How to Get More From Your Product Development Data
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With so many organizations undergoing massive transformations — spurred by the growing complexity of products that combine hardware with sophisticated software — the choices being made today around how to proceed will have ramifications for years.
Whether you’re talking about negotiating developmental bottlenecks, discovering trends to inform process change or proving the impact of transformation, what you don’t know risks your bottom line.
Analytics and insights can make the difference between your organization speeding down an open highway or careening into a ditch.
While laser-focused on immediate targets and deadlines, many organizations either don’t have the time and resources to fully analyze their own product development information or struggle to leverage it to its full capacity. Either way, this limits their ability to hit delivery dates with more precision and predictability.
Gaining Perspective
To assist companies searching for answers we created Jama Analyze™— a purpose-built product development analytics solution that gives leaders visibility and insights to identify where to mitigate risk and drive success. It builds on the development data teams are already generating within solutions like Jama Connect™, Jira Software, GitHub and more, to provide trending of performance metrics across projects, teams and time.
Companies who have been using Jama Connect, for instance, to manage their complex product requirements, can quickly leverage historical development data simply by adding Jama Analyze.
Using two out-of-the-box templates — Volatility Analysis and Quality Coverage — teams can
leverage data and insights to understand issues that may be impacting the ability to get to market on time. Here’s a quick look at both types of insights.
Quality Coverage
“Are we building the right thing?” “Are we building the thing right?”
These questions can haunt product development leadership. With Jama Analyze, you can create custom Quality Coverage trending reports and comparative dashboards for Jama Connect projects to better answer those questions with confidence.
As a project progresses through development, Quality Coverage should continue to increase. By reviewing the trending of Quality Coverage over time, teams can evaluate potential quality risks throughout the development lifecycle. At any time, teams can view the percentage of items in Jama Connect that are missing coverage across the relationship model and then drill in to Jama Connect to determine what may be causing specific coverage delays.
Product leaders can also use dashboards to compare quality coverage trends side-by-side across multiple projects.
This allows multiple teams to gain sharp visibility into their process and accurately track validation and verification testing for on-time deliveries.
Volatility Trends
Early in a product’s lifecycle, it’s expected that a flurry of changes will occur. These natural progressions involve information being added, deleted or augmented as teams define the finer points of what’s being built and why.
If volatility is high later in the development cycle, things can quickly become problematic. Ideally, late in cycle is when teams should be focusing on ensuring quality, for instance, not adding or redesigning features.
Whether it’s because scope is misunderstood or teams are misaligned, too much activity toward the end of development can jeopardize the entire project. And as the risk for missing deadlines becomes reality, inevitably rework and its hefty costs show up.
With our Volatility Trends analysis, you can visualize, at a glance and in real time, the amount of changes that are taking place and at what point within a development cycle. You can then begin to predict risk within your product cycle, which becomes more apparent when comparing data and trends from previous projects.
Turning Data Into Action
With these two analysis templates in place via Jama Analyze and Jama Connect, product development leadership gains the ability to get an expanded view across teams, mitigate risk and predict product development success through strategic decision-making.
This also allows organizations to begin aligning company-defined goals and KPIs to establish baselines for performance and measure progress. Teams can set targets, get alerts and capture feedback all in one place.
Since our customers are already using our open APIs to connect to many different tools — such as Jira Software, QASymphony, Zephyr and SonarQube — across their product development lifecycle, we’ve extended the integration opportunities between Jama Connect and Jama Analyze to drive greater analysis for custom use cases.
Through the powerful combination of Jama Connect and Jama Analyze, organizations will no longer have to wonder whether or not they’re on the right development track. With dashboards and trending of development data, they’ll know. We’re excited to witness the better decisions, faster releases and higher-quality product portfolios that emerge as a result, and we’re just getting started.
Learn more about the possibilities the Jama Product Development Platform unlocks in our recent webinar, Harness the Power of Predictive Product Development.
Robin Calhoun writes about requirements traceability, drawbacks of using legacy requirements management tools (like IBM DOORS), connect data, and aligning teams with an Agile workflow design.
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