Jama Connect® Strengthens its Lead as the #1 Requirements Management Solution in G2®’s Summer 2024 Report
We are thrilled to announce that Jama Connect® has once again been named the overall leader in the G2 Grid® Report for Requirements Management Software for Summer 2024.
G2’s rankings are based on authentic user reviews and data gathered from online sources and social networks, analyzed through their unique v3.0 algorithm. The Summer 2024 G2 Grid® Report reflects scores calculated up until June 4, 2024.
In addition to being recognized as the top requirements management software, Jama Connect® has earned several other accolades for Summer 2024:
Overall Leader
Enterprise Leader
EMEA Leader
Europe Leader
Small-Business Leader
Mid-Market Leader
Momentum Leader
Learn more about the Summer 2024 G2 Grid for top Requirements Management Software products: DOWNLOAD IT HERE
Jama Software® is honored to receive this recognition, which highlights the value we bring to our customers, especially those moving from document-based approaches to complex product, systems, and software development. We are grateful to our customers for their valuable feedback on our product, services, and support.
Customer Feedback Highlights
“Jama [Connect] is not only a ‘document-oriented’ ALM tool, it gives the organization the ability to map the project structure the product structure making it an easy entry point for R&D folks. Configured properly, it is a real technical and regulatory ‘single source of truth.” – Frederic Fiquet, Director, Systems Engineering
“Product Design teams need a requirements management tool like Jama [Connect]. Using Jama Connect allows our software development team to have a well-organized and well-written set of requirements. It allows us to more easily maintain a baseline of features in our continuously evolving software.” — Mark M., Mid-Market
Our commitment is to provide the best possible experience for our users, and being named the overall leader is a testament to their satisfaction and success with Jama Connect.
From all of us at Jama Software, thank you!
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/07/2024-07-25-g2-leader-summer2024.png512986Jama Software/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJama Software2024-07-25 03:00:312024-07-22 16:35:53Jama Connect® Strengthens its Lead as the #1 Requirements Management Solution in G2®’s Summer 2024 Report
How to Overcome Development Challenges: Proving Regulatory Compliance in Complex Product and Systems Development
As we enter the second half of 2024, development of complex products and systems often encounters the intricate web of regulatory compliance. From medical devices and automotive components to aerospace systems and software applications, ensuring adherence to stringent regulations is critical for both market access and consumer safety. However, proving regulatory compliance presents a multitude of challenges that can impede development timelines, inflate costs, and complicate project management. Fortunately, tools like Jama Connect® offer robust solutions to these challenges, streamlining the compliance process and enhancing overall efficiency.
The Challenges of Proving Regulatory Compliance
1: Diverse and Evolving Regulation
Complexity: Different industries are governed by a myriad of regulatory bodies, each with its own set of rules and standards. For example, the medical device industry must comply with FDA regulations in the U.S., CE marking in Europe, and various other international standards.
Evolution: Regulations are not static; they evolve to keep pace with technological advancements, emerging risks, and geopolitical changes. This continuous evolution necessitates constant monitoring and adaptation.
2: Traceability and Documentation
Traceability: Ensuring traceability from requirements through to testing and validation is essential for demonstrating compliance. This involves linking every design decision, change, and test result back to the initial regulatory requirements.
Documentation: Regulatory bodies demand extensive documentation as proof of compliance. Managing and organizing these documents can be a herculean task, particularly in large-scale projects with numerous stakeholders.
3: Collaboration and Communication
Interdisciplinary Teams: Complex systems development typically involves interdisciplinary teams, including engineers, designers, testers, and compliance officers. Effective collaboration and communication across these teams are crucial for ensuring that compliance is maintained throughout the development lifecycle.
Stakeholder Alignment: Aligning all stakeholders on compliance goals and processes can be challenging, especially in large organizations with decentralized teams.
4: Risk Management
Identification: Identifying potential risks related to regulatory compliance early in the development process is critical. These risks can stem from technological uncertainties, supply chain issues, or changes in regulatory requirements.
Mitigation: Developing and implementing strategies to mitigate identified risks requires a proactive and systematic approach, integrating risk management into the overall development process.
Jama Connect is a comprehensive requirements management platform designed to address the complexities of regulatory compliance in product and systems development. Here’s how it helps teams navigate and overcome these challenges:
“We develop complex products that require multidisciplinary work and V-cycle traceability. A tool like Jama Connect is required, and Jama Connect does the job well.” – Nicolas Ohlmann, CTO, CIXI
1: Centralized Requirement Management
Unified Platform: Jama Connect provides a centralized platform where all requirements, tests, and risks can be managed and tracked. This unified approach ensures that all compliance-related information is easily accessible and up-to-date.
Real-Time Updates: With real-time updates and version control, teams can ensure that everyone is working with the most current information, reducing the risk of compliance breaches due to outdated data.
“Jama Connect is a modern solution for requirement management. Other tools are either outdated, cheap, modern-looking clones of IBM DOORS, or insufficient in functionality.” – Requirement Manager, Professional Services Company
2: Enhanced Traceability
End-to-End Traceability: Jama Connect enables end-to-end traceability by linking requirements, design decisions, test cases, and validation results. This comprehensive traceability ensures that all regulatory requirements are met and can be easily demonstrated during audits.
Audit Trails: Detailed audit trails provide a clear record of all changes and decisions, facilitating smoother and more efficient compliance audits.
3: Collaboration and Communication Tools
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Jama Connect fosters collaboration across interdisciplinary teams through its integrated communication tools. This ensures that all team members are aligned on compliance objectives and can easily share information and updates.
Stakeholder Engagement: The platform supports stakeholder engagement by providing customizable dashboards and reports, enabling clear and effective communication of compliance status and progress.
“Investing in a good requirements management tool is a logical step to avoiding the common pitfalls of software development projects. Jama Connect provides the necessary tools to allow a team to manage huge amounts of requirements.” – Director, Solutions Delivery
4: Robust Risk Management
Risk Identification and Assessment: Jama Connect includes tools for identifying and assessing compliance risks, integrating risk management into the overall development process from the outset.
Risk Mitigation Plans: The platform supports the development and tracking of risk mitigation plans, ensuring that potential compliance issues are addressed proactively and systematically.
“I have used various requirements management tools throughout my career spanning over two decades and Jama Connect scores big when it comes to user interface. It is very easy to onboard the tool into the system with minimal training needs for the user groups. This does not belittle the functional core that a creator could do with the tool configuring it. I highly recommend Jama Connect for any organization working on safety-critical systems.” – Senior Manager, Biotechnology Company
Proving regulatory compliance in complex product and systems development is fraught with challenges, from navigating diverse and evolving regulations to ensuring traceability and effective collaboration. Jama Connect provides a powerful solution to these challenges, offering a centralized platform for requirement management, enhanced traceability, robust collaboration tools, and comprehensive risk management capabilities. With Jama Connect, teams can keep up with the ever-changing regulations thanks to our solutions developed and updated by our leading industry experts. By leveraging Jama Connect, teams can streamline the compliance process, reduce risks, and ultimately deliver high-quality, compliant products to market more efficiently.
“We use Jama Connect for requirements, risk, and verification/validation management, as well as integrating Jira and Enterprise Architect. Having traceability in one tool is going to be so helpful for our product development.” – Principal Systems Engineer, Health Care Providers & Services Company
Whether you’re developing cutting-edge medical devices, innovative automotive systems, or advanced software applications, Jama Connect can help you navigate the complexities of regulatory compliance and achieve your development goals with confidence.
Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by McKenzie Jonsson, and Mark Levitt.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/07/Compliance-1.jpg10801920McKenzie Jonsson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgMcKenzie Jonsson2024-07-24 03:00:092024-07-22 13:58:44How to Overcome Development Challenges: Proving Regulatory Compliance in Complex Product and Systems Development
In this blog, we recap a section of our recent eBook, “Simplify Audit Documentation by Leveraging the Power of an Itemized Database” – Click HERE to read the whole thing.
Simplify Audit Documentation by Leveraging the Power of an Itemized Database
How to enhance efficiency, auditability, and stay ahead of the competition with Jama Connect® for Medical Device Development
In the current landscape of medical device and life sciences development — in addition to facing relentless pressures to innovate, remain competitive, and release quality products — medical device developers also must comply with rigorous regulations and standards for their products to be marketed, distributed, and sold in regulated markets like the United States and the European Union.
However, reliance on traditional documents or legacy document-driven systems like Cognition Cockpit and Polarion poses challenges for professionals, particularly those in roles such as quality assurance. This eBook delves into the transition from document-centric workflows to itemized databases, focusing on Jama Connect® as a solution to enhance efficiency and auditability in product development processes.
Traditional product development processes for medical device companies revolve around document-centric workflows. This section highlights the inherent limitations and complexities
associated with managing requirements, traceability, and change control solely through documents.
Challenges include:
Manual traceability matrices often lead to a time-consuming and error-prone process, making it challenging to maintain accurate and up-to-date links between requirements, design elements, and test cases, which are critical for regulatory compliance and product quality.
Version control issues can result in confusion, inconsistencies, and potential compliance risks, as stakeholders struggle to identify the most current documentation amidst multiple iterations, revisions, and parallel development efforts.
Difficulties working in an Agile workflow can hinder traceability and documentation, as the rapid pace of iterations and evolving requirements make it challenging to maintain clear and auditable links between user stories, tasks, and regulatory documentation, impacting the ability to demonstrate compliance and validation.
The absence of a single source of truth contributes to inefficiencies, as disparate document repositories result in data silos, inconsistent information, and difficulty in
reconciling different versions of documentation, leading to confusion and potential errors in audits or reviews.
Slow quality management processes can delay the verification and validation of documentation, impacting the timely detection and resolution of compliance issues, and the ability to demonstrate adherence to regulatory standards, potentially delaying product approvals and market entry.
The risk of errors escalating during iterative design phases grows as manual documentation processes and fragmented tools make it difficult to track and manage changes, increasing the likelihood of overlooked requirements, design inconsistencies, and compliance gaps that can surface during regulatory assessments and audits.
Central to this transition is understanding the inherent value of itemized databases like Jama Connect. This section explores the tangible benefits, including real-time traceability, proactive change management, and improved product quality.
By embracing itemized databases, organizations can:
Accelerate Product Development Cycles: By accelerating product development cycles, organizations can increase their market competitiveness and improve their ability to meet customer demands, while minimizing the risk of delays or missed opportunities caused by manual documentation processes.
Maintain Proactive Traceability: By maintaining proactive traceability, organizations can demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements, ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the development process, while enabling faster detection and resolution of issues before they escalate.
Gain Visibility into Progress and Coverage: By gaining visibility into progress and coverage, organizations can identify gaps and redundancies in their documentation, prioritize requirements, and allocate resources effectively, improving overall product quality, and reducing the risk of compliance issues.
Proactively Manage Risks: By proactively managing risks, organizations can reduce the likelihood of errors and minimize the potential impact of issues, ensuring patient safety and reducing the risk of product recalls, legal liability, or damage to reputation.
Link Suspect Items and Manage Change: By linking suspect items and effectively managing change, organizations can streamline the change management process, minimizing the impact of revisions on other items, and ensuring that each change is properly reviewed and validated before implementation.
Maintain an Agile Workflow: By easily maintaining an Agile workflow, organizations can support their development teams, empowering them to collaborate and innovate effectively, while ensuring that their processes remain compliant and traceable throughout the development lifecycle.
Enhance Documentation: By enhancing compliance documentation, organizations can improve their ability to adhere to regulatory requirements and expectations, minimize the risk of non-compliance, and demonstrate their commitment to patient safety and quality outcomes.
Reuse Requirements: By reusing requirements and enabling release management, organizations can optimize their resources, reduce duplicative efforts, and improve their ability to deliver products that meet customer needs and expectations.
Automate Version Control: By automating version control, organizations can minimize the risk of errors caused by manual processes, streamline the review and approval of documentation, and improve their ability to manage multiple iterations and revisions while maintaining an accurate audit trail.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/07/2024-07-11_simplify-audit-documentation-med-ebook-2-1.jpg5121024Jama Software/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJama Software2024-07-23 07:00:092024-07-23 09:23:40Simplify Audit Documentation by Leveraging the Power of an Itemized Database
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Azure DevOps Integration
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 the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in about five minutes.
In this Features in Five Integration Series video, Susan Manupelli, Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – will demonstrate the Azure DevOps integration with Jama Connect®.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Susan Manupelli: Hello, and welcome to the Features in Five Integration series. My name is Susan Manupelli, and I’m a Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software. Today, we will be walking through Azure DevOps integration. We make it possible for you to integrate Jama Connect with your preferred best-of-breed software to achieve Live Traceability™ across the end-to-end development cycle.
Live Requirements Traceability is the ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement, no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans. This enables significant productivity and quality improvements, dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls, and ultimately results in faster time to market.
Manupelli: Before I demonstrate the integration, I’d like to share a slide that depicts the flow of information. The top represents our process as defined in Java Connect through relationship rules. At the bottom, we’re depicting Azure DevOps. This slide illustrates an implementation task in the form of a user story that syncs up into Jama Connect, as well as a defect created in Jama Connect that syncs down to Azure DevOps. The beauty of this integration is that developers can stay in their tool of choice, in this case, ADO. Product owners can stay in Jama Connect, yet both sides have access to the details of the task. More importantly, the task and related status become part of what’s Live Traceable in Jama Connect. Let’s demo this.
Here we are in Jama Connect. The integration can be configured as a bidirectional sync, so it doesn’t matter whether I create the task in Jama Connect or ADO. First, we’ll decompose a software requirement into a development task that’s in the form of a user story. Here we have a login requirement software requirement. I’m gonna go ahead and add a related downstream user story, which will bring up the form to create a new user story. Notice the editor template feature in Jama Connect prepopulates these with standard user story verbiage. So as a user, I need to log in so that I can view my account. We’re gonna go ahead and set the status to new, and then we’re gonna save and close.
Jama Connect is prompting me to where I wanna save this, so I am going to go ahead and save this where the user stories live in my hierarchy. Notice that upon saving, automatically, the relationship widget indicates the fact that I have traceability, and I could see that traceability back to the software requirement. Within seconds, this user story will flow into ADO.
And you can see that it’s completed already. The integration URL has been populated, and I can navigate this URL, which will open up the item ADO. Let’s take a look. Here we are in ADO. You can imagine the developer has been assigned to implement the user story. They may add some context to the description. They may go ahead and add a comment, And they may go ahead and indicate that they’re starting to work on this user story by changing the status to active.
Notice that the developer can traverse a URL back to Jama Connect to see the requirements that are driving the user story. These links are handy, but the real advantage is the fact that the changes the developer made within seconds will be visible to anyone working in Jama Connect. Let’s flip back to Jama Connect and take a look. Notice the changes the developer made are now visible here in Jama Connect. The product owner can view and respond to the developer’s comment, and notice that the status has also been updated.
Manupelli: The updated status is reflected in a trace view that we can see here automatically, as well as any dashboard reports we have for user stories. So that’s Live Traceability in action. As a reminder, this thing can be configured by directional. So if your process varies and you create user stories in ADO, we support that use case as well.
Here we are in ADO. Let’s create a new user story. Let’s give it a title and give it a description, and let’s go ahead and save this. Within fifteen seconds, this user story will flow into Jama Connect. Here we are back in Jama Connect’s dashboard. Notice the widget showing these stories that are missing upstream relationships? That new user story has shown up here. Let’s open it.
Now let’s relate to existing and find the requirement that the user story fulfills, and we’re gonna go ahead and relate. Notice the traceability is updated automatically. This completes the traceability between the requirement and the user story.
Thank you for watching this Feature in Five session on the Azure DevOps integration for Jama Connect. If you are an existing customer and wanna learn more, please reach out to your customer success manager or consultant. If you’re not yet a client, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com to learn more about the platform and how we can help optimize your development process.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/07/FIF-Azure-Dev-ops.png10801920Susan Manupelli/media/jama-logo-primary.svgSusan Manupelli2024-07-12 03:00:052024-07-08 07:15:15Jama Connect® Features in Five: Azure DevOps Integration
In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Bridging ALM and MBSE: Strategies for Seamless Integration” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.
Integrate Jama Connect® and Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect (EA) using LemonTree.Connect to align business and engineering objectives.
Join our experts Philipp Kalenda, Head of Consulting & Training at LieberLieber and Cary Bryczek, Director of Solution Architecture at Jama Software ® to discover how this powerful collaboration eliminates the gap between requirements engineering, system architecture, design, and product management.
You will gain a thorough understanding of these topics and more:
How Jama Connect®’s Live Traceability™ capabilities allow for seamless integration across best-of-breed tools.
How leveraging Jama Connect Traceable MBSE™ can act as a starting point for your MBSE efforts.
How to create a workflow for deriving systems architecture based on requirements from Jama Connect.
How LemonTree.Connect enables standard engineering domain practices for configuration management.
How to facilitate streamlined evidence that proves your architecture is satisfying requirements.
Below is a preview of our webinar. Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.
The following is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.
Bridging ALM and MBSE: Strategies for Seamless Integration
Cary Bryczek: My name is Cary Bryczek. I’m the Director of Aerospace & Defense Solutions here at Jama Software. I’m really looking forward to speaking with you today on this particular topic and looking forward to Philipp’s presentation as well. So to kick things off, we are going to set … I just want to set the stage with some trends across the A&D industry that we’re seeing. I’ll talk about how those trends are creating challenges for chief engineers and describe what’s keeping them up at night. Then I’ll set the stage for Philipp’s presentation by showing you what Jama Connect’s Traceable MBSE™ looks like and how that’s designed to solve some of those challenges, and Philipp’s going to definitely take you on a deeper dive to show you how system models in Jama Connect interoperate.
In the aerospace and defense industry, developing a new system has a complexity that far exceeds commercial product development. For example, the FAA’s program to develop the unmanned aircraft traffic management system involves not just the pilot and his drone but is designed to enable autonomous and semi-autonomous operation of multiple aerial systems, including passenger and cargo delivery in a tightly integrated civil aerospace. The elements in blue that you see are all distinct systems of their own, and the new traffic management system needs to be able to integrate communications and data across all of those systems to provide this new capability.
Bryczek:Canopy Aerospace, they’re developing a low-cost reusable thermal protection system. Roccor AKA Redwire in Erie, Colorado, they’re developing a characterization of high aspect ratio booms for these large apertures and so many more. This ecosystem of partners and contributing to a whole brings its own challenges to the pool when trying to collaborate, share data, and execute common systems engineering processes. Like the NASA’s Cislunar and Artemis initiatives for space exploration, they’re focusing on operation and survivability.
In the defense domain, we’re seeing all sorts of cases in unmanned aerial systems as well to aid tactical situations and help with strategic planning. The underlying theme of these large systems is the integration and the collaborative approaches to developing these different weapon systems and aerospace systems in very constrained environments.
So from a strategy perspective, what are these agencies trying to really do? Government agencies and aerospace and defense companies are always evolving their strategies to be able to deal with this complexity and to help streamline their engineering processes. For example, the Department of Defense (DOD) has published a new adaptive acquisition framework. This pathway is intended for large-scale traditional hardware acquisitions to facilitate rapid and iterative development and delivery of software capability to the user.
Bryczek: In 2018, the Digital Engineering strategy outlines a vision to modernize how the department designs, develops, delivers, and operates, as well as sustains systems securely and safely. Their vision is to connect people, processes, data, and capabilities across an end-to-end digital enterprise. The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) published its recent Vision 2035 document, and it is intended to inspire and guide the strategic direction of systems engineering, the practice of systems engineering for the global systems community.
MOSA, the Modular Open Systems Approach, it uses a system architecture that allows major subsystem components at the appropriate level to be incrementally added, removed, and replaced throughout the lifecycle of the major system. The DOD’s systems engineering and architecture group is focusing on modernizing the systems engineering practice. They’re leveraging capabilities from CERC. They’re using MOSA to build systems that can be upgraded and to incorporate new technology faster to respond to emerging threats.
When we look at this in a little bit larger view with this new modernization of the systems engineering approach, the DOD has moved away from visualizing its process using a V model in favor of what truly takes place from a process standpoint, which is that modern systems engineering is highly cyclic. You can see the outermost ring is as close to that old V model, where a concept definition is in the upper right, it moves the system definition through architecture and design and over to V & V and back-to-start around on the next cycle.
What’s important is that there’s a strong emphasis on measuring not just the system being built, but the process that’s building the system, your system’s engineering process and that data and models are at the heart of it all. To the fullest extent, models should be used in favor of documents and data should inform decision-making.
What is the industry saying? There’s a challenge to using data-driven approaches and models. The DOD has highlighted there’s a lack of an integrated approach to the implementation of these systems engineering focus areas, and it’s creating a delay in the full implementation of the digital transformation, which is necessary to ensure relevant guidance and skills.
Bryczek: Continuing to use legacy tools and approaches is what is making integrated approaches not possible. What is necessary is to take a federated approach to data across the tool ecosystem and to use tools with more robust APIs, and modern architectures that are standards-based. An MBSE approach requires an integrated approach to connect the system models, architecture, and requirements to the program teams the software teams, and the hardware teams. It doesn’t mean to use a siloed system modeling tool and expect those teams to be able to consume and understand that model.
What we hear quite often is, “How do I achieve the benefits of MBSE when no other engineers can access model parameters that they need for downstream decision-making?” Those with technical oversight, chief engineers who have technical oversight and responsibility for program success, executing MBSE, or even just traditional systems engineering commonly raise the following questions, “How do I know if the architecture and system requirements are satisfying all the needs? How do I know if a change in the architecture will impact testing? How do I know if a change in the architecture will impact downstream hardware or software teams? How do I detect unallocated systems architecture and requirements?”
So the question of, “How do I achieve the benefits of MBSE when no other engineers can access model parameters?” can be answered by using traceable MBSE. Now, the reality at most companies is that the end-to-end systems development process is fragmented into domain-specific tools and spreadsheets that have no built-in collaboration. Now, this leads to fragmented requirements traceability and requires significant manual effort through emails and meetings and sometimes luck to try and prevent delays rework, or cost overruns.
Most companies have come to accept the situation as an unchangeable reality given the lack of a single platform to enable this entire process, nor a method to integrate spreadsheets and desktop tools. Using Traceable MBSE, the system model in the modeling tool is joined with the Jama Connect model. Jama Connect is continually calculating traceability and coverage and provides scores that can be used to identify high-risk areas that can be drilled into to determine corrective actions. The system model can detect those changes and the modeling engineers can take the corrective actions.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/07/Bridging-ALM-and-MBSE-Strategies-for-Seamless-Integration-1.png5121024Cary Bryczek/media/jama-logo-primary.svgCary Bryczek2024-07-11 03:00:042024-07-05 15:00:55[Webinar Recap] Bridging ALM and MBSE: Strategies for Seamless Integration
In this blog post, we summarize our Whitepaper titled “How to Manage Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries” – Written by Kevin Dibble and Jama Software. Click HERE to read the full thing.
How to Manage Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries
Learn how automotive and semiconductor teams use requirements management tools to support meeting ISO/SAE 21434 while increasing visibility, collaboration, and review-cycle efficiency.
Security threats such as malware, ransomware, and data breaches impact many industries, but with expanded connectivity in the automotive and semiconductor sectors, increased urgency exists to safeguard against fast evolving risks.
Research shows that 91% of vehicles are connected, and that number is expected to rise to 96% by 2030. With more automobiles and semiconductor devices being connected, attack surfaces (cybersecurity vulnerabilities) are expanding quickly, and the ISO/SAE 21434 standard aims to understand and safeguard against potential threats.
However, managing a cybersecurity case within the standard requires many steps, and cross-team visibility and collaboration are often challenging. As a result, some teams are turning to requirements management tools to help improve visibility and increase transparency in review cycles.
If you haven’t used a formal requirements management tool before, understanding the benefits, advantages, and how it works helps determine if it’s right for your team.
Why manage a cybersecurity case in a requirements management tool?
A cybersecurity case is a structured argument supported by the evidence of work products to detail why risks found within the Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment (TARA) are reasonable.
Creating a cybersecurity case for ISO/SAE 21434 is a complex process with many moving parts. Using a requirements management tool has many benefits, including improved traceability, easier collaboration, and improved functionality for reviews.
Here are several ways a tool can help.
1. Improved collaboration between OEMs and tier 1 and 2 suppliers. A requirements management tool, such as Jama Connect®, supports requirements interchange format (ReqIF), which can be used for bidirectional communication of requirements, item definitions, and more. Using the tool, you can support improved collaboration workflows.
2. Provides “trace as you go” visibility. You don’t want traceability to be an afterthought handled by your requirements engineer at the end of the project, especially when that project is complex. A purpose-built requirements management tool, like Jama Connect, allows you to create requirements tracing to parent requirements, design blocks for requirements allocation, and more. It supports a trace-as-you-go methodology.
3. Access impact analysis to handle midstream project changes more effectively. Jama Connect provides access to an impact analysis, a powerful capability supporting the trace-as-you-go approach. Running an impact analysis as project changes happen midstream allows for greater understanding and visibility.
4. Automatically generate test coverage reports. With Jama Connect, you can allocate requirements to design blocks or interconnect the requirements management system to design tools. Using tools like Design Architect provides powerful analytics and test coverage reports that are automatically generated.
5. Connect tools and avoid disjointed tooling challenges. Disconnected tools are often a source of visibility issues. Jama Connect links disparate tools and offers a “toolchain view” for more seamless tool functioning and visibility, like with the Design Architect example above.
6. View exactly where you’re at in a project in real-time. As you move through the management of a case, it’s important to see where you are in the process so you can stay on track. Jama Connect can provide analytics that clearly indicate where you’re at in a project, including allocated requirements, tests that have been covered, and more.
How does a requirements management tool fit with the ISO/SAE 21434 standard?
Traceability, collaboration, and improved review processes are all benefits of a purpose-built requirements management tool, but to understand how it works, it helps to have an example. In the details below, we’ve used the Jama Connect platform as an example to see how it works – from product-dependent cybersecurity management to threat analysis and risk assessment methods.
ISO/SAE 21434 is organized by clauses and subclauses, broken out below.
The right requirements management tool will enable your teams to optimize the development process in many of the above areas. Specifically, here’s a breakdown of how the Jama Connect platform supports each of them, as indicated by the box’s color.
Green. These areas are fully supported and recommended to be implemented in Jama Connect. For example, when viewing section 9 in the chart above under the “Concept” heading, Jama Connect supports the item definition, cybersecurity goals, and cybersecurity concept.
Yellow. These are optional and can be implemented in Jama Connect. For example, you’ll see subclauses 5.4.3 “Information sharing” and 5.4.4. “Management systems” fall into this category.
Yellow-green. These are partially supported in the tool. In other words, Jama Connect can support some of the requirements but not all of them. As an example, 10.4.1 “Design” and 10.4.2 “Integration and verification” are included in this category.
Red boxes. These are not recommended for support in Jama Connect and are usually handled with an in-house tool instead—in that some are processes that expand throughout the organization, and some are activities or work products suited for alternative best-of-breed tools. The progression of these work products can, however, be brought back to Jama Connect to reflect status through the Cybersecurity case. An example is the areas under the “post-development phases, including 12 “Production” and 13 “Operations and maintenance.”
One of Jama Connect’s most powerful capabilities is supporting the green and yellow categories through document building and generation. The tool supports the process of building and reviewing documentation with real-time collaboration as well as creating documentation with a single click and no post-processing.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/07/2024-06-05-managing-cybersecturity-case-whitepaper-1.jpg5121024Kevin Dibble/media/jama-logo-primary.svgKevin Dibble2024-07-09 03:00:502024-07-03 12:47:08How to Manage Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries
How to Overcome Development Challenges: Optimizing Review Cycles for Regulated Industries
The nature of regulated industries poses specific hurdles that demand strict procedures and careful consideration. Teams must navigate various difficulties, such as adhering to strict regulations and managing complicated relationships with stakeholders, to deliver top-notch products, software, and systems. Improving the review process is a critical approach for overcoming these challenges, promoting teamwork, enhancing decision-making, and expediting time to market. In this blog post, we delve into how streamlined review processes can help teams conquer development obstacles in regulated sectors.
The Critical Role of Enhanced Review Cycle Processes
Ensuring Compliance with Regulations: In industries such as medical device & life sciences, aerospace & defense, and automotive, adherence to regulatory standards is of utmost importance. Through improved review procedures, all requirements and deliverables are thoroughly evaluated, reducing the possibility of non-compliance and associated penalties. Regular and thorough reviews also aid in the early detection and resolution of any issues during the development process
Fostering Efficient Collaboration: Development projects often involve the collaboration of diverse teams and external partners. Enhanced review processes establish a structured framework for effective collaboration, ensuring that all stakeholders can contribute and provide feedback efficiently. This cooperative approach leads to the creation of comprehensive and well-rounded solutions.
Expediting Development Timelines: Timeliness is crucial in regulated industries. Streamlined review processes can significantly reduce development timelines by swiftly identifying and addressing any issues that may arise. This minimizes the need for rework and helps teams stay on track, ultimately accelerating the time-to-market.
Enhancing Decision-Making: Enhanced review processes offer a holistic view of project progress and potential challenges, facilitating well-informed decision-making. By providing all relevant information to stakeholders, teams can make timely and well-founded decisions, aligning everyone towards a common goal.
“The review process is a lot quicker than it was before, it’s very efficient in Jama Connect. If we compare it to reviewing the spreadsheets and Word documents versus doing a review in Jama Connect Review Center, it’s about an 80% reduction in time, for sure.” – Kurt Shuler, Vice President, Marketing – Arteris IP, “See How Arteris IP is Leveraging Jama Connect for Autonomous Vehicle Development”
Strategies for Enhancing Review Processes
Simplifying Review Processes: It is crucial to have well-defined and streamlined protocols in place for reviews to optimize the process. This includes setting specific review deadlines, using standardized templates, and clearly outlining the roles and responsibilities of all parties involved.
Utilizing Modern Technology: Innovative review tools like Jama Connect’s Review Center offer the ability for real-time collaboration and feedback. These tools allow for reviews to take place at different times, preventing delays and keeping the process moving forward.
Centralizing Documentation and Feedback: Having a centralized location for all review documents and feedback ensures that team members have access to the most up-to-date information. This promotes transparency and ensures that feedback and approvals are properly recorded and easily traceable, which is crucial for compliance audits.
Identifying and Removing Obstacles: Regularly evaluating review cycles to pinpoint any issues and implementing solutions such as automated notifications and reminders can help keep the review process on track. This proactive approach helps maintain progress and ensures timely completion of reviews.
“If working in Aerospace / Avionics engineering, Jama Connect is a solid option to handle requirements, elements of detailed design and Test artifacts. It also enhances cross-team collaboration through the Review Center, the Stream feature.”
– Process Engineer, Aerospace & Defense
The Benefits of Jama Connect®’s Review Center
Jama Connect®‘s Review Center provides an iterative, collaborative approach to reviewing requirements and tests in real-time. With Jama Connect’s Review Center, teams can:
Enable efficient and scalable reviews and shorten review cycles by up to 50%
Prioritize critical decisions and align stakeholders to improve response times, minimize meetings, and eliminate communication bottlenecks
Facilitate compliant reviews and approvals by creating a standardized review process, gaining formal approvals, and exporting to an auditable system of record
Engage unlimited stakeholders: Drive participation from buyers, suppliers, and partners across organizational boundaries for centralized definitions, input, and decisions
“Jama Connect allows us to centrally collect project documentation (requirements, product risks, test cases, etc) and efficiently review, release, and reuse the contents of these documents.”
– Vice President of Engineering, Medical Device & Life Sciences
Improving review procedures is a vital approach to overcoming challenges in regulated industries. When reviews are optimized, they not only ensure adherence to regulations, but also promote efficient teamwork, accelerate development timelines, and enhance decision-making. Jama Connect’s Review Center provides a robust solution for enhancing review processes, allowing for efficient and scalable reviews, aligning stakeholders, promoting compliant reviews, and engaging an unlimited number of participants. With Jama Connect’s Review Center capabilities, teams can streamline their review processes, resulting in the timely delivery of high-quality, compliant products that meet the stringent requirements of regulated sectors.
“We have achieved a significant ROI with Jama Connect in risk reduction and productivity gains: reuse is up 100%, rework is down 50%, requirements review cycle time is cut by 30% and audit preparation time is down 75%.”
– Kurt Shuler, Vice President, Marketing – Arteris IP, “See How Arteris IP is Leveraging Jama Connect for Autonomous Vehicle Development”
Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by McKenzie Jonsson, and Decoteau Wilkerson.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/06/Challenges-Series-Final-Image-Template.jpg10801920Jama Software/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJama Software2024-06-20 03:00:022024-06-18 17:57:33How to Overcome Development Challenges: Optimizing Review Cycles for Regulated Industries
Jama Connect® Features in Five: TestRail Integration
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 the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in about five minutes.
In this Features in Five Integration Series video, Steven Pink – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – demonstrates integrating test results from TestRail with Jama Connect®.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Steven Pink: Hello and welcome to the Features in Five Integration Series. My name is Steven Pink and I’m a senior solutions architect at Jama Software. Today we’re going to be walking through a live demonstration of integrating test results from TestRail with Jama Connect.
We make it possible for you to integrate Jama Connect with preferred best-of-breed software to achieve live traceability across the end-to-end development cycle. Live requirements traceability is the ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans. This enables significant productivity and quality improvements and dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls, and ultimately results in faster time to market.
The goal of integrating with a testing tool like TestRail is to better visualize test coverage for our requirements. Jama Connect can help in identifying and calling out gaps in test coverage, while also visualizing and reporting on the test results, utilizing the filters, dashboards, and exportable reports.
Integration with TestRail starts by mirroring TestRail’s hierarchy of test suites, test sections, test cases, and test results in Jama Connect. We use sets of test cases to mirror the test suites and folders to mirror the test sections within those suites.
As we transition into Jama Connect, I want to point out how we’re relating our test results and test cases from TestRail to the requirements being authored and captured in Jama Connect. As we look at this relationship diagram, we see our software requirements and our user stories relate to the custom test cases being managed over in TestRail. This is a very common scenario for many of our customers where certain teams might be utilizing a different tool for testing, and we need to integrate those results back with the requirements managed in Jama Connect. We can author a test case directly within Jama Connect or within TestRail.
Pink: So we’re going to start out by authoring a test case in Jama Connect. This demo suite would mirror a suite in TestRail, and this folder would mirror a section in TestRail. I’m going to author a new test case within this folder. We’ll call this example test case. Once I’ve saved this test case, we’ll trace it to the requirement that it covers within this project. I’m going to choose one of my example software requirements.
So now I’ve created a test case with a relationship to the software requirement that it covers. We’ll notice this integration URL is populated automatically and allows us to jump to the mirror of that test case that’s been created in TestRail. Once I’ve signed into TestRail, we’ll be able to see that that test case is mirrored into TestRail.
It is in that demo suite and in section A. If we want to run this test case, I’m going to go to my test runs and results and create a new test run. It’s going to be based on that demo suite, and we’re going to include all test cases, which is just one in this example. This example test case is now showing untested. And if I were to look back in Jama Connect, we’ll see for my example test case under the relationships tying back to that software requirement. As soon as we come in here and run our test execution, let’s say we update this to past or failed, this result is going to get sent back to Jama Connect automatically.
Pink: We can also see on the test case itself, there’s an easy link back into Jama Connect. So if our test runners working in TestRail would like to see requirement coverage and traceability, they’re able to easily click the link from TestRail and go back into Jama Connect and explore that traceability and coverage. I’ll use that link right now to go back to our test case in Jama Connect. And now we’ll see because we’ve executed that test case, there’s an associated test run, and that test run is showing the result of past. We can visualize all of this through our trace views, our dashboards, and our custom export templates within Jama Connect. So this is a great reason to be syncing and integrating these results so that we can visualize through the trace view which of these requirements have test cases in place, which requirements might have gaps in testing, as well as being able to drill down and see those test results, even being able to show status of those test results and the status of the defects associated.
Thank you for watching this Features in Five session on integrating test results between Jama Connect and TestRail. If you’re an existing customer and want to learn more, please reach out to your customer success manager or consultant. If you’re not yet a client, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com to learn more about the platform and how we can help optimize your development process.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/06/FIF-TestRail-Integration-1-1.jpg10801920Steven Pink/media/jama-logo-primary.svgSteven Pink2024-06-07 03:00:552024-06-05 10:23:47Jama Connect® Features in Five: TestRail Integration
Jama Connect® Recognized as a Top Rated Requirements Management Solution on TrustRadius!
Jama Connect® has achieved notable recognition on TrustRadius, solidifying its position as a leading platform for requirements, risk, and test management. With an intuitive user interface, robust features, and exceptional customer support, Jama Connect has been honored with a “Top Rated” distinction by TrustRadius in 2024.
Visit the full reportto discover why customers love using Jama Connect for product, systems, and software development. This recognition highlights Jama Software’s unwavering commitment to providing a reliable and efficient requirements management solution that empowers teams to drive innovation and attain exceptional outcomes.
Jama Software values the feedback from our clients who have used Jama Connect and are committed to providing them with the best support, resources, and expertise to help them succeed. As the leading provider of requirements management software, Jama Software is proud to receive recognition for our commitment to enabling multidisciplinary engineering organizations to develop products, systems, and software to maximize their success.
“I’m VERY likely to recommend Jama Connect to a colleague because they’d struggle to get anything done without using it! That’s the tool we’re using for Requirements Management now, so I recommend to my colleagues that they get amongst it!”
-From a review collected and hosted on TrustRadius – Ian Webb, Systems Engineering Technical Writer – Enphase EnergyElectrical & Electronic Manufacturing
“For our company, it was imperative that we streamline all our processes and have a solution that is well controlled for audit purposes. Jama Connect has been able to satisfy these needs easily with its intuitive design which shortened the user learning curve. Furthermore, the configuration management of artifacts is built in from the start which is incredibly powerful for auditors of our products.”
-From a review collected and hosted on TrustRadius – Eric Zaremski, Lead Program Manager – FORT Robotics
From all of us at Jama Software® to all of you, thank you!
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2024/05/2024-05-09_trust-radius-top-rated-1-1.jpg5121024Jama Software/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJama Software2024-05-09 03:00:202024-05-08 16:51:41Jama Connect® Recognized as a Top Rated Requirements Management Solution on TrustRadius!
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Git Repository Integration
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 the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in about five minutes.
In this Features in Five Integration Series video, Atef Ghribi, Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – demonstrates a Git repository integration with Jama Connect® using a repository in GitLab.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Atef Ghribi: Hello and welcome to the Features in Five Integration series. My name is Atef Ghribi and I am a senior solution architect at Jama Software. Today, we’ll be looking at the Git repositories integration using an example of a repository in GitLab. We make it possible for you to integrate Jama Connect with the preferred best-of-breed software to achieve Live Traceability™ across the end-to-end development cycle. Live requirements traceability is the ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement, no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans.
This enables significant productivity and quality improvements, dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls, and ultimately results in faster time to market. Jama Connect being the central space repository for holistic overview across the traceability chain will be able to store the source code change track published by the integration hub from the source code repository management tools such as GitHub or GitLab. This allows software developers to work in their environments without adding additional steps to ensure traceability.
Ghribi: The integration hub will take care of publishing the source code, and commit information to Jama Connect as soon as they are available in the Git repository. Additionally, software developers can provide traceability information in their source code commits, which will allow Jama Connect to create the trace links to other items, making sure that source code change sets are embedded into the traceability chain. By providing this seamless integration, Jama Connect will ensure better accessibility beyond tool boundaries to source code traceability for stakeholders who are not necessarily familiar with Git repositories.
This holistic traceability enables better efficiency in conducting impact analysis and controlling the change management process as well as facilitating reporting and tracking of metrics across tools to assess and achieve compliance with less effort. Here is a simple flow between GitLab and Jama Connect. I will start by adding a simple implementation task to my Jama Connect project. This is the input for the software developer to start working on the implementation. Now this is just an example. We can here use any other item type based on the process defined and configured within Jama Connect.
Going to my implementation issues set and here I will start by creating a new task and then I will just save and close and this will create a new implementation task inside of my Jama Connect project. I will take the ID provided by Jama Connect as information that I will use later for the traceability. Now in GitLab I will make some changes to my source code and will make sure to mention the implementation task ID and my source code commit. I’m of course just using the UI of GitLab here to edit the file, but this would be the same process if I’m working on a different environment development machine and submitting the changes sets from my own local repository.
We are just keeping things simple for the time being. So going into my file and then I’m going to edit the file as a single file just here adding some changes and I will make sure to mention in the commit message the message for the change. And then I will just put the ID as I got it from Jama Connect and now I will just commit the changes and we will see what will happen inside of Jama Connect. The integration will take care of the rest and we will go back to Jama and see how the source code change commit was published and how the traceability will be defined inside of Jama Connect.
Ghribi: Within a few seconds based on the integration configured, we can refresh our project inside of Jama Connect and see how the source code change set will be published to the spot in the project tree that we defined in the integration hub. We will just refresh and now we will see that we now have one item representing our change commit with the name that was provided. So if we look closer here, we’ll be able to see that we have that same message. If we look at the traceability on the right-hand side of the screen and our relationship switch it, we will be able to see that there is one upstream link to the task implementation task that we used in the comment.
So as software developers we don’t need to redundantly create any items inside of Jama Connect or create any links after we submit our traceability. If I go also to the task that is inside of Jama Connect and look at the traceability chain, and refresh, we’ll be able to see here that source code traceability that is managed. So we have bidirectional traceability already inside of Jama Connect, which will now allow us to have and embed our code or change sets traceability source code to the traceability chain of our project.
Thank you for watching this Feature in Five session on the Git repositories integration for Jama Connect. If you are an existing customer and want to learn more, please reach out to your customer success manager or consultant. If you are not yet a client, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com to learn more about the platform and how we can help optimize your development processes.
