Requirements, code, and verification artifacts often live in different systems. Engineers switch between tools to understand requirements, implement functionality, and document traceability. By the time an audit arrives, teams may spend days or weeks proving that what they built matches what was specified.
That gap shows up often in regulated engineering environments. Security requirements span multiple teams, systems, and compliance frameworks, including ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 62443, and FDA design controls. The work itself is rarely contained in one place, but the evidence for it still has to hold together.
In this Features in Five demo, Katie Hucket, Product Line Manager, Advisor/AI at Jama Software, demonstrates how Jama Connect MCP™ helps close that gap by bringing governed requirements, traceability, and auditability into the engineering workflow.
Access requirements without leaving the IDE
With Jama Connect MCP, approved requirements in Jama Connect can flow directly into the IDE. Engineers can pull in the requirement, the metadata around it, and the governance state behind it. They can also see relationships to upstream system, safety, and regulatory requirements.
That context matters. It gives the engineer the information needed to implement the work without leaving the development environment, while still keeping the requirement tied to the source of truth in Jama Connect.
A secure authentication example
The demo followed a platform security team working on secure service-to-service authentication across a distributed system. That kind of implementation is common in large programs, where one requirement can touch many services and many teams.
The engineer starts by retrieving the requirement from the IDE. In this case, the requirement traces upstream to a cybersecurity control aligned with IEC 62443. That trace gives the team a direct line from implementation work back to regulatory intent.
The requirement calls for mutual TLS, but the engineering details are still incomplete. Certificate validation rules are missing. Identity extraction is not fully defined. Authorization enforcement is not spelled out. Those gaps create ambiguity, and ambiguity creates risk.
Refine the requirement through a governed process
Instead of handling the gap outside the workflow, the engineer updates the requirement directly from the IDE. The change still goes through Jama Connect governance. It is permission controlled, reviewed, version controlled, and recorded in audit logs.
That updated requirement becomes the trusted reference for the implementation effort. It also gives AI-assisted development tools better context for generating code and tests that match the approved intent.
Use approved requirements in AI-assisted development
The demo showed how governed requirements can support modern AI-assisted development without losing control of the process. Once the requirement is aligned, the engineer completes the implementation with the requirement in view.
The code reflects the updated requirement. A reference to the requirement is embedded in the implementation, and a formal trace relationship is created.
That pattern scales well beyond a single service. In a large program, the same approach can apply across hundreds of services and thousands of requirements, with consistent traceability across the system.
Traceability has often been treated as a cleanup task. Teams finish the work, then go back and recreate links after the fact. That usually means extra manual effort, and it often leaves gaps.
Jama Connect MCP changes that rhythm. Traceability is created while the work is happening. Requirements, code, and verification artifacts stay connected as the implementation moves forward.
Jama Connect’s Traceability Information Model gives teams a way to work with more than direct links. They can follow structured relationships across upstream regulatory and system requirements, downstream software components, and verification evidence. If a requirement changes, the impact can be traced through the chain of related work.
Understand the impact of change
The demo also showed how this model helps during change analysis. If a new certificate standard is introduced, teams can identify the requirements, code, and validation work that may be affected.
That is the kind of analysis required by standards like ISO 26262 and FDA design controls. It also gives engineering and compliance teams a clearer view of what needs to be updated, reviewed, and revalidated.
Maintain audit readiness across the lifecycle
When traceability is captured as part of the workflow, teams can check coverage across the code base, confirm alignment between requirements and tests, and review how verification evidence maps back to the original requirement.
That makes audit preparation more straightforward. Teams are not rebuilding the story later. The story is already in the system, tied to the work itself.
Closing the loop
Jama Connect MCP connects governed requirements directly into AI-assisted development workflows. It helps teams use approved requirements in the IDE, create traceability as work happens, and keep requirements, code, and verification aligned throughout the product lifecycle.
For large engineering organizations, that means fewer audit findings, faster change impact analysis, and fewer defects caused by requirement gaps. It also gives teams a way to scale secure, compliant product development without losing control of the process.
Migrating to Jama Connect from legacy systems is a significant step forward for engineering and product teams. But there is a practical challenge standing between your team and realizing value: your data is still in the old system.
Data migration needs strategic implementation, and it can’t be treated as an afterthought.
This post shares what success looks like, including our Jama Connect migration methodology, principles, and tooling that makes it work.
Data Migration Is More Than a Technical Task
When your organization decides to move to Jama Connect, you are making a strategic investment in better engineering processes. To get there, your existing data needs to land in Jama Connect in a way that supports how your team works.
If the migration goes well, it is adopted faster. Teams trust what they see and value is realized sooner. The migration itself becomes part of the success story.
If it goes poorly, data goes missing or gets mapped incorrectly. Users do not trust the system. There’s rework that nobody budgeted for. A new interface replicates the frustrations of the old one.
The goal is to land your legacy data in a modern system that is intentionally designed for how your team works going forward.
Common Migration Misconceptions That Cause Problems
Before getting into what works, it is worth addressing misconceptions on migrations.
Misconception 1: It Will Be Quick and Easy
Some teams expect migration to be a simple, automated lift. In reality, inconsistent data structures and a lack of tool-based controls can make the scope larger than anticipated.
Jama Connect addresses this upfront with a detailed questionnaire designed to identify the key factors that influence migration scope.
When the data is especially complex or voluminous, a proof-of-concept project is recommended before any actual migration work begins. The output is a clear migration plan with realistic effort estimates.
Misconception 2: It Is Too Overwhelming to Attempt
On the other end of the spectrum, some teams are so daunted by the perceived scale that they hesitate to move forward at all, even when their legacy system has become slow and cumbersome.
This hesitation often comes from outdated assumptions.
Jama Connect can now support over 10 million items in a single project, and the platform continues to evolve with methods for breaking down large data volumes into manageable chunks.
Migrating large data sets to Jama Connect is a realistic objective.
Jama Connect’s Safety-First Approach
The Jama Connect migration planning process is built around a defined and repeatable methodology.
This is delivered by certified partner networks with active oversight from Jama Software®, and it is enabled by purpose-built migration tooling.
This combination of proven process, expert delivery, and specialized tools gives your migration the rigor and flexibility to succeed regardless of scale.
What Makes a Successful Data Migration
Jama Connect’s data migration methodology is grounded in four guiding principles. Each one addresses a category based on our customer migration experience.
Strategic Alignment
Migration and implementation must move forward together as a single coordinated effort. This sounds straightforward, but it is easy for the two workstreams to drift.
When they do, you get migration teams mapping data based on what exists in the legacy system while implementation teams are making different decisions about structure and configuration.
By the time they converge, conflicts surface. Legacy structures get recreated instead of improved. Users land in a system that does not match how they work.
The fix requires discipline from day one.
Migration and implementation decisions need to reference the target Jama Connect design directly: item types, relationships, project structure.
Every data decision should be made in service of where you are going, not where you have been.
Lead With Validation
One of the most common migration failures is starting before anyone has agreed on what success looks like.
Teams assume they will recognize a good outcome when they see it. That assumption does not hold up across teams and stakeholders.
Leading with validation means defining acceptance criteria before migration begins. It means deciding who signs off, what evidence they need, and how confidence in the data will be established.
Verification confirms the migration ran correctly from a technical standpoint. Validation confirms that the data is fit for its intended use by the business.
Both need explicit ownership before the first migration run.
Structured Rehearsals
Production cutover should never be the first time a migration is executed.
Running a migration for the first time in a production environment, with changes that are often irreversible, is a level of risk that does not need to be accepted.
The alternative is structured rehearsals: dry runs executed in a sandbox environment using real data.
Each rehearsal surfaces issues, data inconsistencies, configuration mismatches, and timing constraints in a controlled setting where they can be resolved safely.
The process repeats until results are clean, consistent, and repeatable.
By the time of production cutover, the team knows exactly what to expect. Stakeholders have seen the results, and confidence is earned, not assumed.
Specialized Tooling
Legacy data is rarely clean or simple, and manual migration work at scale creates opportunities for error.
Purpose-built tooling is what makes efficient and confident migration possible.
Scope interrogates the existing DOORS instance and produces a comprehensive list of all modules. It defines what should be migrated and, just as importantly, what should not.
List analyzes the complexity of legacy data in greater depth. It examines scale, relationships, and transformation requirements before any execution begins, informing configuration decisions in Jama Connect.
Pre-flight compares source data against Jama Connect configurations and flags inconsistencies before anything moves. It also captures the metadata mapping to be used in subsequent steps.
Export automates the breakup of DOORS data into small chunks using the ReqIF format, which preserves raw data as well as embedded images, formatting, hierarchy, and relationships.
Import automates the ingestion of that data into Jama Connect with consistency, repeatability, and speed.
The Legacy Data Manager
One tool deserves special mention. The Legacy Data Manager was built for a scenario that comes up frequently: legacy data that is complex, partially unmapped, or tied to decisions that have not been made yet.
Teams are often forced into a difficult choice. Migrate the data as-is and deal with consequences later, or leave it behind and lose context.
The Legacy Data Manager offers a third path. It packages that data into a special JSON-configured field and brings it into Jama Connect even before it is fully shaped or finalized.
Once it is inside Jama Connect, the data can be refined when the right stakeholders and decisions are in place.
This accelerates the move off legacy tools without forcing premature decisions or sacrificing data.
How the Migration Unfolds
To migrate data to Jama Connect from other tools with ease, the process follows a phased approach.
Analysis defines data structure, mapping, and workflow changes. It sets the foundation for everything that follows.
Planning uses analysis findings to produce a migration plan with a realistic scope and timeline.
Rehearsal Migration is where dry runs happen in a sandbox environment. Issues are identified and resolved. The production plan is refined with greater detail.
Pre-Production Validation is a functional evaluation of the data and workflow transitions. It confirms organizational readiness and identifies any final adjustments needed before go-live.
Production Migration is the actual migration of data from the legacy tool to Jama Connect.
Post-Migration Validation confirms the final state of the data and closes out the transition from legacy to Jama Connect.
Batching: How to Manage Large Migrations Without Timelines Slipping
For large legacy system migrations to Jama Connect, a staggered, iterative batching approach is best.
Rather than attempting to move everything at once, data is migrated in logical groupings, such as by business unit, project, or module.
The key point is that batching is not a migration-only decision.
Each batch needs to be coordinated with implementation so that configuration, workflows, permissions, and training are ready when the data lands.
When done well, batching produces compounding benefits:
Priority teams go live sooner.
Early adopters become internal subject matter experts who support later migration waves.
Delivery teams can be allocated dynamically across batches.
Timeline risk is reduced because complexity is broken down into manageable pieces.
What to Do With Data That Should Not Be Migrated
Not all the data in your legacy system deserves to come along for the ride. A successful migration is about moving the right data.
During analysis, data that actively supports how teams will work in Jama Connect is identified. Often, this process surfaces content that is outdated, redundant, or tied to broken processes.
Rather than automatically migrating everything, Jama Connect helps customers make deliberate decisions about what delivers value and what capabilities in Jama Connect might make certain legacy data or processes obsolete.
This keeps the new system clean, trustworthy, and easier to adopt.
What Makes Migration Succeed at Scale
The teams that come out of a migration in good shape share a few things in common. They:
Treat migration and implementation as one coordinated effort from the start.
Define success criteria before a single record moves.
Run structured rehearsals until results are consistent and repeatable.
Use tooling that was built for the complexity they are dealing with.
This is a reusable approach that has been refined across many customer migrations, from straightforward transitions to very large and complex legacy data moves.
When these pieces come together, migration becomes the foundation that positions your team to realize the full value of Jama Connect from day one.
Watch the Full Webinar on Demand: Best Practices for Data Migration
If you are planning a migration or just starting to think about what it would take, check out the full webinar.
Watch the on-demand recording to hear the complete Jama Connect migration methodology breakdown, a live Q&A with real customer questions, and more detail on the tooling that makes large-scale migration possible.
AI in Requirements Management: Where It Works, Where It Doesn’t, and What to Evaluate
What if your team could spot ambiguous requirements the moment they’re written, keep trace links current without manual cross-referencing, and cut review cycles from weeks to days? That’s what AI brings to requirements management in 2026. Tools built on natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and large language models (LLMs) now give engineers immediate feedback on quality, traceability, and risk, right inside their authoring workflow. The payoff is biggest in regulated industries where a single vague requirement can ripple into months of rework.
This guide covers where AI delivers value today, what the risks and limitations are, how to evaluate tools, and what a real AI-powered requirements workflow looks like.
What Is AI in Requirements Management?
AI in requirements management means applying pattern detection, quality checks, and relationship mapping to the work of writing, tracing, and validating large requirement sets. Engineers derive, decompose, trace, rewrite, and evolve large numbers of engineering artifacts, and that work is time-consuming and prone to human error.
AI changes that by giving engineers immediate feedback. When someone writes “the system shall respond quickly to overcurrent conditions,” AI flags the requirement as unverifiable because there’s no measurable threshold, instead of waiting three months for a test engineer to discover the ambiguity.
Key Technologies Driving AI Requirements Management
Three technologies power most of what you’ll see in AI requirements tools today:
Natural language processing (NLP): The most mature. Tools already use NLP to check requirements quality against INCOSE and EARS criteria for clarity, completeness, and verifiability.
Machine learning (ML): Goes beyond rule-based checking to learn from historical data. Traceability is the standout ML application in requirements engineering so far.
Large language models (LLMs) and predictive analytics: The research frontier. LLMs generate, restructure, and reason over requirements content, while predictive models forecast which requirements carry the highest risk of downstream failures.
NLP is already production-ready in tools like Jama Connect Advisor™, which uses it to score requirements against INCOSE and EARS rules. ML and LLM capabilities are maturing fast, but they come with data quality and validation constraints that regulated teams need to evaluate carefully before relying on them.
Why AI in Requirements Management Pays Off Early
Most requirements problems start long before coding, and catching them early saves more time than any fix later in the lifecycle. Here’s where teams see the biggest returns:
Manual effort and documentation time: Some biopharma teams have cut drafting time by up to 70% with generative AI handling data collection and first drafts. For requirements teams, similar savings show up in trace matrix maintenance and review prep.
Requirements accuracy and consistency: AI-enhanced traceability has reduced review downgrades from 8.7% to 1.6%, and high-confidence trace links increased from 56.4% to 70%. Fewer downgrades means fewer revision cycles on large requirement sets.
Review cycles and time to market: Writing and testing code accounts for only 25% to 35% of total time from idea to launch, so shortening upstream requirements work has an outsized effect on your schedule.
Stakeholder alignment: AI can synthesize inputs from stakeholders across different technical backgrounds, flag conflicts between teams, and surface gaps that would otherwise go unnoticed until integration.
Each of these improvements feeds the next. Cleaner requirements lead to fewer test failures, which lead to shorter review cycles, which free up time for the next program.
Challenges and Risks of AI in Requirements Management
AI can do a lot here, but it comes with constraints that matter in safety-critical industries. Three stand out:
Data quality and training data dependencies: Incomplete training data is a key limiter, with AI-generated requirements omitting core needs when relying on generic datasets. In aviation, emerging guidance calls for data management frameworks addressing bias mitigation and dataset representativeness.
Over-reliance on automation vs. human judgment: Most AI models remain black boxes, which is a problem in safety-critical industries. LLMs in particular may “generate spurious or hallucinatory material” or fail to comply with established criteria. Human review isn’t optional here. It’s a structural requirement baked into every applicable standard.
Regulatory and compliance gaps: Current safety standards (ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 62304) weren’t written to address non-deterministic AI behavior. Applicants proposing AI software will require FAA involvement, signaling that established means of compliance under DO-178C haven’t caught up yet. Teams adopting AI tools today are operating ahead of finalized regulatory frameworks.
None of these are dealbreakers, but they do mean you should treat AI outputs as inputs to human review rather than finished artifacts.
AI Use Cases in Requirements Management
Here are six specific ways teams are using AI in requirements workflows today, from early-stage elicitation through verification and risk assessment.
Automated Requirements Elicitation and Extraction
NLP can pull requirement candidates out of messy stakeholder notes, meeting transcripts, and regulatory documents. This approach has already been used to accelerate initial requirements work, turning unstructured input into structured, traceable requirement sets. The output still needs human review, but the starting point is much closer to a usable baseline.
Intelligent Document Analysis and Relationship Mapping
Instead of manually cross-referencing hundreds of pages, engineers get an automatically generated relationship map showing how requirements connect to design elements, test cases, and risk items. NLP techniques can now create systems diagrams from documentation, detect ambiguity, link similar documents, and improve quality metrics. For teams managing large document sets, automated mapping cuts the time to answer coverage and completeness questions.
Requirements Quality Scoring and Ambiguity Detection
AI scores each requirement against INCOSE and EARS rules, catching vague terms, passive voice, and missing conditions before anything gets baselined. Without that check, ambiguity survives review and shows up months later when a test engineer can’t write a pass/fail criterion. AI can also scan for near-duplicate or conflicting requirements that human reviewers consistently miss.
AI-Powered Test Case Generation
AI can classify requirements by type, translate them to a logical format, and produce test cases covering nominal, boundary, and failure conditions. In the e-mobility domain, requirements have been used to generate linked test cases without manual authoring. For verification engineers facing hundreds of requirements before a milestone, this turns a multi-week manual effort into hours.
Intelligent Traceability and Impact Analysis
Maintaining end-to-end traceability across requirements, architecture, design, implementation, and test artifacts is one of the most labor-intensive parts of regulated development. AI keeps trace links current by detecting when an upstream change creates a gap or suspect link downstream. When a requirement changes, every affected test case, design element, and risk item gets flagged.
Predictive Risk Identification
AI can surface risk at the requirements phase rather than waiting for testing or a regulatory review. Predictive models flag ambiguities most likely to cause downstream rework, identify missing requirements in high-risk areas, and catch conflicting constraints before they spread. AI can also rank requirements by business value, complexity, and technical risk, giving leads a data-informed view of what to build first and where to cut scope without introducing new risk.
How to Evaluate AI Requirements Management Tools
The real question is whether a tool addresses the failure patterns your team already deals with: ambiguous requirements that survive review, trace links that go stale, and audit pressure when nobody can show what happened and why.
When you’re comparing tools, these three things tell you more than any feature list:
Integration with existing workflows: Does the tool sync natively with your ALM, issue tracking (Jira, Azure DevOps), PLM systems, and CI/CD pipelines? Requirements changes need to propagate downstream without manual re-entry.
Traceability and audit trail depth: Bidirectional traceability is a compliance requirement under ISO 26262, DO-178C, and IEC 62304. Look for automated impact analysis, baseline management, and electronic signatures that hold up in a regulatory review.
Support for your specific standards: Does the tool ship with pre-configured templates aligned to your applicable standards, not generic compliance claims?
If a tool checks all three boxes and also scores requirements quality against INCOSE and EARS, it’s worth a closer look. The fastest way to prove value is to run a quality scoring pilot on a single project. Pick a requirement set that’s about to enter review, score it with the tool, and measure whether the review cycle shortens.
Top AI Requirements Management Tools
The right tool depends on your industry, your existing toolchain, and how much regulatory rigor your traceability needs to support. Here are five tools that come up most often.
1. Jama Connect
Jama Connect is a requirements management and traceability platform built for teams developing complex, regulated products across automotive, aerospace, medical devices, and defense. Jama Connect Advisor scores requirements against INCOSE and EARS standards, generates linked test cases, and flags downstream impacts when upstream items change. Live Traceability keeps the full artifact chain visible across the lifecycle.
Pros:
AI quality scoring against INCOSE and EARS standards
Live, bidirectional traceability across the full lifecycle
Pre-built frameworks for ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 62304, and other regulated standards
Jama Connect Review Center supports structured, auditable review workflows
Cons:
Designed for complex, regulated programs, so teams without compliance requirements may not need the full depth
Best for: Automotive, aerospace, defense, and medical device teams building safety-critical or compliance-driven products.
2. IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next
IBM’s cloud-based evolution of the DOORS platform. The Requirements Quality Assistant (RQA) uses Watson AI to score quality and flag ambiguity, passive voice, and missing tolerances during authoring.
Pros:
Long track record in aerospace and defense
Watson-powered scoring pre-trained on 10 INCOSE-based quality issues
Strong configuration management and baselining
Cons:
Administration and configuration can be complex, especially for occasional users, and teams migrating from DOORS Classic should expect a transition period
Performance can degrade on large modules with extensive audit history, with some users reporting slow page loads and high server CPU usage during peak activity
Best for: Aerospace and defense programs already invested in IBM engineering tools.
3. Codebeamer (PTC)
A full ALM platform covering requirements, test, and risk management with built-in regulatory templates. PTC acquired Codebeamer in 2022 and has been integrating it into their Windchill PLM ecosystem.
Pros:
End-to-end ALM with requirements, test, and risk management in one tool
Strong regulatory templates for automotive (ASPICE), medical devices, and aerospace
Good Jira and Jenkins integrations for teams running Agile alongside compliance
Cons:
The full ALM suite can feel heavy for teams that only need requirements management
Integration with PTC’s Windchill PLM is still maturing, and teams outside the PTC ecosystem may not get the full benefit
Best for: Regulated product development teams that want requirements, test, and risk management consolidated in a single ALM platform.
4. Polarion ALM (Siemens)
Siemens’ ALM platform with requirements management, test management, and change tracking. Polarion integrates tightly with the Siemens ecosystem including Teamcenter PLM.
Pros:
Unified ALM covering requirements, test, quality, and change management
Deep integration with Siemens Teamcenter for PLM-connected traceability
Built-in workflow automation and electronic signatures for regulated industries
Cons:
Steep learning curve and complex initial setup, especially without existing Siemens infrastructure
Deployment timelines can be significantly longer than cloud-native alternatives
Best for: Enterprise teams already invested in the Siemens product development ecosystem who need ALM integrated with their PLM.
5. Visure Requirements ALM
An all-in-one ALM platform covering requirements, risk, and test management with a focus on regulated industries. Visure supports ReqIF import/export for data exchange with other requirements tools.
Pros:
Requirements, risk, and test management in a single platform
Strong compliance support for DO-178C, ISO 26262, IEC 62304, and other standards
ReqIF support for requirements data exchange across tools
Cons:
Smaller user community and partner network compared to IBM, Siemens, or PTC
Entry-level costs can be higher than lighter-weight alternatives
Best for: Regulated product development teams looking for an all-in-one requirements and compliance platform outside the major PLM vendor ecosystems.
What AI Looks Like Inside an Actual Requirements Workflow
Jama Connect Advisor™ is a good example of what this looks like in practice. When an engineer writes a requirement, Jama Connect Advisor evaluates it against INCOSE and EARS rules, flags vague terms and structural issues, and returns a quality score before the requirement gets saved. The same tool generates test cases from requirements (with steps, linked back to the source), so verification engineers don’t spend weeks drafting them manually. If a requirement changes later, every linked test case gets a suspect flag automatically. Grifols reduced review cycles from three months to fewer than 30 days after bringing Jama Connect Review Center into their workflow.
The underlying idea is that quality checks and traceability should happen inside the authoring workflow, not as a separate exercise before an audit. When those checks run continuously, requirements stay cleaner, trace links stay current, and the team spends less time on rework and more time on the engineering work that moves the product forward.
Getting Started With AI in Requirements Management
If you’re evaluating where AI fits in your requirements workflow, the fastest way to see value is to pilot quality scoring on a single project. Pick a requirement set that’s about to enter review, score it with an AI tool, and measure whether the review cycle shortens and fewer issues come back from the review board.
Jama Connect offers a free 30-day trial that includes Jama Connect Advisor for requirements quality scoring, AI-generated test cases, and Live Traceability across your full artifact chain. Get started today.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Requirements Management
Can AI replace human engineers in requirements management?
No. AI catches ambiguous language, missing trace links, and structural issues before they propagate downstream. In regulated environments, human review is a structural requirement. AI reduces the manual burden so engineers can focus on judgment calls that require domain expertise.
What should I look for when evaluating AI requirements management tools?
Three things: native integration with your development environment, support for your specific regulatory standards (not generic compliance claims), and AI scoring grounded in recognized frameworks like INCOSE and EARS.
How does AI improve requirements traceability?
Mostly by keeping trace links current without someone having to manually cross-reference a matrix every time something changes. AI tools maintain those links continuously and flag suspect relationships the moment an upstream requirement is modified, so your team catches gaps in hours instead of discovering them weeks later during a review or audit.
Is AI in requirements management ready for safety-critical industries?
Yes, for quality scoring, traceability, and test case generation. But treat AI outputs as inputs to human review. Regulatory frameworks are still catching up to non-deterministic AI behavior, so use AI for detection and drafting while keeping engineers in the approval loop.
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.
Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction to Jama Connect’s Risk Management Package
Stephen Pink: Hello. I’m Stephen Pink. I lead the medical and life sciences solutions architecture team at Jama Software. And today, I’ll be giving an overview of Jama Connect’s risk management package.
Challenges of Traditional Risk Management
Pink: Risk management is the backbone of safe design, but for many medical device companies, ISO 14971 compliance is buried in static spreadsheets that are disconnected from the actual design data.
The problem with this approach is that risk management happens in a silo. When managing risk in traditional documents, it’s very difficult to manage the links between risks and their mitigations. And then every time a requirement changes or we identify new risks, it requires extensive manual review to understand the overall impact on our risk file and our product development lifecycle.
Missing the impact of those changes can also lead to unmitigated hazards that aren’t identified until much later in development, when it becomes much more difficult and costly to correct.
Dynamic Risk Management with Jama Connect
Pink: Jama Connect helps to solve this by allowing you to capture hazard analysis, calculate risk levels, and maintain Live Traceability™ from those hazards and their evaluations to mitigations and verifications, turning your risk file into a dynamic part of your development life cycle, sharing responsibility across the team, and giving you a live view of all the potential risks facing your product in real time.
Pink: Jama Connect’s preconfigured structure allows you to manage a global library of hazards and harms.
If we take a quick peek at my global library, you’ll see I’ve established a global harm and hazard library that I am sharing across all of the different projects that I’m working on. This allows us to standardize a list of common hazards and harms. Jama Connect does come preconfigured with the hazard list from ISO 14971. We can also manage our own, including setting things like the severity of harm and the probability of harm from a hazard that will then be standardized on every product that we’re working on.
Integrating Hazards into Product Development
Pink: As we switch to that product development project where I’m developing the CLEAR three hearing aid, we’ll see as I look into my risk analysis and evaluation component, the harms and hazards that I pulled in from my global library, and then the evaluations of those harms and hazards that I’m performing for this specific product.
We can evaluate each hazard for a specific sequence of events, capturing severity and probability levels here or inheriting those from those related hazards and harms, and ultimately calculating that initial risk level based on configurable lookup matrices and custom logic. This view feels very similar to working in the spreadsheet you might already be using today, but it helps to reduce human error based on globalized configuration for these calculations and deriving the severity and probability level.
Traceability of Risks to Mitigations
Pink: Once the risks are identified, they can also be traced to mitigations if we’ve determined that risk controls are required. So if we come up and enter the trace view, this will show me how each risk is associated to mitigating requirements or even external resources like the instructions for use that will tell the patient how to safely use this hearing aid without exceeding the recommended maximum volume.
Once we have these traces in place, they can also be traced even further down to the verification of these requirements so that we have the full scope of traceability showing the identification of the hazard, the evaluation and risk level, the mitigation with requirements and other resources, and the verification of effectiveness.
Pink: Once all of this is captured, we also can determine the mitigated probability level based on those new controls we’ve put in place, and the residual risk level has now been lowered.
Exporting Risk Reports
Pink: We can also export all of this out of Jama Connect using one of our out-of-the-box risk reports. This is lined with ISO 14971 will give us access to an Excel file here.
So now we can see, after we’ve exported that risk analysis trace, the full scope of hazard identification, pre-mitigation scoring and risk level, controls that we have put in place, and the post mitigation risk levels. We also have a benefit-risk analysis as applicable, and these reports are completely configurable to align with your existing process, your risk calculations, and all of the existing things you’re doing today in Excel, while maintaining a Live Traceability to those design inputs and design control processes that happen every day in Jama Connect. When you stop managing risk in disconnected spreadsheets, safety becomes an integrated part of your design process.
Conclusion and Further Resources
Pink: Thank you for watching this demonstration of risk management in Jama Connect. To learn more about optimizing your risk management process, visit our website at jamasoftware.com, specifically for our risk management package. And if you’re already a Jama Connect customer, your customer success manager or Jama software consultant can also provide additional insights. Thank you for watching.
This is a preview of our recent webinar. Watch the entire webinar HERE.
Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization
Learn how to prevent costly production failures with standardized requirements management.
A survey by Engineering.com revealed that a staggering 83% of companies faced production outcome failures — such as significant delays, cost overruns, product defects, compliance gaps, recalls, omitted requirements, and extensive rework — often stemming from inadequate requirements management.
Join Grant Rhodes, Senior Solutions Consultant, to explore how standardized requirements management can drive consistency, predictability, and a competitive edge. This session will move beyond theory, offering actionable strategies to align cross-functional teams and streamline critical workflows.
Common challenges in standardization, like overcoming resistance and aligning cross-functional teams.
Strategies to maintain process consistency without disrupting current workflows.
How Jama Connect® streamlines requirements elicitation, tracking, change management, and collaboration to prevent costly errors.
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn best practices for successful requirements management and how Jama Connect can support a sustainable and effective approach.
THE VIDEO BELOW IS A PREVIEW OF THIS WEBINAR, WATCH THE ENTIRE PRESENTATION HERE
BELOW IS AN ABBREVIATED SECTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT
Grant Rhodes: Hello, and thank you all for joining. I’m Grant Rhodes, a Senior Solutions Consultant here at Jama Software. It might be that you are new to the discipline of requirements management, or maybe you have been doing it for many years. Either way, I hope I can provide some value today on the topic of standardizing requirements management within an organization. In my career, working with global teams in many different project settings, I’ve seen the importance of standardization firsthand. Requirements management has proven itself a necessary aspect of product development, reducing defects earlier in the development cycle. Standardization of requirements management processes leads to faster and more complete adoption of those processes and greater collaboration across project teams. On the agenda today, we will talk about how standardizing requirements management processes can benefit your organization, and look at some of the challenges that organizations commonly face when developing a standardized process.
Then we will dive into how Jama Connect can make the successful and sustainable implementation of a standardized requirements management process within your organization a reality. Before we get started, let’s make sure that we are aligned on what we mean by requirements management. Requirements management, sometimes called requirements engineering or requirements definition, is the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing, and agreeing on requirements, communicating them to relevant stakeholders, and controlling changes. It is a continuous process throughout product development and is meant to help companies take their raw ideas into more detailed requirements. The pillars of requirements management include requirements definition, requirements validation and verification, and requirements change management. The most fundamental motivation for any requirements management activity is the need to communicate effectively. While requirements are originally elicited on the first steps of the product development lifecycle, it’s important to keep in mind that they are part of a bigger picture and that ownership of that bigger picture may vary.
Rhodes: For example, governance of requirements management processes may fall under your organization’s project or portfolio management office and be controlled centrally, or companies may opt for project-specific ownership. Just as there are multiple approaches to ownership of requirements processes, there is no one size fits all requirements management standard framework, and there are many standards that are proven to work. Examples include those defined in the Systems Engineering Book of Knowledge, the Business Analyst Book of Knowledge, and others. To point out a quote from Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” I highlight this because implementing some of the ideas in this webinar may lead to lively discussion that highlights competing ideas for requirements management and process standards. So now that we have a level set on our definition of requirements management and established that ownership and approach can vary from company to company and even from project to project, let’s move on to our main topic.
Standardizing requirements management across the organization, a concept that can be entirely agnostic and universally beneficial, no matter your project development structure or methodology. There is no question that requirements management has increased in prominence in recent years, and regardless of industry is largely no longer considered something that is nice to have for development, but rather an absolute necessity. Yet for most, implementation details often remain ambiguous and therefore difficult to apply. We can be entirely committed to getting the requirements right with little consensus on what getting the requirements right actually means. Without that agreement, how can we know if we are succeeding? Without a consistent end goal, how can we be sure the effort put into the requirements management process is worthwhile? This is where standardization arrives to save the day. The standard becomes our requirements management plan as opposed to a separate effort for each product or project that detracts from the effort that could be instead focused on development.
Rhodes: There’s massive evidence demonstrating the benefit of defining, deploying, and enforcing requirements management standards for an organization. Those benefits include providing a framework for efficiency, predictability, repeatability, and a benchmark for improvement, better traceability, mitigation of risk, easier training and onboarding, and the elimination of unnecessary rework. Additionally, standardization allows organizations to leverage a diverse array of resources while maintaining consistent results and provides transparency, both in process and work performed. Just as the concept of reusing requirements and leveraging work already done is highly appealing, the standardization of a requirements management process could be viewed as reusing a proven process to ensure the repeatability of a successful development effort. A strong case for standardization is illustrated in the quote, “Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.” What you put in is what you get out. Valuable products are a result of high-quality inputs and high-quality processes.
Even perfect requirements can’t withstand the damaging effects of poor process. The pressure to reduce development time is ever-increasing, and standardization liberates development teams from worrying about the mechanics of the process and allows them to instead give their full focus to solutions development. Consider this quote from Lee Iacocca: “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” Imagine that a new tech company is developing a revolutionary product, but everyone is trusted with their own processes, causing teams to work in silos, maybe even following strong individual processes, but with little alignment. This disconnect can lead to misunderstanding of shared requirements, resulting in bugs and causing delays or extensive meetings to try and realign. If instead the product team defines a standard process for communicating and aligning on the requirements with a communication plan for regular alignment meetings, it would enable them to coordinate more effectively with the same vision about what they’re building.
This blog overviews our recent Datasheet, “Streamline Complex Product Quality Compliance, and Time-to-completion, with Jama Connect for Semiconductors” – To download the entire asset, click HERE.
Streamline Complex Product Quality, Compliance, and Time-to-completion with Jama Connect for Semiconductors
Semiconductor companies face increasing challenges in developing their next-generation products and product families. Product customization and resulting variants make it difficult for development teams to establish and maintain traceability throughout their engineering workflows, especially when design changes occur frequently. This often results in missed ship dates, cost overruns, dissatisfied customers, and, worse still, quality escapes.
Jama Connect for Semiconductors is a custom-built, powerful, and easy-to-use solution that helps automate requirements, testing, and traceability engineering processes that are often done manually in Excel and Word. With Jama Connect for Semiconductors, you will streamline requirements definition and management, bolster review and approval processes, and integrate tests so you can develop the right products with speed, quality, and data integrity – all while maintaining necessary standards compliance.
Accelerated Adoption: Templates, data models, and item types in Jama Connect are preconfigured for common Semiconductor use cases, delivered on day one.
Single Source of Truth: A shared data repository enables Silicon Planners, Platform and Component Architects, Engineers, Testers, and others to collaborate effectively across the product life cycle, helping teams respond to change and mitigate risks.
Visibility Leads to Accountability: Reports and indicators provide real-time status updates on program progress toward milestones.
Reusability: Coordinate custom silicon definition through advanced reuse and sync capabilities to increase work efficiency and consistency.
Contextual Guidance: A Procedure Guide tailored for Semiconductor provides simple process descriptions from the initial Stakeholder MRD to System-level PRDs, through validation and verification.
Jama Connect for Semiconductors is a solution designed and optimized for semiconductor companies. It includes an out-of-the-box Traceability Information Model aligned with systems engineering and semiconductor design best practices, end-to-end traceability from the high-level MRD through post-silicon validation, and a procedure guide with detailed steps for requirement capture, traceability, collaboration, verification reviews, and configuration management baselines.
Jama Connect for Semiconductors: Providing Real-Time Status of Project Requirements
Jama Connect for Semiconductors helps you stay ahead of the competition by strengthening your ability to manage requirements for developing the right products quickly, with high quality, data integrity, and compliance with necessary standards.
What Is IBM DOORS Software? Features, Limitations, and Why Teams Are Switching
If you’ve worked in aerospace, defense, or medical devices, you’ve almost certainly run into IBM DOORS. It’s long been one of the most widely used requirements management tools in regulated industries. But the engineering world has changed since DOORS was built, so a growing number of teams now question whether it still fits their workflows.
This guide breaks down what DOORS does, where it falls short for distributed, compliance-heavy programs, and how tools like Jama Connect® address the gaps.
What Is IBM DOORS Software?
IBM DOORS, or Dynamic Object-Oriented Requirements System, is a requirements management tool for capturing, tracing, and managing changes to requirements throughout development. It’s most common in aerospace, defense, medical devices, and automotive, where regulators expect every requirement to be traceable and every baseline to be documented.
DOORS originated in 1991 as Rational DOORS and today exists as two separate products. DOORS Classic (version 9.x) is the original desktop client, and DOORS Next Generation is a web-based application built on IBM’s Jazz architecture. Despite sharing a name, these are architecturally separate systems, so teams moving between them typically treat it as a full migration rather than an upgrade.
Why Teams Originally Invested in IBM DOORS
The needs that drove DOORS adoption still matter, but DOORS has not kept pace with how teams actually work today. These are the capabilities that made it the default choice for regulated programs:
Bidirectional traceability:DOORS became standard in regulated programs because it maintained linked relationships and an audit-friendly history of those links as requirements changed.
Read-only baselines: Baselines act as frozen snapshots, which fits stage-gate and V-model workflows where teams need an immutable reference at defined milestones.
Audit trails and signatures: For organizations under 21 CFR Part 11, electronic records expectations often drive tool and process choices.
Those capabilities explain why DOORS lasted so long in regulated programs, but they no longer set the tool apart the way they once did. They made DOORS a strong fit for document-centric development, which is also why organizations with established processes often keep it longer than they want to.
Key Features and Capabilities of IBM DOORS Software
Systems engineers and quality leads primarily use DOORS for requirements traceability, baselining, and custom scripting through DOORS eXtension Language (DXL), a scripting language for custom imports, reports, metrics, and tool connections. These are the core capabilities that drove DOORS adoption in regulated development:
Requirements capture and traceability: DOORS organizes requirements into module-based, hierarchical documents and tracks traceability relationships in its own repository, so teams can generate traceability matrices and coverage reports from the stored data.
Baselining and version control: Teams can create frozen baselines for project snapshots and compare versions to see what changed between releases, which fits stage-gate and V-model development workflows.
Change management: DOORS tracks every requirement modification with a full audit history, giving quality and compliance leads a record of what changed, when, and by whom.
DXL scripting and customization: Tool administrators build custom imports, automated reports, and integrations through DXL. Over time, these scripts tend to pile up and become their own maintenance burden.
These features worked well when most development happened in one building with one team, but that model breaks down quickly for distributed, multi-tool, and compliance-heavy programs.
Where IBM DOORS Software Falls Short
Teams tend to reconsider DOORS when the tool starts getting in the way of collaboration, compliance, or how fast engineers can move.
Outdated User Interface and Steep Learning Curve
The DOORS interface feels dated and inefficient for authoring, review, and navigation compared to current web-based tools. That friction shows up most during reviews, when large numbers of stakeholders need to read and comment quickly.
The learning curve makes this worse because DOORS requires careful upfront setup of its database and information architecture, and poor early design can create long-term cleanup work.
Limited Real-Time Collaboration
DOORS was designed for a world where engineers sat in the same building and passed documents through formal review gates. It has some web access, but real-time co-editing and inline comments on specific requirements aren’t built into the core product. When reviews require input from distributed teams across time zones, work tends to spill into email and Word documents instead.
No Cloud-Native Deployment Option
DOORS Classic is on-premises only, and even DOORS Next requires significant migration and administration effort to deploy. For organizations that need strict data residency, validated environments, or lower upgrade effort, that means ongoing IT work to keep servers running, patched, and validated.
High Administration and Maintenance Burden
For a lot of teams, the pressure point isn’t a single technical limitation. It’s the cumulative maintenance work that builds up around customization, reporting, and data cleanup, and it usually comes from a few predictable places:
Specialized scripting dependency: DXL-heavy environments often require a small set of specialists who maintain scripts, troubleshoot imports, and update reports as processes change.
Administration workload: Database design, permission models, and project setup can require dedicated tool administrators, particularly in multi-program organizations.
Migration rework: Custom logic built for DOORS Classic frequently has to be rebuilt when moving to DOORS Next or another requirements tool.
Once those support tasks become routine, the tool starts consuming engineering time instead of protecting it, and that’s usually when organizations start looking at alternatives.
The Business Risk of Staying on IBM DOORS Software
Beyond the day-to-day friction, these limitations carry real risk for regulated programs, from audit gaps to missed updates to downstream test cases and delayed decisions that compound over time.
Compliance Exposure in Regulated Industries
Regulations are changing faster than legacy desktop tools were built to handle. The FDA QMSR, which took effect on February 2, 2026, incorporates ISO 13485:2016 by reference, meaning FDA now directly enforces ISO 13485 as part of its own regulation. The FDA’s cybersecurity rules under Section 524B for “cyber devices” (devices that contain software or have network connectivity) also raise the bar for traceability between cybersecurity risk analysis, design, and postmarket activities.
In aerospace and defense, teams face similar pressure around DO-178 A, B, and C, where DOORS hasn’t kept pace with the frameworks auditors actually expect. Across all of these regulations, the expectation is the same: requirements need to link through design, risk, and testing from start to finish. If those links break, the gaps usually show up during audits or postmarket reviews, when it’s too late to fix things cheaply.
Rework, Delays, and Downstream Quality Failures
Regulatory exposure is one concern, but the day-to-day engineering cost is just as real. When requirements, risk, and test artifacts aren’t kept aligned, upstream changes don’t consistently flag downstream test cases or risk assessments. Engineers can keep building against outdated assumptions until the problem shows up at integration or verification.
At that point, the question shifts from whether a change is needed to how much rework the program can absorb without affecting milestones, quality targets, or certification timelines. The later these issues surface, the more expensive they are to fix, which is exactly why live traceability matters more than stored traceability.
Product Failures, Recalls, and Missed Launches
When traceability gaps go undetected long enough, the consequences move beyond schedule and budget. Products can fail to perform specified functions, customers can discover defects after launch, and entire releases can miss their deadlines or blow past cost targets.
In the worst cases, regulatory bodies reject submissions or require post-launch recalls. All of these trace back to the same root cause: requirements, verification, and risk management weren’t connected tightly enough to catch problems before they reached production.
What to Look for in a Modern Requirements Management Tool
The right replacement for IBM DOORS should keep traceability current instead of treating it as static documentation. These four capabilities separate current platforms from legacy ones:
Live change impact: When a requirement changes, every linked test case, design element, and risk item should be flagged automatically. Impact analysis should trace effects all the way downstream, not just one level deep.
Collaboration in context: Reviews, comments, and decisions should happen at the requirement or test level, with an audit-ready record of who decided what and when.
Open integration: The tool should connect to the rest of the engineering toolchain through APIs and standards without forcing every team into one vendor’s tool set.
Proven results in regulated environments: Look for documented case studies from teams in your industry. For example, Dexcom reported a 60% efficiency improvement in systems engineering after switching to Jama Connect.
Those criteria help teams tell the difference between tools that store traceability and tools that keep it current throughout development. For a structured breakdown, take a look at our Buyer’s Guide to Selecting a Requirements Management Solution.
How Jama Connect Compares to IBM DOORS Software
Jama Connect is a cloud-based requirements management and traceability system built for live traceability, web-based collaboration, and open integration across complex, regulated product development. That’s why it often comes up when engineering groups evaluate a DOORS Next migration.
Here’s how the two platforms compare across the most important capabilities:
Capability
IBM DOORS
Jama Connect
Traceability
Stored traceability with manual baseline comparisons and matrix generation
Live Traceability™ with automatic suspect flagging and real-time coverage tracking
Requirements quality
No built-in quality scoring
Jama Connect Advisor™ scores requirements against INCOSE rules and EARS patterns during authoring
Cloud-native with no on-premises infrastructure for cloud deployments
Collaboration
Desktop client; web access requires a separate server component (DOORS Web Access)
Web-based with list, document, and trace views for distributed review
Here’s what each of the capabilities above actually looks like when you’re using Jama Connect:
Live Traceability: When a requirement changes, every linked downstream artifact (test cases, risk items, design elements) is automatically flagged as suspect so owners can review the impact and update the affected work. Traceability Information Models (TIMs), which define the expected relationships between artifact types, surface coverage gaps automatically instead of waiting for a manual matrix refresh.
Jama Connect Advisor: Scores requirements against INCOSE quality rules and EARS notation patterns during authoring, catching ambiguity and incomplete language before it propagates downstream. It also suggests refined rewrites so authors can fix flagged requirements in place, and can auto-generate test cases from approved requirements to speed up verification planning.
Jama Connect Interchange: Keeps Jama Connect in bidirectional sync with tools like Jira and Azure DevOps through ReqIF and REST APIs, replacing the custom DXL scripts that DOORS environments have to maintain.
Cloud-native deployment: Web-based access with list, document, and trace views, with no on-premises infrastructure required for cloud deployments.
Familiar interface: The list view resembles Excel for teams migrating from spreadsheets, and the document view reads like a structured specification for review, which reduces onboarding friction and keeps traceability from spilling back into email and spreadsheets.
The migration itself can also surface problems that were hidden inside DOORS for years. As one project manager put it after migrating, “The whole migration of the documentation over to Jama Connect was an eye-opener, especially how it revealed the large number of duplicate documents we had that could be significantly reduced.”
Why Teams Are Switching from IBM DOORS Software to Jama Connect
If your team is spending more time maintaining IBM DOORS than actually using it, that’s a good sign you’ve outgrown it. When reviews happen in email because the interface is too clunky, when traceability only gets updated right before an audit, and when a simple migration to DOORS Next feels like a full program in itself, the real cost is all the engineering time your team loses working around it.
In each case, the tool that was supposed to keep traceability current is now the reason it falls behind. If your team needs Live Traceability, cloud-based collaboration, and integration with the rest of your engineering toolchain without the maintenance overhead, Jama Connect is built for exactly that. See how other organizations have made the switch from IBM DOORS, or start your free 30-day trial to see Jama Connect in action.
Frequently Asked Questions About IBM DOORS Software
Is IBM DOORS still supported?
IBM still supports DOORS Next Generation, but DOORS Classic 9.6.x reached end of support in September 2025, and while 9.7.x has extended support, IBM has not announced new feature development. Teams still on Classic often find that moving to a platform like Jama Connect can be less disruptive than migrating to DOORS Next, since the DOORS Next migration requires rebuilding DXL scripts and reworking workflows anyway.
What is the difference between IBM DOORS Classic and IBM DOORS Next Generation?
DOORS Classic (9.x) is a desktop client with DXL scripting for customization. DOORS Next Generation is a web-based application on IBM’s Jazz architecture with different extension and workflow concepts. Because they’re architecturally separate, teams treat the move between them as a full migration, not an upgrade.
Why are engineering teams moving away from IBM DOORS?
Common triggers include unsustainable maintenance load, an interface that slows adoption among newer engineers, and the need for web-based collaboration. Regulatory changes like the FDA QMSR and FDA Section 524B also push teams toward connected traceability that legacy desktop tools weren’t designed to support. Platforms like Jama Connect are among the alternatives teams evaluate when moving off DOORS.
How do you migrate from IBM DOORS to another tool?
Teams commonly use ReqIF export/import to preserve hierarchy and trace relationships. API-based migration works for more complex transformations. The biggest variable is how much custom DXL logic needs to be rebuilt or replaced. For migration planning, see Jama Software’s DOORS alternative comparison.
This blog overviews our Customer Story, “Transmutex Wastes No Time Choosing Jama Connect for Developing Nuclear Waste Recycling Systems” – Download the entire story HERE.
Transmutex Wastes No Time Choosing Jama Connect for Developing Nuclear Waste Recycling Systems
“Jama Connect’s ease of use is a big plus for us because we have a lot of people inexperienced with requirements who can now author and review requirements without training or other meetings,” – ALEXANDRE CARVALHO, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, TRANSMUTEX
ABOUT TRANSMUTEX
Transmutex is a startup reinventing nuclear energy by turning nuclear waste into clean energy, fresh fuel, and other products with industrial applications. The company is currently in a conceptual design phase for a nuclear reactor coupled with an accelerator that generates energy and a reprocessing plant that receives spent fuel assemblies to separate usable from unusable material. The resulting waste has a potential 5 to 200 times reduction in volume and 300,000 years to 300 years of radioactive lifetime reduction which reduces transportation, storage, and liability costs that exceed $90 billion in the U.S alone – these are expected to escalate to $186 billion if nuclear capacity triples as announced at the COP28 declaration.
CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
Working in the highly regulated nuclear reactor and waste processing industry in collaboration with CERN, leading laboratories, industrials, and other startups, Transmutex requires rigorous requirements management and traceability processes to ensure safety, compliance, and project success.
Initially using Word and Excel documents to track requirements, the team knew that this was no way to trace up to 100,000 requirements for several complex systems and entire facilities to ensure requirements quality, documentation consistency, and change management reliability.
Transmutex chose Jama Connect over IBM® DOORS Next®, Cameo, and Capella for its combination of ease-of-use, requirements quality verification, customization, integration, and flexibility that provided the best fit to fuel the company’s development projects and growth.
Intuitive, easy-to-use solution allowing people unfamiliar with requirements to participate in authoring and reviewing requirements
Requirements management customized to fit with the current startup processes and team, with flexibility to adapt to growth
Dashboards tuned specifically for each team, including one providing a quick status check of the health and quality of requirements
Quality verification of requirements authored and analyzed using Jama Connect Advisor™, allowing less experienced people to write requirements with confidence
Complete history of discussions and analyses of requirements and risk accessible to everyone
““We have a dashboard which we call ‘the good, the bad, and the ugly’ with indicators that we create using Jama Connect’s powerful filters that allows us to quickly check the health and quality status of requirements to ensure that they are all precise, traced, and confirmed.” – ALEXANDRE CARVALHO, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, TRANSMUTEX
CHALLENGES
Tracing up to 100,000 requirements for complex systems and entire facilities cannot be done using Word and Excel documents
Involving people who are unfamiliar with requirements to be involved in authoring, commenting on, and reviewing requirements
Identifying well written vs. poorly written requirements in a systematic way to avoid inconsistent documentation quality
Transmutex recognized that using Word and Excel documents would not enable its teams to manage large volumes of requirements with the quality and consistency needed to achieve design goals and regulatory compliance.
EVALUATION
Ease of use and flexibility to ensure participation of a diverse user base
Comprehensive requirements traceability from high-level systems to subsystems, with documentation needed for regulatory compliance
Integration with architectural models in existing MBSE tools
After evaluating IBM DOORS, Capella, Cameo, and Jama Connect, Transmutex selected Jama Connect based on its ease of use in authoring, collaborating, reviewing, and tracing requirements of complex systems and subsystems. The company first learned about Jama Connect through G2, which has reported Jama Connect as the top-ranked solution by customers for years. Unlike competitors with steep learning curves, Jama Connect offered an intuitive interface that allowed the team with varying technical skills to become productive quickly, which was crucial for a startup operating under tight timelines. Using Cameo Datahub, the team integrated the requirements in Jama Connect with their MBSE architectural models in Cameo.
“Using Jama Connect Advisor to verify the quality of the requirements gives confidence to people who are not used to writing requirements.” – ALEXANDRE CARVALHO, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, TRANSMUTEX
Intuitive, easy-to-use solution allowing people unfamiliar with requirements to participate in authoring and reviewing requirements
Requirements management customized to fit with the current startup processes and team, with flexibility to adapt to growth
Dashboards tuned specifically for each team, including one providing a quick status check of the health and quality of requirements
Complete history of discussions and analyses of requirements and risk accessible to everyone
Quality verification of requirements authored and analyzed using Jama Connect Advisor, allowing less experienced people to write requirements with confidence
“The ability to customize Jama Connect to our processes and teams means that we don’t need to compromise on half-done analysis or requirements or complicate the process further.” – ALEXANDRE CARVALHO, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, TRANSMUTEX
The Long-Term Value of Jama Software’s Comprehensive Customer Support
For many SaaS solutions, the term “Customer Success” is often synonymous with “onboarding.” It’s viewed as a temporary phase — a handshake, a setup wizard, a few training sessions, and then a wave goodbye as you sail off into the sea of development alone.
But treating customer success as a one-time event is a missed opportunity, especially when dealing with a platform as powerful and customizable as Jama Connect®.
Product and systems development are not static. Your processes evolve, your teams grow, regulations change, and the market demands shift. If your engineering process is iterative, your relationship with the software that manages it should be, too.
Jama Software’s Customer Success Programs are designed to be a long-term partnership. While we certainly help you get up and running, our true value lies in helping you continuously incorporate lessons learned, optimize your workflows, and adapt the platform to meet new challenges. Here is how leveraging a long-term engagement with our experts can transform Jama Connect from a tool you use into a strategic asset that grows with you.
Initial Onboarding and Launch Should Be a Foundation, not a Finish Line
The first step in any journey is crucial, and our Adoption-oriented Approach is designed to get your teams productive quickly. We know that replacing legacy tools or moving from document-based workflows to a digital engineering platform can feel daunting.
Our initial engagement focuses on high-velocity onboarding. We work with your team to align your people, processes, and data, ensuring that the initial configuration of Jama Connect matches the practicalities of how your teams actually work.
However, a foundation is meant to be built upon. The initial launch establishes your “Day One” capabilities, but “Day Two” and beyond are where the real efficiency gains happen. By viewing onboarding as the start of an iterative cycle rather than a checkbox, you set the stage for continuous improvement.
“Having Jama Software’s Professional Services was critical for helping us set up Jama Connect in a way that made most sense for the automotive industry. They helped us get up and running quickly, but they also knew which knobs and levers of Jama Connect to pull to customize it perfectly for our team. They helped us build processes around Jama Connect that are specific to our industry vertical and they continue to help us as industry and customer best practices change.” Kurt Shuler, Vice President of Marketing – ArterisIP
Expert Consulting and Training
One of the biggest challenges in systems engineering is bridging the gap between theoretical best practices (like INCOSE guidelines) and the messy reality of daily development. This is where our Expert Consulting and Training services shine.
Our consultants aren’t just software trainers; they are industry veterans with deep domain expertise in automotive, medical devices, aerospace, and more. They understand that a “textbook” implementation might not survive first contact with a complex supply chain or a tight regulatory deadline.
“In my interactions, it seems Jama Software employees know a lot about Systems Engineering and knows aerospace’s concerns.” Louis Huerta, Starlab Deputy Lead Systems Engineer – Nanoracks
Through ongoing consulting, we help you:
Balance Best Practices with Reality: Tailor industry standards to fit your specific organizational culture and constraints.
Refine Workflows: As your team becomes more comfortable with Jama Connect, our experts can help you introduce more sophisticated workflows that might have been too complex for Day One.
Train New Roles: As you scale, you will need to onboard new admins, power users, and stakeholders. Our bespoke private trainings ensure knowledge isn’t lost when personnel changes occur.
What happens six months after launch? Or two years? Often, teams fall into a routine. They use the tool the way they were taught during week one, even if their process has fundamentally changed.
A long-term engagement with our Customer Success team allows for continuous optimization. This involves regular checkpoints to assess how the tool is performing against your business goals.
Benchmarking and Scoring
A key component of this is using data to drive decisions. We help you leverage tools like Trace Score™ and Requirement Quality Score™. These metrics provide objective benchmarks to see where your team stands.
Are your requirements clear and verifiable?
Is your traceability coverage improving or degrading over time?
By analyzing these scores iteratively, our consultants work with you to target specific areas for improvement. It transforms “feeling like we could do better” into “knowing exactly what to fix.”
“The Jama Software consultants assigned to our Ford account have a good understanding of the tool and our business. Their knowledge and expertise have been valuable.” Sekhar Ghandikota, Senior Engineer – Ford Motor
Process Improvement
Optimization also means incorporating process improvements. Perhaps you started with a simple V-model but are moving toward Agile or a hybrid approach. Or maybe you acquired a new division that needs to be brought into the fold. Our Success Programs are designed to manage these transitions, helping you onboard new teams and adopt new Jama Connect capabilities as they are released.
Technical Services
As your usage of Jama Connect deepens, your technical needs will likely become more sophisticated. Our Technical Services team is available to address support needs that go beyond standard troubleshooting.
This includes Development Services to create custom reports, extensions, and scripts. For example, you might need a specific compliance report format for an upcoming audit, or a custom script to automate a repetitive task. Rather than utilizing your own engineering resources to build these internal tools, you can leverage our technical experts who know the platform inside and out.
“The Jama Software customer support/success teams always take time to understand our issues and address our teams needs in a timely fashion. They also take time to explain or train our team members on various aspects of using Jama Connect and how best to optimize our use of it.” Director – Internet Software & Services Company
Integration and Data Migration – Enabling Live Traceability™
Silos are the enemy of efficiency. To achieve Live Traceability™, Jama Connect needs to speak to the rest of your ecosystem — whether that’s JIRA for task management, MATLAB for modeling, or automated testing tools.
Our Integration Services help you connect these critical systems. But integration is rarely a “set it and forget it” task. As you add new tools to your stack or change how data flows between teams, our services team ensures those connections remain robust.
Furthermore, Data Services support complex migrations. If you are acquiring legacy data from a merger, or moving off an older tool mid-project, we assist with data migration and exchange extensions. This ensures your “Single Source of Truth” remains accurate and comprehensive, regardless of where the data originated.
Customer Success as an Iterative Advantage
Successful product and systems development is not about reaching a static state of perfection; it is about the ability to adapt, learn, and improve. Your relationship with Jama Connect should reflect that.
By treating Jama Software’s Customer Success Programs as a long-term, iterative engagement, you unlock the full potential of the platform. You move beyond basic usage to strategic optimization, ensuring that as your business grows and changes, your engineering platform remains a catalyst for innovation, not a bottleneck.
Don’t let your success journey end at onboarding. Engage with us to continuously refine your processes, improve your requirement quality, and achieve your most ambitious business goals.
Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Patrick Garman and Kenzie Jonsson.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Industrial Machinery Development Solution
Streamline Industrial Machinery Development with Jama Connect!
In this Features in Five session, Patrick Garman, Solution Lead for Industrial Automation and Machinery at Jama Software, demonstrates how Jama Connect’s Industrial Machinery Data Model empowers teams to accelerate development and maximize project success in the industrial machinery space.
Key highlights include:
Purpose-built support for complex machinery, from robotic assembly cells to heavy equipment.
Centralized systems engineering with integrated safety, cybersecurity, risk management, and testing.
Tools for improving requirements quality, identifying gaps early, and ensuring seamless traceability.
Introduction to Industrial Machinery Data Model
Hi, everyone. I’m Patrick Garman, Solution Lead for Industrial Automation and Machinery at Jama Software. Today, I’ll introduce our industrial machinery data model and why it’s so powerful for teams building sophisticated machinery. Industrial machinery includes systems like robotic assembly cells, packaging equipment, elevators, and heavy machinery. Any automated system with software, safety, or network components.
Integration of Standards and Systems Engineering
These products must comply with a wide range of standards, and our data model integrates systems engineering, safety, cybersecurity, risk management, and testing into one structure in Jama Connect.
This gives your teams a head start so you can launch products faster without reinventing processes. With predefined structures, traceability models, and workflows, Jama Connect reduces rework and recalls by exposing gaps early. Centralized traceability helps teams respond to change confidently, measure progress, and identify risks before they become problems. At the core is our traceability information model, which enforces good engineering practices, prevents invalid links, and highlights gaps automatically. Let’s see how this works and looks in the tool.
First, here’s the project explorer tree. You’ll notice that it’s organized by product architecture as well as domain. This makes it easy for project members to quickly locate relevant data. And, of course, XAML is more than just a repository for requirements. We’re actively managing those requirements based on stakeholder review and feedback.
Utilizing Live Trace Explorer™ for Traceability
Next, let’s look at Live Trace Explorer. This gives a real-time view of traceability coverage across our project. We can immediately see what’s complete, what’s missing coverage, and so on.
Identifying Gaps in Coverage
This is really one of the biggest value drivers, knowing your gaps early before they turn into late-stage redesign. So let’s drill into one of these gaps right now. So I can see that I have just shy of seventeen percent coverage at the system level.
Using Trace View™ to Add Coverage
I can click that metric in the Live Trace Explorer diagram to open Trace View and find exactly where I need to add coverage. In Trace View, you can see that Jama Connect is prompting me to add coverage where required links are missing.
Creating and Managing Test Cases
And you can take action directly from this view to add that coverage, or we can open a specific requirement for a more detailed view. Here we have a system requirement with missing test coverage. I can author test cases directly in Jama Connect using the add related feature, or I can use Jama Connect Advisor™’s test case intelligence tool to generate suggested test cases, complete with test steps based on the context I provide. But of course, traceability doesn’t end with test coverage.
Jama Connect integrates directly with Jira to track development tasks. Jama Connect also has turnkey integrations for the most commonly used digital engineering and productivity tools. For example, I’m able to link my subsystem requirements to model elements in Simulink, again, with one click, links to the source artifacts. Pulling data from your digital thread into Jama Connect is not about duplicating work. Each team works in the tool fit for their purpose, and that work is reflected in Jama Connect for traceability and in context reporting. For teams managing product lines or customer-specific customizations, we can create catalog or library projects for reusable requirements.
Reusability and Component Management
With reuse, we can easily pull a reusable component and its related requirements into any project, and we can also use sync comparison to see which products a part or component is being leveraged in and how it may vary from what we have in our library. And that concludes our tour of the Industrial Machinery data model in Jama Connect. If you’d like a deeper dive or to learn more about Jama Connect Advisor and our live integration capabilities, please let us know.
AI in Requirements Management: Where It Works, Where It Doesn’t, and What to Evaluate
