Tag Archive for: Ease of use

Tag Archive for: Ease of use

Jama Connect vs. IBM® Rational® DOORS® — A Better Alternative to IBM DOORSProduct development teams face many challenges in today’s fast-moving and increasingly regulated environment. Potential missteps, however, can create an expensive ripple effect throughout the product development cycle, with the potential for missed deadlines, compliance issues and more.  

Real-time collaboration and the need for a single source of truth are critical to product development teams. Outdated tools often don’t deliver on these needs, and a misalignment between what a team needs and what a tool provides can hinder success. Requirements management tools that keep pace with your team’s evolving needs can help mitigate potential risks, improve efficiency and achieve faster results.  

If you’re currently using IBM DOORS, understanding the difference between the existing solution and more modern options can help you to determine the best next steps for your organization.  

Requirements Management and IBM DOORS 

Many organizations adopted IBM DOORS because they needed a requirements management tool for their teams and, at the time, it seemed like the best option. But much has changed since the creation of IBM DOORS, and the tool has quickly become outdated. Today’s teams need the ability to not only collaborate in real time but also to do so remotely. They also need to:  

  • Follow a consistent and common requirements practice.  
  • Create a single source of truth for requirements, ensuring that everyone on the team is working from the same information.  
  • Have easy integration so that requirements management is integrated into both core workflows and business to improve productivity.  
  • Be able to track requirements to develop, test and release new products.  

Development teams and critical stakeholders expect the tools they use to be as intuitive as the technology in other areas of their lives. Users of IBM DOORS, however, struggle with usability issues, leading many to not use the solution and opt instead to use outside programs, such as Word or Excel. This creates challenges within workflows, productivity and efficiency, and it introduces potential risks, eliminating the ability to have a single source of truth. But how did IBM DOORS become outdated, and what does it lack?  

RELATED ARTICLE: Is There Life After DOORS®?

The Advantages and Disadvantages of IBM DOORS  

Organizations are often tempted to maintain an outdated solution, even if it’s underperforming. Why? Because fear and worry exist when it comes to switching to a new solution, users often stay with the existing solution or upgrade to the next offering within the same organization (such as IBM DOORS Next).  

The advantage of staying with IBM DOORS is that you don’t need to invest in a new solution and undergo the adoption process that comes with transition. But delaying the switch to a new RM tool only delays the inevitable, because IBM DOORS will eventually go out of support, which will create many challenges, including potential security issues.  

A few common misconceptions around the advantages of IBM DOORS include:  

  • Upgrading to IBM DOORS Next is a less-expensive option. IBM DOORS Next is not IBM DOORS, it’s an entirely new tool with a new approach to requirements. In fact, the only thing the two have in common is in the name. Migrating to IBM DOORS Next might seem like the less-expensive option. However, the work that goes into upgrading to IBM DOORS Next and transitioning to an entirely new RM tool is the same. Moreover, selecting a different solution may help you improve efficiency and achieve ROI faster.  
  • Customizations will carry over to IBM DOORS Next. Organizations invested money and resources in IBM DOORS customizations (DXL), and you might believe that you can take these innovations with you when you move on to IBM DOORS Next. However, this isn’t the case, and selecting a different solution could allow for you to use fewer customizations.  
  • Business disruption is more significant with a different RM solution. Eventually, you’ll need to move away from IBM DOORS after the support is discontinued. The right RM solution will help teams more effectively hit deadlines, collaborate with greater ease and improve business outcomes, offsetting any upfront business transition.  
  • The user experience will suffer. Many people refuse to use IBM DOORS due to a challenging user experience; switching to a new RM tool may accelerate concept, design and validation processes, leading to faster times to market.  

If you’re considering making a switch, comparing various options can help determine which RM tool is best aligned with your needs. An innovative tool has the potential to reduce risk for project rework, expensive errors and compliance risks.  

What is the best alternative to IBM DOORS?  

If you want to move away from IBM DOORS, you aren’t constrained by a specific path to migration. So, what is the best alternative to IBM DOORS?  

The answer is found in examining both what your team needs most right now and what they may need in the future.  

Collaboration is a critical part of the workflow, especially with the increasing number of people working remotely. Organizations need a tool that supports digital transformation, has greater efficiency and is user-friendly enough that people will use it. 

Jama Connect is a modern alternative to traditional legacy platforms, such as IBM DOORS, and was named the overall leader (No. 1) in requirements management software on G2, outranking IBM DOORS Next for implementation, time adoption, ROI and market presence. The tool offers users a reliable solution with:  

Simplicity. Jama Connect provides an intuitive and modern user experience. Requirements management software supports multiple development methodologies and engineering disciplines to drive cross-team collaboration and alignment.  

Flexibility. Customization is a critical factor to product development teams, which ensures that they get the functionality they need most. Jama Connect provides customization, security development and a licensing model that delivers a lower total cost to ownership.  

Open. A poor experience is created when an RM tool doesn’t integrate with other tools that your team wants to use. Jama Connect allows for seamless integration with the most commonly used tools across the product development life cycle. You’ll have access to a powerful network of options to get the right technology stack aligned to your unique business needs.  

Simplicity, flexibility and the ability to easily integrate with other tools give your team the resources they need to create greater success in all of their projects. As you consider adopting RM tools such as Jama Connect, it helps to have a quick comparison to help guide your decision.  

RELATED: Q&A with a Former IBM® DOORS® Evangelist

IBM DOORS vs. Jama Connect — A quick comparison  

Adopting a new RM tool involves asking many questions, including the following: What is the implementation process? What are the costs and ROI? How easy is the tool to use? Consider the following as you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of IBM DOORS Next and Jama Connect.  

Adoption. Organizations worry that adopting a new solution will take too much time and money, so they often gravitate to a solution such as IBM DOORS Next, primarily because they assume adoption is easier. However, Jama Connect is actually 2.7x faster to adopt than IBM DOORS Next. Additionally, Jama Connect rated 80% in ease of administration, compared with IBM DOORS Next, which rated 71%.  

Return on investment. How fast will your investment pay off? This is a critical question for any new solution, and it’s important to note that ROI is achieved 45% faster with Jama Connect compared with IBM DOORS Next.  

Usability. Usability is a key reason many people refuse to use IBM DOORS and instead use email communication, Word, Excel or other outside applications. Users expect their RM experience to be as intuitive as applications in their social environment. Jama Connect rated 85% in “ease of doing business,” compared with IBM DOORS Next, which rated 74%. 

Supports remote working. The remote working trend is only expected to grow in the future. IBM DOORS lacks cloud capabilities, creating challenges with working anywhere, anytime. IBM Jama Connect creates a single repository so it’s easy for remote teams to gather, review and execute on requirements. Structured reviews and collaboration enable teams to elicit feedback, review product features in real-time with stakeholders, and track critical decisions across teams and locations. 

Moving forward with greater confidence   

Products, systems and software development are only getting more complex; so not modernizing your requirements management tool creates potential risks, such as negative outcomes in your product development process.  

As your team increasingly requires the ability to adopt, innovate and grow, continuing to use IBM DOORS will only become more difficult and potentially introduce risk into your product development process.  

Transitioning to a new requirements management tool provides your team with the resources required to innovate, meet deadlines and succeed. You can more effectively define, manage and validate complex system requirements, all while eliminating the risk and inefficiencies associated with outside documents and legacy systems.  

Achieving Live Traceability™ with Jama Connect®

Jama Software®‘s Live Traceability™ allows engineering teams to quickly and easily access the latest and most complete information for any requirement, no matter the stage of development or tools used. This real-time capability boosts productivity by ensuring teams work with the latest data and reduces risks like delays and defects by finding issues early. Research shows that issues found late can be much more expensive to fix, which is why Live Traceability is so important. Jama Connect® helps overcome the limitations of older tools, leading to better results in many industries such as automotive, medical devices, aerospace & defense, and more. To learn more, visit Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

magniX, Selects Jama Connect® for Its Ease of Use and Quick Deployment

magniX chooses Jama Connect for its ease of use, quick deployment, and to help modernize their requirements management program and demonstrate compliance with standards.

Headquartered in Everett, Washington – located just outside of Seattle – magniX is the leading developer of propulsion systems for electric aircraft, including motors, inverters, and motor controllers.

magniX is working to bring affordable, emission-free, and quieter flights to communities around the world.

More about magniX:

  • Founded in 2009
  • Expertise: Leading developer of propulsion systems for electric
  • aircraft, including motors, inverters, and motor controllers
  • Recent Awards for magniX:
    • 2020 Fast Company Most Innovative Company in Energy
    • Finalist 2020 GeekWire Innovation of the Year award
    • Frost and Sullivan Technology Innovation Leadership Award

With big plans on the horizon, magniX set out to find a modern requirements management solution that could help them make their ideas a reality.

Initially, the team was using Microsoft Excel and Word to manage their requirements, but they quickly realized it was only a temporary solution. The limitations and risks of using static requirements in this manual process were becoming apparent.

As they began their search for a requirements management solution, they knew the following things were most important:

    • Moving to a modern, cloud-based RM tool
    • Creating a centralized requirements repository
    • Demonstrating compliance with aviation standards

RELATED POST: Five Key Design Control Practices that Improve Compliance and Help Develop Better Products

While the evaluation process was short and led to the selection of Jama Connect®, the magniX team seriously evaluated multiple systems.

Jama Connect stood out for the following reasons:

  • Jama Connect was a more modern, easy-to-use solution with the powerful features they required
  • Jama Connect allowed for the magniX team to easily customize the solution to meet their needs, without requiring complex custom scripts to be written
  • The interface in Jama Connect was intuitive

“The ability to easily customize Jama Connect to fit our needs without custom scripts is a major advantage over other solutions,” said Carlos Souza, Head of Energy Storage Systems at magniX. “Jama Connect just allows us to achieve more with less work.”

Ease of use and quick deployment

In addition to ease of use and quick deployment, ultimately, the magniX team selected Jama Connect because the solution:

  • Allows for end-to-end traceability that gives the magniX team the ability to control requirements from the product level down to implementation in one single database
  • Is powerful, intuitive, and easy-to-use requiring very little training to see wide adoption and ROI
  • Enables configuration control throughout all stages of development

“One of the main reasons we selected Jama Connect is the ability to provide configuration control for all the requirements and maintain them in one database. It allows everyone in the company to have visibility into the requirements and their status,” said Souza.

Jama Connect helps to form a digital thread through development, test, and risk activities — enabling the magniX team to have end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and overall process improvement. Moving from static requirements (in disparate teams, activities, and tools) to Living Requirements™ management was the key to them achieving real-time, cross-team collaboration and coordination. And, because of its easy, intuitive, modern user interface, broad adoption is made simple.

RELATED POST: Requirements Management – Living NOT Static

Jama Connect is very intuitive and easy to get up and running. We received training, and the rest was very fluid and straight forward,” said Souza. “Teaching others how to use the tool internally is very easy.”

 

To learn more about magniX’s outcome and future with Jama Connect, read the full story here.

 


Bollinger Motors Selects Jama Connect for All-Electric Automotive Development

Bollinger Motors is engineering Class 3 and 4 electric platforms and trucks. From the ground up, the team’s dream was to build something better. Bollinger is working with environmental organizations and Tier 1 and engineering firms to create advanced solutions that will facilitate the reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. They understand that the future is electric, and they’re especially proud to be building their all-electric trucks locally in Detroit, Michigan.

To set a solid foundation for the future of their company’s growth and innovation, bringing in more discipline to their development process was of the utmost importance. Bollinger Motors was looking for some key things in a modern requirements solution, and Jama Software fit the bill.

An Organized and Centralized Requirements Management System

When Jama Software was brought in, it was at the time the company was looking for a streamlined way to handle the complexity of their innovative vehicles. They needed new software to help achieve their high-level goals.

“Our vehicles are a massive organization of complex interconnected parts, and to effectively manage that level of complexity, an organized and centralized requirements management process was essential, “shared Lyth Alobiedat, Lead Controls Engineer at Bollinger Motors.

Across their vehicles, they have eight programmable modules which are each responsible for some subset of the vehicle’s subsystems. Alobiedat oversees all the modules that exist in the vehicles they are building — and his team is responsible for both the software and the implementation of the systems. These complex modules all need to interconnect, communicate, and perform in very specific ways.

With a lean team, they knew that to build the first vehicles of their kind, their requirements management process had to be in order. They needed to move away from static requirements trapped in disparate documents and move towards a modern requirements management platform that enables Living Requirements™ which create a common thread through all downstream activity.

Jama Connect enables the Bollinger team to create living requirements which link each requirement to its decomposed user stories, dev status across engineering teams, change impact analysis, risk analysis, test results, defects, etc. This is helping them more effectively manage and validate complex systems requirements while eliminating the risks and inefficiencies associated with static, inefficient documents-based requirements and other legacy systems.

Ease of Use

According to Alobiedat, ease of use was a core differentiator—and key reason for the selection — of Jama Connect, when compared to other requirements management tools. With many on the Bollinger Motors team experienced in using other, more challenging-to-work-with requirements tools, a platform as easy as Jama Connect stood out for them. Even traditionally non-tool users can get involved and use the tool quickly. “We had one training day with Jama Software’s Professional Services team and after that, nearly every person in the company was able to write at least one or more requirements,” said Alobiedat. Because Jama Connect is designed with training and documentation aligned to industry standards, it helps teams get ramped up quickly and see value immediately.

RELATED: Watch a demonstration of the Jama Connect for Automotive Solution

Ability to Import and Export with REQ IF Data Exchange

Another key priority when selecting Jama Connect, was having the ability to import and export data accordingly, and effectively collaborate through requirements exchange, including standard Req-IF based data exchange.

“The ability to import and export documents with Jama Connect was just something that stood out over anything that I’ve used in the past,” said Alobiedat.

Data Exchange for Jama Connect enables the transfer of requirements and associated metadata between customers and suppliers, using the industry standard ReqIF file format. The ability to import, export, and update data to create an ongoing exchange of requirements throughout the product development process has allowed the Bollinger team to save countless hours of tedious, manual work.

A Configurable, Scalable, SaaS Tool

When the team was looking for a new solution to manage their requirements, a Software as a Services (SaaS) tool was important, but in addition, they wanted a tool that would fit into their team’s existing workflow. “The configurability of everything in Jama Connect is just huge for us, because it allows us to use the tool the way that we want to,” shared Alobiedat.
The Bollinger team knew that having a SaaS requirements management solution would offer integrations with other cloud-based tools — thereby accelerating the design phase of the product development lifecycle with efficiency and scale by connecting requirements in Jama Connect with model-based design tools. It would also help to further streamline product development process and allow better collaboration across ecosystems like MathWorks, MATLAB & Simulink.

“With Jama Connect being a cloud-based tool, I particularly appreciate that it’s one less piece of software to connect, it’s one less VPN to log into and it’s one less risk of any potential local server issues that we have. The simplicity of just being able to quickly log in to a website browser and read the requirements that we need and submit them for approval is huge.” Lyth Alobiedat, Lead Controls Engineer Bollinger Motors

In addition to meeting all the objectives the Bollinger Motors team sought to accomplish by selecting and implementing Jama Connect, they have found some unexpected and welcome features of the platform that are making their processes even more efficient. Read the full customer story to see the benefits and outcomes.


ETAS NI Systems Selects Jama Connect for its Power, Flexibility, and Useability

In the rapidly evolving automotive sector, driven by electrification and advanced driver assistance systems, ETAS NI Systems helps customers by designing, building, and servicing pre-integrated Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) systems.

Started in 2019 when National Instruments and ETAS GmbH joined forces to create a new venture, ETAS NI Systems now employs around 50 people and serves the automotive industry worldwide.

With a mission to improve testing and validation of software in automotive electronics, including electronic control units and sensors, ETAS NI Systems is working hard to keep automotive development safe.

As a newly formed company, ETAS NI Systems didn’t waste any time before evaluating and implementing a requirements management solution. They knew that there was too much at stake.

Searching for a Requirements Management Platform

ETAS NI Systems knew they had a shot to get their product development process right from the very beginning, and that selecting the right requirements management platform was key to their success.

“I had worked with powerful requirements management solutions in the past, and I knew that using something like Word and Excel weren’t an option for our team,” said Hans-Peter Dürr, Technical Director at ETAS NI Systems. “They don’t provide the flexibility required for our complex projects.”

With all options on the table, the team began their evaluation process knowing that the requirements management solution must help them with the following challenges:

Demonstrating Compliance

Because ETAS NI Systems works with automotive companies worldwide, they needed to find a system that helps their clients demonstrate compliance with industry regulations and standards. Many of their clients must comply with a variety of regional safety and compliance standards (e.g., IEC61010), and without a structured requirements management solution, proving compliance would be manual and time consuming for the ETAS NI team.

Reusing Requirements

Across Multiple Projects The team estimates that more than 70% of requirements can be used across projects, especially when it comes to demonstrating regulatory compliance. Therefore, it was crucial that ETAS NI Systems find a solution that would allow them to save valuable development time by having the ability to easily reusing requirements across multiple projects.

Getting Up and Running Quickly Without In-house Tool Expertise

Above all, the team knew they needed a solution that they could and would actually use.

“There are a ton of powerful requirements management solutions out on the market… but they require in-house expertise or months of training, and they’re still difficult to use. We needed a solution that we could get up and going quickly with and could easily train our teams how to use,” said Dürr.

RELATED: Watch a demonstration of the Jama Connect for Automotive Solution

Evaluating the Highest Rated Requirements Management Tools

The ETAS NI Systems evaluation process was not short, nor was it simple – it was months long and included more than 20 different solutions. After a comprehensive evaluation of all available requirements management solutions, ETAS NI Systems selected Jama Connect because it was the only solution on the market that:

  • Provided a single source of truth for organizational visibility
  • Offered the flexibility and power required for complex product development
  • Had an easy-to-use platform that didn’t require in-house expertise or extensive training

Not only did Jama Connect fit the bill for useability, but it also had all the functionality and power ETAS NI Systems needed to improve testing and validation of software in automotive electronics.

“The user experience was very important to us. We needed to find a tool that was web-based, customizable, and easy to use. We found that and more in Jama Connect,” said Dürr.

Download the full customer story to see the results of new partnership between ETAS NI and Jama Software.