Jama rolled out our REST API earlier this year, and we couldn’t wait to see what our customers would do with it. We’ve also had opportunities to work with organizations on good ways to leverage the API, including an exciting and unique engagement with Portland State University (PSU) computer science students in their Capstone Program. We’ve had great experiences working with PSU. Jama participates in their PCEP internship program, several Jama team members are alumni of PSU’s computer science program, and we’re always thrilled to work with students, helping them get a glimpse into how we make software to solve complex, real-world problems.
The Capstone team had seven students in their final year of computer science studies. They worked with our professional services and UX teams to build a web application that demonstrates the capabilities of Jama’s REST API and chose to focus on visualizing relationship data in Jama. “The opportunity to work with a local software company was incredible,” said team member Ricky Valencia. “We were excited to work with the Jama application and get the chance to learn from the team here.”
Over several months, the team dived into pair programming and other Agile practices to plan, build, and test their data visualization application. “Initially, we had a steep learning curve – a few of us hadn’t built web apps or even written in JavaScript,” said team member Michael Hansen. “We learned a lot during this process, including how to better gauge the amount of time needed to complete an objective and a lot about the intricacies of testing.” During their product demo to Jama staff, the team called out how refreshing it was to use an API that is solid and well-documented.
You can see their open-source project on the team’s GitHub. We loved seeing the results of this project and hope the team’s work inspires our customers as much as it has us.
Huge thanks to Michael Hansen, Ricardo Valencia, Chance Snow, Kathleen Tran, Marcus Week, Iman Bilal, Ruben Piatnitsky and Portland State University.