In this blog, we recap our press release covering the new performance and scale benchmarks set with the release of Jama Connect® 8.71
Jama Connect® 8.71 Exceeds Benchmarks
#1 in scale, concurrent users, response times, global usage, and interoperability
Jama Software, the leading requirements management solution provider, has announced performance benchmarks that set a new standard for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) used by engineering teams for complex product development. Specifically, Jama Connect® 8.71 exceeds benchmarksfor published performance and scale metrics for SaaS in the Requirements Management (RM) /Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) space. SaaS adoption among complex product engineering teams has historically lagged other areas of the enterprise due to the security and technical immaturity of hosted products from legacy vendors. Jama Connect is the first enterprise-grade SaaS product in the RM/PLM space and outperforms other SaaS solutions as well as legacy desktop and client-server offerings in use today.
“The poor performance of legacy attempts at ‘hosted’ solutions has led to SaaS hesitancy. The continued, market leading SaaS scale and performance of Jama Connect has broken through this hesitancy and led to rapid global adoption and usage.” – Josh Turpen, Chief Product Officer, Jama Software
Jama Connect 8.71 was released on March 4th, 2022, and all cloud customers and users were seamlessly upgraded as part of our regular SaaS deployment.
For more details on how your team can experience Jama Connect’s user-oriented performance and scale, request a trial here.
In this blog, we recap a webinar discussing the most significant new features in Jama Connect™.
Our Ask Jama webinar series was designed to keep you up to date on new product information, best practices, and tips and tricks on how to best use the platform. By popular request, this episode will focus on the latest enhancements to Jama Connect.
In this session, Jama Software product managers will discuss and demonstrate several of the most significant new features that can help you further enhance your product development processes. Areas featured will include:
Review Center and Workflow
Modeling Tool integrations for MBSE via Smartfacts
Administration Tools
Risk Management
Introducing Categories for improved requirements allocation and variant management
Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.
What’s New in Jama Connect?
Jeremy Johnson: We’ll actually start things off with an introduction of our entire Jama software product management team, which will also serve as an agenda of today’s topics. I’m going to start with two of the members of our team who are not joining us for this session. First is Debbie Mitchell who owns Jama Connect interchange, our new integration solution powering live traceability across best of breed tools and even Microsoft Excel. Next is Joseph Pitarresi. Joseph leads our Jama Software labs efforts with current focus on natural language processing and machine learning, including the upcoming launch of requirements advisor. And now over to our speakers, starting with Steve Gotsch. Steve is one of the original members of Jama Software. Our organization’s deepest product expert, and provides team leadership as director of the product management team. Today, he’ll be helping highlight the recently launched category set of features.
Visit Jama Software’s Discovery Center to help your organization achieve its goals: CLICK HERE!
Jeremy Johnson: Relatively new to Jama software. Katie Huckett brings over a decade of product management experience in enterprise solutions. Katie is primarily focused on reporting and publishing, but today we’ll highlight some of the team’s recent work around enterprise administration and tooling, specifically new license analysis and user administration capabilities.
Next is Chloe Elliot, who is focused on dashboards and insights along with two of today’s topics, notifications, and MBSE integrations, leveraging OSLC. In addition to Chloe’s depth of product and analytics expertise, she also previously managed the Jama Software user community and continues to act as lead for the community’s product ideation process.
Our test and risk management expert is Ashley Ernst. Ashley leverages her deep product expertise in these areas gained from several years as a solution architect, working directly with customers across numerous industries. Ashley will focus today’s discussion on some of the enhancements to Jama Connect’s risk management capabilities.
And our first speaker today will be Julie Goodner. Julie is one of our longest-tenured members of the product management team, and also brings nearly a decade of product management experience. In addition to baselines, Julie focuses on key areas that will be highlighted today. The categories introduced in our first two topics Review Center and Workflow. Julie, I’ll turn things over to you.
Julie Goodner: Hey, everyone, like Jeremy said, my name’s Julie Goodner. Today, I’m going to be talking through so on Review Center updates with workflow and also being able to remove items in a review. So starting off, we have our new templates. So these templates allow you to use workflow with Review Center. And this is a process that you will take in order to enable them. So first you have your org admin set up the approval template, which correlates with the workflow. So once they have the approval template set up, they can go into workflow settings, enable the workflow section, and then it’s all done. It’s ready for the moderator to start utilizing. The moderator will now see if they have both templates enabled, the choice to choose a peer review or an approval review. With the peer review, it can transition into an approval review. And once that’s finalized and signed off by everybody and finalized with the moderator, it will transition those items over to that finalized state automatically. So let’s get a little bit more into that.
So here’s what the admin’s going to see. When they go into the Review Center section, they’ll have options of enabling a peer or an approval review. Again, these are optional settings. They do not have to enable them. But in order to utilize workflow, they do have to turn on the approval template. This approval template has all the permission set up into it. So we’ve moved all the permission settings that were once only in the Review Center wizard into the admin section. This allows for your moderator and your admin to set up smart defaults. So it helps the moderator along, so there’s no confusion when they do their review. Once they enable that approval review and have their template set up, they go into Workflow. They enable the workflow settings there. So having this approval review, it helps reduce errors and clicks and time needed to go back into those items after the review has been finished and manually transition them.
Julie Goodner: In addition, it also improves Part 11 compliance by allowing organizations to set a locked status to reviewed items that have been finalized. So this is what your org and your moderator now will see. They can choose between the peer or the approval. And if they choose the peer, they can transition it to that approval. But what’s really the difference between a peer and approval review? How Jama Connect sees it is a peer review can be used to collaborate with your team, refine requirements, and get them into a spot that’s really ready for that final approval. Once they’re ready, the moderator can transition that peer to an approval review. They can update the approvers and add any additional stakeholders that need to be approvers or reviewers to it. And once it’s complete and signed off, they can trigger that workflow automatically.
To add on to what we’ve done with the templates, we’ve had customers come to us saying, I need ability to remove items from a review. So let’s just say I’m in that peer state. I’m in a peer review. I have items in here that aren’t quite ready. And so instead of creating a brand new review or going and updating my filter, or remove something from a set and publish a new revision, now we let you just do it inside the review. So a moderator can remove an item
Next, once it’s removed, it shows that it’s tagged for removal. So you still have to publish a remover vision in order to actually remove it. Now, this doesn’t remove the item from your filter. It doesn’t remove the item from your project. It’s not deleting anything. What this is doing is just removing it from the review itself.
So once you hit publish, it’s going to inform you that you are removing a review or an item from a review. And once you publish it, it informs you that that item has been removed in what revision. So this one was removed in revision one. This helps streamline your review. You no longer have to create additional reviews. And if it is removed and finalized, the baseline isn’t updated. So the baseline doesn’t have that item in it any longer. If you’ve approved the review, this item will not get approved. And so you don’t have to worry about your workflow status or any of your project areas being reflected because you’ve removed it. It’s simply removed from site, but if you need it, have it back in your review, you can simply repeat those processes, those steps, and it’ll show that the item has been brought back in. And that’s it for me. I’m going to hand it over to Chloe…
Impact and change Analysis are two important concepts in requirements management. Understanding how a change made to one requirement, impacts the upstream and downstream relationships is essential in assessing the scope a change may make. What happens when a change IS made to an upstream requirement, and you are a downstream stakeholder? How will you know and how can you manage this change? This is where suspect notification plays an integral role in informing users of changes to the requirements that they care about.
When relationship links are established between requirements, Jama Connect users can utilize the Impact Analysis feature to inform them as to the downstream or upstream impact of changes to a particular requirement. This helps to indicate the scope a particular change may make across the system of linkages. If suspect linking is enabled, and a change is made, users are alerted of these changes through various indicators and views in Jama Connect:
Displayed in the Relationship Indicator column with a red exclamation point icon (which you can hover over to see how the item violates relationship rules.)
Displayed in the individual requirement in the “Relationship” view as “Causing Suspect” for each linked requirement that is suspect.
If a linked requirement is marked suspect, users can take advantage of Jama Connects’s Compare Versions feature and get a side-by-side visual comparison of the changes between versions of requirements to determine what has changed. This allows them to assess the impact of the change that caused the suspect and make appropriate changes to the linked requirements. A good example of this is if a set of verification tests are linked downstream to a functional requirement. If a change to the details of the functional requirement is changed, then all downstream verifications will be marked suspect, and the test lead can impact the change and update the tests accordingly. When the changes are complete, the suspect link can be “cleared” (either individually or in bulk). This ability to control and react to change is especially important in meeting regulatory standards, such as DO178C, ISO26262, ISO 13485 (and many others). We cannot assume requirements are static and must have visibility to what changed, and the impact that change will have.
Suspect linking can be configured in the Jama Connect Org Admin setting, per item type field. This allows for granular flexibility for users to set which field changes will trigger a suspect link. This level of flexibility is extremely important as it allows users to define suspect rules according to their process and what fields are essential to track for change.
Conclusion:
Don’t let suspicious requirements scare you! Understand that they are an important part of the requirements change process and are there to help you control and react to updates made to linked requirements. Let’s face it, requirements change, and getting a clear understanding of when something changes and what changed is essential.
Leveraging Jama Connect To Optimize Your Product And Systems Development Process
With over 12.5 million active users, organizations around the globe rely on Jama Connect to help bring complex products to life. Innovative companies choose Jama Connect to improve quality, reduce rework, prove compliance, and get to market faster.
That’s why we’re excited to announce a three-part webinar series designed to help our customers get the most out of Jama Connect. In this webinar series, Optimize with Jama Connect, we’ll dive deeper into Jama Connect and our experts will give you an in-depth overview how to use Jama Connect to optimize your product and systems development process.
Below is a snapshot of when each webinar will happen, what will be covered, and how you can save your spot.
Optimize with Jama Connect: Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization
Wednesday, December 9 – 8:00 a.m. PT | 5:00 p.m. CET
According to an Engineering.com survey, 83% of companies experienced at least one negative product outcome including: significant delays, cost overruns, product defects, compliance gaps, recalls, omitted requirements, and lengthy rework. Often these negative outcomes were directly related to poor requirements management.
On the flip side, standardization fosters excellence in requirements management, resulting in consistency, repeatability, predictability, and a competitive edge.
In the first episode of our Optimize with Jama Connect webinar series, we’ll explore the benefits of defining, deploying, and enforcing requirements management standards within your organization.
We’ll also share best practices for requirements management standards and illustrate Jama Connect can help facilitate a successful and sustainable approach.
In this webinar, we’ll cover:
The benefits of standardizing requirements management across the organization
Common challenges in requirements management standardization
Using Jama Connect to facilitate implementation of requirements management best practices and standards
Optimize with Jama Connect: Managing Product Development Complexities Across Hardware and Software Teams
Thursday, January 14 – 8:00 a.m. PT | 17:00 CEST
With the growing complexity of products and software, the more complicated the process required to build it becomes — and the accompanying increased risk of flaws which can lead to expensive, and potentially reputation-harming recalls. Managing complexities across software and hardware development requires the entire development process to consider (and include) a variety of teams and interdependencies.
In the second episode of our Optimize with Jama Connect webinar series, we will discuss some of the key challenges that teams face when integrating hardware and software requirements, risks, and tests, with a document based or legacy tool approach.
We’ll also discuss how Jama Connect and its integration capabilities helps teams developing complex systems and products to:
Reduce product development risk
Provide end-to-end traceability for all involved teams
Optimize with Jama Connect: Building a More Effective and Efficient Product Development Process
Wednesday, February 10 – 8:00 a.m. PT | 5:00 p.m. CET
An ideal product development process requires close collaboration between teams, up-to-date knowledge of applicable regulations, and an efficient requirements management platform for defining, verifying, and validating requirements. However, not every manager is convinced that his or her team needs to do a better job on requirements development and management, or that such an investment will pay off —despite numerous industry studies which indicate that requirements issues are a pervasive cause of project distress.
In the third episode of our Optimize with Jama Connect webinar series, we’ll cover some of the ways our customers have used Jama Connect to improve not only their requirements, risk, and test management processes, but also their end-to-end product development process and outcomes.
Register for this webinar to learn more about how Jama Connect helps teams to:
Speed development with fine-grained, structured data
Spot bugs and problems sooner by improving visibility
Rethink linear development processes to work in parallel
To view the full series, watch recordings of the webinars after they happen, or register for individual webinars, visit our Optimize with Jama Connect page.
As part of our ongoing series of Ask Jama webinars, covering customer questions and best practices, we recently held a webinar addressing release management options in Jama Connect.
In the webinar, Ryan Moore, a Jama Connect expert and a consultant from our Professional Services team, discusses options for managing releases within Jama Connect. The following concepts were covered:
Leveraging Jama Connect’s release field
Re-use and synchronization
Branching vs. mainline approaches
We heard from our customers afterward that this webinar was informative and insightful, and we wanted to make sure that you didn’t miss out on this great content. Below you can see a transcript of the webinar, and view the full webinar recording.
The Full Demonstration of Release Management Options in Jama Connect
Transcript: Release Management Options in Jama Connect
Thank you all for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join us for the session about change management options in Jama Connect. Before we get started, I’d like to start off by clarifying a few key concepts as they pertain to requirements management, and really how they fit in within the scope of Jama Connect. I’ll also be including some use cases for each of the concepts we walk through today to help provide a bit of a bigger picture. And then we’ll go into a live demonstration within the tool. Through my experience with different organizations and various industries, I find that people tend to use a lot of different terminology and nomenclature that may pertain to any one subject, whether you’re discussing what you consider a specific version, or what’s the difference between a product versus a project, or how you define your user roles. This is no different when you’re approaching the concept of how you define releases. So, it’s important for us to clarify it.
A release to one person may be considered the final distribution of a product, where it’s officially available to the public or active in the field. Software teams, on the other hand, may think of release in terms of code or hardware. Other teams may consider manufacturing distribution in their framing releases. For our considerations today, let’s consider a release a grouping of requirements and corresponding tests that represent a product at a specific point in time. This could be a requirement set that’s specific to a product version, such as version 2.0 or version 3.0, where it could be included as part of a blanket, summer or fall release. So, regardless of what your organization is going to be using for requirements and tests, you could be using stakeholder requirements, market, user requirements, system versus subsystem, functional versus non-functional, design requirements or input requirements, verifications, validations, or calling new test cases. These are the types of artifacts that we’re going to be considering as a part of a release.
Now let’s define baselines. Baselines are a very important aspect of Release Management and within Jama Connect as well. They provide clear cut lines in the sand. Baselining within Jama Connect can really be considered the ability to capture a snapshot of any grouping of items that you choose within a project at any given point in time. Let’s elaborate on some of the more common use cases for baselines. Baselines provide the ability to take full snapshots of artifacts. By taking baselines at release milestones, we’re able to make comparisons down the road using Jama Connect’s baseline comparison reports, which are exportable. They also provide detailed information and nuanced changes quickly and easily. Just a couple of clicks of a button, we can pull up these reports. The baseline reports will provide you a full list of any modified, deleted, or added items between baselines. So, it gives you the information that you need to be able to make quick comparisons. You can also use them to compare to the current state of the project. We can use baseline to compare between two baselines, or we can select a baseline that we captured prior and compare it to the current state of the project as well.
Additionally, you can also use Jama Connect’s baselines to actually roll back items, so you can roll back to prior baselines. Since baselines can be captured at the time of release, that also means you’ll have the ability to revert back to prior releases. So, lots of different power and what you can do in leveraging the baselines. As I mentioned, they are also easily exportable if you need it to export out and place into a quality management system (QMS) or another type of document control. And as a final caveat, we want to keep in mind that baselines, they’re static bits of information. They’re not going to be able to be leveraged to fork projects on a different path or branch them, if you will. Today we’ll through the concept of branching via reuse and synchronization during the presentation today.
What is reuse and synchronization? Reuse and synchronization within Jama Connect can be considered as two advanced concepts. They both have very beneficial use cases and unique purposes. For that reason, I’ve included separate definitions. But you can also use them together and the outcome is going to be a lot of time saving and powerful use cases for you. Consider the concepts of reuse. In practice and in defining reuse is really to simply copy items in Jama Connect from one location to another, or it can be within the same project or across separate Jama Connect projects. Synchronization can be considered an additional step on top of reuse that allows you to maintain connections between those copied or reused items. Synchronization really adds an additional layer of monitoring between your artifacts to track differences or changes between them, and also provides you the ability to push and pull information between those synchronized items. Synchronization really leverages the concept of global IDs within Jama Connect. And those are the shared IDs between reused and synchronized artifacts that are going to help you bridge those items and maintain the connection between them.
Let’s walk through a few use cases for reuse and synchronization to help you better frame the use cases here and how it’s applicable and practical in use. Major releases to a large product. These could be small or large modifications to variants or existing product lines that you have. Staged releases of an evolving product is a second use case. And that may be used to leverage over time on a rolling schedule. For example, if you release a beta product, where you’ll be refining towards a final version and working as you go. Recent synchronization allows for version comparisons. As I mentioned before, Jama Connect’s synchronization allows you to generate a comparison view to easily identify differences between synchronized items. Also allows for “maintenance” updates to release projects. And synchronization allows you to separate Jama Connect projects into different maintenance workspaces, if you will, and easily push changes back into one main major release project. It also allows for changes to be “pushed” between releases.
In the same vein, and we’re talking about these projects that we’re leveraging for releases, you can use the synchronization to push changes back and forth between those projects. It allows for change control to the product. So, synchronization pushes, and this is very important, are never automatic. It’s always going to be a manual process, so you have to have ownership of that. What that means is that users always dictate when the changes are being made. Once again, this is a very important aspect to remember when considering using synchronization. You need to develop a regular cadence to determine who and when the changes are going to be pushed and pulled between synchronized artifacts or items. Then lastly, you’re able to use reuse and synchronization to create branches or forks from the original project. If needed, this concept of branching allows you to really work on multiple releases in parallel.
Release Management Options
Let’s talk about releases and in terms of the different types of releases that organizations may be working on as they go through the product development cycle. When we talk in terms of releases, we have two different methodologies that we’ll outline today and their differences. Linear versus parallel releases. We have linear on the left-hand side here and parallels on the right-hand side here. As you can see, linear releases are sequential or one after the other. They’re never going to be worked on simultaneously. Alternatively, parallel releases on the right-hand side, as you might expect by the name, parallel, they’re going to be worked on in tandem or side by side. So, you can be working on multiple releases in tandem.
“How are requirements impacted by these two approaches?” you might be thinking. In linear release management requirement, typically, we’ll have one singular definition at any given time. If I’m working in parallel, however, I may have the same requirement that spanned across two or three different releases. And that definition could easily change depending on the need of that release, or if I’m working in Release V2.0 versus Release 3.0. We might have a different need to alter the definition of that requirement. Since it’s summertime, let’s take a sunscreen for example. If I’m working on sunscreen products, it has different options SPF 15, SPF 30, and SPF 50. And we’re working on these simultaneously because we’re needing to roll them out on a similar timeline, where we have a similar roadmap for them. There may be same requirement in SPF 15 as there is in SPF 50 to include a very specific ingredient that helps block out the sun. But in SPF 15, we may need less of that depending on the strength versus needing more in SPF 50.
Let’s talk about the suggested approaches in Jama Connect for linear versus parallel. For the specific Jama Connect features and how they pertain to each release, Jama Connect’s release field is going to be the suggested method for the linear approach. The reason being is that the release field is going to allow you to make items a part of only one release at a time. So, the release field in Jama Connect doesn’t allow you to tag items in more than one release at a time. From a configuration standpoint, that means that the release field does need to be added to each item type that we’ll be using to label items as part of releases. That can be easily done by accessing your Jama Connect Admin section, navigating to the item types and then going to the fields. And if you don’t already have a release field as part of the item, you can easily add that there. In linear releases, you’re going to be leveraging baselines within one project to capture the state of the artifacts at the time of release.
Parallel releases on the right-hand side, reuse and synchronization really enable you to work simultaneously across multiple projects. And these projects will be release specific projects. Each project will maintain the scope of a unique release. Parallel release approaches. There are a few different variations that you may choose from when using parallel approaches. If you need to work in parallel, you have to roll out multiple releases simultaneously. You have two suggested approaches here, two key concepts that we’ll cover. A branching approach and a mainline approach. The branching approach, which is really aptly named for a visual image of branches stretching out from the base of a tree, requires you to leverage Jama Connect’s project duplication with synchronization. So, we’ll be copying projects. We’ll also be synchronizing the items within the project in the process of creating that project copy. Your various release projects will be branched off of your original release project. So, if we’re looking at our graphic here, our one would be the original release project, the first release, and then we could branch off into other various releases. So, we’ve branched off to R2, and then we have two branches that come off of R2, R2.1 and R3. And you can see that these are copies of R2 labeled here.
The mainline approach, however, dictates that you use one centralized project for the current state of affairs or the most recent release. Projects are created for unique releases and specific elements may be picked and chosen off of the mainline project to be selected for reuse and synchronization into your specific release projects. This method allows you to pick and choose, as I said, which specific elements are impacted by a release and strategically copy them into the appropriate release project. The resulting project off of your main project may be thought of as a unique release-specific workspace. You’ll manage all your release- specific work in the outlier projects and then push changes back into the mainline via synchronization once you’ve finalized your release.
Once again, Jama Connect’s baselines are going to be leveraged once releases are pushed back into the main project to capture release milestones. So, we have our release-specific projects R1, R2, and R3. And we have our mainline project that houses all of the aggregate information. So, we are able to push and pull back and forth between these. Key capabilities in Jama Connect for each release management approach. If we’re looking at linear releases using that release field and also leveraging baselines. So, two main concepts there for the linear, and that’s the one after the other. We’re not working in tandem or in parallel. For parallel, we talked about the branching in the mainline approaches. Branching will really be leveraging the project duplication, reuse and synchronization. Whereas mainline, we’re looking at reuse, synchronization, and baselines.
Now that we’ve walked through all that, let’s hop into the tool itself and give you a quick demonstration of how to use the release field, how to branch projects, and what the mainline approach looks like as well.
To learn more about how to optimize team collaboration for streamlined product development processes, download our new eBook
Because we’re always looking for ways to support and enable our customers’ success, we’ve created this Ask Jama webinar series to keep you up to date on new product information, best practices, and tips and tricks on how to best use the platform. By popular request, the topic of this upcoming webinar will be Release Management options in Jama Connect.
Ryan Moore, a Jama Connect expert and a consultant from our Professional Services team, will be discussing options for managing releases within Jama Connect. Concepts we’ll be covering include:
Leveraging Jama’s release field
Re-use and synchronization
Branching vs. mainline approaches
We’ve also made sure to include plenty of time to answer your questions around release management (or other relevant topics) during the event.
Date: Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020 Time: 8:00 – 9:00am PST
Presented by:
Ryan Moore –Consultant, Jama Software
Ryan is a Business Consultant on the Professional Services team at Jama. He works directly with customers to implement Jama Connect, and help navigate requirements management, through best practice guidance.
We’vestayedin contact with our Jama Connect customers as they’ve transitioned to a remote work reality. Teams are working through a lot of changes as they manage new product timelines, supply chain disruption and new market demands. Through it all theycontinue to prioritize innovation and timelines.
One common theme emerged among these teams: Productivity in remote work demands teams take time to evaluate how they canoptimize the Jama Connect platform to work smarter.Areas of focus:Teams want to improve their process, help people become more efficient, and take advantage of all the platform’s capabilities.
Here’s the breakdown.
1. Optimize the way you use Jama Connect to improve your process.
When you go remote, it’s easy to be tempted by the plethora of communication tools. They all have their time and place.But engineering teams require more focus and tighter alignment. Collaboration and communication tools built into the context of where the work is actuallybeing done helpsreduce confusion and minimize disruption.
Jama Connect ensures decisions get made inside the process, not in silos. There’s not an email here, or a Slack communication there to explain what needs to happen next. Everyone stayson the same page—a crucial need when your teams are remote. You reduce the risk of building off the wrong information which can cause delays and rework.
2. Check the way you use the technology in Jama Connect.
When your teams work remotely, the ways you’renot using your technology to its fullest potential can become glaringly apparent.Every Jama Connect technology capability, even ones that aren’t about collaboration, take on greater importance.
Tightening product traceability is a best practice Jama Connect customers supporting remote teams recommend.The way companies do business is changing fast, and the ability to manage change is critical. When requirements traceability is carried out correctly, teams can accurately assess the impact of changes, track the full history of product development, keep everyone in sync, and consistently improve the quality of the products being built — in every project, and every release. In Jama Connect you can extend traceability beyond the engineering processes to link development and test activities back to the business rationale.And, coverage analysis can help a team find gaps and understand positive and negative progress quickly.
3. Educate your teamsabout the Jama Connect tools.
Now’s the time to take advantage of the full collaborative capabilities of the Jama Connect platform. Tools like Review Center make it easy for remote teams to work together.
In the Review Center, you can send items like systems specifications or test plans for an unlimited amount of reviews with as many contributors as you want, including engineers and testers. Everyone in that review receives an email notification and can approve, reject, and give feedback on every individual requirement or section of a document that needs review. You can keep track of who contributed, what their role is, how much time they’ve spent in the review, and their overall level of completion. Learn more about the Review Center in Best Practices for Jama Connect Review Center.
As countries begin to open up, we’ll be here to update you on ways to adjust your teams and workflows so you can maintain momentum. Check back often.
Get more help optimizing Jama Connect so you can improve efficiency and productivity for your remote teams. Learn about our Rapid Optimization Workshops, now available as a remote service.READ MORE
Reviews play a key role in successful product and systems development. They help ensure a new product will meet stakeholder, market, and compliance requirements.
Unfortunately, not all teams recognize the importance of implementing a solution for a formal review process: Almost a third of teams either have no requirements management system in place and rely on informal forms of collaboration and reviews with email and shared spreadsheets, according to a research report from Engineering.com.
Outdated review processes — involving long email chains, shared spreadsheets, and lengthy meetings — stifle collaboration, increase miscommunication, and result in team misalignment. This often leads to long review cycles, versioning issues, and an abundance of unnecessary meetings.
While a breakdown in communication can happen at any point in the product development lifecycle, reviewing and approving requirements is a particularly important process for ensuring all stakeholders are aligned. In fact, collaboration and clear communication during the review process has tangible benefits that impact speed to market, product quality, and your bottom line.
And while every review is different, there are generally three primary roles that exist in a product review: Moderators, Approvers, and Reviewers. In Jama Connect™ Review Center, each of these roles can be formally assigned to mirror best practices and ensure everyone understands the scope of their responsibilities.
Formal and informal reviews may necessitate different things from each of these roles, but we’ve compiled a list of best practices by role to make reviews go quickly and smoothly.
See the development time savings and efficiencies that our customers are experiencing with Review Center in this infographic.
Best Practices for Requirements Reviews by Role
As the Moderator, you are ultimately responsible for facilitating the review and incorporating the feedback from Approvers and Reviewers.
Best Practices for Moderators:
Provide thorough guidance. What type of feedback are you seeking? That the requirements are valid and correct? Or that the requirements are feasible? Or that the requirements are written well with proper grammar and syntax? Be sure to include specific focus and instructions in the review invite so all participants know exactly what to provide.
Balance the number of participants. Think carefully about the number of people you invite to a review. Too many and you’ll never have time to incorporate all the feedback. Too few and you may not receive enough feedback or miss critical stakeholder opinions.
Incorporate all feedback. If you have thoughts, feedback, or ideas related to a requirement, add comments for transparency so all participants can see the feedback.
Revise! It’s ok to publish lots of revisions during a review. Just make sure that all participants are looking at the latest revision so they can easily compare differences across revisions.
Close reviews when they are complete. Reviews finish when 1) you have enough feedback or 2) the deadline is reached. If you have enough feedback prior to deadline, make sure that you close it.
Best Practices for Reviews and Approvers:
If you are taking the role of Approver or Reviewer, your primary responsibility is to provide feedback.
Focus your feedback based on the Moderator’s instructions. What did the Moderator request you to review? Technical feasibility? Validation of requirement needs? Grammar and syntax? If you’re unsure, ask your Moderator.
Highlight important feedback. When adding feedback, highlighting text helps others know that you are focusing feedback on that specific piece of the requirement.
Categorize your comments for clarity. Indicate if your feedback is a question, proposed change, or issue.
Clearly communicate when you are finished. Make sure you clearly communicate that you are finished providing feedback so the moderator will know you are done. Keep in mind that you don’t need to comment on every item – you can abstain from providing feedback on certain items in the review.
The Benefits of Conducting Reviews in Jama Connect™
Jama Connect Review Center allows teams to:
Assign roles such as Moderators, Approvers, and Reviewers
Send product requirements for review
Define what’s required
Invite relevant stakeholders to participate, collaborate, and iterate on resolving issues
Approve agreed-upon requirements
Facilitating the improvement of collaboration and communication during reviews is resulting in major returns for Jama Software customers.
Take RBC Medical(now known as Vantage Medtech), for example, who now saves an average of $150,000 per project after they moved from semi-manual processes to conducing reviews in Jama Connect. Now that RBC Medical has a centralized place to manage and collaborate on reviews, they’ve all but eliminated the need for lengthy, in-person meetings or back and forth emailing, making reviews more efficient and scalable.
But cost savings isn’t the only positive business outcome to result from an improved review process. MediSync estimates that Jama Connect Review Center has saved the team 80% of planning time that previously would have been wasted on meetings, sorting through versioned documents and emails, and consolidating feedback in review cycle.
Another customer, global healthcare leader Grifols, says that Review Center has helped it shorten review cycles from three months to fewer than 30 days, while reducing budget overruns. It estimates savings of over 80 hours per project in medical device development.
By simplifying the revision and approval process, Review Center streamlines reviews and facilitates team collaboration. With the ability to easily provide feedback where required, stakeholders and participants can move quickly and efficiently through reviews and on to the next stage of product development.
When our customers move from managing requirements in isolated documents to using a collaborative requirements management solution, they’re better-equipped to conduct impact analysis and ensure full test coverage and traceability throughout the development process.
Managing complex requirements necessitates that information be visible and accessible to all team members at all times. You also have to make sure that all this information is connected in a way that is relevant and comprehensible to your teams. This helps ensure that you’re building what you set out to build, that it fulfills your customers’ expectations, and that it’s safe and compliant.
In order to get a full picture of what’s been built and if it’s on track, it’s crucial to build connections between data, as well as to map the conversations and decisions associated with each requirement.
In this post, we’ll explore how some of our customers have realized these results using Jama Connect™.
Traceability is Essential to Requirements Management
With everything you’re managing day-to-day, the last thing you need is a tool that takes just as much time and effort to learn and use as writing and managing the requirements themselves. A requirements management solution should make your life easier, and it should be easy to roll out to your team. Moreover, the solution should help you step back and look at your entire product or system as it’s being built, see all of the connections, and easily identify where work is needed.
Our Jama Professional Services consultants often hear from customers facing the inherent challenges of complex systems that establishing and managing traceability in Jama Connect is much easier than in any other solution they’ve tried.
Here are five ways to create relationships, account for full test coverage, and manage traceability throughout the development process in Jama Connect
1. Build a framework for properly linking artifacts with relationship rules
Creating meaningful connections between artifacts is vital to having that all-important big picture view. With relationship rules, you specify the proper relationships and how to implement them, while also freeing up your team’s time to focus on building and managing requirements.
2. Find out who is connected to an item and easily communicate with connected users in the Collaboration Stream
Let’s say you notice that something is wrong with the way a requirement is written, and it needs to be adjusted. Jama makes it easy to identify not only everyone who is involved with that requirement, but also everyone involved with impacted requirements. Using the Collaboration Stream, you can quickly post the issue for these connected users, who then receive a notification and can respond quickly —without anyone needing to book a conference room.
3. Determine gaps in your test coverage quickly and easily with Trace View
A critical piece of assuring quality is being able to see where gaps lie in your test coverage. Jama Connect’s Trace View identifies those gaps by leveraging the relationships your team has created to give you a holistic view of where work is still needed.
4. Identify high-level impact across your project using suspect links
If a system-level requirement changes, it could dramatically impact the quality of your product. By using the suspect links feature in Jama Connect, you can see at a glance what other items are impacted by changes and quickly assess whether additional changes need to be made downstream.
5. Understand how product features are connected or share IP using Reuse and Sync
Complex systems make for complicated connections between individual systems and products. Jama Connect allows you to share crucial pieces of information across product lines, compare these connections at a glance, and align them with the click of a button using the Reuse and Sync feature.
Managing traceability in complex product and systems development is challenging, but it’s essential for ensuring product quality, on-time and on-budget delivery, and alignment between customer expectations and the final deliverable. That’s why you need the right product development platform to help you achieve traceability and reap the benefits.
It’s in the name: Jama Connect™ gives you superior visibility into every stage of your product development process by connecting stakeholders with the right information at the right time. The result is better collaboration within and across teams, so delayed replies and ambiguous feedback won’t hamper your forward progress.
Our Jama Professional Services consultants work with users across a range of organizations and industries to help them optimize collaborative success and get the most value from the platform. To share more of their expertise, our consultants recently conducted a webinar on Jama Connect best practices that covered a range of topics, including creating groups and finding information faster.
Today, we’ll be sharing more insights from that webinar, this time looking at some of the common functionalities and lesser-known features our consultants recommend for teams looking to improve their collaboration within Jama Connect.
(For this post, we’re assuming a reasonable level of familiarity with Jama Connect. If you’re looking for a more granular guide, start with the User Guide or get your questions answered in our support community.)
Stream View
On the far right of your Jama Connect dashboard, you’ll see a link to stream view. Stream view lets you see all the conversations happening at a specific level of the project or across the items located within a project. You can join an existing conversation or start a new one by @ mentioning the individuals or teams you want to connect with. For instance, start typing “system engineers,” and you’ll see that group pop up. Now you can initiate a conversation with a specific group, and everyone in that group can receive a notification that you’ve made a comment.
This brings us to another feature in Jama Connect that makes communication easier: notifications.
Comment Notifications
There’s an easy way to control some of the feedback notifications you receive in Jama Connect, especially during the review process.
By default, when you comment on an item within a review, you start following that item, and whenever anyone else comments on the item or anywhere within the review, you’ll receive a notification.
You can easily change your notification settings from your profile. In the upper right corner of your Jama Connect instance, you’ll see your name; click on it to access your profile. Select the Review Center tab. You have two notification options: “Email me updates to items on following” or “Automatically follow items I have commented on.” Uncheck the second choice. Now, when you comment on a review, you will no longer automatically be following that item.
If you’re already keeping tabs on the comments in Review Center, you probably won’t need email notifications outside of Jama, but this is an opportunity to customize how you receive information about your process.
Subscriptions Notifications
Subscriptions allow you to loop a group of users — like the systems engineering team — into notifications about new defects or updates to defects within the project. You can also subscribe yourself to any item in Jama Connect that’s relevant to you. For instance, if you subscribe to a set of defects, every time a defect is added or updated, you’ll receive a notification.
Just as with comments, you can control how often you receive email notifications. To do this, go back to your profile, click the “Subscriptions” tab in the upper right. There, you’ll see everything you’re subscribed to, and you can unsubscribe or customize how you’d like to receive notifications about updates or additions to items on your subscription list.
You’ll see that immediate subscription notifications are the default, but you can change that to daily or weekly notifications. One of our consultants suggests that daily digests are the most helpful: Weekly notifications contain too much information that isn’t pertinent, while immediate notifications clog up your inbox so that it’s easy to miss what’s most important.
Categorizing Feedback
There’s a single, powerful tip for improving the feedback you give and receive when participating in a review. We’ve all received emails or other communications where it’s not clear what the sender is asking for: Are they asking a question? Do they need action from you?
Jama’s Review Center includes a feature that allows participants to categorize their feedback as a question, a proposed change or a potential issue. Adding context to your review comments helps ensure clear, efficient feedback, and empowers the moderator to filter and manage feedback by its assigned category.
For a deeper dive into maximizing Jama Connect, check out the Ask Jama webinar or explore the Jama Connect User Guide, which is full of tools to plan and track progress and performance.
![[Press Release Recap] Jama Connect® 8.71 Exceeds Benchmarks for Saas Performance and Scale](https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/03/Press-Release-Performance-and-Scale.jpeg "[Press Release Recap] Jama Connect® 8.71 Exceeds Benchmarks for Saas Performance and Scale")
