Jama Software Unplugged » Eric

Digitizing the Dashboard

Eric — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:32:12 +0000

I saw that another one of our customers has posted videos of their product in action. Vertical Power creates digital dashboards for aircraft which replaces traditional control sets to display the most critical during each phase of flight. While we don’t have any pilots on staff at Jama, it’s very cool technology.

Here is a brief writeup on their product in Flying Magazine.

Innovation at SMART

Eric — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:06:14 +0000

Gizmodo is a great source for new, innovative (and not so innovative - how many ipod docks do we really need?) products. They keep our team up to date on the latest gadgets. Gizmodo just posted on the SMART table, which utilizes the multitouch interface for kids which looks like a pretty cool idea.

It’s always exciting for us to see our customers innovating and creating great new products.

Our team was down in the bay area earlier this summer and saw another very cool implementation of multi-touch at Autodesk labs where they had created a giant “touch wall” that they used at the TED conference. They’ve posted some information at their labs site.

Traceability - Just Make it Simple.

Eric — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:25:26 +0000

You hear a lot about “traceability’ in context to requirements management. It’s one of the primary benefits and reasons for buying a requirements management solution.

As the products we’re all building become more sophisticated as stand-alone software applications or embedded software within physical products, it’s common for development projects to consist of hundreds or thousands of requirements and other related items.

So, how do you keep track of everything when changes occur? That’s where traceability comes in.

Traceability helps you create relationships between requirements, use cases, test cases, tasks and any other items within a project, and across multiple projects, so when changes occur, as they often do, you can easily

Assess the impact
Keep the team aligned
And, keep the project on track

Our philosophy for building the traceability features within Contour is “make it powerful, but keep it simple.”

And, the reason for our obsession with simplicity is because setting up trace relationships involves some time upfront to reap the benefits later on in the project life-cycle. So, the big question often becomes, “Is traceability worth the effort?”

What we’ve tried to do differently is make this process as fast and simple as possible within Contour, so it’s no longer a question of whether “it’s worth it” to do traceability. To illustrate our approach, we put together this short video.

Is traceablity valuable to your team? Is it hassle? We’re curious what you think.