[Webinar Recap] Working with Baselines in Jama Connect to Facilitate Compliance and Reuse

As part of our ongoing Ask Jama webinar series, covering customer questions and best practices, our most recent webinar was all about the details of the latest product roadmap enhancements related to baselines and how these changes benefit our customers, especially when it comes to compliance.

In this webinar, a panel of Jama Connect experts discuss the top updates that have been released, and the future of baselines in Jama Connect.

This webinar was well received by our customers, and we wanted to make sure nobody missed out on this great content. Below, you’ll find a recording of the webinar and an abbreviated transcript.

Ask Jama: Defining and Implementing Baselines to Simplify Compliance

Julie Goodner: I’m really excited to show you the enhancements that we have made to the Baseline area along with giving you a sneak peek of where we’re headed. Over the last few releases, we have dramatically changed the look and feel of the Baseline area of Jama Connect. We’ve worked extensively on permissions, auditability, and usability to make Baseline workflow more efficient.

I’ll be walking you through the way we have dramatically enhanced our Baseline preview, the list and reading views, the header activity stream and our new slide over panel preview. Everything that I’ll be showing you today has come from direct customer feedback and I’m excited to show you where we’re at and where we’re going. Over the years, we’ve received feedback from our customers regarding enhancements to the Baseline tree.

This was a large body of work that we hope creates a more useful and consistent experience for you. You can now add all version core and custom fields to your baseline list view including the workflow status. When looking at your baseline list view, we now provide a count of all the items that are included. So, at a glance, you can easily see the scale of your baseline items.

Watch the below recording to see the top five improvements to Baselines in Jama Connect in these key areas:

Baseline tree view
List and reading views
Baseline header
Activity streams
Slide-over panel previews

Adrian Rolufs: Now we’re going to talk a little bit about how to utilize these baselines and the new capabilities that Julie just described in Jama Connect while you’re doing your requirements engineering work. Most of the work around baselines is focused on the management of work products.

We’re going to talk today, about how that work aligns with your compliance needs and we’ll talk about how different standards for different industries drive those requirements. We’re going to talk about how that aids in understanding the traceability during your document life cycle and we’ll also focus on some best practices around what we find works best for our customers when managing baselines in Jama Connect.

First of all, let’s take a look at the automotive industry. If you’re developing automotive products that have a functional safety concern, then you’re typically following ISO 26262 as part of your development and if you’re developing software, you may well be following Automotive SPICE. Both of those standards or regulations have requirements that are met by the Baseline features of Jama Connect and that falls under the categories of configuration management as well as document management.

Those standards require that you are able to keep track of the versions of the documentation that when you have a completed product, you can point back to the specific versions of the requirements that it met and the Baseline feature of Jama Connect is the way to do that. If we switch over and take a look at the medical device industry, in the medical device industry, there’s a design history file or DHF that is required to be generated for every product that is submitted to the market.

That DHF, an integral part of that if you’re using Jama Connect is the baselines, the baseline captures exactly the version of the content of each of the different work products that’s going to go into the DHF and typically, there’s a baseline for every work product and an exported document to a QMS system that goes along with that. So, similar to the needs of automotive but a little bit different terminology.

Now, if we take a look at airborne systems. Each of the requirements or the standards that’s typically followed there has requirements for configuration management. Configuration management is typically the activity that is most closely associated with the Baseline function of Jama Connect and you’ll see there’s sections there that drive that as well. The nice thing is even though there’s different standards for different industries, they’re largely requiring teams to achieve the same goals.

So, the common functionality provided by Jama Connect through the baselines and version history meets those requirements and that’s what we’ll be looking at today. First of all, what is that common workflow through Jama Connect that meets all those requirements? For any work product or document that you’re generating from Jama Connect, it generally needs to go through the same process.

You’re going to create the material either by importing or creating the content in Jama Connect, you’re going to build traceability using the relationship features of Jama Connect to associate the individual requirements with other requirements or test cases. That material then needs to go through a comprehensive review process to make sure that the right people have reviewed the content for accuracy, completeness, verifiability, ability to implement a solution and capture that feedback and then eventual approval in Jama Connect.

Once you have that, you then will have baselines that came about as part of the review process and the final baseline that was actually signed off in Jama Connect, you’ll want to capture as an official record saying that this is the signed off version that we are building our product to meet. And then finally, in many cases, it makes sense to export a document version of that to check into a PLM system or a QMS system or to distribute to other people who may not have access to your Jama Connect environment.

You can view the full webinar by clicking on the button below, or take a moment to go back and watch a few of our other Ask Jama webinars, like this one on release management options in Jama Connect, or this one on moving from a document-based design control and risk management in medical device development.

Watch the full webinar to learn more about the latest product roadmap enhancements related to Baselines, and how to get the most out of Jama Connect.

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Jama Software

Subject matter experts from Jama Software provide guidance and best practices on requirements management, test management, compliance and regulation, risk management, and complex product and software development.