of the UI between what you do for requirements, creating a test case isn’t any different than creating any other requirements.
So it’s a very familiar UI for both operations, which I think is important. The review and approval piece is really a nice strong point for Jama, and to be able to apply that to reviews for test cases is really great. And I just think it’s a really streamlined UI. It really has everything you need and nothing that you don’t. So I just think it’s a great tool. And then there’s one other aspect that I really like is the impact analysis. You mentioned being able to trace when something’s changed after the fact. It’s also to be able to say, “Hey, we’re looking at making a change here.” There’s one button in Jama, you click that impact analysis and it tells you all of your test cases that you might need to revisit if you make that change.

Mario Maldari: I call that the proactive method.

Susan Manupelli: Yes.

Mario Maldari: Yeah, the impact analysis is extremely important. And if you were a developer in an organization and you changed a requirement or you were about to change a requirement and you knew you had 30 tests that are associated with that, you could run the impact analysis. See all of those, and you could proactively warn your test team, “Hey guys, I’m about to make this change. Here it is. I’ll explain it to you. We can have a separate review and approval.”

So it really contains all of that and controls all of that for you. I’ve often said to people, it’s one thing to have your requirements in a tool, and that’s the first step. Define your requirements, have your traceability. But if you’re not doing your testing and validating those requirements, then how do you know that you built the right thing, right? So extremely important aspect testing to requirements in the supply. So any requirements gathering process so I’m glad we could talk about it today. Sue, glad I could have you to talk to about it. And I’d like to thank everyone for their time and thanks for participating in the vlog series and we’ll see you on the next one.

Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.

Download our Jama Software® Data Model Diagnostic to learn more!

Thank you for watching our Episode 9, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Requirements Driven Testing. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Empower Your Team and Improve Your Requirements Management Process


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

RELATED


Document View

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Document View

Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect®’s powerful features… in under five minutes.

In this Features in Five video, Katie Huckett, Senior Product Manager at Jama Software®, walks viewers through Document View, a new feature offered in Jama Connect.

In this session, viewers will learn how Document View, now available alongside list and single-item views, allows users to:

  • Author, read, and edit items in line in a single view while maintaining an item-based structure within project hierarchies.
  • Improve consistency and accuracy of requirements quality by incorporating built-in support for Jama Connect Advisor™, an add-on to Jama Connect.

Jama Connects complete requirements authoring solutions supports different use cases and different preferred user work styles such as those previously performed in siloed tools like Microsoft Word or Excel.

With Document View, you can leverage all the functionality and toolbar actions of reading view, such as filtering and configuring items, reuse, batch transition, send for review, edit and more. Double-click on an item to open quick edit mode with the option to expand to full edit mode. Insert new items without losing your place in the document, add comments and lock or unlock items.

Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Katie Huckett: Hi, my name is Katie Huckett and I’m a senior product manager here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to walk you through Jama Connects new feature Document View. Jama Connect now provides Document View, alongside list and single item view. Document view allows users to author, read and edit items in line in a single view while maintaining an item-based structure within project hierarchies. Document view improves consistency and accuracy of requirements quality by incorporating built-in support for Jama Connect Advisor™ and add-on to Jama Connect. Jama Connects complete requirements authoring solutions supports different use cases and different preferred user work styles such as those previously performed in siloed tools like Microsoft Word or Excel.

With Document View, you can leverage all the functionality and toolbar actions of reading view, such as filtering and configuring items, reuse, batch transition, send for review, edit and more. Double-click on an item to open quick edit mode with the option to expand to full edit mode. Insert new items without losing your place in the document, add comments and lock or unlock items.

Let’s see what this looks like in Jama Connect. Here in Jama Connect, I wanted to start on the current reading view so that you can see as I toggle over to our new Document View the transition to the new, clean, modern design. We’ve removed the horizontal lines between the items for a more seamless document experience. The item ID and current version are visible under the item name and comments and locking functionality have moved to the right of the item name so they don’t get lost within the content itself. Use the edit feature to quickly edit items without changing views or manually tracking your place in the document. I’ve opened what we call quick edit mode, which is a condensed form of fields only visible on the current view, as well as any additional required fields that you may have missed that need to be completed in order to save the item.

If you need to see the additional fields available for this item, expand to full edit mode and then you’ll be able to access any additional fields that you need. Quickly return to quick edit mode to complete any edits that you need before saving and completing your work. As I mentioned previously, Document View provide support for Jama Connect Advisor™. As you highlight text in a rich text field that you have enabled advisor for, you’ll notice an analyze button beneath the field. As you analyze the results, you’ll then see any recommendations that have been found. Click the view details button to see the information in more detail.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Advisor™

Huckett: Create new items and Document View with our new inline insert. I’m going to insert a new item between item one and two here, so I have a new requirement that needs to go in here. So you’ll see as you hover between the items, you have a plus button for inline insert form, and I’m going to go ahead and insert a new design description. You’ll notice that our inline insert form is very similar to the quick ad functionality that’s available in the ad dropdown in the content header. Only the name and description fields are visible, name being the only one that’s required. We are bypassing any additional required fields at this point so that you can quickly add as many items as you need to and then go back and edit in more detail and fill out the remaining required fields.

So you’ll notice I’ll add in a name and description into this item. You’ll note the Jama Connected Advisor analysis is also available in the inline insert functionality. We’re going to save this item. You’ll receive a toast message that lets you know your item’s been created, and you’ll see that new item appear in between items one and the previous item two that I had before. So as I mentioned, there is an additional required field on this item that I did not complete before. So I’ll go back in, edit this item, find that additional required field and assign someone to it so that we can then fully save and complete this item for the time being.

In order to view comments, you’ll click on the comments icon next to the item name. After clicking on the icon, you’ll see the comments stream up here in a modal above Document View where you can interact with, comment and reply to any comments on the item. Next, I’ll take you over to the admin section for your Jama Connect administrators to customize and configure Document View and Jama Connect Advisor™ to your organization’s needs. For each item type, it can be configured for default Document View settings. You’ll find a new projects Document View option in the view dropdown where you can then place your default visible fields. Jama Connect Advisor™ can be turned on for any rich text field on any item type your organization chooses and left off for any item types that don’t need the analysis.

RELATED: Jama Connect®: Quick ROI Calculator

Huckett: When you open a rich text field on an item type, you’ll notice a brand new checkbox for Jama Connect Advisor™. Enable advisor for that particular item type field and save your configuration either before or after the individual item field configuration for Jama Connect Advisor™. Don’t forget to go into the dedicated admin section to enable the INCOSE rules in whole or selectively based on your needs and the EARS patterns.

For more information about Document View, please contact your customer success manager or Jama consultant. And if you would just like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your product development processes, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com. Thank you.

To view more Jama Connect Features in Five topics visit: Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series

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reuse and variant management

Jama Connect® vs. IBM®DOORS®: Reuse and Variant Management: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.

In Episode 8 of our Roundtable Chat series, Mario Maldari – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software® – and Gary Hayes – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – discuss the importance of reuse and variant management for product teams.

To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Mario Maldari: Hello everyone. Welcome to episode eight in our vlog series. Hope you’ve enjoying the series so far. Today, we’ll be discussing the important topic of requirements reuse, and I’m joined by my friend and colleague Gary Hayes today. Gary, would you like to introduce yourself?

Gary Hayes: Sure thing, Mario. Thank you. My name’s Gary Hayes. I am part of Mario’s team. I’ve been working with systems and software engineering teams for the last 25 plus years, just recently have joined Jama. Prior to that, I spent 18 years working with Rational Software and IBM, supporting their systems and software engineering tools suite. Got a lot of experience in the early days with Requisite Pro as part of Rational Software before being acquired by IBM and then, morphing into the Jazz-based tools and Requirements Composer, acquiring Telelogic and DOORS, and then, DOORS Next Generation. So, been around tools for a long time.

Mario Maldari: 
Thanks Gary. You’re like me. We’ve been in Requirement Space for many years, so thanks for that, Gary. As both of us know, being in the requirement space for a while, requirements reuse is an extremely important concept. Whether you’re creating a common library set of requirements or you’re doing variant development, this is something that we experienced through many years of working with requirements tools. Very important concept, and curious as your perception working with other requirements tools regarding reuse and in particular, maybe the DOORS family of products. How has that been for you?

Gary Hayes: Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. In the early days of Requisite Pro and actually, my first exposure to requirements tools were with Technology Builders and Calibre. Calibre version 1 as a matter of fact. Back in those days, they were client server tools that really didn’t have any kind of reuse features except copy and paste. Clone and own, if you will. And DOORS, my first exposure to DOORS was that same way. You could create linkages, you could copy modules and reuse those and different projects as they got spun up, but the real reuse didn’t come into play until you got to more modernly architected tools like DOORS Next Generation. DOORS Next Generation has a variety of ways in which they could reuse components or reuse different artifacts with the environment. For one, you could start off a project, and clone an existing project, and use everything that you had before.

But what they really started to do was use the change sets, which was really change sets with code development where you could branch and merge. You really started seeing a lot more sophisticated ways to do reuse within a project. It made it really interesting and it is fairly easy to understand for people using requirements. You really wanted to have a use case that matched up with one, what you needed in an environment. And then also, you wanted to match up with the maturity of your organization. You didn’t want to overwhelm them with a process that they couldn’t handle. DOORS Next Generation took that to the new level by Introducing Global Configuration Management or GCM for short. Very complex way to do business. And it was really a way to include not just requirements for reuse, but all of the artifacts across the software and systems engineering lifecycle.

Really interesting, sounds really great, but like I said, very complex, and once you turned it on to use in your environment, you couldn’t turn it off, so it did not lend itself to a lot of flexibility. It was flexible from the point of view that yeah, I can make components in different disciplines and mix and match them as I chose to, but you really had to have a mature organization and a mature administration group to keep it under control, and make sure everything stayed on track.

RELATED: The Benefits of Jama Connect®: Supercharge Your Systems Development and Engineering Process

Mario Maldari: Yeah, the complexity, I think it’s a challenge for adoption. And I think targeting some of the very large, big customers and modeling their use case, I think that becomes very difficult for smaller customers when they try to use some simple use cases and take them forward. So, I think that that complexity is a challenge. Well, let me show you something. I want to talk a little bit about how reuse is done in Jama, and I’d like to show it to you. Some of the common reuse scenarios that I’ve seen here at Jama, but as well as an industry is developing common libraries of requirements where you’re wanting to develop once and be able to reuse these requirements across the board in different projects, even within the same project. Parallel development. Very common to reuse requirements for your parallel development as well as variant reuse, being able to use them across your variants. These are very common scenarios that we see in industry today.

Jama has a very simple implementation for reuse, but it’s quite powerful. Anything in Jama can be reused, whether it’s a set of requirements or an individual requirement. And to do so, you simply will click on the requirement, and you can say reuse item. And here, you can share this requirement. Within the same project, you can reuse it, or you can reuse it in a different project. And you have a few different options here as well. You can add a relationship from the original item, so you have a link back to it. You can include all tags, attachments, and links. You also have the ability to include the relationships from the source item, include related items as well in minor relationships. A lot of different options when you go to reuse the requirement. And once it’s reused, you can take a look at the requirement itself, and see where it’s been reused. You can see in this case, the current item I have here I’m looking at, but then this requirement’s also shared across and reused in two different projects.

And you’ll see it’s out of sync. That means the requirement’s been evolving and changing in these different projects, which is what you’d expect in this case. Now, if I wanted to get a little bit more information and see okay, well, how are those requirements evolving and changing? I can take a look at the synced items here across the whole project. And if I want to take a look at this particular requirement and see how it’s been evolving and changing, I can take a look at it and I say, “It’s out of sync.” And I can say, “Well, let’s compare.” And here, I can get a side by side comparison of how the requirements he has evolved in this project. You can see the source project, I have the name with a global impact. And in the project that I’ve reused it in, I can see easily that this requirement has changed to a North America scope only. A really nice side-by-side comparison in terms of how the requirements are evolving.

Even more to that, there’s a nice UI here where if I decide that the requirement, that’s evolving, I want to override it with the source, I can do that easily. Or perhaps this requirement that’s evolving should be the new standard. I can overwrite the original with the evolved requirement. A lot of options in terms of managing your reused requirements. But I think the key for me, from my perspective with the Jama implementation, it’s very simple, very easy to use. You can build from a very simple case to a very complex case as you go incrementally, so you’re not overwhelmed instantly with the reuse scenario itself. A nice supporting UI to deal with reuse within Jama. Let me just stop there, Gary, and see if you had any perceptions. You’re relatively new to Jama, so just curious to your thoughts.

RELATED: Eight Ways Requirements Management Software Will Save You Significant Money

Gary Hayes: Yeah, what I really like about this is that it’s easy to enable. It’s really kind of straightforward. It has a variety of use cases that it supports. Got some basic features, but it also supports some advanced features, so you can turn on as much or as little as you need to be effective. Also, the people that are part of the project, the common users, they get that visual cue. I noticed that in the interface, anything that was in a reuse state had the little dot next to it. If I was curious about the reused state of it, I could drill down on that and do some comparisons myself to see how it evolved over time. I think that one, it’s important that it’s easy to use and people aren’t afraid of using it. They can investigate it and it’s very simple. Simple, yet powerful in my estimation.

Mario Maldari: Yeah, I think that’s a good way of saying it. And of course, you and I have been in requirements for 20 years plus, we know that reuse is such an important concept, but it’s really about striking the balance between features and functionality and ease of use. It’s something that every requirement tool needs to have and needs to support. But the question is how easy is it to adopt? And how easy is it to use? You want to find yourself being productive and not wasting a lot of time and energy out of the box.

Gary Hayes: Exactly. Yep, absolutely.

Mario Maldari: Well, Gary, I want to thank you very much for your time today, and want to thank everyone watching this vlog series, and look forward to seeing you on the next one.

Gary Hayes: Thank you.

Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.

Download our Jama Software® Data Model Diagnostic to learn more!

Thank you for watching our Episode 8, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Reuse and Variant Management. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Empower Your Team and Improve Your Requirements Management Process

We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including Requirements-Driven Testing and Total Cost of Ownership.


DOOR Vlog Episode 7

Jama Connect® vs. IBM®DOORS®: Industry Templates: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.

In Episode 7 of our Roundtable Chat series, Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software®– and Danny Beerens – Senior Consultant at Jama Software®– discuss the importance of industry templates in requirements management.

To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Cary Bryczek: Welcome to part seven of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the series so far. My name is Cary Bryczek, and I’m from Jama Software. I’ve been working here at Jama for over nine years, and I’m the director of aerospace and defense solutions. You’re in for a really special treat today. And I’m excited to be joined by my colleague Danny Beerens, who is a longtime IBM expert. Danny, tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

Danny Beerens: Hi, Cary. Thanks for this introduction. Yes, my name is Danny Beerens. And within Jama, I am both a solution architect for pre-sales and a senior consultant for post-sales. So I’m not going to sell you anything I can’t deliver myself. I’ve been in the requirements management field for the last 15 years, starting with DOORS Telelogic, and after the acquisition by IBM, I moved to IBM Jazz, the ELM Suite, and I actually started out with implementing Rational Requirements Composer. It was the prelude to DOORS Next.

Cary Bryczek: Oh wow. That’s awesome. So today’s topic of industry templates, I think, is a really interesting one. Requirements tools have been around for decades and were originally designed to be just a database. They had some rudimentary capability to control versions and add attributes, and that was about it. There were very few concepts, and still today there are very few concepts of a pre-configured template that were specific to the processes of a particular industry such as automotive or medical devices. When there are no templates and organizations start adopting a new tool, they’re forced to then configure the requirements management system to match the processes to be able to generate reporting information and documentation. Now, this just takes a lot of time, and it forces organizations, in many cases, to have teams of workers whose job it was to just engineer and maintain the tool itself. Danny, what’s been your experience with IBM tools with regards to templates?

Danny Beerens: Well, in general, IBM does offer some industry templates, what they call solution process assets. And for those, there is not a lot of templates available. So you have system software engineering templates. You have a template to support DO 178B and ASPICE ISO 26262.

Cary Bryczek: So in your experience in using DOORS, is there even the concept of creating a template? Is that hard?

Danny Beerens: Yeah, you can create your own templates, but yes, like you mentioned in your introduction, it takes a lot of time and effort from your own organization to implement your own templates to support your own industry. So setting up everything to get ready to start using the application, it takes a lot of effort for your own organization to be set up.

RELATED: ASPICE 101: What is Automotive SPICE?

Cary Bryczek: Oh gosh. Well, it’s so easy in Jama. I think maybe I should let the tool talk for itself. Our templates come right out of the box pre-configured. Let me show you maybe what the building blocks look like. In Jama, totally web-based, our pre-configured industry templates come with item types that represent the nomenclature very specific to the industry. So in A&D and space defense, you’re looking at different types of element requirements, different failure analyses, functional requirements, high-level and low-level requirements for avionic systems, parts. All of these are pre-configured with the most common types of attributes ready for you to use right out of the box. And then where we start talking about how to interconnect all of that kind of data is where we have, in Jama, our relationship rules. And our relationship rules, we have relationship rules for the NASA product breakdown structure.

So if you are following the NASA systems engineering handbook and you’re going all the way from stakeholder expectations to component level requirements, we have this pre-configured for you with all of the correct relationship types. We have one for avionics development that matches all of the DO 178 and ARP 4754. We have templates for MBSE. We have templates for defense system V. We have templates for automotive as well. So all of those are basic automotive framework. If you’re having to do ASPICE or ISO 26262 or both of them together, we have these pre-configured data models for you to start just creating and authoring the requirements right away.

If you’re doing automotive development within the semiconductor industry, we have a template that is developed by industry experts. So we at Jama have hired people that have worked in these industries and know what are the types of compliance reporting that you have to do and then put together these just easy and ready-to-go templates that allow you to get started right away. If you need to do functional safety in automotive or cybersecurity, our templates are built right in, letting you do the safety and cybersecurity right away along with your design development of your requirements. Danny, doesn’t that look like it’ll save organizations time to get started and eliminate the army of DOORS admins?

Danny Beerens: Oh, definitely. If I look at that, your type system is already there. Your relationships are already defined. It saves a world of work there.

Cary Bryczek: So what, Danny, about DOORS NG? What’s the state of industry templates with that tool?

Danny Beerens: If you look at the entire IBM ELM suite, the main focus nowadays is automotive, ASPICE ISO 26262, cybersecurity. And although there are many other multiple templates for different industries like aerospace, medical devices, rail end, they mostly seem to focus on EWM or RTC, as it was called previously. So there is hardly any good templates to support industries endorsing NextGen.

There is an additional application that would allow you to have specific templates or to configure your templates and migrate those to DOORS Next. It’s called Method Composer, but then you also need to know how Method Composer works because you get your templates out of the box. You need to adapt those templates in Method Composer to suit your business processes, and then from there, export it to DOORS Next. So you need an additional application. You need to know how that additional application works to customize it to your processes. Then you need to make sure that DOORS Next gets those templates.

So you need another application, additional infrastructure, and there’s a lot of knowledge in Method Composer. So you need either an IBM expert like I was, an IBM business partner to help you out with that. And in my experience, there is hardly any company that also acquires Method Composer. So you are stuck with setting up your templates in DOORS Next Gen yourself, again.

Cary Bryczek: Wow. God, that just sounds so complicated. So there really aren’t any really ready-to-go templates made for an industry. You still have to do a lot of work.

Danny Beerens: You need a lot of hand work yourself, so you take time away from your own engineering team, from your own process engineers implementing everything in DOORS Next Gen or, like I mentioned previously, in traditional DOORS. So it takes a lot of time away and costs a lot of effort to get you started.

Cary Bryczek: Wow. Is there any process documentation that the end users would use? Anything like that? Or you just have to make that yourself too?

RELATED: Eight Ways Requirements Management Software Will Save You Significant Money

Danny Beerens: Well, you look at your own process or the customer’s process documents, and you try to translate that into a configuration of DOORS or DOORS Next Gen. So there’s really not an easy way to set things up for your industry.

Cary Bryczek: Jama Software, we’ve hired, like I said before, industry experts to put together, not just the templates themselves, but also put together the process manuals that guide users to follow their required industry standards such as the automotive ASPICE and ARP 4754 or IC 6304. Maybe we can take a look at and look at that from a user’s perspective. Let me share my screen here.

Our templates are not just pre-configured in Jama itself, which is very nice. It also comes with a user guide. How do you use Jama itself to follow? This one is a airborne systems process guide. How do I make sure that I really am following ARP 4754 and DL 178? How do I use the system from a high-level process standpoint? So we have these process guides that make it really easy. And then from a user’s perspective, I jump in, I really like the automotive project, we have fantastic sample projects that you can look at, as well as a bare bones skeleton template that you can just start filling in. We have places where you can implement your planning documents in addition to the requirements. We have the dashboards that show you processes that are taking place within your requirements. It’s very easy to follow from the user’s perspective at all.

So I can see what are the different types of requirements, what are the different types of validation testing, or what are the risks that you’re following, and even how the particular system that you are engineering is subdivided from a systems engineering standpoint. So if I want to define the mechanical engineering or the software, I can dig right down in. And this configuration of how the information is organized, how the information is related to one another, it’s all part of the solution, so users don’t have to spend time studying the standards that you have to adhere to or the organization’s process. That’s already built for you. You can just start using it right away, which I think is really cool and a huge time saver and what really differentiates Jama Software from IBM itself.

Danny Beerens: And if you look at your type system and then the documentation that comes along, I must say in my 15 years, I’ve learned that having industry templates is a really great stepping stone to getting a customer quick up and running and achieving their industry compliancy goals. They don’t have to figure it out themselves. It’s already there. You will have guiding documents that explain to you why those templates are set up like they are, what the purpose is, and it comes fully guided with Jama experts. They are experts in the industry, so they can also talk you through the templates if you have any questions. It just simply helps you adjust the framework that comes out of the box to your specific situation within your industry. So you’re already there. You just need to apply rough tweaks to make it your own, and that’s it. And that’s what I love about Jama, working for Jama. How about you?

Cary Bryczek: I love that too. If I’m an end user, I just install Jama, tweak it a little bit here and there and give a minimal amount of training to my users, and then they’re ready to use it. And working at Jama in the aerospace and defense, I really enjoy putting together these solutions and seeing the companies not have to work so hard at using the tool, but actually spending more time innovating on the products and the systems that they’re building. Thanks so much, Danny, for your perspective on the IBM side. That was really insightful. I learned a lot.

Danny Beerens: You’re welcome.

Cary Bryczek: This concludes our vlog on the industry templates and its significance within the requirements management domain. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying the series so far. Stay tuned for our next entry in our series. We look forward to seeing you then.

Danny Beerens: Thanks for having me.

Cary Bryczek: See you next time.

Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.

Download our Jama Software® Data Model Diagnostic to learn more!

Thank you for watching our Episode 7, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Industry Templates. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Empower Your Team and Improve Your Requirements Management Process

We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.


requiremens authoring solution

In this blog, we recap our press release, “Jama Software® Is the First to Deliver a Complete Requirements Authoring Solution” – To read the entire thing, click HERE

Jama Software® Is the First to Deliver a Complete Requirements Authoring Solution

Requirements can now be authored in free text form, natural language analyzed, and managed as distinct items

Jama Software®, the industry-leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, has announced enhancements to Jama Connect®’s user experience. As part of the update, Jama Connect now includes a Document View, which allows users to author, read, and edit items in-line in a single view while maintaining an item-based structure within project hierarchies. This enables the streamlined authoring of requirements leading to material efficiencies gained and time saved.

The new Document View augments Jama Software’s atomic, item-based requirements approach. It allows users to easily learn and adopt Jama Connect whether moving from a documents-based approach or a legacy requirements tool. The seamless user experience combines the best of model-based requirements engineering with an enhanced, quick-editing Document View functionality. This improves time-to-adoption for Jama Connect users.

In addition, the enhancements also improve consistency and accuracy of requirements quality by incorporating built-in support for Jama Connect Advisor™ (add-on to Jama Connect).  With this, users can seamlessly see EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) and INCOSE (International Council for Systems Engineering) rules suggestions while actively authoring and editing requirements.

Jama Connect is the only comprehensive requirements management and traceability solution that allows:

  • Requirements authoring in free text form;
  • Analysis in natural language to maintain quality; and
  • Management of requirements as distinct items.

These capabilities make Jama Connect an incredibly powerful platform that delivers immense value for optimizing and accelerating systems development across various industry verticals.

“Jama Software is committed to continuously improving the adoptability and useability of Jama Connect. These powerful enhancements strengthen Jama Connect’s best-of-breed requirements authoring and Live Traceability™ offering, which continues to make Jama Connect the highest-rated solution for ease of use and adoptability in the industry, “said Josh Turpen, Chief Product Officer of Jama Software.

To learn more about Jama Connect’s features, please visit our product features page. If you would like to speak with one of our industry experts and/or book a free Jama Connect trial, click here.

About Jama Software

Jama Software® is focused on maximizing innovation success. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, autonomous vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect® to minimize the risk of product failure, delays, cost overruns, compliance gaps, defects, and rework. Jama Connect uniquely creates Live Traceability™ through siloed development, test, and risk activities to provide end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement. Our rapidly growing customer base of more than 12.5 million users across 30 countries spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, financial services, and insurance industries. For more information about Jama Connect, please visit www-dev.jamasoftware.com.

For more information on Jama Connect Advisor, please refer to our datasheet,
DOWNLOAD THE DATASHEET or GET A FREE TRIAL OF JAMA CONNECT ADVISOR.

Read the entire press release here!
Jama Software® Is the First to Deliver a Complete Requirements Authoring Solution


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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Jama Connect® Features in Five: Risk Management for Medical Device

Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect®’s powerful features… in under five minutes.

We always want to be respectful of your valuable time, but in this Features in Five video, we do go beyond the promised five-minute format to include an information-packed session. Join Vincent Balgos, Director of Medical Solutions at Jama Software®, as he walks through how risk management is integrated into the Jama Connect for Medical Device framework and how our new Lookup Matrix feature can fit seamlessly with your organization’s risk processes

In this session, viewers will learn how:

  • Jama Connect for Medical Device framework helps organizations align with regulations such as ISO 13485:2016, 21 CFR 820.30, and ISO 14971:2019
  • How to set up and utilize our new Lookup Matrix feature

Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Vincent Balgos: Hi, my name is Vincent Balgos, and I’m the director of Medical Solutions here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to provide an overview of how Risk Management is integrated as part of our medical device framework offering. In addition, I like to show you a new feature called Lookup Matrix that can fit seamlessly with your risk processes in a few easy steps.

So when developing complex products, integrating risk management activities can be a complicated process, usually requiring experts from various functional groups. Without a connected tool, there’s a potential for fragmented risk activities across the different siloed groups. This may lead to an impact on the product, its function, its safety, and its users.
In Jama Connects out of the box medical device framework, the risk management process is already integrated with other elements of key product development. These practices are aligned with ISO standards such as 13485, design controls 820.30, and also, of course, 14971. Seeing the relationship diagram of the medical device framework that’s readily available out of the box, hazards are a standalone item type that allows users to identify hazards that come directly from the product’s intended use, which is compliant with ISO 14971 section 5.4.

Related to the hazards is a risk evaluation item type that contains fields that also align with 14971 best practices, such as hazard situation, sequence of events, harm and severity, and probabilities, both pre mitigate and post mitigate. The risk evaluation is in trace downstream to risk control requirements and their verification activities. This continues to comply with the standard of practice as defined in 14971. Let’s dive into risk analysis. I’d like to talk to you about our new Lookup Matrix. Released in 8.75, this new feature allows the use of dedicated pick list inputs to automatically output desired content based on a pre-configured lookup table. The Lookup Matrix offers an easy-to-use interface, which allows for seamless analysis within the tool, which aligns with your organization’s process.

RELATED: Jama Connect® for Medical Device Development Datasheet

Vincent Balgos: As you can see here on the right, here is the general setup process, which I’m actually going to walk through right now. Here’s the out-of-the-box medical device framework. If you go into the admin section, one of the first steps is really to configure the Lookup Matrix. In the admin section, the first thing you have to do is define your pick list. So if I go here on the left, as you can see here, I’ve already set up an example for my Lookup Matrix, but this is an easy task to do to create your own that you want. So, for example, if I need to create a brand new pick list, all I have to do is hit the green button here. We’ll call this new pick list or lookup. And the key thing is here is instead of choosing the standard, we actually need to select the new Lookup Matrix.

And what this does is it’ll create a brand new pick list where then you can go ahead and define the different options as you have in your other standard pick lists. As you can see here, here are some options that, again, taking it straight from 14971, some good examples for probability. Some info tips and some color and stuff like that. So you can see here, I’ve created four different pick lists that will serve as input into my Lookup Matrix. That’s step one.

Step two is then to actually create your Lookup Matrix. Select on Lookup Matrix. You can actually see that here’s a new field where you can configure your Lookup Matrix. I’ve already pre-established this, but if I hit the view button, I can see that my probability P1 and P2 pick list is actually input on both my X and Y axes. And I can actually determine what is that total probability based off these two inputs. The second Lookup Matrix that we need to create is the risk lookup acceptability. Which actually takes input from the probability total Lookup Matrix that we just talked about and then compares it against the severity of it.

From here, this is where then you can do a lookup analysis based off your organization’s risk management process. This is pre-configured, but if you wanted to create your own, it’s as easy as hitting a couple buttons. All you have to do is add a new Lookup Matrix. Now we’ll call this new Lookup Matrix. And then from here I just have to pick what are my input pick list. So for my X axis let’s pick severity, like we did before. And then, for my Y-axis, we’ll go ahead and pick the total probability. As for the values of it, this is where the risk acceptability value is another input Lookup Matrix pick list that we have to create.

Once you’ve established that, you go ahead and hit generate matrix, and then the bottom screen here, you can actually then configure your matrix per your organization. So, for example, here, I can click that this is low, but maybe here, this is where I want to actually then increase the level of risk. As you can see here, this is quite easily configurable and easily managed. Now that you’ve established your Lookup Matrix, the last part is actually configuring your item type fields. So for this particular example, I created a brand new item type called the risk evaluation Lookup Matrix. And one of the key things you have to do is actually identify that this is a calculated logic field and that you’d like to use your Lookup Matrix.

RELATED: Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®

Vincent Balgos: As you can see here, here’s this has been predefined, but again, and if you wanted to add your own, it’s easy as adding your own field. So, for example, if we go ahead and hit add field, I go to customs, go ahead and hit calculate and logic. And we’ll say this is our new risk lookup. Once I come down to here, I establish that. For my calculation type, I actually just select Lookup Matrix. And then as my calculation source, I actually want to define my risk acceptability. And then here’s where then I define what are the fields to be used as input. So for this one here, it becomes pre-populated with the severity. But the next one is like, do I want to talk about pre-mitigated P-total or residual P-total? Why don’t we go ahead and pick residual. So that can establish your new field. Now that you configured your Lookup Matrix appropriately within your admin section, why don’t we jump to the project and see how that looks.

As you can see in this new project, I created this new item type called a risk evaluation Lookup Matrix. In the list view, as you can see, here are some pre-populated examples of this new item type with the Lookup Matrix functionality enabled. As you can see here, this follows the general standard best practice with 14971 in terms of identifying your hazards, sequence of events, hazardous situation. But more importantly, I identify what the severity is, the P1, P2, and P total. Again, based off your Lookup Matrix configuration, this is predetermined. But I can see here for this example, on my risk example five, that actually I have not identified what is my P1 mitigated. But this is really nice because with this view, you can take a look at seeing what has not been enabled, and then you can address it immediately right here on the screen. Let me show you how.

So for this particular example, I can see that my P1 hasn’t been defined yet. This is easily addressed by just go ahead and double click this. Let’s say with the, this is again, this is pre-mitigated, this is probably a more a probable type of event. I can go ahead and hit probable, and you can see that my “P total” is automatically updated again based off of my first Lookup Matrix. And then my risk level is also then determined based off that second Lookup Matrix that we’ve had here. If I further go down the list here, I can see I can go back and then see, hey, let’s define what our P1 mitigator looks like. So then with that, let’s say I put it in the risk controls and say, this is now improbable. I can go ahead and update based off of that. My “P total” has been reduced now to medium, but my risk level is still high. Again, this shows you can apply dynamic changes and analysis on your risk management activities on the fly.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Jama Connect Features

We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Features in Five topics, including Reviews, Dashboard Management, and more.


In this blog, we partially recap this customer story, “Vave Health Migrates to Jama Connect® to Accelerate Development and FDA Clearance” Read the entire story HERE.

Vave Health is committed to revolutionizing the physician-patient experience through innovative, industry-transforming technologies. Their innovative handheld ultrasound device packs the ability to wirelessly connect with your Android or iOS smartphone or tablet.

After initially selecting Matrix Requirements, Vave Health found themselves constrained by the tool’s limited functionality and were ready for a change. Following a requirements management market analysis, Jama Connect® was selected and onboarded due to its ease of use and industry-leading functionality.

Read this customer story to see how now, with more confidence in their processes, Vave health has achieved the following outcomes:

  • Accelerate the release cadence from what previously took a couple weeks, down to a day or two
  • Decrease generation of trace matrices from 30 days to one per project
  • Scale development process with the ability to run multiple projects in parallel
  • Maintain traceability and instantly identify coverage for verification and validation of requirements to respond to action items sooner in development

VAVE HEALTH CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW

CHALLENGES WITH MATRIX

  • Reports, such as a traceability matrix, were taking too long to generate
  • The steep learning curve caused most people to revert to working in Word and Excel
  • Inability to develop parallel projects and reuse data between releases, contributed to duplicated work and slower-than-desired release cadence

SELECTION CRITERIA

  • A solution that would scale with their growth
  • Quick-to-adopt and easy-to-use 
  • Strong market presence
  • Ease of data migration

OUTCOME + FUTURE

  • Accelerate the release cadence from what previously took a couple of weeks, down to a day or two
  • Decrease generation of trace matrices from 30 days to one per project
  • Scale development process with the ability to run multiple projects in parallel
  • Maintain traceability and instantly identify coverage for verification and validation of requirements to respond to action items sooner in development

RELATED: 2023 Predictions for Medical Device Product Development

CHALLENGES

In the early days of Vave Health, the development team originally selected Matrix Requirements due to its low cost. While the tool was sufficient for managing their requirements in the preliminary stages of development, as the company began to scale, it became apparent that they needed a more mature, enterprise-grade solution with more robust capabilities.

The main challenges that Vave Health had which led them to seek out a new solution were:

  • Reports, such as a traceability matrix, were taking too long to generate
  • Steep learning curve caused most people to revert to working in Word and Excel
  • Inability to develop parallel projects and reuse data between releases, contributed to duplicated work and slower-than-desired release cadence

As a small team, they did not have dedicated staff to manage requirements – it was a shared responsibility. With Matrix Requirements, the learning curve was so steep, only a few people were able to use it. Even then, it was used similarly to an Excel spreadsheet.

“Matrix Requirements was difficult to use, and it limited our ability to easily extract reports and quickly show traceability. The whole process just took too long,” said Craig Loomis, Vice President of Product at Vave Health.

“One of the deliverables in getting our product released is generating the trace matrix. With Matrix Requirements, it was very cumbersome,” said Sandhya Mitnala, Head of Quality and Regulatory at Vave Health. “We realized that something that should have taken one or two days, and managed through the project, took us almost a month. It was a very manual process.”

Additionally, as the team grew and the development work went from singular to multiple projects, the team ran into limitations using Matrix Requirements.

“One thing we didn’t initially think about when selecting Matrix Requirements was the ability to have multiple projects in motion at the same time,” said Loomis. “Although it was technically possible, there was no good way to extract the trace matrix and manage revisions across different projects at the same time in parallel.”

RELATED: FDA Updates to the Medical Device Cybersecurity Guidance

SELECTION CONSIDERATIONS

In order to overcome the limitations of their current tool, the team set out to find a solution that could meet their current needs and grow with them as they expanded in the market.

“The startup world is unique in that you’re trying to do so much more with fewer resources. Sometimes you do need to leverage technology to automate things that larger companies would be
able to throw bodies at,” said Loomis.

When it came time to evaluate the available solutions in the marketplace, things moved quickly.

“From my experience working with Jama Software® at other companies, and my coworkers’ similar experiences, we wanted to move to a more automated solution and Jama Software was on everyone’s mind,” said Mitnala. “It was a very easy choice for us. All of the solutions we looked at, outside of Jama Connect®, were ruled out quickly,” shared Loomis.

During the evaluation process, the Vave Health team was able to access a sandbox account created specifically for them, so they could test out the solution to make sure it was the right fit.
Because there were so many things already in motion, the team wanted to ensure that data migration would not be an issue, so they could keep moving quickly.

“Before we even signed a contract, we spent time in Jama Connect and had a lot of confidence in moving forward. We knew that our data would be migrated easily, and we wouldn’t be putting our projects at risk,” said Loomis.

Although Matrix Requirements supported some initial needs, the team knew that in order to derive the value they needed, it was time to up-level their tool for requirements management and systems engineering. The return on investment for Jama Connect, a robust, yet easy-to-use platform (which comprised the feature set and functionality they required) would increase efficiencies, simplify compliance, reduce risk, and ultimately speed time-to-market, paying dividends in the long run.

“As a startup, the one thing you must ensure is that you are able to move fast. You’re learning the market, you’re working against your competitors, and speed to market is critical. Especially where there are things that can be automated – that’s where you want to invest,” said Loomis.

To read the entire outcome from Vave Health’s choice of Jama Connect, read the entire customer story here:
Vave Health Migrates to Jama Connect® to Accelerate Development and FDA Clearance