Traceability

Jama Connect®: Accelerating Systems Development with Requirements Management and Live Traceability™

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Systems Development

Jama Software is always on the lookout for news and content to benefit and inform our industry partners. As such, we’ve curated a series of articles that we found insightful. In this blog post, we share content sourced from Lifecycle Insights – Jama Connect®: Accelerating Systems Development with Requirements Management and Live Traceability™  – which was originally published on August 17, 2022, by John McMillan.

Jama Connect®: Accelerating Systems Development with Requirements Management and Live Traceability™

How does Jama Software®’s approach to managing the vast array of complex engineering requirements provide organizations a competitive advantage? Their approach is a software solution developed specifically to provide unified requirements management and traceability across organization development processes whether that be the traditional V-model, Waterfall, Agile, or otherwise. Jama Connect requirements management software with Live Traceability was designed to help development and engineering organizations improve quality, reduce rework, ensure compliance, and get high-quality complex products, systems, and software to market faster and on budget.

Historically in product development, each engineering discipline utilizes tools that are specifically suited to maximize their ability to be innovative and productive in their own design space. Communication between other disciplines and the broader organization however has historically been siloed or fragmented and often managed through “throw-over-the-wall” manual approaches. Those approaches are error-prone and often result in discovering late-stage issues downstream that result in design rework, delay product delivery, and create cost overruns that impact the organizations’ bottom line.

The Cost of Discovering Late-Stage Issues

When late-stage issues are discovered during integration testing, systems testing, and during final acceptance testing they are expensive to fix. Jama Connect platform was developed to enable organizations to detect and correct requirement and testing issues and solve disjointed discipline problems. This is provided through a requirements management platform designed specifically to help engineering organizations align people, processes, and tools in one concise application early on and throughout product development- when the cost of change is lowest.

Jama Connect was designed to provide unique real-time visibility and actionable insights for the end-to-end product, systems, and software development processes. Within the application, users develop relationship models between each discipline’s tools by way of data elements. These data elements are connected with direct tool integrations with Live Traceability. Once the flow of each element’s connections is defined and reflected throughout the system – should a data element be modified, the connected element stakeholders are alerted, and each discipline can review and address any changes accordingly. The application’s unique open architecture allows integrations with a range of premium solutions across the full ALM-PLM tool ecosystem.

Related: Requirements Traceability Benchmark

What about Integration and Customization?

Jama Connects list of supported tools and plug-in integrations for Live Traceability is already quite extensive and is growing.

  • For Design and Simulation model-based requirements management Connect seamlessly integrates with MBSE and SysML tools including Ansys, MathWorks, Enterprise Architecture, and Catia’s No Magic.
  • For Task Management, Live Traceability is directly supported for Jira, Bugzilla, Azure DevOps, and TFS without any changes required by software developers’ preferred tools, methodology, or field values.
  • For PLM and PLE link requirements to hardware specifications and product line engineering for traceability and impact analysis are seamlessly supported for Teamcenter, Windchill, Aras, Pure-Systems, and BigLever.
  • For Test Automation, live trace requirements and test cases to automated testing results are supported from tools including Tricentis, Ansys, LDRA, TestRail, ZEPHYR, Vector, Jenkins, Bugzilla, and Parasoft.
  • For Risk Management, traceability is supported from Ansys FMEA/DFMEA calculations as well as Microsoft Excel including functions and spreadsheets, is also supported without any changes required to Risk team’s tooling or approaches.
  • For DevOps, Live Traceability is extended down to source code with applications including GitLab, GitHub, and Azure DevOps with no changes required to software developers’ tools or methodologies.

Though Jama Connect provides users with the ability to develop custom model system frameworks, it also includes the frameworks for plans, templates, and checklists that are specifically aligned to industry standards for medical devices, automotive, semiconductor, aerospace, defense/government, software development, and industrial manufacturing. In addition, an extensive list of industry standards and regulations are supported including ISO, IEC, FDA, EU, SEBoK, ARP, DO, and more. These industry-specific standards help organizations ensure end-to-end compliance, mitigate risk, and overall process improvement guidance.

Addressing risk management with system analysis that is tailored to each product’s industry standards and regulations, “left-shifts” risk management throughout the product’s development flow and in turn serves as an integral part of the product lifecycle process. Organizations can standardize and integrate their own risk analysis, evaluation, and risk management processes within Jama Connect’s platform to create a single source of truth for everything risk related.

In addition to risk management, Jama Connect provides critical verification and validation requirements for complex systems via test management. The tool supports customized reporting for proof of regulatory compliance and performs manual user-acceptance testing to ensure products are designed with end-users in mind. The tool generates links to disparate processes, sources, and people that increase visibility and simplifies the user’s path to compliance with traceability of tests back to its requirement. It also traces failed tests to new and existing defects for quick resolution, enabling users to reuse validated requirements saving time when testing consistent features across products.

Related: The Comprehensive Guide to Successfully Adopting Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)

MBSE Platform, Decision Making, and Traceability

MBSE (Model Based System Engineering) is another key area that Jama Connect provides a streamlined and collaborative data-driven approach to in the product development cycle. Jama Connect’s Companion MBSE platform combines requirements, architectures, behaviors, verification, and validation into a single model of the system by applying structure and rules for data and a consistent interface language between the parts of the system. The MBSE platform is designed to help organizations formalize the development, integration, and use of models to inform enterprise and program decision-making. It also allows non-technical stakeholders to visualize a model of the system of interest and interact with its data in familiar views like documents and spreadsheets.

A leading problem that product engineering organizations face is complying with traceability spanning siloed teams and tools (e.g., design, hardware, software, test, risk, quality) creating an increased risk of negative outcomes such as extensive rework, delays, & cost overruns. Requirements traceability across the entire systems development lifecycle is a core tenant of the systems engineering discipline and underpins industry standards to ensure higher quality, faster cycle times, and less costly rework.

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