In this blog, we’ll break down key elements of our Jama Connect for Semiconductor Software.
Jama Connect® for Semiconductor Software
It can take months or even years to complete the development of a new chip. To avoid costly mistakes, semiconductor requirements need to be clearly communicated to the entire team across the development lifecycle. While most teams acknowledge their communication challenges, the risk of process change or adopting a new tool can be daunting. Jama Connect for Semiconductor provides an intuitive, leading-edge semiconductor requirements management solution for complex chip development with methods in use today by top manufacturers.
Supercharge Your Systems Development and Engineering Process
Jama Connect® is a solution for managing product requirements from idea through development, launch, and iteration. It brings people and data together in one place, providing visibility and actionable insights into the product development lifecycle. Jama Connect equips teams to analyze impacts, track decisions, and ensure quality of the product you set out to build.
Simplify Complex Product Development With Jama Connect
Jama Connect is a hub for understanding your complete product development lifecycle, enabling product managers and engineers to track requirements, decisions, and relationships on multiple levels to deliver compliant, market-driven products effectively. Jama Connect helps teams deliver high-quality products on time and on budget by aligning stakeholders, identifying risks early on and visualizing connections between regulations, requirements, and test cases throughout the development process.
Key Benefits
In the increasingly complex semiconductor industry, market forces are creating new challenges for semiconductor product developers. Jama Connect was designed to help teams:
Confidence – Trace requirements throughout the development process, illuminate risk, and proceed with confidence that you are building what you set out to build.
Visibility – Gain visibility into the product development process by monitoring relationships and dependencies between systems, teams, activities, and results.
Speed – Align teams, track decisions efficiently, and minimize rework to create high-quality products on time and on budget.
Adaptability – Easily adapt Jama Connect to your project and organizational workflows to create an intuitive experience so your teams can get up to speed quickly.
Performance – Benchmark and monitor team performance over time to understand the benefits of retooling your product development process. Store and reuse existing intellectual property and best practices from multiple product lines.
Infineon Transitions From a Document-Centric to Data-Centric Development Flow with Jama Connect
Founded in 1999 as a spin-off of Siemens AG, German semiconductor manufacturer, Infineon Technologies AG is a world leader in semiconductor solutions that make life easier, safer, and greener. Ranking among the 10% most sustainable companies in the world, Infineon is a leading player in automotive, digital security systems, power and sensor systems, and industrial power control.
In our Infineon customer story, we examine how Jama Software helps Infineon manage complex product development subject to regulatory compliance and increase efficiency. Read the full customer story to find out how Infineon’s shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution resulted in:
Better management of product complexities throughout the development cycle
Systematic handling of requirements from product definition to product development and verification
Improved collaboration with distributed teams both inside and outside of their organization
More effective exchange of requirements to ensure functional safety standards are met
Database-centric approach increases the efficiency of Infineon product development
Jama Connect helped Infineon shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution enabling newfound product development efficiencies around complexities, communication, reviews, and compliance.
CHALLENGES
• Keep the overview on ever-increasing product complexities and avoid requirements misunderstandings
• Provide compliance without compromising time-to-market goals
• Manual document versioning makes review cycles and alignment difficult
• Improve the review & sign-off process, making it an integral part of the requirement management system
• Need for enhanced reuse capabilities • Exchange requirements information with customers and suppliers
• Overcome the scaling limits of a document-centric approach
SOLUTIONS
• Jama Connect’s scalability supports complex projects
• Easier to show compliance to industry regulations
• Jama Connect Review Center supports an efficient process
• Provide requirements-accurate versioning to backtrace decisions
• Reuse requirements to shorten development cycles
• Digital exchange of requirements between customers and suppliers
RESULTS
• Better management of product complexities throughout the development cycle
• Systematic handling of requirements from product definition to product development and verification
• The traceability of requirements enables functional safety standards compliance
• Improved collaboration with distributed teams both inside and outside of their organization
• More effective exchange of requirements to ensure functional safety standards are met
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/2022-11-29-jama-connect-for-semiconductor-1.jpg5121024Decoteau Wilkerson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDecoteau Wilkerson2022-11-29 03:00:502024-01-18 10:54:33Jama Connect® for Semiconductor Software: Modernize and Digitize the Requirements Management Process
Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Review and Collaboration: 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 4 of our Roundtable Chat series, Mario Maldari – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software® – and Vincent Balgos – Director of Medical Device Solutions at Jama Software® – walk us through reviews and collaboration in Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS.
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Vincent Balgos: Hi, welcome to part four of our vlog series. I hope you are enjoying the series so far. My name is Vincent Balgos, and I’ll be representing Jama Software today. In terms of experience, I’ve been working at Jama for over nine months now, but before joining Jama, I was a systems engineer in the medical device field working on requirements, reviews, risk and collaboration. I’m actually a former Jama customer and have been using the tool in practice for over six years developing complex medical products. I’m joined today by my colleague, Mario Maldari. Mario, would you like to introduce yourself and provide some background?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, thanks Vincent. My name is Mario Maldari. I’m Director of Solution Architecture at Jama. Spent about 20 years working in various requirement solutions, started with Requisite Pro back in the day and started working on the DOORS family. DOORS, DOORS Next Generation, so a lot of history with requirements management software in different industries.
Vincent Balgos: Great. How long have you been working at Jama?
Mario Maldari: Just about a year now.
Vincent Balgos: Oh great, so similar to myself. Welcome to the team and look forward to the discussion.
Mario Maldari: Thank you.
Vincent Balgos: As part of this series, we will be discussing actually the requirements, review and collaboration across different various tool sets. As many of you know, working and reviewing requirements are essential tasks that requires a significant effort sometimes from drafting the initial spirit of the requirement to the solidification of the final language. It’s an iterative and collaborative effort that usually requires lots of different teams across different function groups. There are many tools that can help with review and common ones that we’ve seen are generally emails, Word, Excel, PowerPoint to more complex tools, which is our focus today. Today we’d like to actually talk about the Review Center, a review and collaboration within the DOORS and how’s that compare to Jama, with Mario’s experience at DOORS, what’s been your experience with performing these tasks under the DOORS?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, it’s been interesting. I think some of the challenges that our customers faced at the time were difficulty with the tooling itself, the way that the collaboration and the review was done within the tool or facilitated within the tool. What would happen is they’d often go outside the tooling. They’d start using Word or documents and they’d email this back and forth. Besides going outside the tool, you’d end up losing a lot of history in terms of auditability, who made the decisions, and how the requirements evolved. It diminished the purpose and the value of a formal requirements tool. When it’s difficult, people just go outside the tool and that’s what we were seeing a lot with DOORS.
Then as DOORS Next started evolving, things didn’t get much better. It was very difficult to use the reviews within DOORS next. I was a test lead at the time trying to review requirements and test cases. I found that the UI itself was very difficult to use and facilitate. Again, it was just people going outside of the tooling to go with whatever was easier for them. It was quite a challenge from a usability point of view.
Vincent Balgos: That’s really interesting and that’s a little bit different workflow that we have actually natively within our Jama tool. Let me actually walk you through that. As you can see, Mario, here is actually the review center within natively within the Jama tool itself. This is actually a review that I just held with my team and we were reviewing actually five different requirements. We were able to collaborate, live and provide comment, feedback, approval, rejection or needs a revisit, and as a moderator, I can actually see and manage the whole review center within a single tool right through here.
For example, we highlighted this particular area and Carleda had some interesting comment here, but that’s a single point of comment. A more interesting one is one that we actually had here. We were talking about tolerances for a particular gain field requirement and I asked Jakob @Jakob, Hey, is this enough? What about X, Y, Z? Jakob responded as we had here. You can see this kind of maintains some of that audit trail traceability that you kind of mentioned that tend to get lost in different emails and different tools and stuff like that. But you can see that this is all collected in a single tool within the Jama space.
What’s also nice, as you know again, as you’re going through the review, you can see what the status of the review is in terms of the number of comments that we have here on the left, the number of approvals that we have, and then somewhere we may actually need a little bit more time. For example, this one here, I had a lot of conversation that I may want to have to go back with my team and kind of resolve that we have here. With that said, what do you think about Jam’s workflow?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, I think Jama’s workflow in terms of the review and approval, I think the usability is key here. When the tool itself facilitates a certain workflow and it makes it easy for the customers to use, I think that’s key. What I like about this is it stores everything within Jama. A year from now I can go back and look and say, who made the comment to get this approved and what was the discussion around that? I can easily see that. At the same time, I can easily get that information out of the tooling should I ever need to send it to an auditor or send it to management. The key is it’s all kept within the tool. I like that a lot.
Vincent Balgos: We just really just covered a very small snippet of the capabilities and power of the review center, but we can do exports, we can moderate this. There are additional capabilities here, but it’s great to hear that this is a more seamless flow. As you can see in the short demo, collaborating within Review Center is as easy as posting on social media where you can see comments, tag people, continue the discussion of the requirement or whatever you’re reviewing all within a single place. Jama allows live collaboration natively within the tool. Gone are the days, as you describe, Mario, about handling which email, which Word versions that we should be looking at. It seems a lot more efficient process than you described at DOORS.
Mario Maldari: Yeah, and it’s one thing too, you could formally manage your requirements in a tool and that’s great, but if you cannot have a workflow that facilitates a proper review and approval, then the tooling itself is very diminished. This kind of rounds off that whole workflow of requirements management. I like that a lot.
Vincent Balgos: Yeah, right. While I may have shown you a medical example, this tool is actually agnostic to any industry that you have within. This could be applied to aerospace, auto, semiconductor, other areas of the business. Again, just want to kind of share that tidbit.
Well, thank you for this discussion and your perspective, Mario. This kind of concludes our v-log on review and collaboration and the significance within the requirements management domain. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying the series so far. Stay tuned for the next entry in our series and we look forward to seeing you then.
Mario Maldari: Thank you, Vincent.
Thank you for watching our Episode 4, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Review and Collaboration. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; 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.
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/Doors-VLOG-Episode-4-intro-1.jpg10801920Mario Maldari/media/jama-logo-primary.svgMario Maldari2022-11-16 03:00:132024-01-18 13:17:27Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Review and Collaboration: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
In this blog, we’ll preview our customer story, “Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®.” To read the entire customer story, click HERE.
Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®
Graduates enter the workforce better prepared to tackle real-world engineering problems with modern technology
About Carnegie Mellon University
Master of Science in Software Engineering (M.S.-SE) is a unique program offered exclusively at CMU’s Silicon Valley campus by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Emphasizes a rigorous foundation in the core disciplines of software engineering
Offers students fundamental knowledge, skills, and first-hand experience in software engineering by balancing theory and practice, engaging students in active learning, and encouraging collaboration on projects drawn from real-world contexts
CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
As a co-founder of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Master’s Program, Dr. Cécile Péraire set out to prepare her students to enter the workforce by teaching modern software tools and processes with a hands-on approach. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon as a professor, Péraire worked for a decade at Rational Software and then at IBM.
As part of this modern approach to software engineering, Péraire teaches her students how to use Jama Connect® as the single source of truth for software product definition and uses the platform as a way to review her student’s work.
Principles of the Software Engineering Course
As a professor of Software Engineering for master’s students at Carnegie Mellon, Cécile Péraire teaches with a hands-on approach. Each semester, students are asked to select one real world challenge, and to come up with a software product that could help address the challenge. In the past, students have selected challenges like wildfires, food waste, and homelessness.
Instead of teaching a traditional lecture-based course, Péraire takes a mixed approach that combines flipped-classroom delivery and project-based learning, with students implementing dual-track Agile during their project. As the name suggests, it’s a process that has two tracks of work – one track aims at discovering what functionality to build next, focusing on requirements engineering and interaction design, and the other track focuses on delivering new functionality. The two tracks run continuously and in parallel with a strong focus on understanding the needs of the stakeholders and validating that the team is building the right product from the technical perspective, the user perspective, and the business perspective.
“In order to ensure that my students are building the right product, they must remain with the stakeholders during the entire semester and welcome changes at any time, principle,” said Péraire.
Selection Process
Prior to Péraire joining CMU, the requirements engineering course was taught in a more traditional and outdated fashion.
“When I joined CMU, I inherited a requirements engineering course that was taught using Word and Excel. I’ve always tried to teach fairly lightweight processes but having to create and structure documents introduced a lot of overhead for the students and made the process quite heavy and old fashioned,” said Péraire. “I could immediately see that it wasn’t working. When I had a chance to create my own course, I decided to do it differently.”
When Péraire set out to find a requirements management solution for her requirements engineering and interaction design course, she had a set of very specific criteria.
The new solution must have the following characteristics:
Cloud-based
Robust requirements management capabilities
Customizable to support all development practices
Reliable – free from bugs and crashes
User-friendly interface that is easy to learn
Resources and e-learning for students
Responsive and helpful support team and account management
After evaluating all available solutions, Péraire determined that Jama Connect stood out as the leader and fit her needs the best.
“After reading many reviews about the leading requirements management solutions, I ended up with a short list of about five tools that I evaluated very thoroughly. Overall, Jama Connect was the one that performed the best and met all of the criteria on my list,” said Péraire.
Using Jama Connect for Teaching Software Engineering
“…from interview notes to storyboards, prototypes, user stories, all the way down to working software. Every artifact that relates to the project is available in or accessible from Jama Connect. It’s the hub for all of the information we need.” CÉCILE PÉRAIRE, Professor of Software Engineering Carnegie Mellon
Now, with Jama Connect deeply ingrained in her software engineering course, students use the platform as their single source of truth for all software product definition activities.
Using Jama Connect for software product definition has been key to supporting her students in order to build the right product for their stakeholders. They use Jama Connect as a hub for all the artifacts that are created during the project, “…from interview notes to storyboards, prototypes, user stories, all the way down to working software. Every artifact that relates to the project is available in or accessible from Jama Connect. It’s the hub for all of the information we need,” said Péraire.
“My students use Jama Connect first to structure the information effectively, and then to share the information within their teams and with other stakeholders. They are required to stay in contact with their stakeholders throughout the semester and Jama Connect helps to facilitate that communication when they aren’t able to meet in person. Remote communication can happen synchronously or asynchronously as Jama Connect supports all those different ways of sharing information and getting feedback on the work done,” said Péraire.
Using Jama Connect to Review Work Provides Students with Real-World Project Management Experience
In addition to using Jama Connect to help students learn how to properly organize software development projects’ artifacts, Péraire also uses the platform to review, grade, and give feedback on her students’ work.
Improved Review Processes
“I use Jama Connect Review Center to grade and provide feedback on all deliverables. The process in itself is a learning experience for students because it actually mimics the real-world industry review. It provides me with the ability to very easily comment on any element of the project, ask questions, request changes, or have discussions related to a specific section of a deliverable,” said Péraire.
Enhanced Visibility into Revision History
“Jama Connect gives me visibility into the students’ work. At any point I can log into Jama Connect and see what is going on, who is doing what, and I can see the different discussion streams. I can see the revision history and who is contributing to what. Compared to Word and Excel, this gives me an improved ability to evaluate students individually while letting them work in teams,” said Péraire.
Effective Collaboration
“With Jama Connect, I not only have improved visibility into the students’ work, but I have the ability to effectively collaborate with students outside of the classroom for both mentoring and evaluation purposes. We can have a conversation around any project item,” said Péraire.
Because Péraire’s courses are hands-on and not lecture-based, her students learn by doing. By taking a project-based approach to learning, she’s able to mimic what happens in the industry, and her students get firsthand experience working through those challenges and interacting with stakeholders.
“Software product definition is a highly creative process supported by a combination of interactive design and requirements engineering practices. As students learn to apply those practices on their products during the course project, they document the outcome of their work in Jama Connect.” said Péraire.
“Jama Connect is really an effective way of teaching by example. The platform is fully customizable, so I created a structure for the students that nicely supports software product definition in the context of course projects. Students can use that as a good example of how to structure and share information in the future. That can be used as a starting point for a project and be customized to adapt to a different context,” said Péraire.
With Jama Connect, Péraire shares that her students can focus on content creation instead of building a complex document structure, which results in better learning outcomes and increased student productivity. Even if a student graduates and goes on to work at an organization that chooses not to use a requirements management platform like Jama Connect, Péraire believes her students are still more prepared to enter the workforce than those taught traditional, outdated software engineering tools and processes.
“Learning with Jama Connect gives my students a model of how to organize and structure artifacts related to software product definition. Even if they do not have a requirements management tool and have to go back to Word and Excel on their next project, they will have a good idea about how to organize and structure the information. While in that case they would lose the power of the tool, being exposed to an effective way of working should benefit my students greatly,” said Péraire
“Learning with Jama Connect gives my students a model of how to organize and structure artifacts related to software product definition. Even if they do not have a requirements management tool and have to go back to Word and Excel on their next project, they will have a good idea about how to organize and structure the information.”
How Jama Software® Supports CCMI
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University is the birthplace of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a framework used to evaluate the maturity of an organization’s software development process. The model describes a five-level evolutionary path of increasingly organized and systematically more mature processes.
Worldwide CMMI plays a key role in software development organizations that must showcase their development maturity. Teams are working hard to move their current CMM level to the next level and hence demonstrate their ability to deliver quality software.
Being CMMI certified is a common requirement for the Department of Defense (DoD) and U.S. Government software development contracts.
“While I am not a CMMI expert, my understanding is that during a CMMI appraisal, the organization must show evidence of implementation for each practice in the scope of the appraisal. For organizations that have a good process in place, Jama Connect can make this process visible. This can be beneficial during the CMMI appraisal in order to quickly identify evidence that the required practices are being implemented by the organization. Jama Connect can be leveraged to support demonstrating the alignment between CMMI and the practices adopted by the organizations needing certification,” said Péraire.
To read about the predicted future of Carnegie Mellon University and Jama Connect, download the full customer story HERE
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/2022-11-10-customer-story-carnegie-mellon-1-1.jpg5121024McKenzie Jonsson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgMcKenzie Jonsson2022-11-10 03:00:002024-01-18 13:32:20Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Advisor™
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, Joseph Pitarresi, Senior Product Manager at Jama Software, will introduce viewers to Jama Connect Advisor™, Jama Connect’s natural language processing (NLP) tool, designed to improve requirement quality.
In this session, we’ll explore the benefits of using Jama Connect Advisor™ to:
Reduce authoring errors
Increase clarity
Optimize foundational product needs and requirements managed in Jama Connect Cloud
Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Joseph Pitarresi: Hello and welcome. Thanks for joining me today. I’m Joseph, Senior Product Manager at Jama Software. In this video, I’ll introduce Jama Connect Advisor, our new requirements authoring solution crafted with engineering-based natural language processing to help users write effective, efficient, and well-organized requirements. As a fully integrated add-on product for Jama Connect Cloud, it delivers extraordinary speed and accuracy in authoring advice. In this video, we’ll explore the benefits of using it in your daily product development to reduce authoring errors, increase clarity, and optimize the foundational product needs and requirements managed in Jama Connect Cloud.
Today, products of all types are rapidly becoming increasingly complex across every industry sector. Intelligent, connected products with rich software complexity are the new norm. Because of this, an exciting architectural evolution has emerged. The Systems-of-Systems architecture has become the new standard and brings with it the need to balance rigor and precision with agility and adaptability in the product development process. Success in this new form of product delivery starts by having accurate user requirements written clearly in natural language. Conversely, poorly written or ambiguous statements lead to development issues downstream.
Joseph Pitarresi: Efficient, precise, and professionally written requirements form the foundation of product development success. This is exactly what Jama Connect Advisor is crafted to help you and your team create. Our solution has been intentionally designed to help teams author intricate product requirements quickly and with precision. It’s been created to minimize the interruption of engineering and creative workflow processes. Jama Connect Advisor is a state-of-the-art authoring optimizer powered by engineering-focused natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Our use of engineering-focused natural language is different from that used by general-purpose digital assistance. It applies to special engineering terminology and engineering syntax expertise essential for successful product development.
So how does it work? It applies the globally proven industry principles of the International Council on Systems Engineering requirement’s rules and the easy approach to the requirement’s syntax. Authoring is a challenging task. Even experienced systems engineers and MBSEs need to consider the over 40 INCOSE rules and EARS notations six patterns while authoring even one requirement sentence. This is a daunting task. The challenge represents the perfect application of engineering-based natural language processing and artificial intelligence to speed up productivity and enhance quality. When you use Jama Connect Advisor, it reinforces and extends the authoring skills for everyone involved, regardless of their current skill level.
Joseph Pitarresi: Now let’s see how you and your team can use Jama Connect Advisor. Step one is to open a requirement in Jama Connect. Step two is to select the edit button. Step three is highlighting the rich text of a statement for analysis. You’ll notice a purple analyze button will appear on the lower right, select it. You’ll first see the quick analysis. This saves time, avoiding the need to review already well-written statements. You will see either a green, yellow or red indicator in the quick analysis. This is a rough initial gauge of quality. Next, if you see a yellow or red indicator, you’ll want to view the detailed analysis. Select the detailed analysis button.
Now you can consider detailed advice given by the INCOSE rules and EARS patterns assessments. Once you’ve considered advice, you can dismiss the detailed analysis, make your desired changes right in Jama Connect single-item view. If desired, you can repeat the analysis after you’ve made changes just to confirm your improvements were effective. This is all done in real-time with minimal interruption to your workflow and the creative thinking process.
In summary, Jama Connect Advisor enhances development team effectiveness by enabling teams to develop, refine, and adopt authoring skills faster. It speeds the creation of institutional knowledge, helping to develop an organization’s own unique approach to capturing customer value during the product development process. Thank you for joining today. We look forward to hearing from you and please ask your Jama software representative for a demo and more information about Jama Connect Advisor. Thank you.
CLICK HERE TO TRY OUT JAMA CONNECT ADVISOR FOR FREE!
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 Risk Management, Reviews, and more.
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/FIF-Req-Advisor-5in5-intro-22.jpg10801920Joseph Pitarresi/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJoseph Pitarresi2022-11-04 03:00:132023-07-26 12:37:44Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Advisor™
Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Filters, Search, and Analysis: 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, A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 3 of our Roundtable Chat series, Richard Watson – Practice Director at Jama Software® – and Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture, Jama Software® – walk us through filtering, searching, and analyzing content in Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Richard Watson: Welcome to part three of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the vlog so far. My name is Richard Watson and I’ll be representing DOORS today. In terms of experience, I’ve been using DOORS for just over 20 years and all of those was as the DOORS and DOORS Next product manager. I’m joined today by Cary.
Cary Bryczek: Hi everybody. I’m Cary. I haven’t had the pleasure of using DOORS for as many years as Richard. I’ve been blessed by not having to use it, but I have used Jama for a very long time and I’m the Director of Solutions Architecture here at Jama, and I’ve been in the requirements world for more than 25 years.
Richard Watson: Thank you. So in this vlog we’re going to be talking about requirements analysis, that’s filtering, searching, dashboards, etc.
Analysis is probably one of the most important reasons that we actually pick a requirements tool in the first place. The risk of life or the risk of lots of money gets organizations imposing compliance needs or their industry will give them regulations that they simply have to meet. And document-based systems just don’t give the relevant granularity to enable things like live traceability. So we need a tool.
Over time, the way we’ve engineered complex systems has changed and we find a much wider community of stakeholders are interested in direct access to the requirements. They want to actually go into the tool. And so usability of that tool becomes key. We also continue to get a wide dynamic set of users and new users, certainly younger users expect the tool to almost be like their social media apps that they’re using.
Cary Bryczek: Yeah, right but aren’t developing with the social media tools that the younger folks are used to. We’re doing real engineering.
Richard Watson: So how to persuade them to use an engineering tool?
Today’s tool engineers are being overwhelmed by data. Data can have, of course, huge value, but if you can’t find the data, it can sometimes even hinder your process, let alone give you any value.
Cary Bryczek: To do that analysis, we need to know how the information is stored, maybe even over multiple systems and how it’s all related to each other. We need to have different views of all of that trace data to ensure that really everything is being done as expected.
Richard Watson: So, okay, let’s start digging into the details. If we start with filters and search. Looking at DOORS, DOORS obviously has a world that’s wrapped around individual modules, and so trying to filter and search information across modules is next to impossible.
Initially, when we started out using DOORS years ago, that was okay. Today it’s not. Today we’re finding organizations have got thousands of DOORS modules and millions of requirements in those are total modules. It’s really difficult to find the data that you need. When you’re in a module, of course, DOORS has got quite sophisticated, complex filter definitions, but even they’re frustrating because if you want to modify them for some reason, perhaps you need to change them or maybe they’re even wrong, you have to start from scratch and normally, you need help to do that.
If we jump the fence DOORS Next, DOORS Next is DOORS next generation. It should be the next generation of DOORS, but it’s hampered by its history. DOORS Next actually was developed on top of an original tool requirements composer. And in order to introduce the DOORS, facilities, modules were added. And as a secondary fun function, modules actually confuse the situation. For example, when you add a requirement to a DOORS Next module, it also gets added to what’s called a base folder. And so when you’re searching for information, you need to know whether you’re looking for the requirement in a module or whether inadvertently you find that requirement in the folder. Sometimes you can even count these requirements twice because they’re in two separate places.
Cary Bryczek: Richard, that sounds complicated even listening to you describe it. Jama is a modern tool and we took a completely new approach with a web-based UI that’s designed for anybody to get up and running. And filters and searches is one of the prime areas that make it really super simple and easy to use for analysis.
Let me just show you what I mean. When we created Jama, we wanted it to be easy to use right away, and finding information should be just intuitive as possible. You don’t have to write any kind of DXL. I can see filters that I already have. I can see just things that I’ve bookmarked creating and searching. Again, I don’t have to write any DXL. It should just show me the particular type of requirements. I can even find things across. What are the ones that don’t have any downstream relationships.
Richard Watson: Yeah. This is so much different to DOORS, and also it’s an improvement over DOORS Next, Cary, because you can do filters on the information at the other side of the relationships and that’s quite difficult to do in DOORS Next and you just can’t do that in DOORS at all.
Cary Bryczek: Yeah. Filters are built into almost any view that you’re on. So if I’m right in a view that I’m looking at requirements, I’m able to filter it right there, filtered by keyword, filtered by the types of things that are in the view, even through traceability.
Richard Watson: Yeah. That’s really interesting, Cary. I particularly liked the way you were doing filters over relationships. I mean you consider it trying to do a filter in DOORS Next, which is impossible saying show me requirements related to defects that have been raised against failed test cases. You just can’t do that type of filtering inside of DOORS Next. So it’s pretty cool in Jama.
Richard Watson: Also, you’re showing the dashboard functionality. Dashboards in DOORS just don’t exist. So it’s got a welcome screen so you can sometimes see information on that welcome screen, but that was introduced so late in the process or the release schedule that not many organizations use it.
DOORS Next, of course, has dashboards, but again that’s hampered by history. DOORS Next dashboards are very much focused on requirements in folders. So for our DOORS user moving into DOORS Next, you’ll find that the maturity of dashboards around module information is pretty limited.
Cary Bryczek: With Jama, our dashboard technology is built right into the tool. You don’t need any extra add-on servers to make it work. And it’s something that is used as a launchpad for different stakeholders to get to the information. Let me show you what I mean.
We have dashboards that are built right in. The reporting engine is native inside of Jama itself, and then so you can take those filters that we were creating earlier and turn them into widgets, into pie charts, into bar charts, then you can download the information. You can download a picture of the things. You can see which requirements don’t have tests, what are the suspect ones, which are the recently viewed things, what’s the progress, which are the things that I’ve touched in the past few days. So if I need to pick up where I left off, launch that directly from a dashboard review.
Richard Watson: Yeah, that’s cool. I like the traceability map there as well. That’s really good. So let’s move on and talk about analysis of requirements. Analysis of requirements is where the fund is and we can start with DOORS.
DOORS has some analysis for capabilities, but mostly organizations are expected to develop DXL solutions. DXL it’s a cool thing to fill in gaps. I remember going around many of the software conferences and people will actually proudly come to me and say, “Hey, Richard. Our organization’s got hundreds of thousands of lines of DXL scripts,” sometimes over a million lines of DXL scripts.
Think about what we’re saying. A million lines of customization code where the organization’s core business is not developing requirements tools. That DXL hampers the performance of DOORS. Sometimes you lose sight of what’s making DOORS go slowly. Is it DOORS itself or is it a customization? And also, as time moved on, the number of people that have got skills in developing DXL is diminishing greatly. And so if you try to, you are exposing your organization to risk because you can’t maintain or extend your current environment.
Jumping the fence to DOORS Next, there’s a different problem entirely. DOORS Next, of course, doesn’t support front end customizations. It doesn’t support DXL. When you look at DOORS Next, actually you start to look at traceability. We want a system that can see an overall view of live traceability between data so that you can analyze that information. And the only way you can do that in DOORS Next is either with an additional tool, so Jazz reporting system, or you start looking at OSLC techniques. OSLC is okay if you’re looking at your Jazz-based products only. It’s got some very big constraints if you’re starting to get tools from different vendors. So you get tied into a single vendor solution simply because of the lack of maturity of OSLC implementations.
Cary Bryczek: Gosh, Richard. Again, that sounds really complicated. And one of the great things that Jama software did was build all of that workflow capability, all of the bits and pieces that you’d have to do with DXL into the software. So people just come in to Jama Connect and just start using it. And the live traceability aspect is probably my favorite aspect about the tool and it’s super powerful. Let me show you what I mean. One of the things that’s great is that live traceability enables pretty much anyone to find anything at the current moment across boundaries. And so, one of the ways that we start live traceability is through that relationship rule diagram. I can see the schema for what’s traced, and this information might be coming in live from other tools in the ecosystem.
We give you an easy way to organize. So if I’m starting to analyze a system just following this explore tree, and seeing how the information is organized by system and subsystem for this aircraft. Now once inside, just navigating to find that information is super simple. I even have live traceability here in the tools itself, so in the requirements, so I can see this particular function requirement, it traces to a system requirement.
Traceability is in almost every view that we look at. So if I’m in this one detail view of a requirement, I know it’s got upstream and downstream traces. If I’m in the live tracing view, my live tracing view, this is a multi-level view of requirements. So I can see if I’m following these requirements on down to the validation level or the system level. I can walk that traceability all the way down, multiple levels of requirements to look at test runs, to look at any defects along the way. It’s really powerful. And then I can start and filter right where I need to be. So if I want to have a filtered start from a filter view, which are the ones that are causing suspect?
Now, this shortens the amount of information that I have on the screen. It really makes the analysis much faster to do than having to work with DXL scripts or exporting stuff to spreadsheets and looking at the information.
Richard Watson: Thanks very much, Cary. That insight to Jama Connect is just reminding me of my last 18 months in Jama. I’ve really enjoyed picking up the Jama Connect product, really excited by it.
That brings us to the end of this particular vlog. I hope you all enjoyed it, and please feel free to take some time to look at some of the other vlogs in this series. Thanks very much, Cary.
Cary Bryczek: Thanks, Richard.
Thank you for watching our Episode 3, Jama Connect vs. DOORS: Filters, Search, and Analysis. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Review and Collaboration; Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; 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.
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/Doors-VLOG-Episode-3-intro-3-1.jpg10801920Richard Watson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgRichard Watson2022-11-02 03:00:142023-01-12 16:46:14Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Filters, Search, and Analysis: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
In this blog, we recap our press release covering the new performance and scale benchmarks set with the release of Jama Connect Advisor™ – The Industry’s First Native, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Advisor to Improve Requirement Quality.
Jama Software® Releases Jama Connect Advisor™ – The Industry’s First Native, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Advisor to Improve Requirement Quality
Jama Software®, the leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, has announced the launch of the Jama Connect Advisor™ — an intelligent, natural language advisor that improves the quality of requirements based on industry-recommended best practices by INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) rules and EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation for successful product development and market delivery.
Maintaining requirements quality is critical for product development as studies have shown that 70 to 85 percent of rework is due to faulty requirements. Efficient, precise, and accurately written requirements are the single source of truth that aligns development effort across engineering disciplines reducing rework, lengthy integration meetings, and costly late-stage surprises.
“Requirement quality is critical to our success, but it is hard to train and enforce. Jama Connect Advisor gives us the ability to train new engineers and ensure consistent requirement quality across projects – a real game changer for us,” said Sheila King, Senior Project Engineer, Rockwell Automation.
Companies not only benefit from reduced rework, but also the automation of training for new engineers to learn requirements authoring best practices. Jama Connect Advisor provides self-paced training as requirements are being authored and reviewed to help new engineers ramp up quickly without placing time demands on more experienced engineers.
“Needs, requirements, verification, and validation are common threads that tie all systems lifecycle activities and artifacts together. Because of this, the quality of the needs and requirements is critical to project success. Tools such as Jama Connect Advisor — that aid those defining well-formed needs and requirements and have the characteristics defined in the INCOSE Guide to Writing Requirements — are invaluable,“ said Lou Wheatcraft, Senior Consultant, Managing Member, Wheatland Consulting, LLC, and Co-Chair INCOSE Requirements Working Group.
Jama Connect Advisor helps engineers and product developers:
Leverage engineering-based natural language processing guidance while editing within Jama Connect®
Author intricate product requirements quickly, easily, and with precision
Develop and improve authoring skills through guidance based on industry-recommended practice by INCOSE Rules and EARS Notation
“Jama Software is committed to helping our clients improve the performance of the engineering process. Fundamental to this improvement is ensuring the quality of requirements through intelligent analysis and automated training for new engineers,” said Marc Osofsky, Chief Executive Officer, Jama Software.
Key Benefits of Jama Connect Advisor:
Reduce costly rework
Automate the training of engineers on requirements authoring best practices
Eliminate late-stage errors due to faulty requirements
Reduce tedious and morale-draining integration meetings
Increase engineering productivity through quality automation
With correct, precise, and efficient requirements, companies can accelerate product development to remain competitive in this new era of innovation.
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/2022-10-26-jama-connect-advisor-press-release-1.jpg5121024Karrie Sundbom/media/jama-logo-primary.svgKarrie Sundbom2022-10-26 07:00:572023-07-26 12:41:47Jama Software® Releases Jama Connect Advisor™ – The Industry’s First Native, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Advisor to Improve Requirement Quality
A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Adoptability for All Stakeholders
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, A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 2 of our Roundtable Chat series, Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture, Jama Software® and Susan Manupelli – Senior Solutions Architect, Jama Software® – walk us through the importance of adaptability, and ease of use, for all stakeholders in a requirements management tool.
Watch this short video below to learn more and find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Cary Bryczek: Hi everybody. Welcome to part two of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the series so far. My name is Cary Bryczek, and I’ll be representing Jama software today. In terms of experience, I’ve been using Jama for nine years, but have used DOORS and numerous other requirements tools for the past 20 years. I’m joined today by Susan.
Susan Manupelli: Hi there. My name is Susan Manupelli. I’m a solutions architect here at Jama Software. Prior to joining Jama, I was a test architect working on the engineering lifecycle management suite of products, particularly on Rational DOORS Next Generation and the Global Configuration Manager. So I’m happy to be here with you today to talk requirements management adoptability
Cary Bryczek: Thank you Susan. In this vlog, we’re going to be talking about the adoptability for all stakeholders. Adoptability, it might be the most important aspect for a requirements tool and sometimes it’s the most overlooked. Adoptability isn’t just about being able to get users to actually use the software, but it’s about how well it fits into the IT ecosystem. How hard or easy it is to maintain, or even whether or not the organization recognizes its benefits.
UI, Ease of Use, and Adoptability
Susan Manupelli: Right. Let’s talk… One of the first challenges in the adoption of DOORS Classic is that many dev teams are distributed globally. DOORS is a legacy client server application, which doesn’t scale well over the WAM, so DWA, DOORS Web Access, was released as the answer to that problem, but it lacks significant functionality only available in the desktop client.
Another challenge with DOORS Classic is that the UI look and feel is very dated. Modern engineering teams are energized by utilizing the very latest technologies for developing state-of-the-art products for the future, and then they’re asked to use a requirements tool that was designed some 30 years ago. So that just doesn’t fly very well.
Let’s talk a little bit about DOORS Next Generation. It was marketed as a new modern alternative to DOORS Classic. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to use. There are too many different options for use and a lack of direction on best practices. So we’ll go through some of these challenges in the vlog.
The first place where users struggle to adopt DOORS Next Generation is a very basic question; whether to use modules or not. DNG originally only allowed you to organize requirements in a tree view hierarchy of folders. And later, to accommodate users that were more familiar with DOORS Classic, modules were added to DNG. Modules provide a document-like view for requirements, but these same artifacts outside of the module view show up in alpha numeric order in the true view, it makes organization of artifacts outside of the module very confusing.
Cary Bryczek: Wow. Yeah, that does sound complicated to comprehend. Jama was developed as a web-based solution from scratch. We wanted to fulfill the lowest common denominator stakeholder so anybody could come in and use our software. Our UI is modern and intuitive. Let me show you what I mean.
This is what I mean about our UI. It’s very streamlined. There’s hardly any button clicks or menus to learn how to use. There’s four main menus. And then the rest of them are kind of like right click kinds of options. We have the dashboard built right in. Our views are super simple. The explorer tree matches exactly what you see in our list view. And our views are very simple to navigate. So if this is the list view, and I wanted to see a document or a reading kind of view, I can just toggle the buttons to show those different types of views.
Teaching someone how to use this is really super simple, and it doesn’t take that much time at all. In fact, analysts have even recognized Jama Software as being the easiest user tool in the marketplace. You can go out there and see something like from G2, which queries users without us even knowing about it to get their direct feedback on the tools.
Link Relationship Rules and Traceability
Susan Manupelli: Well thanks, Cary. That was great. Another area that’s confusing in DNG has to do with linking. Linking behavior is different between module artifacts and non-module artifacts. A lack of understanding leads to incorrect or incomplete traceability analysis. In DNG, if you link to artifacts that are outside of a module, the link is placed on the core artifact. If you link to artifacts within a module, the link only appears in that particular module. If you then print a traceability report, you’ll only see links made in the module context. So links to core artifacts won’t be displayed. So as a user, that behavior is very confusing.
Another gate to adoptability has to do with enforcing link relationships. Enforcing relationship rules in DNG it’s just hard to do. Either all links are allowed, which means that users can kind of willy-nilly apply link rules that don’t make sense really for relationship, or allowed link rules are specified in a list form for a given component, and then they must be recreated across all components in the project. There’s also no visual representation of link rules in DNG, and there’s no notion of enforcement of required link rules, so compliance is hard to maintain.
Cary Bryczek: Gosh, just listening to that sounds really confusing to me, and I’ve even used DOORS. In Jama, linking is just straightforward. If an item is linked to another item, that link relationship will be visible wherever you are in the UI. We also have the capability to see what our relationship schema looks like and enforce a consistent way to apply traceability. Let me show you what I mean.
There’s a couple of different ways to look at the traceability. I can see that traceability right away. So I know that this standard aircraft platform requirement is traced to another object downstream. I can see the traceability numbers, so this one in this list view. I can see that this one requirement has five different traceability things. I can see it also in the trace view. We’ll tee up a live real-time version of what’s currently traceable out there. It’s very easy to see where there’s gaps in traceability because there’s just no information there.
We have our traceability rule set. Think of this picture as being the schema for what types of objects are allowed to be traced to one another. So I might have four levels of requirements traceability. I might have test cases in there. And so this set of rules would enforce the users to create consistent traces. And then I can follow those rules down in the live trace view as well. So if I’m following this aircraft level requirement, I can see the system requirements, and any kind of lower level objects, whether those are high level software requirements. Here I see some verification tests and agency test runs. Traceability is really made to be super intuitive, real-time, live, to allow anybody to understand and analyze the current situation.
Susan Manupelli: Another common issue is that DOORS Next is hard to administer and maintain. Upgrades are often a challenge. As major architectural changes have occurred in recent releases of the DNG, the time and effort and ultimately the cost to upgrade has been daunting.
Another area of maintenance in DNG has to do with the type system. The type system, that’s the part of DNG that keeps track of your artifact types, your attributes and your values and their relationships. And that needs to be consistent from project to project for cross component and cross project reporting. And there’s no global way to keep these items in sync from project to project or component to component.
Cary Bryczek: Cool. That’s really different than the experience here at Jama. Our host of solutions get updates just about every 60 days. Middleware and security updates are handled as necessary. And sometimes the middlewares might take six months to a year or so. Very stable releases and changes to the ecosystem. We have self-hosted solutions and even customers that have air gap, we can satisfy those sort of ecosystem environments. Very easy to set up and deploy.
Now, it was interesting that you talked about, Susan, though the type rules. In Jama, we’re a little bit different for item types and attributes. We define those globally. Here’s an example.
Our type rules are defined globally, like I said. Here’s an example of schema for the types that are relevant to this particular achiever one project. When we define them globally, it’s all point and click kinds of experience of dealing with that. These attributes are now consistent from project to project to project. And that way you can have really easy reuse scenarios. If you’re doing complex scenarios like product line engineering or if you have complex libraries of data that you use from one project to the next, having that consistent type definition really makes it easier for you to do analysis, leverage reuse, have shorter project startup times.
Susan Manupelli: Yeah, sure. I can definitely see that. One other area that I wanted to talk about has to do with reporting. For all the effort that’s put into DNG to maintain the projects, to build up the requirement specs, the reporting needed to meet certifications is hard or sometimes impossible to create. Mistakes or inconsistencies in the type system that we just talked about, those often manifest as issues once you try to do some traceability reporting. Keeping data consistent between DNG in the reporting data stores has proven to be a challenge, so we’re talking about the data warehouse and LQE. And basically robust reporting out of DNG requires the use of additional IBM tooling, either Jazz Reporting Service, or RPE, the Rational Publishing Engine, and those products are outside of DNG.
Cary Bryczek: That sounds complicated. Again, one of the great things that we have at Jama is our reporting engine is built right into Jama itself. And Jama is a single application, so there’s no deploying 11 different servers of applications that are sort of cobbled together through an integration under the covers. Jama is just a single application. And exporting is super easy. Let me show you what I mean.
We have lots of built in reports. Lots of different kinds of reports that you can add in. We have the capability to export directly to Excel, Word, right there. All a user has to do is configure the view that they’re looking at, whether that’s the reading view or the list view that’s customized to match what they need to have. And then they can have the built in export templates that are just creatable via Microsoft Word templates, so there’s no custom coding in most cases that a user has to do to run these kinds of reports. Doesn’t that sound much easier, Susan?
Susan Manupelli: It sure does.
Cary Bryczek: That brings us to the end of this particular vlog. I hope you all have enjoyed it. Please, I hope you also take some time out to look at some of the other vlogs in this series. Thank you so much, Susan, for your perspective on DOORS and DNG as well.
Susan Manupelli: Thank you Cary. Happy to be here.
Thank you for watching our Episode 2, Jama Connect vs. DOORS: Adoptability for All Stakeholders. To watch Episode 1 of this video series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Adoptability for All Stakeholders; Filters, Search and Analysis; Review and Collaboration; Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; 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.
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/Doors-VLOG-Episode-2-Blog-Image.jpg10801920Cary Bryczek/media/jama-logo-primary.svgCary Bryczek2022-10-19 03:00:362023-01-12 16:46:16A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Adoptability for All Stakeholders
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Interchange™
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, Debbie Mitchell, Product Manager at Jama Software, will introduce viewers to Jama Connect®’s dedicated integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange™.
In this session, we will explore:
Benefits of integrating Jama Connect
Features of Jama Connect Interchange
Common Jira and Excel Functions integration workflows
Follow along with this short video below to learn more, and you can find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Debbie Mitchell: Welcome. I’m Debbie, a Product Manager here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to introduce you to Jama Connect’s dedicated integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange. In this video, we will explore the benefits of integrating Jama Connect to other best-of-breed tools, the features offered by Jama Connect Interchange, and some common workflows using our Jira and Excel Functions integrations.
When developing new products, organizations typically employ an entire suite of best-of-breed tools. Requirements management tools like Jama Connect, task management tools like Jira and Microsoft Azure DevOps, and charting and spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel.
Working across disconnected tools can present a problem, though. Information quickly becomes out of date, and teams get out of sync with one another, leading to product delays, defects, cost overruns, rework and recalls. This is why we built Jama Connect Interchange, a new integration platform that delivers seamless integration between Jama Connect and other best-of-breed tools.
Unlike other integration tools in the marketplace, Interchange is built, supported, and continually enhanced by dedicated teams at Jama Software. This means Interchange is deeply integrated with Jama Connect configurations and workflows, providing you with a smart and seamless sync while you continue to work in your tool of choice.
Let’s take a common example. Suppose my company is building a new product that includes a software component. Using Jama Connect, I finalize a list of software requirements which will now be decomposed into individual user stories. Those stories will be sent to Jira, the software development team’s tool of choice, for the software engineers to complete.
Debbie Mitchell: Let’s see what this looks like in Jama Connect. Using Interchange, I have set up an integration that allows the user stories that I’ve created in this set to automatically flow to a specific project in Jira. In Jira, the software development team can then refine the stories and create additional tasks and subtasks as needed to complete the development work.
In the Interchange admin hub, I’ve specified exactly how information should flow between Jama Connect and Jira for this particular project. I can specify whether each field flows one way or bi-directionally, and the frequency with which changes are synced. Updates can flow as fast as every 15 seconds, so both systems always have the latest information.
For this particular scenario, I’ve configured Interchange so that when development work is complete in Jira, the user story status is automatically synced back to Jama Connect to a field called Development Status. Now I can use the trace view in Jama Connect to easily identify when all user stories associated with a particular requirement have been completed.
To further automate this workflow, I can use the Interchange Excel Functions module to apply additional logical transformations to my data in Jama Connect. You can think of Excel Functions as a calculator that runs in the background while you continue to work in Jama Connect. A Jama Connect administrator maintains the formulas and calculations in an Excel template, and those formulas are then applied to fields in Jama Connect based on the settings and rules the administrator sets up in Interchange.
In this simple example, I’ve set up a rule in my Excel template stating that when all downstream user stories have a status of Development Done, I want the upstream software requirement in Jama Connect to also be marked as Done. Now, this is just one example of how Interchange Excel Functions can be used.
Debbie Mitchell: Jama Connect clients today derive much deeper value from Interchange for scenarios like complex risk calculations, automated field inheritance or data population between related items, customized test case status rollups, and more. You can find out more about Excel functions, use cases, and capabilities by joining the Jama Connect interchange sub-community on the Jama Software community website.
Jama Connect customers can now leverage the power of Interchange to continuously sync information between Jama Connect and other best-of-breed tools. This means teams can continue using their tool of choice to maximize productivity while ensuring that critical project requirements stay in sync. Unlike other solutions in the market, Interchange has been specifically designed and developed to work seamlessly with Jama Connect. It’s easy to deploy, configure, use, and expand, driving efficiency and further lowering your total cost of ownership.
For more information about Interchange, contact your Customer Success Manager today, and thanks.
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, Risk Management, Reviews, Requirements Advisor, and more.
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/FIF-JCI-Blog-Image-NEW.jpg10801920Debbie Mitchell/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDebbie Mitchell2022-10-07 03:00:162023-10-24 17:03:56Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Interchange™
What Is OSLC?
OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) is an “open” standard designed to facilitate communication between tooling primarily used in engineering disciplines. The initial work was done by IBM in 2009 and in 2013 governance moved to OASIS. The idea behind OSLC is to provide a common layer for tool vendors so that connection between tools can be created without having to write and maintain individual connectors between each set of tools. In theory, this reduces the burden on tool vendors and gives users confidence that tools that support OSLC will interoperate without issue.
What tools support OSLC?
Many tool vendors do not directly support OSLC. Jama Software® integrates with a wide variety of best-of-breed tools and most of them do not come with native OSLC connectors. Of the 25 most prevalent tools that we see in the market, 20% have some OSLC capability, and only 16% have a company- supported connector. Contrast that with the fact that 100% of these tools have a company-supported REST API and you can clearly see the direction of the market.
OSLC services a relatively small niche that often requires consulting and some technical assistance to setup. Given that many of the tools that utilize OSLC are desktop based, the IT environment becomes a challenge for integration. This has led many to rely on third-party vendors to broker the OSLC integration layer and provide the support necessary. At Jama Software we have partnered with MiD and their product Smartfacts to enable this connection. Jama Connect® has a robust REST API and through our partnership with MiD we can support those customers who need an OSLC integration, while extending our integration capabilities to the much wider systems engineering ecosystem.
Using the integration hierarchy to achieve Live Traceability™
Most companies who are considering an OSLC integration are doing so to improve requirements traceability across their product development process. Requirements traceability approaches range from rudimentary, manual approaches, to automated synchronization across tools. At Jama Software we’re focused on helping our customers achieve Live Traceability™ via automated synchronizations of best-of-breed tools to a common traceability model. For those desktop tools that do not fully support automated synchronization, a lower level of traceability is the best that can be achieved.
Organizations that are heavily invested in a specific toolchain suite can leverage OSLC to reduce the interop challenge inherent in suites that have been created through acquisition. Embedding user interfaces into other applications and maintaining links allows a user to navigate through the “suite” without having to open each application. When dealing with desktop applications, this can reduce the need to load up each tool individually. It is certainly better than trying to sync information through manual efforts.
In desktop tool scenarios and with tools that do not have a web API, OSLC might be as far as you can go. In which case, Jama Software has you covered. For those who want to move beyond the single user context and achieve Live Traceability, we recommend Level 4 integrations. Utilizing easy-to-implement, universal web standards we’ve helped hundreds of organizations achieve the user-level benefits of contextual data while also elevating the systems engineer’s visibility to the process and organization level.
Contact Jama Software today to find out how we can help you with OSLC and further you on your journey towards Live Traceability.
https://www-dev.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/09/2022-09-13-oslc-what-is-it-1.jpg5121024Josh Turpen/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJosh Turpen2022-09-13 03:00:032023-01-12 16:46:21OSLC – What Is It and What Are Its Challenges?
In this blog, we recap the “Driving Business Outcomes with Jama Software’s Success Programs” webinar.
When you buy Jama Connect, you’re not just buying the #1 requirements management solution on the market. Our Customer Success team stands behind you, delivering the expertise, guidance, and resources you need to see a quick return on your investment and achieve your business goals.
Our adoption-oriented approach balances industry best practices with the practicalities of how you plan, build, and test your products.
In this webinar, we discuss how Jama Software has created specific diagnostic tools and customer success offerings to achieve higher value with Jama Connect. We also explore how Jama Connect can enable transformational value to positively impact your business, and how our specific customer success offerings can help your team increase traceability compliance and requirement quality.
Learn more about our new customer success programs, and how they lead to better outcomes such as:
Higher percentage of passing tests
Lower product defect rates
Faster time to market
Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.
Driving Business Outcomes with Jama Software’s Success Programs
John D’Addario: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I’m John D’Addario, senior director of customer success here at Jama Software. I’m responsible for our global customer success team here, and we are so excited to share with you some of insights around how our new success program can help you and your company drive business outcomes with Jama Connect. I’ve asked my colleague Preston to join me today. Preston, can you give a brief introduction of yourself?
Preston Mitchell: Yeah. Thanks John. Hey everybody. It’s great to be here. As John mentioned, I’m really excited to share with you some of the things we’ve been working on here to make the success programs even better. For those of you that don’t know me, I am the director of the global solutions team. I’ve been with Jama for about 10 years. My background is kind of in requirements management. I’ve been a business analyst, I’ve been an Agile program manager. So I’m really excited about all of the best practices when it comes to system development and requirements authoring. So yeah, I’ll pass it back to John and we’ll dive in.
John D’Addario: Thanks Preston. So as the number one in requirements management software, our purpose is to ensure that innovators succeed with customer success at the forefront of everything we do. Through years of industry specific experience and thousands of customer engagements, we bring the best practices to bear, to maximize the success rate of the product development process. There are six core business outcomes we focus on helping you drive with Jama Connect. They are reduced cycle time, increased process efficiency, streamline and accelerate reviews, speed time to market, gain visibility and control, ensure compliance and manage risk. We do this across our five key verticals, medical device, automotives and semiconductor, space, airborne and defense systems, software development, and industrial manufacturing.
We have a really exciting agenda for you today. We’re going to go through four topics. We’re going to give an overview of our success program. Preston’s going to go on and talk about measurements and outcomes. We’re going to do a double click on the success programs and then leave some time at the end for some Q and A. So let’s get into it. We are the experts when it comes to requirements management and traceability. We have years of experience between our customer success managers, solution consultants, and technical support engineers. Through our success program, we help our customers achieve faster time to value with Jama Connect.
Preston Mitchell: Hey John, maybe for some of the folks we could give a breakdown of the different team roles here. I’m not sure if everyone has actually interacted with their entire success team at Jama Software. So maybe we could give a background of each of the roles and what their goals are at Jama.
John D’Addario: Sure, sure. So starting with our customer success manager, really think of your customer success manager as you’re trusted advisor, focusing on understanding your business outcomes. We work together to build what we call a success plan. We use that success plan to help marshal resources across the genre enterprise. We also help you with all your commercial needs, like renewals, buying more licenses, adding a success program subscription, adding services, things like that. Our technical support engineers are there to help you with any technical questions that come up during your time with Jama Connect. They are well versed in the ins and outs of all things technical. Preston, why don’t you give a little bit more detail around the solution consultants?
Preston Mitchell: Yeah, definitely. The solution consultants are part of my team. They really bring a lot of industry experience to bear. So a lot of them have been product managers, system engineers, quality managers in their prior roles. So they bring industry experience like requirements authoring experience, quality management, specific industry experience. Then they also of course have a lot of deep practical experience using Jama Connect the product. So they combine those to really recommend best practice uses of the tool. They very much understand the pain points and the outcomes that you all are trying to drive with your products every day. So any kind of deep product questions, or asks of how to use Jama Connect in order to achieve their goals, that’s really what their purpose is.
John D’Addario: Great. Great. When I look at this team and the resources we have here at Jama, I’m a little partial to think that, not only do we have the best team and the requirements management industry, I think we have the best team of any team that I’ve worked in over the last 10, 15 years. It’s really exciting to have this level of engagement between these three teams with this one mission of driving customer success. Let’s do a little bit of a deep dive into our success program. So through this continual engagement with your teams, we really focus on measurable improvements to your process. We do that by forming focus areas, helping you drive adoption and usage of Jama Connect, helping eliminate trace debt, and increasing your Traceability Score™, improving requirements quality score, increasing verification compliance. When you think about the success program, one of the main benefits of the success program is what we call the success catalog.
John D’Addario: This success catalog brings together four great resources for our customers to use. The first one being training resources. The second one being benchmark assessments. The third one being solution consulting. And lastly, fourth, our technical services. When you think about your journey with Jama Connect, think about it in three stages, implement, measure, and optimize. The success program is at the foundation of helping you achieve those business outcomes. We do that by mixing different services in our success catalog together, and what we call a success path. In these three examples, you can see here, we have three different success path that brings this prescriptive use of these services in the catalog to help you achieve business outcomes during the different phases of your journey with Jama Connect.
