Stonesoft Corporation (NASDAQ OMX: SFT1V), a leading provider of integrated network security solutions, knows a thing or two about enterprise software. Its award-winning solution, StoneGate, provides its customers a powerful, flexible and cost-effective way to protect the information flow of large, distributed organizations.
When Stonesoft recently chose Jama Contour, these same 3 characteristics of power, flexibility and immediate ROI were key criteria Stonesoft valued in its thorough evaluation process of several requirements management solutions.
“We chose Contour after looking at the competitors. The traditional tools seem to be stuck with old client-server technology and look too complex.”
- Ville Hamalainen, director of R&D, Stonesoft Corporation, Finland
Founded on the vision of bringing simplicity and tangible business value to security solutions for businesses, Stonesoft is a global organization with corporate headquarters in Helsinki, Finland and Americas headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, with offices throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. The StoneGate product family unifies firewall, VPN, IPS and SSL VPN; blending network security, end-to-end availability and load balancing into a unified and centrally managed system.
At Jama, we’re excited to be working the talented crew at Stonesoft and recently we had the opportunity to speak with Ville Hamalainen, the director of R&D, and ask him a few questions about Stonesoft’s product development process and their reasons for selecting Contour.
What are the goals of the projects you’re managing within Contour? Tell us a little bit about the products your team is building.
We are using Contour to manage the development of our StoneGate product family: Firewall/VPN and VPN client, IPS, SSL VPN and our Management Center software products. For more details on Stonesoft’s products, click on the image.
How large are your projects in terms of the number of requirements involved?
We manage each new release of StoneGate as a project within Contour. Each release project has about 20 features for the whole StoneGate product family, and each of these new features contains on average 25+ requirements and other related items. So we’re looking at 500+ requirements in total for each project under management.
What development process do you use?
We use an iterative process, quite close to the Unified Process. We produce about 5 increments every project round and the duration is about 9 months. From a traceability standpoint, we start by defining the features and then we create related downstream items for functional requirements, design mock-ups and user scenarios. And, we map these to our release schedule within Contour.
What’s nice is that we recently leveraged Jama’s professional services team to help customize Contour to fit our process and configure an enhanced release management view that we needed. This engagement only took a few months and we now have a better way to see everything related to the features within a planned release.
What’s the biggest challenge you and your team face in managing this process?
Communication with our product development teams around the world in Sophia Antipolis, France, Helsinki, Finland and Atlanta, Georgia. I think it’s a challenge many global teams face, but Contour helps because it now enables us to keep everyone in sync and aligned on building the right set of features for each new release of our products.
Why did you choose Contour? How will Jama help you be more successful?
We chose Contour after looking at the competitors. The traditional tools seem to be stuck with old client-server technology and look too complex. In our assessment, we found Contour to be the most cost-effective and collaborative tool for requirements management on the market today.
What were you using before Contour to manage requirements?
We used Microsoft Word documents stored to Lotus Notes.
Bonus Question: What’s your favorite band of all time?
That’s a tough one. I’d have to say Queen or The Beatles. I also like Rage against the Machine, but of all time… I’d have to say The Beatles.
The Beatles, a respectable choice. Thanks Ville for the insights. For more information about Stonesoft, visit www.stonesoft.com
To discover for yourself why innovative companies like Stonesoft are choosing Contour as an easier, more collaborative solution for requirements management, request a free trial. Product development is complex enough, the software you use to manage it shouldn’t be. Enjoy the journey.
Tags: Customers, Jama Contour, John, Product Development, product innovation, software development, Stonesoft, Traceability, web-based requirements management
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