Jama Connect^® Features in Five: Collaboration

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, Carleda Wade, Senior Consultant at Jama Software, walks through how to collaborate with others users in Jama Connect.

In this session, viewers will learn how to:

• Use the comment widget to @mention a user or group
• Leverage action tags to designate high-priority comments
• Use the Stream tab and the project dashboard stream view to see comments
• Filter for comments that require action

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

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Carleda Wade: Hi, I’m Carleda Wade, Senior Consultant at Jama Software. By the end of this training, you’ll be familiar with how to collaborate in Jama Connect and have the confidence and basic skills to begin interacting with other users in the application. In this session, we will use the comment widget to @mention a user or group, leverage action tags to designate high-priority comments, use the stream tab and the project dashboard stream view to see comments, and we will filter for comments that require action.

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

Wade: So now let’s jump back into Jama Connect. As you can see, I’m back on the homepage. You can see bookmarks and recently viewed items on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand side, you’ll see active reviews and then stream activity in the bottom right-hand. If I click on the view all stream activity link here, it will bring me to this stream tab. From here, if I want to I can see all of the comments that are across the various projects within my Jama instance.

I also have the ability to apply a filter to, let’s say, look for any open questions, and when I do that, you’ll see any question that doesn’t have a resolution that’s being open. I can choose to reply to this or answer this question directly from here by clicking on answer question. And then when I answer this question, not only will you see it presented here in this stream, but if I go back to my project, this information, once I refresh this, will show up here in my activity stream. So here you can see both the comment as well as the response. From my dashboard, this activity stream will be a comprehensive viewing of not only changes made in the project but also comments that are made within the project. Here if ever I could choose to do a search for, let’s say, Joe, and anything that either was created by Joe or has Joe tagged will show up. Also, from this dashboard, I can click on the stream.

RELATED: Jama Connect^® vs. IBM^® DOORS^®: Document Generation: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Wade: This stream view will show me only comments that are made within my project. And once again, just like in the stream view for the full instance in the top header, I can apply filters if I like. Back to my project explorer, if I choose to, let’s say, look at my system requirements and maybe I want to look at climate monitoring, in this single-item view, I also have the ability to review comments. So if you have it enabled, you can click on review comments and see any comments that are made as part of the review module, or clicking on the comments will allow you to be able to interact directly with this particular requirement. So I could choose to create this comment, and maybe I want to have the person who owns this. So I want to have Joe, so I can @mention Joe to say, “Hey, can we clarify this?”

And then I can actually mark this action as a question. And when I do this, Joe will get an email notification that says that he needs to come into Jama and be able to reply to this. Joe would also have the ability to reply to his email, and that information will be added to this thread. But not only can I @mention a single user, but I also have the ability to @mention, let’s say, my risk team. And when I send this notification, every person who’s a part of that user group will get a notification, and once again, they can come in and start making comments directly. But let’s say, for whatever reason, after I make a comment that I decide that I need to delete it, or I inadvertently delete it.

So even though I just added this comment for the risk team, let’s say I choose to delete this, you’ll see the confirmation message that says to confirm, and let’s say I choose to delete it. But fear not because anything that happens in Jama stays in Jama. So now if I navigate out of the single item view back to the dashboard, when I… Let’s clear that. When I refresh my page you can see for the activity stream that this item is showing that it has been deleted. But if I want to, now I can click on restore, and all is well. Now you’ll see this comment is showing as un-deleted. So just to summarize, there are a number of different ways to be able to collaborate and comment on content within Jama. So just pick what works best for you, depending on where you are within the system at the time.

Thank you for watching.

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.

Jama Connect^® vs. IBM^® DOORS^®: Migration & Data Mapping: 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 6 of our Roundtable Chat series, Richard Watson – Practice Director at Jama Software^® – and Alisa Eikanas  – Senior Consultant at Jama Software^® – discuss migration & data mapping, and how to migrate your DOORS^® data to a new tool.

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: Hi everybody, I hope you’re all enjoying watching the vlog so far and that you take the time to watch some of the others. I’m Richard Watson, and I’m part of the solution management team at Jama Software. In this vlog, I’ll be giving the DOORS angle on things. I’ve been a systems engineer for about 35 years, 20 of which was as the product manager for DOORS and DOORS Next. I now spend much of my time advising clients on migration strategies to Jama Connect. Today I’m joined by Alisa, who’s going to give the Jama side of things.

Alisa Eikanas: Hello everyone, and good morning Richard. My name is Alisa Eikanas, and I’ve been a consultant here at Jama Software for just about five years. In that time, I’ve supported hundreds of successful implementations and have extensive experience supporting customers with complex migration needs, so I’m tickled to be here.

Richard Watson: Organizations are often black and white when it comes to migration. Either they believe migration is too risky to form, and so they’re stuck in their current tool, or they trivialize things, and they think it’s as simple as pressing a button and everything is done.
In my experience migration isn’t complex, but it does involve taking a lot of very small decisions and then repeatedly executing against those decisions when you’re migrating the data itself.

Alisa Eikanas: Mm-hmm, I couldn’t agree more. I often use the analogy of moving to help illustrate this very same point to customers. When you’re making the decision to move to a new house, the benefits are obvious. A bigger house, better schools, et cetera, and there’s things you can do to make that moving process more efficient. You can hire a mover and do all of that stuff, but there’s no shortcutting the fact that you still have to label the boxes, tell the movers where they have to go.

So again, we can take care of the heavy lifting, but that attention to detail is something that’s not ever going to be avoided. And it might seem tedious, but it’s so necessary in order to avoid unnecessary frustrations if not given the proper attention at the proper time. There are typically two blocking points regarding migrations.
So first, management would like to… The migration process itself to be predictable so that they can follow the progress and predict how long it will take. Ultimately, what they’re trying to avoid is disruption to work, additional costs, making sure that the proper resources are available during that process. And secondly, for end users themselves, they expect the migration to run smoothly and for us to be able to demonstrate that the migration task has been executed without error.

For example, I was recently working on a migration with a team and the data that we were migrating from DOORS Classic, they’ve been working on that data for 20 years and some of the original engineers are still involved in the project. And so, you can imagine for them how stressful it is to consider 20 years of their work being moved and just wanting to make sure and not have any fears or reservations.

That as the data was moved, that there would be no negative impacts to that data. So it’s completely understandable, but again, these are things that Jama Connect has found ways to address proactively to ensure that both of those concerns… Having the efficient be predictable so that it can be efficient and not overly expensive. As well as for end users, just ensuring again that data integrity is maintained from point A to point B.

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Richard Watson: Generating a business case for migration is also often terribly difficult. In fact, it’s very difficult to justify moving from IBM DOORS to IBM DOORS Next because it’s more of an emotional decision. One reason to move away from DOORS is the aim to adopt more of a model-based systems engineering approach. If you have that, then it becomes consistent for your engineers, easier to create reports, and cheaper for integrations.
We all know that without DLX, it’s terribly difficult in DOORS to keep a consistent data model between your different modules. Thinking about consistent data types between modules, for example. DOORS Next, unfortunately, is very much the same as DOORS. While it has got shared information types within a component, those types are independent of other components and other projects. So you can very quickly have different data sets in DOORS Next that diverge apart exactly the same as you do inside DOORS.

Alisa Eikanas: Yeah, I would add that there’s typically always a great deal of desire to migrate, but defeating the perception that it’s an insurmountable obstacle can be tricky. This, as in many other cases, is where Jama Software really excels and exemplifies our customer-centric approach to solutions. We don’t treat or expect our customers or their data to be the same.

So, before we even begin a migration effort… Or for those of you that are considering looking into migration, Jama Software offers a free DOORS data model diagnostic service, providing a financial breakdown of the benefits, removing your DOORS data to an MBSE approach. And following that migration, your data, both old and new, we’ll consistently respect the data model defined by your organization within your Jama Connect instance.

Richard Watson: Another fallacy is that sticking to a single vendor for migration makes things simpler. Migration tools must be stronger between those tools from the same vendor. So DOORS, migration to DOORS Next is not the case, unfortunately. So DOORS Next is a wholly new requirement system, it’s just like moving to a different tool from a different vendor.

The data inside of DOORS Next is very different to DOORS, so it’s not a natural upgrade. You do have to do data migration. When adopting a new requirements tool, it’s really important to establish that data model so that you can exploit the benefits of the new tool with a consistent data model.

Migrating your data from DOORS to DOORS Next attempts to recreate your DOORS data in DOORS Next exactly as it used to look like in DOORS, and that leaves the reshaping of that data to the end user. We all know that the end user will typically not clean the data once he starts using DOORS Next, and so inefficient data in DOORS effectively becomes inefficient data inside of DOORS Next.

Alisa Eikanas: Absolutely, and what you’re talking about is a missed opportunity. That opportunity to recognize we can look at our data, see that perhaps we’re not treating it consistently or in a standardized way. And as we’re migrating that data, there is an opportunity to, again, apply a data model that’s going to be consistent and afford you so many benefits.

So, when approaching migrations here at Jama Software, firstly we identify. We work with organizations to identify and define the data model most appropriate for your development process, and then we migrate your DOORS data into that model. This doesn’t result in compromised data in any way, but it avoids the mass reshaping or cleaning of data after it’s been migrated.

Jama Software brings over 150 years of shared DOORS experience that we can bring to bear in helping clients migrate to Jama Connect. And in addition to that, we have extensive experience supporting customers going through that actual process of moving their data from DOORS or D&G into Jama Connect.

RELATED: When Evaluating Product Development Software Tools, Not All Cloud is Equal

Richard Watson: Alisa, perhaps the best thing to do next is simply to take a look at the tool. Should we take a look at Jama Connect?

Alisa Eikanas: Absolutely, let’s take a look at a project in Jama. But before we actually start poking around the project itself, let’s start with that data model we’ve been talking about. So, what we’re looking at here on this project dashboard is a rendering of that data model. So if we take a look at this example, we see that we have user needs, we have system requirements, system architecture, subsystem requirements, et cetera.

And in addition to showing each of those artifact types or item types, we also show the traceability paths between them. So for example, here we see our system requirements, and we see that we have those traceability lines established between the appropriate artifact types. We’re not ever going to see a user need directly connected to a subsystem requirement because through our data model, we’re just ensuring that that proper decomposition path is respected.

So again, that process of… As we’re migrating our data, taking the opportunity to identify and to establish a data model is just incredibly powerful and beneficial to our teams. Once we establish that model, and again, we’re going to migrate your data into that defined data model, we want to ensure that that transition is still comfortable for DOORS users. So again, this data model might be new, but the data is still the same.

It’s the same data that they had in DOORS. So that transition from DOORS to Jama is, for the most part… Or, it is a very comfortable one. Navigating around the project itself feels very similar for DOORS users, and I’ll give you an example of that. So, for example, if you’re looking at a DOORS project, you might see a folder with a number of modules located underneath that folder. And then of course, within our modules we’re going to have our individual objects.
So here we’re looking at a Jama project, and what we’re looking at is the project explorer. This will probably visually look similar enough to DOORS users, and what I’ve done is I’ve built out just a quick little example here. So, Jama has a different container name for this, but it’s essentially a DOORS folder. And then underneath that DOORS folder we’re going to see our individual modules listed out, and then if we open up one of our modules we’re going to see our individual objects.

Heading objects as well as our regular requirement or text objects. And that same hierarchical document structure that was established in DOORS, we’re able to carry that over seamlessly in Jama so that for DOORS users, again, it’s… Everything looks and is organized the same way that they’re used to seeing it, and it just makes it very comfortable.

But going back to that added benefit of having an established data model, for example, if I open up this system requirement, if I’m looking at the traceability information, here I can see that the system requirement has a parent, it has a child. But in this downstream bubble right here, I see that it’s red. That’s telling me that there’s a problem, it’s obviously not that it doesn’t have any children because I can see that, again, this user need has…
Or, that this system requirement has a parent user need and a downstream subsystem requirement. So, taking this example of a system requirement where Jama is telling me, “Hey, we’re missing some required coverage.” If I go back to that data model and I take a look at my system requirement, I can see that yes, I’ve satisfied that need to have a parent user need, and I’ve satisfied that need to have a child subsystem requirement. But I’ve yet to satisfy that need for a downstream architecture and a downstream verification.

So again, this is a very brief glimpse of the many benefits of having that established data model. But most, I would say the key takeaway again is that we can kill two birds with one stone. We’re migrating you to a more efficient system and tool as well as just ensuring that we’re able to also bring in efficiencies to your process by establishing that data model.

Richard Watson: That’s cool Alisa, thank you very much. So, that brings us to the end of this vlog for today. Hopefully, you’ve had some high-level overview of migration. Alisa, thank you very much for your discussion and perspective, that was super useful to actually see the tool.

I hope those listening to the vlog do have a reasonable starting point for migration, and I look forward to hearing about your successes in the future. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying this vlog series so far, stay tuned for the next entry in our series, it’ll be coming in a few weeks’ time. Thanks very much, Alisa.

Alisa Eikanas: Yep, 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 6, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Migration & Data Mapping. 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.

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?

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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.

RELATED: Why Investing in Requirements Management During an Economic Downturn Makes Good Business Sense

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.

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: 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.