Today, Jama Software announced a major update to its flagship product, Jama 8.10. Companies building complex products in medical, semiconductor, aerospace and automotive industries rely on Jama for more intuitive requirements definition, verification and validation. With its new feature enhancements, Jama is evolving the way traceability can be used in the product development process by giving product development teams the ability to see, in real time, the upstream and downstream impact of their decisions.

“For our customers’ mission critical defense systems, meeting their requirements is essential to give them the assurance that our systems will perform as expected. The ability to show traceability from customer requirements to verification and validation cases allows us to know with certainty that we have met their needs,” said Joe Plunkett, director of engineering at Mercury Systems. “Using Jama has enabled us to be more efficient and cost effective in executing customer program requirements as well as developing commercial products. The capabilities in 8.10 are taking traceability to the next level and we’re excited about the impact it will have in helping us make better decisions, faster.”

In the past, traceability has been seen as a static component of the product development process, introduced at the end in order to fulfill audit requirements. For companies achieving compliance within regulated industries, linking data, people and results to requirements is an essential part of proving both the product specification and the development process. With Jama 8.10, the Trace View feature allows data to be accessed by all users at any time, providing powerful context for daily decision-making needs. No longer an afterthought, Live Traceability is built directly into the product development process, allowing users to see missing relationships, address development gaps and easily understand the impact of decisions and actions. The historical, exportable audit trail builds as you go, simply as a result of using Jama. The release also includes more functionality around relationships in baselines and relationships in review center.

“Traceability information is too valuable to be referenced only at audit time. Companies need to see and activate relationships between data, people and decisions to accelerate and hone their innovation,” said Jennifer Jaffe, vice president of product at Jama Software. “With 8.10, Jama is empowering engineers and innovators to connect across teams, taking advantage of live data to accelerate decisions, drive faster time to market and mitigate risk.”

For companies regulated by agencies such as the FDA, FAA and financial regulators, Jama’s traceability features provide detailed, meaningful documentation describing how the product works, who built it and why. Traceability documentation also supports product developers working with outside vendors such as contract manufacturers and customers within an ecosystem.

The release of Jama 8.10 follows a series of significant product and ecosystem enhancements in 2016 including the release of Jama 8 and the launch of the company’s technology alliance. The company was recently cited in an independent research firm’s modern traceability report highlighting how development teams can bring software to market faster by using modern traceability. The news continues a number of major announcements demonstrating the company’s commitment to product development for safety and regulated industries including ISO26262 “fit for purpose” certification by internationally recognized testing body TÜV SÜD and the introduction of the Jama Functional Safety Validation Kit.