Jama Connect®‘s Features in Five Series:
Your Guide to Streamlining Product Development
Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In our Features in Five video series, we pull back the curtains to give you a look at a few of the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in under five minutes.
Would you like to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement—no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans?
Live Traceability™ in Jama Connect enables you to do just that! Now you can manage requirements with complete traceability across the end-to-end systems development process for proven reduction in cycle time and improved product quality.
This enables the engineering process to be managed through data, and its performance improved in real time; dramatically reducing the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls; and ultimately resulting in faster time to market.
In this video, we demonstrate how Jama Connect helps teams integrate with preferred best-of-breed tools to achieve Live Traceabilty™ across the end-to-end development cycle.
Struggling with scattered requirements and disconnected systems?
Teams often struggle to build on existing work when requirements and tests are spread across documents and systems. Lacking a live trace, they must manually identify and copy related content, increasing the risk of rework and gaps. Additionally, teams tend to lack visibility across efforts, causing necessary changes to not propagate across reuse content, potentially impacting quality and disconnecting product design efforts.
Jama Connect simplifies and enhances the process of reusing requirements and verifications by allowing you to copy selected content with its containers and its traced items. Synchronization ensures visibility and enables key use cases such as parallel product definition, common content libraries, and product variance.
In this video, we explain how your team can reduce time to market and improve quality by reusing and synchronizing requirements and other content in Jama Connect.
Review Center
Are complex review processes bogging down your development process?
Reviews play a key role in successful product development. Jama Connect’s Review Center streamlines the review process, saving valuable time and making reviews across teams and various stakeholders seamless! In this video, you will learn how to initiate a review, how to invite participants to a review, how users can complete tasks, provide feedback, and finish a review. You also see how moderators can view review activity, interact with feedback, publish revisions, compare review versions, and more.
In this video, we demonstrate a powerful and easy-to-use feature in Jama Connect, the Review Center.
Jama Connect Features in Five: Integrations Series
The #1 problem product engineering organizations face is complying with traceability requirements spanning siloed teams and tools. Jama Connect helps teams solve this by offering integrations with various other applications and tools via Jama Connect Interchange™ as well as Jira, Excel, Cameo, and more.
We are excited to announce our upcoming eight-part Jama Connect Features in Five integration video series demonstrating the best-of-breed tools that plug into Jama Connect for Live Traceability!
How to Integrate Jama Connect® with Microsoft Excel Using the Jama Connect Interchange™ (JCI)-Excel Functions Module
Everyday, the world’s most innovative companies use Jama Connect® to build life-changing products, software, and services. Jama Connect includes powerful requirements traceability, risk management, and test management capabilities to help our customers get their products to market faster.
Jama Connect also includes numerous configuration settings — which our customers use to adapt the tool to their organization’s engineering practices and achieve compliance to industry-specific standards and regulations.
On top of this wide range of options, though, many of our users still require an additional level of customization to really make Jama Connect their own – this just usually requires an adjustment to the workflow logic here, or an additional calculation there.
Other requirements management tools achieve this extra level of configuration using JavaScript extensions or complex propriety scripting languages that can take literally years to master (with the frustrations taking years off your life in the process!)
Jama Software® has solved this same problem using the much more accessible, universal language of Microsoft® Excel formulas. Our powerful Excel Functions add-on module can be purchased with our integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange™ (JCI).
Imagine your average Excel workbook, where formulas are applied to certain cells to perform calculations or logically transform data. Now, imagine if you could apply those same formulas directly to fields in Jama Connect. Pretty powerful, right?
You can think of the JCI-Excel Functions as a calculator that runs in the background while you work in Jama Connect. As you enter fields in Jama Connect, field values are automatically sent to an Excel template where formulas are set up. Formulas are run instantly, and the resulting values are sent back to Jama Connect. Your Jama Connect users don’t ever need to open an Excel workbook or even have a license to Excel to benefit from this automation.
In today’s blog, I’d like to do the same for JCI-Excel Functions. As the Product Manager for JCI, I’ve heard from numerous customers who have used this module to achieve time-saving workflow automation, streamline manual data entry, and automate complex calculations.
Keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list! If your team has another workstream they’re loving, I’d encourage you to post about it in the JCI Sub-Community for others to see.
Example #1 – Complex Calculations (Defect Prioritization Scenario)
Many projects incorporate complex and proprietary formulas or calculations that take years for a company to perfect. Rather than perform these calculations offline and input the results in Jama Connect manually, you can use JCI to map Jama Connect fields directly to an Excel workbook and watch the same calculations run automatically.
In this simple risk calculation, a Defect’s overall Risk Priority Number (RPN) is calculated using the following formula: RPN = (A+B)*(C+D+E), where each variable is taken from a field in the item.
With JCI, fields A through E are mapped to the Excel template, where the formula is run. The resulting RPN is then automatically populated in the Calculated RPN field.
Example #2 – Field Inheritance Across Items (Library Scenario)
This flexible workstream allows you to share fields or values across related items. For example, you could maintain a standard or approved “library” of items in one part of the system, and automatically populate values from that library to other items as needed.
With this workstream, users no longer need to copy values across items manually. Instead, values flow automatically, and any time a field in the “source” item is updated, the “target” items automatically receive the update as well.
In this risk analysis example, values from a standard library of hazards and harms are automatically populated to an individual risk analysis item.
Example #3 – Logical Transformations (Software Development Scenario)
Use this example to update fields automatically when certain conditions are met. In the following software development scenario, we’ve set up a rule stating that when all downstream user stories have a status of Development Done, the upstream software requirement in Jama Connect should also be marked as Done. This workstream simplifies life for the product manager by allowing them to see at a glance when a feature is complete.
Conclusion
Jama Connect Interchange is an integration platform that seamlessly connects Jama Connect with other best-of-breed tools, like Microsoft Excel, and Atlassian Jira.
JCI is built, supported, and continuously enhanced by dedicated teams at Jama Software. This means that JCI is deeply integrated with Jama Connect configurations and workflows, providing you with a smart and seamless sync.
JCI supports both cloud-based and self-hosted instances of Jama Connect. If you’d like to learn more about Jama Connect in general or start a free trial of our #1-rated requirements management platform, please click here. If you’re already a Jama Connect customer and would like to find out whether JCI would be a good fit for your organization, please contact your Customer Success Manager.
Revolutionize Your Software Development Process with Seamless Integration of Jama Connect and Atlassian Jira
Nearly all of Jama Software®’s clients engage in software development to some degree. In some cases, the products they build are entirely software-based, and in others, software is just one critical component of a more complex system.
Because most software engineering teams use Atlassian Jira as their central development hub, Jama Software provides a direct link between Jama Connect® and Jira through our integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange™.
As the Product Manager for Jama Connect Interchange (JCI), I often get asked by customers for best practices and examples of how to integrate Jama Connect with Jira, so their teams can collaborate across these tools more seamlessly.
For the most part, the customers I talk to aren’t interested in discussing high-level theories and best practices for software development (though our seasoned consulting team is always happy to provide advice in this area!). Rather, customers are looking for ground floor examples and use cases to reconnect their disconnected teams and processes.
Our customers know that in order to finish projects on time and on budget, the two most important tools in their software development ecosystem – Jama Connect and Jira – need to talk to each other directly. That’s where a targeted integration workstream comes in.
Jama Connect-Jira Integration Examples
Today, I’m going to share a few of the most successful Jama Connect to Jira integration examples we’ve seen. These examples can be implemented on their own or layered together for a more advanced workstream.
Keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list! If your team has another workstream they’re loving, I’d encourage you to post about it in the JCI Sub-Community for others to see.
Editor’s Note: The terminology included below may vary slightly depending on your industry.
Example #1 (Agile Development Workstream) – Requirements in Jama Connect, Stories and Tasks in Jira
Most of our customers have the best success by completing their higher-level product planning in Jama Connect, while reserving Jira for more granular task execution by the software engineering team.
This is because Jira excels at task management, while Jama Connect’s built-in requirements traceability, risk management, and test management capabilities make it the ideal place to track your project in a holistic manner.
With the following model, you send software requirements from Jama Connect to Jira for execution at distinct points in the project’s lifecycle when software development activity occurs.
Rather than sync full hierarchies of items (requirements, user stories, tasks, etc.) back and forth unnecessarily, we set up JCI to sync just the relevant information at the time it is needed by the receiving team. This provides greater focus and prevents duplication of effort or conflicting changes.
Example #2 (Project Management Workstream) – Requirements and Stories in Jama Connect, Tasks in Jira
This example is similar to the first, except that User Stories are authored in Jama Connect rather than in Jira. Use this workstream if the Project Manager or Product Manager typically breaks down requirements into more granular units of work (stories) during the planning phase, before passing them off to the development team for execution.
With this workstream, each team works in their tool of choice, and when information is shared by multiple teams, that information is visible from both tools and synced in real time.
Example # 3 – Never Miss a Regression Defect
The regression testing cycle that accompanies each new software release can be chaotic if you don’t have an airtight process in place. During regression, Jama Software’s own development teams use JCI to streamline communication between our QA testers (who work in Jama Connect) and software engineers (who work in Jira). This ensures that any regression defects reported by QA are instantly sent to engineers for triage, and the release is not held up.
Here is how it works:
Since defects are automatically synced to Jira soon as they are reported, we eliminate any potential communication delays between the two teams, and more importantly, we ensure that no defects get missed.
Jama Connect Interchange is an integration platform that seamlessly integrates Jama Connect with other best-of-breed tools, like Atlassian Jira and Microsoft Excel.
JCI is built, supported, and continuously enhanced by dedicated teams at Jama Software. This means that JCI is deeply integrated with Jama Connect configurations and workstreams, providing you with a smart and seamless sync.
JCI supports both cloud-based and self-hosted instances of Jama Connect. To find out whether JCI would be a good fit for your organization, contact your Customer Success Manager.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Interchange™
Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect®’s powerful features… in under five minutes.
In this Features in Five video, Debbie Mitchell, Product Manager at Jama Software, will introduce viewers to Jama Connect®’s dedicated integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange™.
In this session, we will explore:
Benefits of integrating Jama Connect
Features of Jama Connect Interchange
Common Jira and Excel Functions integration workflows
Follow along with this short video below to learn more, and you can find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Debbie Mitchell: Welcome. I’m Debbie, a Product Manager here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to introduce you to Jama Connect’s dedicated integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange. In this video, we will explore the benefits of integrating Jama Connect to other best-of-breed tools, the features offered by Jama Connect Interchange, and some common workflows using our Jira and Excel Functions integrations.
When developing new products, organizations typically employ an entire suite of best-of-breed tools. Requirements management tools like Jama Connect, task management tools like Jira and Microsoft Azure DevOps, and charting and spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel.
Working across disconnected tools can present a problem, though. Information quickly becomes out of date, and teams get out of sync with one another, leading to product delays, defects, cost overruns, rework and recalls. This is why we built Jama Connect Interchange, a new integration platform that delivers seamless integration between Jama Connect and other best-of-breed tools.
Unlike other integration tools in the marketplace, Interchange is built, supported, and continually enhanced by dedicated teams at Jama Software. This means Interchange is deeply integrated with Jama Connect configurations and workflows, providing you with a smart and seamless sync while you continue to work in your tool of choice.
Let’s take a common example. Suppose my company is building a new product that includes a software component. Using Jama Connect, I finalize a list of software requirements which will now be decomposed into individual user stories. Those stories will be sent to Jira, the software development team’s tool of choice, for the software engineers to complete.
Debbie Mitchell: Let’s see what this looks like in Jama Connect. Using Interchange, I have set up an integration that allows the user stories that I’ve created in this set to automatically flow to a specific project in Jira. In Jira, the software development team can then refine the stories and create additional tasks and subtasks as needed to complete the development work.
In the Interchange admin hub, I’ve specified exactly how information should flow between Jama Connect and Jira for this particular project. I can specify whether each field flows one way or bi-directionally, and the frequency with which changes are synced. Updates can flow as fast as every 15 seconds, so both systems always have the latest information.
For this particular scenario, I’ve configured Interchange so that when development work is complete in Jira, the user story status is automatically synced back to Jama Connect to a field called Development Status. Now I can use the trace view in Jama Connect to easily identify when all user stories associated with a particular requirement have been completed.
To further automate this workflow, I can use the Interchange Excel Functions module to apply additional logical transformations to my data in Jama Connect. You can think of Excel Functions as a calculator that runs in the background while you continue to work in Jama Connect. A Jama Connect administrator maintains the formulas and calculations in an Excel template, and those formulas are then applied to fields in Jama Connect based on the settings and rules the administrator sets up in Interchange.
In this simple example, I’ve set up a rule in my Excel template stating that when all downstream user stories have a status of Development Done, I want the upstream software requirement in Jama Connect to also be marked as Done. Now, this is just one example of how Interchange Excel Functions can be used.
Debbie Mitchell: Jama Connect clients today derive much deeper value from Interchange for scenarios like complex risk calculations, automated field inheritance or data population between related items, customized test case status rollups, and more. You can find out more about Excel functions, use cases, and capabilities by joining the Jama Connect interchange sub-community on the Jama Software community website.
Jama Connect customers can now leverage the power of Interchange to continuously sync information between Jama Connect and other best-of-breed tools. This means teams can continue using their tool of choice to maximize productivity while ensuring that critical project requirements stay in sync. Unlike other solutions in the market, Interchange has been specifically designed and developed to work seamlessly with Jama Connect. It’s easy to deploy, configure, use, and expand, driving efficiency and further lowering your total cost of ownership.
For more information about Interchange, contact your Customer Success Manager today, and thanks.
To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Jama Connect Features
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Features in Five topics, including, Risk Management, Reviews, Requirements Advisor, and more.
Jama Software® Partners with Sparx Systems To Strengthen Live Traceability™ Across Systems Development
Jama Software helps organizations manage requirements with Live Traceability™ through the systems development process for proven cycle time reduction and quality improvement. Sparx Systems is a leading integrated modeling and collaboration platform aimed at creating, sharing, and verifying models as a reference for building complex systems.
The seamless integration provides a real-time synchronous connection to the Enterprise Architect repositories. Users can work on the same model, at the same time, from anywhere in the world. Teams using a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach provide an integration with another best-of-breed tool while maintaining Live Traceability within Jama Connect®.
Live Traceability between Jama Connect and Enterprise Architect provides systems engineers, business analysts and software developers with real-time visibility between requirements and system models, enabling:
Instant access to view Jama Connect requirements and properties without leaving Enterprise Architect.
The ability to selectively create links between model elements and requirements
Seamless participation in the comment stream across tools
The creation of new model elements directly within Jama Connect
Bi-directional synchronization of changes
Simple and efficient setup and administration
This holistic approach will reduce the amount of iteration on requirements that take place in siloed tool environments as well as reduce the risk associated with manual efforts associated with tracing between disconnected tools.
“This first release of the Jama Connect integration for Enterprise Architect further cements Sparx’s commitment to integrate, harmonize, and work with industry-leading tools in the modeling and design space,” stated Geoffrey Sparks, CEO at Sparx Systems. “The Jama Connect Integration ensures the many modelers currently using our respective tool suites can share modeling and design info in a way that plays to the strength of each tool and seamlessly accelerates development. It has been a pleasure working with the Jama Software team and being able to bring this capability to our users and we look forward to future developments building upon this first release,” continued Sparks.
“The integration between Jama Connect and Enterprise Architect is a significant addition to Jama Connect’s best-of-breed ecosystem that is not only unique but essential for achieving Live Traceability across the systems development lifecycle,” stated Tom Tseki, Jama Software’s Chief Revenue Officer. “Jama Software’s ecosystem of connected best-of-breed tools continues to expand and the Requirements Traceability Alliance members are committed to interoperability across the entire system development toolchain.”
About Sparx Systems
Sparx Systems is a global software company specializing in high performance, visual modeling platforms for planning, designing, and constructing software-intensive systems. Sparx platforms are used by systems designers, corporate planners, business analysts, enterprise architects, standards developers, and software engineers. Sparx modeling software is widely used in finance, defense, government, aerospace, automotive engineering, geospatial, entertainment, health, smart grid, aviation, retail, and telecommunications. Sparx Systems’ flagship modeling platform, Enterprise Architect, provides robust support for team-wide collaboration and can scale up from single-user deployment to teams with hundreds of local and remote collaborators. With more than one million effective users globally and 80% of Fortune 100 firms owning licenses, Enterprise Architect is an essential platform for the most complex of projects. For more information, please visit the company website: https://sparxsystems.com
About Jama Software
Jama Software is focused on maximizing innovation success. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, autonomous vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect® to minimize the risk of product failure, delays, cost overruns, compliance gaps, defects, and rework. Jama Connect uniquely creates Live Traceability™ through siloed development, test, and risk activities to provide end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement. Our rapidly growing customer base of more than 12.5 million users across 30 countries spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, financial services, and insurance industries. Visit us at jamasoftware.com
Click HERE to learn more about how Jama Connect can help you redefine and accelerate your systems engineering and development processes.
In this post, we recap a recent webinar hosted by Jama Software on the topic of integrating TestRail and Jama Connect
As the digital demands of the business continue to escalate, software delivery teams are under extraordinary pressure to deliver more work faster. Speed, however, counts for little if these teams are not delivering a high-quality product of value; rapid turnaround for a customer request is futile if the feature doesn’t work properly or meet their needs.
Fortunately, including quality assurance and test teams in the earliest phases of the software delivery lifecycle has never been easier; striking the right balance between speed and quality.
By seamlessly linking requirements to their test cases and test results, product managers and system engineers benefit from real-time visibility into test coverage and automated compliance reporting.
Join Jama Software’s VP of Product Management, Jeremy Johnson, and Tasktop Director of Partner Pre-Sales, Zoe Vickers, for a webinar demonstrating:
How linking requirements in Jama to tests that can integrate directly to or from TestRail enables transparency and cross-team alignment
How to correct inefficiencies and speed up time-to-market while enhancing product quality and employee satisfaction
Jeremy Johnson: I’m going to start by going through the agenda of topics that we have lined up for you today. Most of you are likely already familiar with Jama Connect’s ability to manage requirements, test and risk as part of your overall product development life cycle. So we’re going to start this discussion specifically around our perspective on integrations. We’ll have Zoe come in and talk about Tasktop Hub for Jama Connect and tell you a little bit about Tasktop as a company. Then we’ll move into test management challenges that we see when we discuss product development with our customers and prospective customers. And we’ll also touch on the benefits of integrating TestRail and Jama Connect. Zoe will then dive a little bit deeper into the integration flow and some of the benefits and show a live demo, connecting TestRail and Jama Connect. And then we’ll recap some key takeaways and get into some questions and answers at the end of the session.
So like I mentioned I’d like to start here with Jama software’s perspective on integrations. And the first point to touch on here is really the best practice around product development is to view integrations as a means to achieve live traceability across the systems development life cycle. Many if not most of you are familiar with the V model, you see a representation here. And you may not be with live traceability. So it’s really a component where different pieces of data that impact the product development life cycle need to evolve, need to be very dynamic throughout the process. Things like verification and validation need to happen much earlier in the process.
So maintaining this live traceability between all of these different product development components, different assets that might be involved, different products that might be involved is critical to optimizing your product development life cycle and processes. The real key here of course is that with this notion of live traceability in place, issues are reduced, and those that do arise are found earlier in the process. You can see here based on data from industry sources, these issues, finding these issues earlier in the can save 16 to as much as 110 times the cost of not finding them until later in the process.
Now I think everybody at this stage of evolution understands and agrees that this is the best practice. But really the challenge has been implementing this in the real world. So why is it that companies tend to struggle? And the reality is that most companies or probably nearly all companies don’t have an end-to-end system development process that covers all of these components. They tend to be broken up into silos, different toolsets, maybe even desktop tools and spreadsheets. Some of those things come into play. And all of those variability, all of that variability in the tool chain leads to potential issues. These areas with Xs on this representation of the V model. Those are potential areas where the traceability might be broken, and that results in significant manual effort, emails, meetings, all of those kinds of things, maybe a little bit of luck involved in trying to prevent delays and defects and rework and cost overruns that can come if those data points, that traceability is broken.
And Jama Software and Jama Connect as a product can certainly resolve some of these components in its inherent capability of tying risk and test information with requirements. But many companies have come to really accept this situation as unchangeable. If we don’t have a single platform to do all of this, then we inherently need to manage these things in silos and accept maybe desktop tools and spreadsheets or on some level part of the process. Then those are things that you’re simply not going to be able to control and manage. But a really a key to bringing this all together to achieving this live traceability is to sync these existing software tools, these best of breed tools.
Even in desktop tools and spreadsheets and things with requirements. So Jama Software is one of the companies that is really truly making this possible. So if we look at live traceability and an example of the connected data, the connected components within Jama Connect, you can see how easy it is to define elements, the relationships across tools, maybe even spreadsheets in this example. This happens to be from our medical device solution, but we have similar but tailored solutions for aerospace and defense automotive and semiconductor for industry industrial manufacturing, various different industries. These components are continually synced with best of breed tools. They’re applying their own specific engineering disciplines, and importantly linking that back to requirements and other vital components of the product development life cycle within Jama Connect.
So again you can see some of those connections in this diagram, very common for things like JIRA and Azure DevOps and downstream issue identification, task management, some of those things on the execution side. Zoe is going to touch a little bit on how JIRA comes into play in this scenario. We have test rail of course that Zoe will be talking about on the verification, the testing side. So those will come into play as we get deeper into this discussion. And one of the key ways that we help customers achieve this live traceability is with our strategic partnership with Tasktop. So to introduce you to Tasktop and some of their capabilities, I’ll now pass it over to Zoe.
Zoe Vickers: Thanks, Jeremy. I really appreciate it. Hi everyone. So what I just want to talk about as a whole is Tasktop has actually been a strategic partner of Jama’s for many years. And what this partnership really allows all of you Jama customers to do is you have the ability to integrate Jama with over 60 plus tools in the more agile DevOps testing ecosystem. The reason Jama decided to partner with us at Tasktop is because what we offer is an out of the box point and click configuration for setting up these integrations. What I mean by this is not a heavy services engagement. It is not something that each time you add a new project, you add new fields, you add new requirement types in JIRA that you might want to integrate with. Different tools like TestRail or JIRA. You don’t have to reach back out to Jama or Tasktop.
You are able to actually scale your integrations on your own. So that way you can build an enterprise wide solution within your own teams. One of the things that I want to show on the next slide is really the ability of what are all of the different connectors that Tasktop has. So I mentioned that we do allow you to integrate with over 60 different tools. Again, we actually have something called our integration test factory where internally at Tasktop we run over 500,000 tests a day, against every supported version of software that we have.
So again what we’re able to help, you do know we’ve helped many, many Jama customers do over the years is integrate drama with the fullest of tools on the right hand side. If you’re taking a quick look through that, they are out for the ties. Again, some of the most common ones that we are seeing specifically with Jama customers is we’re working with Azure DevOps, we’re working with JIRA, we’re working with TestRail, we’re working with Spark CA. And really the idea here is to bring in as much traceability across your different tool chains. So that way as you go back to some of those different traceability diagrams that Jeremy was talking about, you can see where all your [inaudible 00:12:05] teams are doing their work, and you actually have the visibility into the up-to-date status at any moment in time.
One of the big things that we talk about with Tasktop is why do you actually need an integration solution? There are some brilliant developers out there who can build a integration solution in-house. And a lot of times those integrations work beautifully, but what I’ve had many customers over the last few years talk with me about is that it’s hard to scale. And then it becomes a little bit more of a problem for them when it comes to error handling or troubleshooting. What we like to talk about at Tasktop is really to say first off integration solutions are needed, whether it’s through mergers or acquisitions or just growing teams as you go from large, medium, or small businesses. You have a lot of duplicate data entry that might be happening in a variety of tools.
Whether you’re communicating between your requirements tools, your agile teams, to your ITSM teams logging tickets. What task that’s going to help you do is actually eliminate a lot of that overhead and duplicate data entry, which then is going to help allow you to actually speed up your or delivery times and it’s also going to improve the communication between the teams, because they are able to collaborate across different tools without actually having to exit those applications. So one of the things that we’ll be able to even talk about today with Tasktop is you’re no longer going to have to walk across the office or send an email or extra Slack message. You can continue to comment back and forth in Jama, within TestRail, within JIRA. So that way your teams truly do have the end-to-end visibility of who’s working on what without having to log out of their tools of choice.
The main way that Tasktop actually does this is through something called model-based integration. So one of the big things that we like to talk about at Tasktop is there a value in just a simple point to point integration? Yes. This webinar today is talking specifically about Jama to TestRail. But we also need to be aware that none of you are going to operate in just the vacuum of those two tools. You probably have an entire ecosystem. 10, 15, 20 tools that your different teams are using. Tasktop is built to be an integration solution so you can scale across your entire organization. How we do this is that we are not actually a plugin to Jama or a plugin to TestRail. We are an independent third party solution that can be both on-prem or cloud hosted and how we actually offer this integration is through something we call model-based integration.
What a model is going to do is it is going to act as that universal translator to convert and normalize data between systems. What I mean by that is in that image on the right hand side you’re actually able to see for example I have a variety of different tools, this is an example customer we’ve worked with has. And specifically if we look at Jama they are doing a lot of their defect logging there. And as that relates back to their different requirements. So what I’m able to do is I’m able to take not only Jama, but also the specific work item that they’re working on. So there are different maybe bug or defect types with all the schema that makes up that specific item and map it into my specific model. From there, instead of just going over to TestRail, I could integrate that specific information with JIRA, with Azure DevOps, with a problem from ServiceNow.
And I’m also able to then take something like TestRail and map that into the model. So at any point in time when you want to add an additional tool or an additional work item, you want to actually bring integration and synchronization with your teams. You easily can map it to the model and reuse any half of any other integration to easily map it to. So an example of how this actually works is on this next slide imagine that you have your two different tools. So we have Jama test case on the left and we have a TestRail test case on the right. Then you have the model in the center. So think of your model as nothing more than a bucket of fields. Before you hopped on the webinar today, you probably decided, “Hey, I am interested in integration.” That means that probably on some little scratch piece of paper or an Excel document you have noticed and said, “Hey, I want to get information from this tool to this tool.”
The information I care about is something like a status or a priority or the assignee of this item. All that information goes into the model. Think of the model as Tasktop. From there I can easily map from Jama to the model, and you can see that we can have a one to one relationship between fields or a one to many. Then I can also map TestRail to the model. And as I do that, as we keep clicking through, you’re going to see these different boxes pop up, which shows a Jama collection and a TestRail collection. What that means is first off we look at the black lines. Tasktop is able to help route the data anywhere it needs to go to the correct fields, to the correct values via the model. From there, once we go into Tasktop later we’ll talk about how the architecture Tasktop works. Where in the previous side when I had shown you can map any tool to any other one half of an integration.
We see here that half of your integration is going to be called a Jama collection. That means we’re mapping from Jama to the model. And the other half of the integration is going to be from TestRail to the model and that’s your test rail collection. The reason this matters to you is that the second question I get from a lot of customers is, “Well, do we have to have all these fields equal? Does the schema in both tools need to match?” And the answer is no. You guys can start your integration with baby steps. You’re going to very easily be able to say, “This is this state of my Jama, this is the state of my TestRail. Let’s just start flowing information.” Then from there you can determine to scale.
In this blog post, experts from Cadence, OpsHub, and Jama Software talk about enabling digital transformation in the hardware and semiconductor industries.
The relentless pace of innovation, rapidly changing markets, and increasing product complexity are creating intense pressures on companies in the semiconductor and hardware space. Some of the biggest challenges relate to scaling effectively and efficiently within the context of digital transformations.
Organizations in all sectors are looking to support faster release cycles and accelerate innovation. Siloed and legacy tool chains create a major hurdle in accomplishing these goals.
Watch the webinar or read the recording to learn more about:
Rich collaboration
Complete traceability
Full transparency among all stakeholders
Faster releases
Improved quality and productivity
Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.
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Jama Connect: the Leading Platform for Requirements
Matt Graham: Thanks everybody for joining. So today, before we get into the agenda just to introduce the three products that there are three subject matter experts about. First of all, something near and dear to my heart, the Cadence vManager, verification management platform which is a scalable, reliable and very feature rich verification planning and management solution from Cadence. That sits on top of a number of our verification and provides a sort of roll up capability. And we’ll describe it in a little more detail in a couple of slides. On the OpsHub opposite side, we’ll be looking at the OpsHub integration manager that enables enterprises to integrate their best of breed tools together that are best suited for the various teams and their various roles and connect those two together for integration and collaboration. And then Jama Connect, which is the leading platform for requirements, risk and test management to help provide that sort of end-to-end compliance solution.
Our agenda today. First we’ll look at some of the challenges of the semiconductor and hardware development ecosystem. This is obviously a very fast paced, highly competitive type of environment and there’s a lot of specific challenges that the integration of the tools I just mentioned can help address and solve. We’ll look at how engineers in this space can scale effectively and efficiently utilizing some of these, the tools to address some of the ongoing transformations in that space. And then specific to semiconductor domain, bridging the gap in what has historically been a very siloed development process. And bringing together for efficiency, quality and reliability all of the various tools that I mentioned and giving it a really nice integrated development and verification environment. We’ll then have a specific use case and demo showing how the three tools work in concert and then look at some key takeaways. And as Marie mentioned, some Q and A.
Standards for Requirements such as ISO 26262
Specifically to the semiconductor and hardware ecosystem, there are a developing set of challenges. And of course they’ve always been challenges in this area. First pass design success is critical for hardware development. Just because the tooling costs are so great. We don’t want to have to respurn hardware. It’s not like just releasing more software. It is it requires expense. But that has been the way of hardware development for some time. In the last several years we’ve seen a need creeping into that environment for even stricter compliance, particularly around mission critical domain such as aero and defense, automotive especially as self-driving and autonomous vehicles come in. And adherence to standards like ISO 26262 presents another layer of requirements and need for management and collaboration on top of an already strict set of sort of design parameters.
As I mentioned, this development environment tends to be very siloed in its nature because it is so specialist. You have specialist designers, specialists verification engineers to test the designs, specialists post silicon, specialists layout engineers and so on and so forth. And all of those silos, well somewhat required of the specialty of each of those tasks tends to hinder collaboration, compromise quality and just impact efficiency and velocity overall. In an area where efficiency and quality is critical. We can’t have bugs in semiconductors going to automotive and we need to be able to turn those new cell phones, those new mobile devices as quickly as possible. So turnaround time is just getting compressed and the requirement for quality is increasing at the same time.
All of that sort of siloed nature of the specialties as well as the need for velocity and quality really ends up in poor traceability of results in terms of compliance and quality issues creeping in. Especially when it comes to doing things like audits for ISO and other similar standards that are becoming the requirement across again aero and defense type applications, automotive type applications and even down into the sort of consumer device applications. And really traceability is a watch word now in the ecosystem of hardware and semiconductor development.
So how does the offering from Cadence, vManager fit into and help provide a solution to those challenges that I just mentioned? Well, for a number of years now, in fact, vManager has been around for about 15 years and in that entire time it’s had the key capability of the verification plan. And the verification plan really exists to provide traceability between what is being executed during the testing or verification of your semiconductor or hardware design. And what were the goals of that or the requirements of that testing or verification project. Things like testing interfaces, both internal and external to the semiconductor, testing compliance with standards like ethernet and USB, such as that, things like that. As well as the internal requirements of the device, it must route packets this fast. It must answer phone calls in this manner or whatever it might be.
And the verification plan in vManager really allows the user to enter those requirements and then connect them to the real results that are occurring. We ran these tests, these tests were associated with a given requirement. Those tests passed therefore the requirement is satisfied. And so the V plan becomes a very natural place. And in fact the appropriate place to connect the rest of the ecosystem via OpsHub, two tool requirements coming from Jama Connect so that we can have traceability across the software development, the hardware development, whatever. The mechanical development et cetera ecosystems. And the vManager and the verification plan is really where that hardware verification, that hardware and semiconductor development information enters that ecosystem through the conduit of the verification plan. So let’s look a little bit more on, well what exactly is in that verification plan that vManager provides.
Enabling Digital Transformation: Static Documents Cause Challenges
And the V plan is really what we call, what we refer to in our vManager sort of pitch if you will as an executable verification specification or an executable verification contract. And what that means is that there’s data incoming to that during the creation, the authoring of that verification plan. Not only through connectivity to tools like Jama but also from say static documents like standards specifications, ethernet that I mentioned before, USB those are standard protocols that have very lengthy standards documents and needs to be a way to import, kind of gather the data from that and put it in the verification plan. Another input to the verification plan is other verification plans. So if you think about a system on a chip that is not a single piece of intellectual property, it’s built up of many, many different pieces, a USB piece, a central processing piece, a memory management piece and so on.
And each of those pieces can have their own verification plans for the verification at that sort of lower block level as well as then can sort of conglomerating or aggregating those verification plans into a single sort of system on a chip verification plan. And the vManager, V plan allows that through sort of parameterization and instantiation and really flexible set of sort of reuse capabilities for verification lands. And then of course just engineers authoring their verification plan. Literally writing, typing in here’s a specific requirement et cetera. And then we have the component of mapping those requirements to items that exist in the actual testing environment. Things like we have a test, did it pass or fail? What requirement is that test related to? So there’s mapping the test to a particular requirement and then did that test pass or fail. Those of you familiar with hardware verification know that tests passing and failing is not the only statistic or metric that we track.
There’s other metrics and statistics such as code coverage, functional coverage, assertion coverage, software coverage, all tracking what scenarios and what stimulus were driven to the specific device under test. And what was the reaction of the device under test? And then what percentage of the device has been exercised during that test? It is all basically statistics gathering from the testing effort. All that data can be mapped into the verification plan, directed to the specific requirement or multiple requirements that it may satisfy. And of course, this gives us the ability to not only specify a requirement, but then capture whether that requirement was met. Was it satisfied? And this is the place where I’ll hand over to Jeremy now to talk about what those requirements in those higher level requirements or system level requirements in the general world and how they’re going to connect into this hardware verification, hardware development world.
Development teams need the most effective solution to manage product development complexity, but can’t afford to restructure their entire process and workflow.
That’s why integrating leading product development solutions like Jama Connect™ and Jira Software is the best answer. We recently explored some of the benefits of bringing the two solutions together in a recent webinar, “Managing Hardware & Software Product Development Complexity with Jama & Jira,” and wanted to share a few of the advantages with our readers.
The Document Dilemma
In the past, Microsoft Excel or Word may have done a passable job at housing requirements and specifications. However, even those who believe those types of tools were once effective have long since realized that they are no longer practical when it comes to complex product development.
It’s likely you’ve been there — staring at a worksheet with 100+ rows and 10+ columns of data. In an effort to add clarification, you also have a Word doc with a list of specifications. You send the documents via email for your team to read through, and then attempt to comprehend and submit actionable feedback that will impact the outcome of the entire project.
You dread getting the responses back because you know everyone has a different method for submitting feedback and version control will be a nightmare. Even with tools like SharePoint or wikis, collaborating via documents makes it impossible to get timely and actionable feedback from multiple team members in a way that maximizes efficiency.
The Answer: Database Solutions
Database solutions like Jama Connect and Jira Software ease the pain of managing complex product development.
These solutions are purpose-built to help you execute specific pieces of the product development lifecycle, and are known to outperform competitors in those functional areas. Here’s a quick glance at how the two platforms complement each other.
Jama Connect Answers the questions: What are we going to build? Why are we building it?
Areas of focus: The upstream definition process — making sure you’re doing the right things to successfully build the right product.
Jira Software Answers the questions: How are we going to build it? When are we going to do it? Who is going to do the work? Areas of focus: Task tracking and making sure those tasks are being completed.
Integrating Jama and Jira Creates a Juggernaut
Bringing together Jama Connect and Jira Software allows you to work in the solution that best fits your workflow, not the other way around. They are both flexible solutions that adapt to your process — whether that’s Waterfall or Agile or something in between.
Jama Connect is used for business objectives and epics (i.e., requirements), as well as status and relationships in the stories phase. It puts all the content in one location so the versioned document dilemma you’ve experienced disappears. Within the system, you can:
Collaborate with ease using communication and review capabilities
Seamlessly capture and manage decision history and version control
Ensure requirements are tied to test cases with coverage analysis upstream and downstream
To complete the loop, Jira Software tracks tasks and progress. It’s the bidirectional synchronization between the two systems that allows you to maintain consistency and alignment throughout the development process.
If tests fail and will create a defect as a result, that information is passed to Jira Software for those defects to managed and fixed.
Furthermore, team members who work in Jama Connect can change the priority of a defect in that system. The information is then available to team members who work in Jira Software. Team members working in Jira Software can continue doing their burn downs and execution, with visibility into where the defect originated and what high-level requirements might be impacted.
By integrating best-in-breed solutions, day-to-day users of each specific software don’t have to bounce back and forth between different tools or change their workflow or process. Yet they can still benefit from sharing the necessary information between both solutions.
A Closer Look
We get many inquiries about Jama’s integrations, and most frequently they involve Jira Software. To hear more about the key benefits of using these two first-class product development solutions, watch our webinar.
![[Webinar Recap] Optimizing Your QA Process by Integrating TestRail and Jama Connect®](https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/01/2022-1-27-WB-Tasktop-Recap_Social-Image.png "[Webinar Recap] Optimizing Your QA Process by Integrating TestRail and Jama Connect®")
