Tag Archive for: Jama Connect Platform

Document View

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Document View

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, Katie Huckett, Senior Product Manager at Jama Software®, walks viewers through Document View, a new feature offered in Jama Connect.

In this session, viewers will learn how Document View, now available alongside list and single-item views, allows users to:

  • Author, read, and edit items in line in a single view while maintaining an item-based structure within project hierarchies.
  • Improve consistency and accuracy of requirements quality by incorporating built-in support for Jama Connect Advisor™, an add-on to Jama Connect.

Jama Connects complete requirements authoring solutions supports different use cases and different preferred user work styles such as those previously performed in siloed tools like Microsoft Word or Excel.

With Document View, you can leverage all the functionality and toolbar actions of reading view, such as filtering and configuring items, reuse, batch transition, send for review, edit and more. Double-click on an item to open quick edit mode with the option to expand to full edit mode. Insert new items without losing your place in the document, add comments and lock or unlock items.

Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Katie Huckett: Hi, my name is Katie Huckett and I’m a senior product manager here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to walk you through Jama Connects new feature Document View. Jama Connect now provides Document View, alongside list and single item view. Document view allows users to author, read and edit items in line in a single view while maintaining an item-based structure within project hierarchies. Document view improves consistency and accuracy of requirements quality by incorporating built-in support for Jama Connect Advisor™ and add-on to Jama Connect. Jama Connects complete requirements authoring solutions supports different use cases and different preferred user work styles such as those previously performed in siloed tools like Microsoft Word or Excel.

With Document View, you can leverage all the functionality and toolbar actions of reading view, such as filtering and configuring items, reuse, batch transition, send for review, edit and more. Double-click on an item to open quick edit mode with the option to expand to full edit mode. Insert new items without losing your place in the document, add comments and lock or unlock items.

Let’s see what this looks like in Jama Connect. Here in Jama Connect, I wanted to start on the current reading view so that you can see as I toggle over to our new Document View the transition to the new, clean, modern design. We’ve removed the horizontal lines between the items for a more seamless document experience. The item ID and current version are visible under the item name and comments and locking functionality have moved to the right of the item name so they don’t get lost within the content itself. Use the edit feature to quickly edit items without changing views or manually tracking your place in the document. I’ve opened what we call quick edit mode, which is a condensed form of fields only visible on the current view, as well as any additional required fields that you may have missed that need to be completed in order to save the item.

If you need to see the additional fields available for this item, expand to full edit mode and then you’ll be able to access any additional fields that you need. Quickly return to quick edit mode to complete any edits that you need before saving and completing your work. As I mentioned previously, Document View provide support for Jama Connect Advisor™. As you highlight text in a rich text field that you have enabled advisor for, you’ll notice an analyze button beneath the field. As you analyze the results, you’ll then see any recommendations that have been found. Click the view details button to see the information in more detail.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Advisor™

Huckett: Create new items and Document View with our new inline insert. I’m going to insert a new item between item one and two here, so I have a new requirement that needs to go in here. So you’ll see as you hover between the items, you have a plus button for inline insert form, and I’m going to go ahead and insert a new design description. You’ll notice that our inline insert form is very similar to the quick ad functionality that’s available in the ad dropdown in the content header. Only the name and description fields are visible, name being the only one that’s required. We are bypassing any additional required fields at this point so that you can quickly add as many items as you need to and then go back and edit in more detail and fill out the remaining required fields.

So you’ll notice I’ll add in a name and description into this item. You’ll note the Jama Connected Advisor analysis is also available in the inline insert functionality. We’re going to save this item. You’ll receive a toast message that lets you know your item’s been created, and you’ll see that new item appear in between items one and the previous item two that I had before. So as I mentioned, there is an additional required field on this item that I did not complete before. So I’ll go back in, edit this item, find that additional required field and assign someone to it so that we can then fully save and complete this item for the time being.

In order to view comments, you’ll click on the comments icon next to the item name. After clicking on the icon, you’ll see the comments stream up here in a modal above Document View where you can interact with, comment and reply to any comments on the item. Next, I’ll take you over to the admin section for your Jama Connect administrators to customize and configure Document View and Jama Connect Advisor™ to your organization’s needs. For each item type, it can be configured for default Document View settings. You’ll find a new projects Document View option in the view dropdown where you can then place your default visible fields. Jama Connect Advisor™ can be turned on for any rich text field on any item type your organization chooses and left off for any item types that don’t need the analysis.

RELATED: Jama Connect®: Quick ROI Calculator

Huckett: When you open a rich text field on an item type, you’ll notice a brand new checkbox for Jama Connect Advisor™. Enable advisor for that particular item type field and save your configuration either before or after the individual item field configuration for Jama Connect Advisor™. Don’t forget to go into the dedicated admin section to enable the INCOSE rules in whole or selectively based on your needs and the EARS patterns.

For more information about Document View, please contact your customer success manager or Jama consultant. And if you would just like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your product development processes, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com. Thank you.

To view more Jama Connect Features in Five topics visit: Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series

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reuse and variant management

Jama Connect® vs. IBM®DOORS®: Reuse and Variant Management: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.

In Episode 8 of our Roundtable Chat series, Mario Maldari – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software® – and Gary Hayes – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – discuss the importance of reuse and variant management for product teams.

To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Mario Maldari: Hello everyone. Welcome to episode eight in our vlog series. Hope you’ve enjoying the series so far. Today, we’ll be discussing the important topic of requirements reuse, and I’m joined by my friend and colleague Gary Hayes today. Gary, would you like to introduce yourself?

Gary Hayes: Sure thing, Mario. Thank you. My name’s Gary Hayes. I am part of Mario’s team. I’ve been working with systems and software engineering teams for the last 25 plus years, just recently have joined Jama. Prior to that, I spent 18 years working with Rational Software and IBM, supporting their systems and software engineering tools suite. Got a lot of experience in the early days with Requisite Pro as part of Rational Software before being acquired by IBM and then, morphing into the Jazz-based tools and Requirements Composer, acquiring Telelogic and DOORS, and then, DOORS Next Generation. So, been around tools for a long time.

Mario Maldari: 
Thanks Gary. You’re like me. We’ve been in Requirement Space for many years, so thanks for that, Gary. As both of us know, being in the requirement space for a while, requirements reuse is an extremely important concept. Whether you’re creating a common library set of requirements or you’re doing variant development, this is something that we experienced through many years of working with requirements tools. Very important concept, and curious as your perception working with other requirements tools regarding reuse and in particular, maybe the DOORS family of products. How has that been for you?

Gary Hayes: Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. In the early days of Requisite Pro and actually, my first exposure to requirements tools were with Technology Builders and Calibre. Calibre version 1 as a matter of fact. Back in those days, they were client server tools that really didn’t have any kind of reuse features except copy and paste. Clone and own, if you will. And DOORS, my first exposure to DOORS was that same way. You could create linkages, you could copy modules and reuse those and different projects as they got spun up, but the real reuse didn’t come into play until you got to more modernly architected tools like DOORS Next Generation. DOORS Next Generation has a variety of ways in which they could reuse components or reuse different artifacts with the environment. For one, you could start off a project, and clone an existing project, and use everything that you had before.

But what they really started to do was use the change sets, which was really change sets with code development where you could branch and merge. You really started seeing a lot more sophisticated ways to do reuse within a project. It made it really interesting and it is fairly easy to understand for people using requirements. You really wanted to have a use case that matched up with one, what you needed in an environment. And then also, you wanted to match up with the maturity of your organization. You didn’t want to overwhelm them with a process that they couldn’t handle. DOORS Next Generation took that to the new level by Introducing Global Configuration Management or GCM for short. Very complex way to do business. And it was really a way to include not just requirements for reuse, but all of the artifacts across the software and systems engineering lifecycle.

Really interesting, sounds really great, but like I said, very complex, and once you turned it on to use in your environment, you couldn’t turn it off, so it did not lend itself to a lot of flexibility. It was flexible from the point of view that yeah, I can make components in different disciplines and mix and match them as I chose to, but you really had to have a mature organization and a mature administration group to keep it under control, and make sure everything stayed on track.

RELATED: The Benefits of Jama Connect®: Supercharge Your Systems Development and Engineering Process

Mario Maldari: Yeah, the complexity, I think it’s a challenge for adoption. And I think targeting some of the very large, big customers and modeling their use case, I think that becomes very difficult for smaller customers when they try to use some simple use cases and take them forward. So, I think that that complexity is a challenge. Well, let me show you something. I want to talk a little bit about how reuse is done in Jama, and I’d like to show it to you. Some of the common reuse scenarios that I’ve seen here at Jama, but as well as an industry is developing common libraries of requirements where you’re wanting to develop once and be able to reuse these requirements across the board in different projects, even within the same project. Parallel development. Very common to reuse requirements for your parallel development as well as variant reuse, being able to use them across your variants. These are very common scenarios that we see in industry today.

Jama has a very simple implementation for reuse, but it’s quite powerful. Anything in Jama can be reused, whether it’s a set of requirements or an individual requirement. And to do so, you simply will click on the requirement, and you can say reuse item. And here, you can share this requirement. Within the same project, you can reuse it, or you can reuse it in a different project. And you have a few different options here as well. You can add a relationship from the original item, so you have a link back to it. You can include all tags, attachments, and links. You also have the ability to include the relationships from the source item, include related items as well in minor relationships. A lot of different options when you go to reuse the requirement. And once it’s reused, you can take a look at the requirement itself, and see where it’s been reused. You can see in this case, the current item I have here I’m looking at, but then this requirement’s also shared across and reused in two different projects.

And you’ll see it’s out of sync. That means the requirement’s been evolving and changing in these different projects, which is what you’d expect in this case. Now, if I wanted to get a little bit more information and see okay, well, how are those requirements evolving and changing? I can take a look at the synced items here across the whole project. And if I want to take a look at this particular requirement and see how it’s been evolving and changing, I can take a look at it and I say, “It’s out of sync.” And I can say, “Well, let’s compare.” And here, I can get a side by side comparison of how the requirements he has evolved in this project. You can see the source project, I have the name with a global impact. And in the project that I’ve reused it in, I can see easily that this requirement has changed to a North America scope only. A really nice side-by-side comparison in terms of how the requirements are evolving.

Even more to that, there’s a nice UI here where if I decide that the requirement, that’s evolving, I want to override it with the source, I can do that easily. Or perhaps this requirement that’s evolving should be the new standard. I can overwrite the original with the evolved requirement. A lot of options in terms of managing your reused requirements. But I think the key for me, from my perspective with the Jama implementation, it’s very simple, very easy to use. You can build from a very simple case to a very complex case as you go incrementally, so you’re not overwhelmed instantly with the reuse scenario itself. A nice supporting UI to deal with reuse within Jama. Let me just stop there, Gary, and see if you had any perceptions. You’re relatively new to Jama, so just curious to your thoughts.

RELATED: Eight Ways Requirements Management Software Will Save You Significant Money

Gary Hayes: Yeah, what I really like about this is that it’s easy to enable. It’s really kind of straightforward. It has a variety of use cases that it supports. Got some basic features, but it also supports some advanced features, so you can turn on as much or as little as you need to be effective. Also, the people that are part of the project, the common users, they get that visual cue. I noticed that in the interface, anything that was in a reuse state had the little dot next to it. If I was curious about the reused state of it, I could drill down on that and do some comparisons myself to see how it evolved over time. I think that one, it’s important that it’s easy to use and people aren’t afraid of using it. They can investigate it and it’s very simple. Simple, yet powerful in my estimation.

Mario Maldari: Yeah, I think that’s a good way of saying it. And of course, you and I have been in requirements for 20 years plus, we know that reuse is such an important concept, but it’s really about striking the balance between features and functionality and ease of use. It’s something that every requirement tool needs to have and needs to support. But the question is how easy is it to adopt? And how easy is it to use? You want to find yourself being productive and not wasting a lot of time and energy out of the box.

Gary Hayes: Exactly. Yep, absolutely.

Mario Maldari: Well, Gary, I want to thank you very much for your time today, and want to thank everyone watching this vlog series, and look forward to seeing you on the next one.

Gary Hayes: Thank you.

Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.

Download our Jama Software® Data Model Diagnostic to learn more!

Thank you for watching our Episode 8, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Reuse and Variant Management. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Empower Your Team and Improve Your Requirements Management Process

We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including Requirements-Driven Testing and Total Cost of Ownership.


DOOR Vlog Episode 7

Jama Connect® vs. IBM®DOORS®: Industry Templates: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.

In Episode 7 of our Roundtable Chat series, Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software®– and Danny Beerens – Senior Consultant at Jama Software®– discuss the importance of industry templates in requirements management.

To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Cary Bryczek: Welcome to part seven of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the series so far. My name is Cary Bryczek, and I’m from Jama Software. I’ve been working here at Jama for over nine years, and I’m the director of aerospace and defense solutions. You’re in for a really special treat today. And I’m excited to be joined by my colleague Danny Beerens, who is a longtime IBM expert. Danny, tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

Danny Beerens: Hi, Cary. Thanks for this introduction. Yes, my name is Danny Beerens. And within Jama, I am both a solution architect for pre-sales and a senior consultant for post-sales. So I’m not going to sell you anything I can’t deliver myself. I’ve been in the requirements management field for the last 15 years, starting with DOORS Telelogic, and after the acquisition by IBM, I moved to IBM Jazz, the ELM Suite, and I actually started out with implementing Rational Requirements Composer. It was the prelude to DOORS Next.

Cary Bryczek: Oh wow. That’s awesome. So today’s topic of industry templates, I think, is a really interesting one. Requirements tools have been around for decades and were originally designed to be just a database. They had some rudimentary capability to control versions and add attributes, and that was about it. There were very few concepts, and still today there are very few concepts of a pre-configured template that were specific to the processes of a particular industry such as automotive or medical devices. When there are no templates and organizations start adopting a new tool, they’re forced to then configure the requirements management system to match the processes to be able to generate reporting information and documentation. Now, this just takes a lot of time, and it forces organizations, in many cases, to have teams of workers whose job it was to just engineer and maintain the tool itself. Danny, what’s been your experience with IBM tools with regards to templates?

Danny Beerens: Well, in general, IBM does offer some industry templates, what they call solution process assets. And for those, there is not a lot of templates available. So you have system software engineering templates. You have a template to support DO 178B and ASPICE ISO 26262.

Cary Bryczek: So in your experience in using DOORS, is there even the concept of creating a template? Is that hard?

Danny Beerens: Yeah, you can create your own templates, but yes, like you mentioned in your introduction, it takes a lot of time and effort from your own organization to implement your own templates to support your own industry. So setting up everything to get ready to start using the application, it takes a lot of effort for your own organization to be set up.

RELATED: ASPICE 101: What is Automotive SPICE?

Cary Bryczek: Oh gosh. Well, it’s so easy in Jama. I think maybe I should let the tool talk for itself. Our templates come right out of the box pre-configured. Let me show you maybe what the building blocks look like. In Jama, totally web-based, our pre-configured industry templates come with item types that represent the nomenclature very specific to the industry. So in A&D and space defense, you’re looking at different types of element requirements, different failure analyses, functional requirements, high-level and low-level requirements for avionic systems, parts. All of these are pre-configured with the most common types of attributes ready for you to use right out of the box. And then where we start talking about how to interconnect all of that kind of data is where we have, in Jama, our relationship rules. And our relationship rules, we have relationship rules for the NASA product breakdown structure.

So if you are following the NASA systems engineering handbook and you’re going all the way from stakeholder expectations to component level requirements, we have this pre-configured for you with all of the correct relationship types. We have one for avionics development that matches all of the DO 178 and ARP 4754. We have templates for MBSE. We have templates for defense system V. We have templates for automotive as well. So all of those are basic automotive framework. If you’re having to do ASPICE or ISO 26262 or both of them together, we have these pre-configured data models for you to start just creating and authoring the requirements right away.

If you’re doing automotive development within the semiconductor industry, we have a template that is developed by industry experts. So we at Jama have hired people that have worked in these industries and know what are the types of compliance reporting that you have to do and then put together these just easy and ready-to-go templates that allow you to get started right away. If you need to do functional safety in automotive or cybersecurity, our templates are built right in, letting you do the safety and cybersecurity right away along with your design development of your requirements. Danny, doesn’t that look like it’ll save organizations time to get started and eliminate the army of DOORS admins?

Danny Beerens: Oh, definitely. If I look at that, your type system is already there. Your relationships are already defined. It saves a world of work there.

Cary Bryczek: So what, Danny, about DOORS NG? What’s the state of industry templates with that tool?

Danny Beerens: If you look at the entire IBM ELM suite, the main focus nowadays is automotive, ASPICE ISO 26262, cybersecurity. And although there are many other multiple templates for different industries like aerospace, medical devices, rail end, they mostly seem to focus on EWM or RTC, as it was called previously. So there is hardly any good templates to support industries endorsing NextGen.

There is an additional application that would allow you to have specific templates or to configure your templates and migrate those to DOORS Next. It’s called Method Composer, but then you also need to know how Method Composer works because you get your templates out of the box. You need to adapt those templates in Method Composer to suit your business processes, and then from there, export it to DOORS Next. So you need an additional application. You need to know how that additional application works to customize it to your processes. Then you need to make sure that DOORS Next gets those templates.

So you need another application, additional infrastructure, and there’s a lot of knowledge in Method Composer. So you need either an IBM expert like I was, an IBM business partner to help you out with that. And in my experience, there is hardly any company that also acquires Method Composer. So you are stuck with setting up your templates in DOORS Next Gen yourself, again.

Cary Bryczek: Wow. God, that just sounds so complicated. So there really aren’t any really ready-to-go templates made for an industry. You still have to do a lot of work.

Danny Beerens: You need a lot of hand work yourself, so you take time away from your own engineering team, from your own process engineers implementing everything in DOORS Next Gen or, like I mentioned previously, in traditional DOORS. So it takes a lot of time away and costs a lot of effort to get you started.

Cary Bryczek: Wow. Is there any process documentation that the end users would use? Anything like that? Or you just have to make that yourself too?

RELATED: Eight Ways Requirements Management Software Will Save You Significant Money

Danny Beerens: Well, you look at your own process or the customer’s process documents, and you try to translate that into a configuration of DOORS or DOORS Next Gen. So there’s really not an easy way to set things up for your industry.

Cary Bryczek: Jama Software, we’ve hired, like I said before, industry experts to put together, not just the templates themselves, but also put together the process manuals that guide users to follow their required industry standards such as the automotive ASPICE and ARP 4754 or IC 6304. Maybe we can take a look at and look at that from a user’s perspective. Let me share my screen here.

Our templates are not just pre-configured in Jama itself, which is very nice. It also comes with a user guide. How do you use Jama itself to follow? This one is a airborne systems process guide. How do I make sure that I really am following ARP 4754 and DL 178? How do I use the system from a high-level process standpoint? So we have these process guides that make it really easy. And then from a user’s perspective, I jump in, I really like the automotive project, we have fantastic sample projects that you can look at, as well as a bare bones skeleton template that you can just start filling in. We have places where you can implement your planning documents in addition to the requirements. We have the dashboards that show you processes that are taking place within your requirements. It’s very easy to follow from the user’s perspective at all.

So I can see what are the different types of requirements, what are the different types of validation testing, or what are the risks that you’re following, and even how the particular system that you are engineering is subdivided from a systems engineering standpoint. So if I want to define the mechanical engineering or the software, I can dig right down in. And this configuration of how the information is organized, how the information is related to one another, it’s all part of the solution, so users don’t have to spend time studying the standards that you have to adhere to or the organization’s process. That’s already built for you. You can just start using it right away, which I think is really cool and a huge time saver and what really differentiates Jama Software from IBM itself.

Danny Beerens: And if you look at your type system and then the documentation that comes along, I must say in my 15 years, I’ve learned that having industry templates is a really great stepping stone to getting a customer quick up and running and achieving their industry compliancy goals. They don’t have to figure it out themselves. It’s already there. You will have guiding documents that explain to you why those templates are set up like they are, what the purpose is, and it comes fully guided with Jama experts. They are experts in the industry, so they can also talk you through the templates if you have any questions. It just simply helps you adjust the framework that comes out of the box to your specific situation within your industry. So you’re already there. You just need to apply rough tweaks to make it your own, and that’s it. And that’s what I love about Jama, working for Jama. How about you?

Cary Bryczek: I love that too. If I’m an end user, I just install Jama, tweak it a little bit here and there and give a minimal amount of training to my users, and then they’re ready to use it. And working at Jama in the aerospace and defense, I really enjoy putting together these solutions and seeing the companies not have to work so hard at using the tool, but actually spending more time innovating on the products and the systems that they’re building. Thanks so much, Danny, for your perspective on the IBM side. That was really insightful. I learned a lot.

Danny Beerens: You’re welcome.

Cary Bryczek: This concludes our vlog on the industry templates and its significance within the requirements management domain. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying the series so far. Stay tuned for our next entry in our series. We look forward to seeing you then.

Danny Beerens: Thanks for having me.

Cary Bryczek: See you next time.

Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.

Download our Jama Software® Data Model Diagnostic to learn more!

Thank you for watching our Episode 7, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Industry Templates. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Empower Your Team and Improve Your Requirements Management Process

We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.


requiremens authoring solution

In this blog, we recap our press release, “Jama Software® Is the First to Deliver a Complete Requirements Authoring Solution” – To read the entire thing, click HERE

Jama Software® Is the First to Deliver a Complete Requirements Authoring Solution

Requirements can now be authored in free text form, natural language analyzed, and managed as distinct items

Jama Software®, the industry-leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, has announced enhancements to Jama Connect®’s user experience. As part of the update, Jama Connect now includes a Document View, which allows users to author, read, and edit items in-line in a single view while maintaining an item-based structure within project hierarchies. This enables the streamlined authoring of requirements leading to material efficiencies gained and time saved.

The new Document View augments Jama Software’s atomic, item-based requirements approach. It allows users to easily learn and adopt Jama Connect whether moving from a documents-based approach or a legacy requirements tool. The seamless user experience combines the best of model-based requirements engineering with an enhanced, quick-editing Document View functionality. This improves time-to-adoption for Jama Connect users.

In addition, the enhancements also improve consistency and accuracy of requirements quality by incorporating built-in support for Jama Connect Advisor™ (add-on to Jama Connect).  With this, users can seamlessly see EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) and INCOSE (International Council for Systems Engineering) rules suggestions while actively authoring and editing requirements.

Jama Connect is the only comprehensive requirements management and traceability solution that allows:

  • Requirements authoring in free text form;
  • Analysis in natural language to maintain quality; and
  • Management of requirements as distinct items.

These capabilities make Jama Connect an incredibly powerful platform that delivers immense value for optimizing and accelerating systems development across various industry verticals.

“Jama Software is committed to continuously improving the adoptability and useability of Jama Connect. These powerful enhancements strengthen Jama Connect’s best-of-breed requirements authoring and Live Traceability™ offering, which continues to make Jama Connect the highest-rated solution for ease of use and adoptability in the industry, “said Josh Turpen, Chief Product Officer of Jama Software.

To learn more about Jama Connect’s features, please visit our product features page. If you would like to speak with one of our industry experts and/or book a free Jama Connect trial, click here.

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. For more information about Jama Connect, please visit www.jamasoftware.com.

For more information on Jama Connect Advisor, please refer to our datasheet: DOWNLOAD DATASHEET

Read the entire press release here!
Jama Software® Is the First to Deliver a Complete Requirements Authoring Solution


Write Better Requirements

In this blog, we recap the “Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™” webinar.

Successful product delivery starts with having the right user needs and requirements. Efficient, precise, and professionally written requirements form the foundation of the product development process so that various teams (design, software, and hardware systems) can all work together with a shared and clear understanding of the project goals.

Jama Connect Advisor™ is a state-of-the-art requirements authoring guide and optimizer powered by natural language processing for engineering that helps a system engineer or a product developer write effective, well-organized requirement specifications based on industry-accepted INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) rules and the EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation.

Learn more about leveraging Jama Connect Advisor to:

  • Improve the quality and usability of your requirements
  • Save time authoring, reviewing, and updating requirement statements
  • Continuously enhance team requirement authoring skills with regular use
  • Deliver programs and projects on time and on budget with long-term success
  • Plus, hear from Rockwell Automation on their experience with Jama Connect Advisor

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™

Jeremy Johnson: Great, thank you so much Juliet, and thank you so much to everybody that’s joining us today. This is a pretty special time for us, to be able to take a new capability to market from a product management and product development standpoint is just, it’s an extremely exciting time for us, so again, appreciate everybody’s time in joining us here today.

Before we transition into the main portion of the session here, I did want to provide a short introduction and short overview of our agenda. We’ll talk a little bit, for those that aren’t familiar with us, a little bit about Jama Software. We’ll talk a little bit about the trends in product development, some of the challenges that we see in requirements authoring. We’ll also, of course, introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor, who it’s for, how it works, we’ll get into a demonstration. We’ll also talk a little bit about our customer success program, specifically our customer success authoring workshop, and how we are now including and embedding the technology and the capabilities around Jama Connect Advisor into that consulting offering.

And then, as Juliet mentioned, our special guest, Sheila King, will go into the requirements quality focus that she’s helping implement at Rockwell Automation, and we’re super excited and happy to have her. And then we should have some time at the end of the session for some questions as well. But again, starting with and moving into Jama Software’s role in the product development ecosystem, our vision and our purpose, as an organization, is to ensure that innovators succeed. And as you’ll see from today’s discussion and demonstration, that’s really at the core of what drove our introduction of Jama Connect Advisor.

From a broader solution standpoint, Jama’s the number one requirements management provider in the marketplace, we help teams with requirement management and product development through Live Traceability that also spans not only requirements, but the verification and validation components on the test side, risk management, and other key data that drives those processes forward.

The value that we hope these innovative organizations our customers derive is really focused around things like cycle time reduction, helping speed time to market, enabling through Live Traceability the ability to gain visibility and control over the organization’s product development processes and really drive streamlining, really drive a tremendous amount of value, and ultimately ensure compliance and manage risk.

As far as organizations that we work with, we span medical device, automotive, industrial machinery, software, and this is just a sampling of the customers that we have the pleasure to partner with. We have over 800 customers globally, these organizations span from smaller startup organizations to large global enterprises. So with that very short intro to Jama Software, I now would like to bring in Joseph Pitarresi to review some of the complexity and challenges that we see today in product development, and of course to introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor. Joseph?

Related: Jama Connect Advisor™ Datasheet

Joseph Pitarresi: I’m really excited to talk about Jama Connect Advisor today, and some of the things that are happening in the environment that led us to the development of this solution is that today’s systems have become much more complex, and the emergence of the Systems of Systems architecture has become the dominant approach for devices in all sectors, whether it’s aerospace, automotive, medical, and even consumer products now.

The Systems of Systems is obviously a collection of independent subsystems that are integrated into larger systems and deliver the unique capabilities required by users. The challenge is that it’s difficult to produce accurate predictive models of all emergent behaviors, so global Systems of Systems performance is difficult to design. And that leads to testing and verification, verifying upgrades to existing Systems of Systems is difficult and expensive as well, so it’s hard to scale. So these are some of the factors that have led us to think about how can we help.

Another question we ask ourselves is why is requirements authoring so hard? So if we look at the industry approaches for requirements authoring, we looked at the International Council on Systems Engineering and their guide for requirements, there’s the need to exercise a core subset of over 40 rules in the INCOSE rules for writing requirements, and in addition to that, assess 49 requirement attributes. So just following INCOSE alone requires a substantial amount of training and understanding and then applying it, and that can take a lot of time.

And in addition, we’ve also found that the EARS, the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax, is being adopted by many organizations developing complex Systems of Systems. That includes Airbus, Bosch, Dyson, Honeywell, Intel, NASA, Siemens, and others, and what EARS does is gently constrains the textual requirements, the EARS patterns provide guidance while you’re writing a requirements sentence, and it provides syntax structure with an underlying rule set. Now, as I said, even these industry preferred approaches are challenging to apply, so we’re looking at how we might address that.

Related: How the EARS Notation Supports Effective Requirements Management and Live Traceability™ 

Joseph Pitarresi: So today, just as a brief example, product requirements quality drive fidelity and efficiency in the product development cycle, and if you just look at this automotive example, there’s many systems, it’s a complex System of Systems that are dependent on each other, and any of these systems can either lead to confusing the operator, or systems not operating optimally. And if you look at the traditional V model of approaching systems engineering, the requirements are fundamental at the very early phase. So immediately after your needs analysis you need to have really clear, crisp, accurate requirements definitions.

Now the negative outcomes of poorly written requirements have been well documented. It often leads to delayed time to market, late stage errors in the product, inaccurate translation of stakeholder needs into product attributes, and the lack of development team synergy, as teams are very organic today and the requirements need to be documented clearly and in an understandable way so that the team can execute with high performance. And then ultimately failure to verification and validation can happen without the high quality requirements.

A secondary challenge is the training and reinforcement of requirements offering skills. The lack of proper requirements can lead to product issues, and it’s a significant challenge in today’s environment. So 30% of engineering degree holders are nearing retirement, that’s globally, and in the US 79% of American workers agree that to retain or increase their future employability they need to continue their learning and development. So computer scientists, 47.5% participate in work related training to maintain and extend their skills, and engineers, almost 60% participate in work related training. So onboarding, retraining, and training system engineers remains a significant challenge.

So with those items as a background I’d like to introduce Jama Connect Advisor. Jama Connect Advisor is an add-on for Jama Connect Cloud. It’s an intelligent natural language advisor that improves the quality of requirements. It allows you to author intricate product requirements quickly, easily, and with precision. It’s powered by engineering-based natural language processing, so this is not a general purpose aid, it’s engineering language-based, and the advice is based on the recommended practice, as I mentioned before, the INCOSE rules and the EARS notation. It has a very significant side benefit that while you use it, it augments skills and reinforces organizational preferences while authoring. So not only is it doing the pragmatic work of improving requirements quality, you learn how to do that more quickly and efficiently over time with its use.
So when we look at Jama Connect Advisor’s capabilities, its features are the analysis from industry leading practices, as we’d mentioned in INCOSE, the International Council on Systems Engineering, the EARS notation, and also the unique thing is that the application is designed to work, it’s crafted to use INCOSE rules and EARS notation together to increase the quality and accuracy, and the efficacy of requirement statements, and that’s really its unique value, it’s very quick and efficient, and combines both those attributes. And we’ll talk about that more in a minute. The guidance is provided seamlessly while you’re editing in Jama Connect single item view, and we’ll demonstrate that.

The above has been a preview of this transcript. To watch the full webinar, visit: Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™

RELATED


 

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Risk Management for Medical Device

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.

We always want to be respectful of your valuable time, but in this Features in Five video, we do go beyond the promised five-minute format to include an information-packed session. Join Vincent Balgos, Director of Medical Solutions at Jama Software®, as he walks through how risk management is integrated into the Jama Connect for Medical Device framework and how our new Lookup Matrix feature can fit seamlessly with your organization’s risk processes

In this session, viewers will learn how:

  • Jama Connect for Medical Device framework helps organizations align with regulations such as ISO 13485:2016, 21 CFR 820.30, and ISO 14971:2019
  • How to set up and utilize our new Lookup Matrix feature

Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Vincent Balgos: Hi, my name is Vincent Balgos, and I’m the director of Medical Solutions here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to provide an overview of how Risk Management is integrated as part of our medical device framework offering. In addition, I like to show you a new feature called Lookup Matrix that can fit seamlessly with your risk processes in a few easy steps.

So when developing complex products, integrating risk management activities can be a complicated process, usually requiring experts from various functional groups. Without a connected tool, there’s a potential for fragmented risk activities across the different siloed groups. This may lead to an impact on the product, its function, its safety, and its users.
In Jama Connects out of the box medical device framework, the risk management process is already integrated with other elements of key product development. These practices are aligned with ISO standards such as 13485, design controls 820.30, and also, of course, 14971. Seeing the relationship diagram of the medical device framework that’s readily available out of the box, hazards are a standalone item type that allows users to identify hazards that come directly from the product’s intended use, which is compliant with ISO 14971 section 5.4.

Related to the hazards is a risk evaluation item type that contains fields that also align with 14971 best practices, such as hazard situation, sequence of events, harm and severity, and probabilities, both pre mitigate and post mitigate. The risk evaluation is in trace downstream to risk control requirements and their verification activities. This continues to comply with the standard of practice as defined in 14971. Let’s dive into risk analysis. I’d like to talk to you about our new Lookup Matrix. Released in 8.75, this new feature allows the use of dedicated pick list inputs to automatically output desired content based on a pre-configured lookup table. The Lookup Matrix offers an easy-to-use interface, which allows for seamless analysis within the tool, which aligns with your organization’s process.

RELATED: Jama Connect® for Medical Device Development Datasheet

Vincent Balgos: As you can see here on the right, here is the general setup process, which I’m actually going to walk through right now. Here’s the out-of-the-box medical device framework. If you go into the admin section, one of the first steps is really to configure the Lookup Matrix. In the admin section, the first thing you have to do is define your pick list. So if I go here on the left, as you can see here, I’ve already set up an example for my Lookup Matrix, but this is an easy task to do to create your own that you want. So, for example, if I need to create a brand new pick list, all I have to do is hit the green button here. We’ll call this new pick list or lookup. And the key thing is here is instead of choosing the standard, we actually need to select the new Lookup Matrix.

And what this does is it’ll create a brand new pick list where then you can go ahead and define the different options as you have in your other standard pick lists. As you can see here, here are some options that, again, taking it straight from 14971, some good examples for probability. Some info tips and some color and stuff like that. So you can see here, I’ve created four different pick lists that will serve as input into my Lookup Matrix. That’s step one.

Step two is then to actually create your Lookup Matrix. Select on Lookup Matrix. You can actually see that here’s a new field where you can configure your Lookup Matrix. I’ve already pre-established this, but if I hit the view button, I can see that my probability P1 and P2 pick list is actually input on both my X and Y axes. And I can actually determine what is that total probability based off these two inputs. The second Lookup Matrix that we need to create is the risk lookup acceptability. Which actually takes input from the probability total Lookup Matrix that we just talked about and then compares it against the severity of it.

From here, this is where then you can do a lookup analysis based off your organization’s risk management process. This is pre-configured, but if you wanted to create your own, it’s as easy as hitting a couple buttons. All you have to do is add a new Lookup Matrix. Now we’ll call this new Lookup Matrix. And then from here I just have to pick what are my input pick list. So for my X axis let’s pick severity, like we did before. And then, for my Y-axis, we’ll go ahead and pick the total probability. As for the values of it, this is where the risk acceptability value is another input Lookup Matrix pick list that we have to create.

Once you’ve established that, you go ahead and hit generate matrix, and then the bottom screen here, you can actually then configure your matrix per your organization. So, for example, here, I can click that this is low, but maybe here, this is where I want to actually then increase the level of risk. As you can see here, this is quite easily configurable and easily managed. Now that you’ve established your Lookup Matrix, the last part is actually configuring your item type fields. So for this particular example, I created a brand new item type called the risk evaluation Lookup Matrix. And one of the key things you have to do is actually identify that this is a calculated logic field and that you’d like to use your Lookup Matrix.

RELATED: Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®

Vincent Balgos: As you can see here, here’s this has been predefined, but again, and if you wanted to add your own, it’s easy as adding your own field. So, for example, if we go ahead and hit add field, I go to customs, go ahead and hit calculate and logic. And we’ll say this is our new risk lookup. Once I come down to here, I establish that. For my calculation type, I actually just select Lookup Matrix. And then as my calculation source, I actually want to define my risk acceptability. And then here’s where then I define what are the fields to be used as input. So for this one here, it becomes pre-populated with the severity. But the next one is like, do I want to talk about pre-mitigated P-total or residual P-total? Why don’t we go ahead and pick residual. So that can establish your new field. Now that you configured your Lookup Matrix appropriately within your admin section, why don’t we jump to the project and see how that looks.

As you can see in this new project, I created this new item type called a risk evaluation Lookup Matrix. In the list view, as you can see, here are some pre-populated examples of this new item type with the Lookup Matrix functionality enabled. As you can see here, this follows the general standard best practice with 14971 in terms of identifying your hazards, sequence of events, hazardous situation. But more importantly, I identify what the severity is, the P1, P2, and P total. Again, based off your Lookup Matrix configuration, this is predetermined. But I can see here for this example, on my risk example five, that actually I have not identified what is my P1 mitigated. But this is really nice because with this view, you can take a look at seeing what has not been enabled, and then you can address it immediately right here on the screen. Let me show you how.

So for this particular example, I can see that my P1 hasn’t been defined yet. This is easily addressed by just go ahead and double click this. Let’s say with the, this is again, this is pre-mitigated, this is probably a more a probable type of event. I can go ahead and hit probable, and you can see that my “P total” is automatically updated again based off of my first Lookup Matrix. And then my risk level is also then determined based off that second Lookup Matrix that we’ve had here. If I further go down the list here, I can see I can go back and then see, hey, let’s define what our P1 mitigator looks like. So then with that, let’s say I put it in the risk controls and say, this is now improbable. I can go ahead and update based off of that. My “P total” has been reduced now to medium, but my risk level is still high. Again, this shows you can apply dynamic changes and analysis on your risk management activities on the fly.

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 Reviews, Dashboard Management, and more.


In this blog, we partially recap this customer story, “Vave Health Migrates to Jama Connect® to Accelerate Development and FDA Clearance” Read the entire story HERE.

Vave Health is committed to revolutionizing the physician-patient experience through innovative, industry-transforming technologies. Their innovative handheld ultrasound device packs the ability to wirelessly connect with your Android or iOS smartphone or tablet.

After initially selecting Matrix Requirements, Vave Health found themselves constrained by the tool’s limited functionality and were ready for a change. Following a requirements management market analysis, Jama Connect® was selected and onboarded due to its ease of use and industry-leading functionality.

Read this customer story to see how now, with more confidence in their processes, Vave health has achieved the following outcomes:

  • Accelerate the release cadence from what previously took a couple weeks, down to a day or two
  • Decrease generation of trace matrices from 30 days to one per project
  • Scale development process with the ability to run multiple projects in parallel
  • Maintain traceability and instantly identify coverage for verification and validation of requirements to respond to action items sooner in development

VAVE HEALTH CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW

CHALLENGES WITH MATRIX

  • Reports, such as a traceability matrix, were taking too long to generate
  • The steep learning curve caused most people to revert to working in Word and Excel
  • Inability to develop parallel projects and reuse data between releases, contributed to duplicated work and slower-than-desired release cadence

SELECTION CRITERIA

  • A solution that would scale with their growth
  • Quick-to-adopt and easy-to-use 
  • Strong market presence
  • Ease of data migration

OUTCOME + FUTURE

  • Accelerate the release cadence from what previously took a couple of weeks, down to a day or two
  • Decrease generation of trace matrices from 30 days to one per project
  • Scale development process with the ability to run multiple projects in parallel
  • Maintain traceability and instantly identify coverage for verification and validation of requirements to respond to action items sooner in development

RELATED: 2023 Predictions for Medical Device Product Development

CHALLENGES

In the early days of Vave Health, the development team originally selected Matrix Requirements due to its low cost. While the tool was sufficient for managing their requirements in the preliminary stages of development, as the company began to scale, it became apparent that they needed a more mature, enterprise-grade solution with more robust capabilities.

The main challenges that Vave Health had which led them to seek out a new solution were:

  • Reports, such as a traceability matrix, were taking too long to generate
  • Steep learning curve caused most people to revert to working in Word and Excel
  • Inability to develop parallel projects and reuse data between releases, contributed to duplicated work and slower-than-desired release cadence

As a small team, they did not have dedicated staff to manage requirements – it was a shared responsibility. With Matrix Requirements, the learning curve was so steep, only a few people were able to use it. Even then, it was used similarly to an Excel spreadsheet.

“Matrix Requirements was difficult to use, and it limited our ability to easily extract reports and quickly show traceability. The whole process just took too long,” said Craig Loomis, Vice President of Product at Vave Health.

“One of the deliverables in getting our product released is generating the trace matrix. With Matrix Requirements, it was very cumbersome,” said Sandhya Mitnala, Head of Quality and Regulatory at Vave Health. “We realized that something that should have taken one or two days, and managed through the project, took us almost a month. It was a very manual process.”

Additionally, as the team grew and the development work went from singular to multiple projects, the team ran into limitations using Matrix Requirements.

“One thing we didn’t initially think about when selecting Matrix Requirements was the ability to have multiple projects in motion at the same time,” said Loomis. “Although it was technically possible, there was no good way to extract the trace matrix and manage revisions across different projects at the same time in parallel.”

RELATED: FDA Updates to the Medical Device Cybersecurity Guidance

SELECTION CONSIDERATIONS

In order to overcome the limitations of their current tool, the team set out to find a solution that could meet their current needs and grow with them as they expanded in the market.

“The startup world is unique in that you’re trying to do so much more with fewer resources. Sometimes you do need to leverage technology to automate things that larger companies would be
able to throw bodies at,” said Loomis.

When it came time to evaluate the available solutions in the marketplace, things moved quickly.

“From my experience working with Jama Software® at other companies, and my coworkers’ similar experiences, we wanted to move to a more automated solution and Jama Software was on everyone’s mind,” said Mitnala. “It was a very easy choice for us. All of the solutions we looked at, outside of Jama Connect®, were ruled out quickly,” shared Loomis.

During the evaluation process, the Vave Health team was able to access a sandbox account created specifically for them, so they could test out the solution to make sure it was the right fit.
Because there were so many things already in motion, the team wanted to ensure that data migration would not be an issue, so they could keep moving quickly.

“Before we even signed a contract, we spent time in Jama Connect and had a lot of confidence in moving forward. We knew that our data would be migrated easily, and we wouldn’t be putting our projects at risk,” said Loomis.

Although Matrix Requirements supported some initial needs, the team knew that in order to derive the value they needed, it was time to up-level their tool for requirements management and systems engineering. The return on investment for Jama Connect, a robust, yet easy-to-use platform (which comprised the feature set and functionality they required) would increase efficiencies, simplify compliance, reduce risk, and ultimately speed time-to-market, paying dividends in the long run.

“As a startup, the one thing you must ensure is that you are able to move fast. You’re learning the market, you’re working against your competitors, and speed to market is critical. Especially where there are things that can be automated – that’s where you want to invest,” said Loomis.

To read the entire outcome from Vave Health’s choice of Jama Connect, read the entire customer story here:
Vave Health Migrates to Jama Connect® to Accelerate Development and FDA Clearance


robotics

In this blog, we announce Jama Connect® for Robotics, which leverages functional safety and best practices for robotics product development.

Jama Connect® for Robotics

Reduce deployment time, ensure best practice adoption, and increase the success rate of innovation in robotics development

Leveraging functional safety and best practices for robotics product development based on the IEC 61508 industrial standard.

Jama Software®, the industry-leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, has announced the launch of Jama Connect for Robotics, which incorporates product development and functional safety best practices based on the IEC 61508 industrial standard for robotics product development.

Jama Connect for Robotics is a complete set of frameworks, example projects, and procedural, export, and configuration documentation that helps teams reduce deployment time, ensure best practice adoption, and increase the success rate of innovation. This solution comes with a fully equipped package that contains a robotics dataset, a procedural guide to functional safety based on IEC 61508, and other relevant guides. All these items help companies accelerate robotics product development with comprehensive reporting to document the process and improve compliance.

”Jama Software is proud to release a first-of-its-kind solution to the market that caters to all companies innovating and developing robotics applications,” said Tom Tseki, Chief Revenue Officer of Jama Software. “Jama Connect for Robotics enables companies to rapidly innovate, reduce risk, implement Live Traceability™, and optimize their systems development process.”

“Jama Connect for Robotics provides a consistent and comprehensible way to specify, analyze, and create critical products in compliance with IEC 61508,” stated Nicole Pappler, Senior Functional Safety Expert, AlektoMetis. “This solution allows for a structured approach to assigning functionality and safety functions to components. In addition, the solution provides a framework to accumulate the relevant and necessary documentation and evidence needed for getting the functional safety capabilities of the final product confirmed by the certification bodies.

To learn more about Jama Connect for Robotics, download the datasheet, or see the press release in its entirety, click here.

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. For more information about Jama Connect services, please visit www.jamasoftware.com

Read the entire press release here! Jama Software® Launches Jama Connect® for Robotics


Collaboration

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Collaboration

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, Carleda Wade, Senior Consultant at Jama Software, walks through how to collaborate with others users in Jama Connect.

In this session, viewers will learn how to:

  • Use the comment widget to @mention a user or group
  • Leverage action tags to designate high-priority comments
  • Use the Stream tab and the project dashboard stream view to see comments
  • Filter for comments that require action

Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Carleda Wade: Hi, I’m Carleda Wade, Senior Consultant at Jama Software. By the end of this training, you’ll be familiar with how to collaborate in Jama Connect and have the confidence and basic skills to begin interacting with other users in the application. In this session, we will use the comment widget to @mention a user or group, leverage action tags to designate high-priority comments, use the stream tab and the project dashboard stream view to see comments, and we will filter for comments that require action.

RELATED: Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®

Wade: So now let’s jump back into Jama Connect. As you can see, I’m back on the homepage. You can see bookmarks and recently viewed items on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand side, you’ll see active reviews and then stream activity in the bottom right-hand. If I click on the view all stream activity link here, it will bring me to this stream tab. From here, if I want to I can see all of the comments that are across the various projects within my Jama instance.

I also have the ability to apply a filter to, let’s say, look for any open questions, and when I do that, you’ll see any question that doesn’t have a resolution that’s being open. I can choose to reply to this or answer this question directly from here by clicking on answer question. And then when I answer this question, not only will you see it presented here in this stream, but if I go back to my project, this information, once I refresh this, will show up here in my activity stream. So here you can see both the comment as well as the response. From my dashboard, this activity stream will be a comprehensive viewing of not only changes made in the project but also comments that are made within the project. Here if ever I could choose to do a search for, let’s say, Joe, and anything that either was created by Joe or has Joe tagged will show up. Also, from this dashboard, I can click on the stream.

RELATED: Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Document Generation: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Wade: This stream view will show me only comments that are made within my project. And once again, just like in the stream view for the full instance in the top header, I can apply filters if I like. Back to my project explorer, if I choose to, let’s say, look at my system requirements and maybe I want to look at climate monitoring, in this single-item view, I also have the ability to review comments. So if you have it enabled, you can click on review comments and see any comments that are made as part of the review module, or clicking on the comments will allow you to be able to interact directly with this particular requirement. So I could choose to create this comment, and maybe I want to have the person who owns this. So I want to have Joe, so I can @mention Joe to say, “Hey, can we clarify this?”

And then I can actually mark this action as a question. And when I do this, Joe will get an email notification that says that he needs to come into Jama and be able to reply to this. Joe would also have the ability to reply to his email, and that information will be added to this thread. But not only can I @mention a single user, but I also have the ability to @mention, let’s say, my risk team. And when I send this notification, every person who’s a part of that user group will get a notification, and once again, they can come in and start making comments directly. But let’s say, for whatever reason, after I make a comment that I decide that I need to delete it, or I inadvertently delete it.

So even though I just added this comment for the risk team, let’s say I choose to delete this, you’ll see the confirmation message that says to confirm, and let’s say I choose to delete it. But fear not because anything that happens in Jama stays in Jama. So now if I navigate out of the single item view back to the dashboard, when I… Let’s clear that. When I refresh my page you can see for the activity stream that this item is showing that it has been deleted. But if I want to, now I can click on restore, and all is well. Now you’ll see this comment is showing as un-deleted. So just to summarize, there are a number of different ways to be able to collaborate and comment on content within Jama. So just pick what works best for you, depending on where you are within the system at the time.

Thank you for watching.

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, and more.


Migration & Data Mapping

Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Migration & Data Mapping: A User Experience Roundtable Chat

Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.

In Episode 6 of our Roundtable Chat series, Richard Watson – Practice Director at Jama Software® – and Alisa Eikanas  – Senior Consultant at Jama Software® – discuss migration & data mapping, and how to migrate your DOORS® data to a new tool.

To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Richard Watson: Hi everybody, I hope you’re all enjoying watching the vlog so far and that you take the time to watch some of the others. I’m Richard Watson, and I’m part of the solution management team at Jama Software. In this vlog, I’ll be giving the DOORS angle on things. I’ve been a systems engineer for about 35 years, 20 of which was as the product manager for DOORS and DOORS Next. I now spend much of my time advising clients on migration strategies to Jama Connect. Today I’m joined by Alisa, who’s going to give the Jama side of things.

Alisa Eikanas: Hello everyone, and good morning Richard. My name is Alisa Eikanas, and I’ve been a consultant here at Jama Software for just about five years. In that time, I’ve supported hundreds of successful implementations and have extensive experience supporting customers with complex migration needs, so I’m tickled to be here.

Richard Watson: Organizations are often black and white when it comes to migration. Either they believe migration is too risky to form, and so they’re stuck in their current tool, or they trivialize things, and they think it’s as simple as pressing a button and everything is done.
In my experience migration isn’t complex, but it does involve taking a lot of very small decisions and then repeatedly executing against those decisions when you’re migrating the data itself.

Alisa Eikanas: Mm-hmm, I couldn’t agree more. I often use the analogy of moving to help illustrate this very same point to customers. When you’re making the decision to move to a new house, the benefits are obvious. A bigger house, better schools, et cetera, and there’s things you can do to make that moving process more efficient. You can hire a mover and do all of that stuff, but there’s no shortcutting the fact that you still have to label the boxes, tell the movers where they have to go.

So again, we can take care of the heavy lifting, but that attention to detail is something that’s not ever going to be avoided. And it might seem tedious, but it’s so necessary in order to avoid unnecessary frustrations if not given the proper attention at the proper time. There are typically two blocking points regarding migrations.
So first, management would like to… The migration process itself to be predictable so that they can follow the progress and predict how long it will take. Ultimately, what they’re trying to avoid is disruption to work, additional costs, making sure that the proper resources are available during that process. And secondly, for end users themselves, they expect the migration to run smoothly and for us to be able to demonstrate that the migration task has been executed without error.

For example, I was recently working on a migration with a team and the data that we were migrating from DOORS Classic, they’ve been working on that data for 20 years and some of the original engineers are still involved in the project. And so, you can imagine for them how stressful it is to consider 20 years of their work being moved and just wanting to make sure and not have any fears or reservations.

That as the data was moved, that there would be no negative impacts to that data. So it’s completely understandable, but again, these are things that Jama Connect has found ways to address proactively to ensure that both of those concerns… Having the efficient be predictable so that it can be efficient and not overly expensive. As well as for end users, just ensuring again that data integrity is maintained from point A to point B.

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Richard Watson: Generating a business case for migration is also often terribly difficult. In fact, it’s very difficult to justify moving from IBM DOORS to IBM DOORS Next because it’s more of an emotional decision. One reason to move away from DOORS is the aim to adopt more of a model-based systems engineering approach. If you have that, then it becomes consistent for your engineers, easier to create reports, and cheaper for integrations.
We all know that without DLX, it’s terribly difficult in DOORS to keep a consistent data model between your different modules. Thinking about consistent data types between modules, for example. DOORS Next, unfortunately, is very much the same as DOORS. While it has got shared information types within a component, those types are independent of other components and other projects. So you can very quickly have different data sets in DOORS Next that diverge apart exactly the same as you do inside DOORS.

Alisa Eikanas: Yeah, I would add that there’s typically always a great deal of desire to migrate, but defeating the perception that it’s an insurmountable obstacle can be tricky. This, as in many other cases, is where Jama Software really excels and exemplifies our customer-centric approach to solutions. We don’t treat or expect our customers or their data to be the same.

So, before we even begin a migration effort… Or for those of you that are considering looking into migration, Jama Software offers a free DOORS data model diagnostic service, providing a financial breakdown of the benefits, removing your DOORS data to an MBSE approach. And following that migration, your data, both old and new, we’ll consistently respect the data model defined by your organization within your Jama Connect instance.

Richard Watson: Another fallacy is that sticking to a single vendor for migration makes things simpler. Migration tools must be stronger between those tools from the same vendor. So DOORS, migration to DOORS Next is not the case, unfortunately. So DOORS Next is a wholly new requirement system, it’s just like moving to a different tool from a different vendor.

The data inside of DOORS Next is very different to DOORS, so it’s not a natural upgrade. You do have to do data migration. When adopting a new requirements tool, it’s really important to establish that data model so that you can exploit the benefits of the new tool with a consistent data model.

Migrating your data from DOORS to DOORS Next attempts to recreate your DOORS data in DOORS Next exactly as it used to look like in DOORS, and that leaves the reshaping of that data to the end user. We all know that the end user will typically not clean the data once he starts using DOORS Next, and so inefficient data in DOORS effectively becomes inefficient data inside of DOORS Next.

Alisa Eikanas: Absolutely, and what you’re talking about is a missed opportunity. That opportunity to recognize we can look at our data, see that perhaps we’re not treating it consistently or in a standardized way. And as we’re migrating that data, there is an opportunity to, again, apply a data model that’s going to be consistent and afford you so many benefits.

So, when approaching migrations here at Jama Software, firstly we identify. We work with organizations to identify and define the data model most appropriate for your development process, and then we migrate your DOORS data into that model. This doesn’t result in compromised data in any way, but it avoids the mass reshaping or cleaning of data after it’s been migrated.

Jama Software brings over 150 years of shared DOORS experience that we can bring to bear in helping clients migrate to Jama Connect. And in addition to that, we have extensive experience supporting customers going through that actual process of moving their data from DOORS or D&G into Jama Connect.

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Richard Watson: Alisa, perhaps the best thing to do next is simply to take a look at the tool. Should we take a look at Jama Connect?

Alisa Eikanas: Absolutely, let’s take a look at a project in Jama. But before we actually start poking around the project itself, let’s start with that data model we’ve been talking about. So, what we’re looking at here on this project dashboard is a rendering of that data model. So if we take a look at this example, we see that we have user needs, we have system requirements, system architecture, subsystem requirements, et cetera.

And in addition to showing each of those artifact types or item types, we also show the traceability paths between them. So for example, here we see our system requirements, and we see that we have those traceability lines established between the appropriate artifact types. We’re not ever going to see a user need directly connected to a subsystem requirement because through our data model, we’re just ensuring that that proper decomposition path is respected.

So again, that process of… As we’re migrating our data, taking the opportunity to identify and to establish a data model is just incredibly powerful and beneficial to our teams. Once we establish that model, and again, we’re going to migrate your data into that defined data model, we want to ensure that that transition is still comfortable for DOORS users. So again, this data model might be new, but the data is still the same.

It’s the same data that they had in DOORS. So that transition from DOORS to Jama is, for the most part… Or, it is a very comfortable one. Navigating around the project itself feels very similar for DOORS users, and I’ll give you an example of that. So, for example, if you’re looking at a DOORS project, you might see a folder with a number of modules located underneath that folder. And then of course, within our modules we’re going to have our individual objects.
So here we’re looking at a Jama project, and what we’re looking at is the project explorer. This will probably visually look similar enough to DOORS users, and what I’ve done is I’ve built out just a quick little example here. So, Jama has a different container name for this, but it’s essentially a DOORS folder. And then underneath that DOORS folder we’re going to see our individual modules listed out, and then if we open up one of our modules we’re going to see our individual objects.

Heading objects as well as our regular requirement or text objects. And that same hierarchical document structure that was established in DOORS, we’re able to carry that over seamlessly in Jama so that for DOORS users, again, it’s… Everything looks and is organized the same way that they’re used to seeing it, and it just makes it very comfortable.

But going back to that added benefit of having an established data model, for example, if I open up this system requirement, if I’m looking at the traceability information, here I can see that the system requirement has a parent, it has a child. But in this downstream bubble right here, I see that it’s red. That’s telling me that there’s a problem, it’s obviously not that it doesn’t have any children because I can see that, again, this user need has…
Or, that this system requirement has a parent user need and a downstream subsystem requirement. So, taking this example of a system requirement where Jama is telling me, “Hey, we’re missing some required coverage.” If I go back to that data model and I take a look at my system requirement, I can see that yes, I’ve satisfied that need to have a parent user need, and I’ve satisfied that need to have a child subsystem requirement. But I’ve yet to satisfy that need for a downstream architecture and a downstream verification.

So again, this is a very brief glimpse of the many benefits of having that established data model. But most, I would say the key takeaway again is that we can kill two birds with one stone. We’re migrating you to a more efficient system and tool as well as just ensuring that we’re able to also bring in efficiencies to your process by establishing that data model.

Richard Watson: That’s cool Alisa, thank you very much. So, that brings us to the end of this vlog for today. Hopefully, you’ve had some high-level overview of migration. Alisa, thank you very much for your discussion and perspective, that was super useful to actually see the tool.

I hope those listening to the vlog do have a reasonable starting point for migration, and I look forward to hearing about your successes in the future. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying this vlog series so far, stay tuned for the next entry in our series, it’ll be coming in a few weeks’ time. Thanks very much, Alisa.

Alisa Eikanas: Yep, thank you.

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Thank you for watching our Episode 6, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Migration & Data Mapping. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Empower Your Team and Improve Your Requirements Management Process

We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.