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What does DOORS stand for?

DOORS is an acronym that stands for Rational Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements System.

What is DOORS?

IBM DOORS, formerly known as Telelogic DOORS, is a legacy requirements management tool originally created in 1991 and is part of the IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Family.

Why was IBM DOORS originally built?

Requirements management tools started to evolve more than 30 years ago when it became clear that document-based tools such as Microsoft Office did not offer the capabilities able to manage and analyze requirements traceability.

There was initially a limited choice of requirements tools including QSS DOORS (now IBM), Rational Requisite Pro (end of life), Borland Calibre RM (now Microfocus), as well as a few others.

Legacy requirements solutions may have been sufficient to handle managing requirements in the past but are failing to keep pace over time due to increasing engineering complexity and the need for modern software to be far easier to use.

Why did teams originally invest in IBM DOORS?

Requirements management has long been accepted by the engineering industry as an essential discipline, no matter which process is used, or which type of system is being produced. IBM DOORS was typically selected as choices were limited. Organizations originally invested in a requirements tool to establish a standard requirements management practice and process that allowed teams to align on a single source of truth for requirements.

They invested in DOORS software with the goal of:

Encouraging and motivating teams to follow common requirements practices.
Establishing a single source of truth for requirements to ensure teams were working off the same information.
Creating minimal disruption to the business with an off-the-shelf solution that allowed teams to focus on their core business.
Integrating requirements into core workflows and business without impacting how people work.
Tracking the life of a requirement through development, test, and release.

Related: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

Why does IBM DOORS fall short for requirements management?

The past few decades have ushered in a new way of working — now teams are expected to work more efficiently and collaboratively across the organization and supply chain. Companies building highly regulated and complex products often rely on legacy tools such as IBM DOORS, yet as product development methodologies evolve, legacy requirements management tools have not kept pace.

Misalignment between what teams need vs. what legacy solutions provide can introduce increased risk in the product development process, leading to inefficiencies and lack of visibility that often result in missed deadlines, defects, compliance gaps, and rework. Companies that have migrated to a modern solution from IBM DOORS have achieved faster development times, greater efficiencies, and reduced expenses. As you plan your next move, we’ll cover everything you need to consider moving forward, including market challenges, how engineering teams are adapting, and why waiting to make a change will continue to expose you to greater unnecessary risks.

RELATED: Move to Jama Connect — A Modern Requirements Management Alternative to IBM DOORS

The Drawbacks of DOORS Software

You may currently be using a solution that was implemented with the intention of producing positive business outcomes. But over time, the market has changed and, as a result, your organization’s needs have changed.

If you feel like you’ve outgrown your requirements management software, you aren’t alone. Complex systems such as IBM DOORS have inherent drawbacks and have also had trouble keeping up with the innovation occurring in highly regulated industries. Continuing to use a solution that your organization has outgrown comes with a variety of challenges, including:

A cumbersome user experience. DOORS has a complex and challenging architecture and an outdated user interface. Existing users are losing the motivation to continue to use DOORS while new users are reluctant or refuse to learn. Users oftentimes refuse to use DOORS and wind up working in Word/Excel and collaboration is done in meetings and emails leaving decisions and details lost outside of DOORS.

A system lacking robust collaboration abilities and a single source of truth for requirements. With stakeholders reluctant to work within DOORS, “librarians” must enter information into the system to keep everything up to date, while the real collaboration happens outside of DOORS in emails or conversations. As a result, organizations lack the ability to perform robust reviews or examine the audit trail for requirements evolution. Additionally, teams using DOORS often must retain dedicated staff, a cost that is unnecessary in today’s competitive market where teams are being tasked with doing more with less.

Risk is introduced due to aging technologies. DOORS 9.6 is already outside of its original support window, which raises questions about how long DOORS will continue. Inevitably, IBM will at some point discontinue support for the DOORS legacy platform, and that leaves customers in a high-risk situation trying to protect their intellectual property. Additionally, a cloud option is not available, which creates challenges with remote working.

A high cost of ownership and reliance on customization. Organizations need to focus on their core business and using a bespoken RM tool interferes with that goal. Companies often struggle to achieve the benefits promised by DOORS without complex customization, and those customizations don’t transfer to IBM DOORS Next.

Stagnant infrastructure doesn’t support change. At rest, DOORS is working and has a low IT manpower cost of ownership. Changes are constantly happening and ignoring them creates additional risk. As the IT industry faces more demanding regulations, supporting the DOORS architecture is growing increasingly difficult.

Lack of vertical frameworks to support compliance. As industries establish increased regulatory and compliance rules, new and updated industry engineering frameworks have been created (e.g., DO178 A, B & C). Legacy requirements tools made early attempts at providing engineering frameworks, but these have not kept up with industry changes and are now mostly left to users to create for themselves.

Related: How to Overcome Organizational Barriers to Live Requirements Traceability

Risks and Costs Associated with Staying with DOORS Software

Tools that are difficult or frustrating to use — and require experts to operate — will not only slow down development but will also breed resistance and hinder adoption. As is the case with DOORS software. This creates fragmented processes that introduce unnecessary risks for organizations that must stay current with compliance regulations while developing integrated, complex products that sustain business and maintain market relevance.

The unintended consequences of a fragmented development process are critical functions such as requirements traceability, verification, validation, risk mitigation, product integration, and compliance can be fraught with information gaps, defects, delays, rework, recalls, missed requirements, and significant manual effort.

In the complex product, systems, and software delivery lifecycle, organizations can experience negative outcomes when using DOORS software, such as:

Performance: Product fails to perform specified functions.
Quality: Product defects are discovered by customers post-launch.
Delays: Product release deadlines are missed, or costs are overrun.
Fit to requirements: Product fails to meet the needs of customers.
Compliance gaps: Gaps identified late and require extreme cost to rework and fix.
Regulatory action: Product is not approved for launch or recalled post-launch.

Achieving Live Traceability™ with Jama Connect

Jama Software’s Live Traceability allows engineering teams to quickly and easily access the latest and most complete information for any requirement, no matter the stage of development or tools used. This real-time capability boosts productivity by ensuring teams work with the latest data and reduces risks like delays and defects by finding issues early. Research shows that issues found late can be much more expensive to fix, which is why Live Traceability is so important. Jama Connect helps overcome the limitations of older tools, leading to better results in many industries such as automotive, medical devices, aerospace & defense, and more. To learn more, visit Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution
Interested in making a change in your requirements management tool? There are a lot of solutions on the market, check out our requirements management buyer’s guide to cut through the clutter, Selecting the Right Requirements Management Tool.

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

Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect’s powerful features… in under five minutes.

In this Features in Five video, Katie Huckett, Senior Product Manager at Jama Software, will introduce viewers to Jama Connect Advisor™, Jama Connect’s natural language processing (NLP) tool, designed to improve requirement quality.

In this video, learn how Jama Connect Advisor enhances your product management by:

- Reducing authoring errors
- Increasing clarity
- Optimizing foundational product needs and requirements managed in Jama Connect Cloud

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Katie Huckett: Hi. I’m Katie Huckett, Senior Product Manager at Jama Software. In this video, I’ll introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor, an add-on to Jama Connect Cloud that uses engineering-based natural language processing to optimize requirements authoring. It helps you write effective, well-organized requirements with speed and accuracy.

We’ll explore how Jama Connect Advisor can enhance your product development by reducing errors, increasing clarity, and optimizing the foundational requirements managed within Jama Connect Cloud. Jama Connect Advisor is designed to help teams author complex requirements quickly and accurately using AI and engineering-focused natural language processing. It minimizes disruption to engineering workflows while improving quality. How does it work?

Jama Connect Advisor applies the globally recognized INCOSE requirements rules and EARS syntax patterns. Even experienced engineers find it challenging to follow all forty INCOSE rules and six EARS patterns while writing even a single requirement.

That’s where Jama Connect Advisor steps in to streamline the process and enhance productivity. Now I’d like to show you a demonstration of how Jama Connect Advisor enables teams to intelligently improve requirements quality and usability, minimize requirement ambiguity and contradictions, which are the source of seventy to eighty-five percent of rework, and save time authoring, reviewing, analyzing, and updating requirement statements.

RELATED: Jama Connect Advisor™ Datasheet

Huckett: There are a few different ways that you can use Jama Connect Advisor within the Jama Connect Cloud application.

Let’s start by adding a new requirement. Once you’ve added your requirement into the description field, you’ll notice the highlighted text to analyze the prompt underneath the description field. Once you’re ready, go ahead and select the text that you’d like to analyze and select analyze selection.

Underneath the description field, you’ll see a quick summary of your INCOSE score as well as any errors found, if any. You can move on at this point and save your item, or you can go ahead and view the details if you’d like to make changes at this point. So I can see on the slide over panel, the text that’s been analyzed, what my INCOSE score is, eighty-seven percent, and then the different identifiers that I’ve flagged it for the INCOSE rules. Underneath, you’ll see the EARS errors, if any were found. You’ll also see some information about the EARS notation pattern that your requirement might align with. I’m gonna go ahead and save this item, and I’ll wait to make my changes in a moment.

Now that I’ve saved that, let’s say I want to analyze a whole group of existing requirements. I’m going to go ahead and analyze all items within my set on the side here. So I’ll select all items and you’ll notice the batch analyze button, appears in the top right-hand corner. Once you select that, you’ll be given a summary view of what will be analyzed. So you can see I’ve got seventeen items selected here. All seventeen of those items happen to have a Jama Connect Advisor-enabled field on it, and then we have thirty-four fields per, these items. So it appears we have two Jama Connect Advisor enabled fields, per each item within this group.

Once you select analyze, the slide of our panel will pop up on the right-hand side. You’ll notice your group of requirements. Each item is listed at the top within this drop-down. You can navigate with the drop-down or the directional arrows. And then underneath, we also have a field drop-down. So as I mentioned, we have two fields per item type on this particular example. So I can swap between those as well either using the drop down or the directional arrows to move through.

So now that I’ve come in here and I see the, recommendations, I’d like to go in and edit my item to make some changes. So here, I want to remove some of the items that were flagged. I’m gonna remove this and just update this to say, you know, users can create a login using we don’t wanna use pronouns, per that flag. So I’m gonna change this to using an Apple ID, email.

RELATED: The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

Huckett: I’m gonna update this to be an actual logical condition with or social media. And then I’m gonna remove the example of LinkedIn because I don’t necessarily need that, and I’ll just update that to end the sentence there. Once I’ve made my changes, I can select the text again in the edit quick edit mode, analyze the selection, and I can see here my INCOSE rule score is now a hundred percent. I still have to deal with my ears errors, but so far so good on INCOSE.

I can view my details again in the slide-over panel and update here. I can also close that back out, and I can return to my batch analysis results by selecting the latest analysis link at the top, and that will take me right back in where I was before I made those changes. Now I can go ahead and save my item and complete those changes going forward. If I want to work through these requirements across multiple sessions or maybe I just wanna have a benchmark of what my score was before I started making my edits, you can then generate a report within the slide-over panel.

That will open up in your reports history page where you can download the report into Excel.

Once you open the report that was generated, we have a few different tabs you can work through in the worksheet. The first one just gives you some general information. What’s the average score of your requirements, the minimum, and maximum score, your total number of valid requirements, and then if you did have any invalid requirements as well. The file analysis reports, tab will give you a complete breakdown of all the requirements that were analyzed, their score, and then any corresponding INCOSE flags that may have popped up within the analysis.

We also have an explanation of each INCOSE flag as long as with their associated description. And then if your, report did happen to include any invalid requirements for any reason, those will be included in their separate sheet as well. Thank you for watching this demonstration of Jama Connect Advisor. If you would like to learn more about how Jamala Connect can optimize your product development process, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com

If you are already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information about Jama Connect Advisor, please contact your Customer Success Manager or Jama Software Consultant.

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

Jama Connect Receives Buyer’s Choice for 2025 on TrustRadius!

We’re proud to announce that Jama Connect has earned the Buyer’s Choice distinction from TrustRadius for 2025, recognizing it as a top platform for requirements, risk, and test management. This award reflects excellence in key areas: best capabilities, value for price, and customer relationships, based on verified user feedback.

“Requirements management is being revolutionized by Jama Connect to enable seamless collaboration and traceability” – Verified User – Project Manager in Information Technology, Medical Device Company – TrustRadius Review

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

Visit the full report to see why customers love using Jama Connect. This award reflects Jama Software’s commitment to driving innovation and delivering reliable solutions that help teams achieve exceptional results.

“Jama Connect has been invaluable to our organization as a common place to host our product’s specifications (user needs, system and module requirements, system interface), testing (test cases and traceability), as well as risk management documentation. All of our recent projects make use of Jama Connect and is used by the majority of our engineers.” – Verified User, Manager in Engineering, Medical Device Company – TrustRadius Review

We sincerely thank our customers for their feedback and ongoing support. Jama Software remains dedicated to providing the best resources and expertise to help you succeed!

“Jama Connect – Excellent Tool for Regulated Products!! We use Jama Connect to manage our IEC 61508 functional safety requirements that are used to certify our products. Jama Connect had an out of the box solution which allowed us to have tools to support all our artifacts and were able to further exploit its customization to support our companies unique processes. All safety and non-safety requirements across every engineering function uses the tool in this use case.” – Eric Zaremski, Lead Program Manager, FORT Robotics – TrustRadius Review

Intelligently improve your development process with Jama Connect:
Start your free 30-day trial!

From all of us at Jama Software, thank you!

In this blog, we’ll recap a section of our eBook, “Energy Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Energy” – Click HERE to download it in its entirety.

Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Product Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Energy

Use a Single Platform to Streamline Complex Energy Product Requirements Management and Traceability

Energy companies face numerous challenges in managing product requirements and traceability due to growing complexity and enhanced regulatory scrutiny to ensure quality, safety, and security. Delivering products or systems on time, reducing rework and recalls, and speeding up reviews and approvals, are critical in the intensely competitive environment.

Energy companies often attempt to manage critical processes using Word, Excel, or PDF document-based technology. While this manual approach may be adequate for small, simple projects, it fails as complexity and scale increase. Reliance on legacy document management software such as Confluence or SharePoint for tracing, storing, sharing, and retrieving requirements and traceability documents means dealing with data siloes, lack of interoperability, constant changes, security threats, and limited collaboration and analysis.

As a result, companies have difficulty:

Tracking the decomposition and implementation of their requirements
Managing the traceability between requirements, tests, designs and software
Generating documents to demonstrate adherence to standards for auditors
Managing updates and changes across concurrent or similar product development
Identifying product defects early in development
Delivering high quality products on time and budget
Collaborating effectively with all stakeholders around product requirements and standards
Creating an audit trail around sign-off and implementation of requirements

BOTTOM LINE

The increasing complexity of the energy industry and continued reliance on Word, Excel or outdated tools that lead to rework, delays, inefficient work processes, and late discovery of defects make it difficult for energy companies to efficiently manage product requirements to meet both internal and customer needs.

RELATED: Power Efficiency and Innovation Across Your Development Process with Jama Connect® for Energy Storage Systems

What if you didn’t have to compromise?

This Buyer’s Guide incorporates insights from Jama Software’s more than 15 years of experience partnering with forward-thinking product development teams and industry experts. We’ve designed a modern, digital platform that helps energy companies efficiently manage and deliver complex products by providing a centralized repository for all requirements, tests, and reports that are accessible by all stakeholders.

This allows energy companies to:

Reduce rework and product recalls significantly
Deliver products on time
Find defects faster and earlier
Reduce manual work associated with managing data in documents involving searching, duplicating, and formatting data, and tracking communications around requirements and reporting
Speed up review and approval cycles for requirements, feasibility, and certification documents
Increase product and data quality to ensure full test coverage, track end-to-end decomposition of products, and enable a unified data model for reporting and data extraction
Understand the source and impact of changes better and remove scope creep
Assign clear ownership over product definition

Use these insights to better understand the challenges you’re up against and thoughtfully consider potential solutions. Plus, learn how to get the buy-in you need to undertake the kind of transformation necessary to succeed with complex products.

Making the Case for Change

Jama Connect^® helps energy organizations transition their product development from a document-based way of working to a powerful —but easy-to-use—digital platform that provides a single source of truth which is easily
accessible by all stakeholders at any time. When product requirements and traceability are managed in a centralized platform, users benefit from a straightforward process and the business impact and value of the platform becomes clear across the organization—making management buy-in easier.

If your company is not considering the importance of transitioning to a more modern, digital, streamlined process, time is not on your side. Failing to act quickly can leave your organization even further behind.

But to see the value of a positive impact a system can have, stakeholders in an organization must appreciate the challenges first.

This is where you come in. You can help quantify the problem within your organization and provide data to help make the case for change.

Go through the exercises in the next section using data from your organization to identify your current situation and the size of the potential opportunity.

Tools to Assess the Situation in Your Organization

Throughout the past decade of working with energy (among other industries managing complex products or systems), four common pain points continuously arise for those who have yet to transform their process.

We’ll provide context around the problems and share equations with examples to help you uncover the savings from a modern product requirements management and traceability solution. Remember to adjust the variables according to your company’s metrics to get a more precise estimate, and rethink how your team functions.

Improving any one of these four aspects of your process produces real savings. While the calculations on the following pages aren’t cumulative, they impact one another and can add up to significant value for your organization.

This is the potential of using a modern digital platform. If realized, it can radically change your business and be the competitive edge you need in today’s market.

THE FOUR COMMON PAIN POINTS

Rework
Delays in Product Delivery
Inefficient Process for Working with Internal and External Stakeholders
Failure to Find and Fix Defects Early

Rework

In our experience, approximately 30-50% of a given product development process is rework. Rework is any time spent on extra work — including mid-product development changes, incorrect testing, or fixing problems — and it costs your company big time. Requirements errors cause the majority of rework. Improving the ability to track requirements from definition through testing to catch changes and adjust scope can ensure you’re doing or building the right thing and massively reducing overall lifecycle costs. Complete the equation below to get an understanding of the number of hours your team spends in rework and the value of that in working hours alone.

RELATED: Reduce Rework – ROI Calculator

PRO TIP

If your organization is working on more than one product at a time, repeat this calculation for each and add up the savings for a holistic view.

Delays in Product Delivery

Delivering products quickly and maintaining high quality are usually seen as compounding challenges. Conventional wisdom says the quicker you complete a product, the more likely it is to have issues, and vice versa. Understanding the impact of change, capturing decisions, communicating feedback, and reusing existing intellectual property — all aspects that can help speed time-to-market — can be improved with a modern requirements management and traceability solution.

RELATED: Reclaiming Productive Work Time – ROI Calculator

PRO TIP

Cost savings can certainly be great and have an impact on your bottom line, but don’t forget the qualitative implications. Consider what it would mean for your company’s reputation to complete high quality, product development faster.

Inefficient Process for Working with Internal and External Stakeholders

Are your days spent in inefficient meetings with internal stakeholders, customers, and subcontractors, sifting through emails and document versions for historical information, waiting for reviews and approvals, or creating documents for auditors? You’re not alone. Many teams suffer the repercussions of archaic, siloed product development work. A modern process maximizes efficiency by tackling the root causes of momentum-killing delays and holdups. Calculate how much unproductive work time is costing your business and imagine the possibilities of getting that time back. What could you do with one extra hour each day?

RELATED: Improving The Review Process – ROI Calculator

PRO TIP

We’ve seen long status meetings shrink or vanish when teams have the right solutions in place. Think about your team’s schedule and adjust the average time saved per person based on the time spent in meetings each week.

Failure to Find and Fix Defects Early

It’s common for product development to reveal defects at some point between launch and delivery. The important thing is to have a system in place that can quickly and accurately identify defects and track their impact up and downstream. This provides visibility into the problem as early as possible when it’s less detrimental to fix.

RELATED: Identify Defects Early – ROI Calculator

PRO TIP

This calculation factors in personnel hours, but you should also think about the cost of delays and missed opportunities. Plus, should defects go undetected due to sub-par product requirements or testing or delivering lower-quality products could have devastating consequences.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS EBOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Product Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Energy

Jama Connect is Once Again Named by G2 as the Overall Leader for Requirements Management Software

We’re excited to announce that Jama Connect has once again been recognized as the overall leader in the G2 Grid Report for Requirements Management Software for Fall 2024! G2’s rankings are based on verified user reviews and data gathered from across the web, analyzed through their proprietary v3.0 algorithm. The Fall 2024 G2 Grid Report reflects results calculated through August 27, 2024, showcasing the best in the field.

In addition to being named the top choice for requirements management, Jama Connect earned several prestigious accolades spanning all business size and multiple geographies for Fall 2024, including:

Overall Leader
Momentum Leader
Small-Business Leader
Mid-Market Leader
Enterprise Leader
EMEA Leader
Europe Leader

Learn more about the Fall 2024 G2 Grid for top Requirements Management Software products:
DOWNLOAD IT HERE

This recognition highlights the exceptional value we bring to customers transitioning from document-based approaches for managing complex product, systems, and software development. We are deeply grateful to our users for their trust and for sharing their open and honest feedback on our product, services, and support.

Customer Feedback Highlights

“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 – G2.com

“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 – G2.com

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

We are committed to providing the best possible experience for our users, and being named the overall leader by G2 is a testament to the success and satisfaction our customers have found with Jama Connect.

From all of us at Jama Software, thank you!

Where to Find Jama Software This Fall: Our 2024 Event Schedule

Join the Jama Software team in person this fall at some of the industry’s most exciting events. Whether you’re attending to learn about the latest trends in systems engineering, requirements management, or Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), our team of subject matter experts will be on hand to meet, discuss, and demonstrate how Jama Connect^® can help you tackle complex development challenges.

Below is our lineup of events for October and November — let’s connect!

TSIA World Envision – Las Vegas, Nevada, USA – October 21-23, 2024

Industry: Softech
Jama Software Representatives: Brian Morrisroe, Sales Lead and Steven Meadows, Principal Solutions Lead
Booth Number: 226
About this Event: We’re sponsoring the TSIA World Envision Expo in Las Vegas, where tech executives and professionals gather to network, connect, and explore solutions. Visit us at Booth #226 and join our Expo Theatre Session on Wednesday, October 23, at 12:15 PM to discover the power of Jama Connect.
Learn More: https://www.tsia.com/conference

Reuters Automotive USA 2024 – Detroit, Michigan, USA – October 21-23, 2024

Industry: Automotive / Semiconductor
Jama Software Representatives: Neil Stroud, General Manager – Auto & Semi and Steve Rush, Principal Solutions Consultant
Booth Number: 18
About this Event: Reuters’ Automotive USA is the automotive industry gathers to hear from trailblazing OEMs, innovative solution providers, and government agencies tackling today’s biggest challenges. Be sure to stop by the Jama Software booth #18 and say hi!
Learn More: https://events.reutersevents.com/automotive/automotive-usa

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

NDIA 27th Annual System and Mission Engineering Conference – Norfolk, Virginia, USA – October 27-31, 2024

Industry: Aerospace & Defense,
Jama Software Representatives: Cary Bryczek, Director – Solutions & Consulting and Rob Wilmot, Senior Account Executive
Booth Number: 4
About this Event: The Annual Systems & Mission Engineering Conference gathers defense professionals from industry, government, and academia to discuss improving defense acquisition and system performance. Jama Software is hosting a workshop on Monday, October 28 at 5:00pm in the Imagination Meeting Room. No prior experience with MBSE or Jama Connect is required. Space is limited. Contact us to learn more!
Learn More: https://www.ndia.org/events/2024/10/28/systems-mission-engineering-2024

MBSE Tutorial Session – Norfolk, Virginia, USA – Monday, October 28 | 5:00 – 7:00 PM ET

Event Theme: MBSE
Jama Software Representative: Cary Bryczek, Director of Aerospace & Defense Solutions
Location: Hilton Norfolk – The Main, Imagination Meeting Room, 3rd floor (in-person only)
About this Event: Attending the NDIA Systems and Mission Engineering Conference? Don’t miss our complimentary MBSE Tutorial Session the day before the event! Connect MBSE to mission-critical systems with insights aligned to DoD’s 2018 Digital Engineering Strategy & INCOSE SE Vision 2035. Build a complete model that includes mission needs, requirements, architecture, tests, risks, and software stories. Gain expertise in authoring, traceability, collaboration features, and measuring system development progress in real-time using Jama Connect.
Food & Drinks: Enjoy a buffet dinner with beer, wine, and cocktails while networking with peers
Seats are limited! Secure your spot now – https://lnkd.in/gEjJe5k4

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

ASEC INCOSE UK 2024 – Edinburgh, Scotland – November 5 – 6, 2024

Industry: Aerospace & Defense
Jama Software Representatives: Karl Mulcahy, Global Sales Manager, A&D and Colin White, Principal Solutions Consultant
Booth Number: TBA
About this Event: ASEC 2024 is The UK’s premier System Engineering event, attracting a wide range of industry, academic, and government professionals.
Learn More: https://www.asec2024.org.uk

Software-Defined Vehicles Europe 2024 – Frankfurt, Germany – November 11 – 14, 2024

Industry: Automotive / Semiconductor
Jama Software Representatives: Matt Mickle, Director – Solutions & Consulting and Stefan Stange, Managing Director – Sales
Booth Number: TBA
About this Event: The Software-Defined Vehicles (SDV) event is co-located with Cyber Security Europe and Connected Vehicles Europe, bringing together decision-makers from leading OEMs and Tier 1s in the Cybersecurity, Connectivity, and Software-Defined Vehicle sectors.
Don’t Miss: Matt Mickle and Florian Rohde, Managing Partner, iProcess LLC – on November 12, from 11:00 a.m. – 11:40 a.m. CET as they present their session “Supporting SDV Development Through Traceabile Agile” on the Main Stage.
Learn More: https://www.automotive-iq.com/events-sdv-software-defined-vehicles-europe

SpaceTech Expo 2024 – Bremen, Germany – November 19 – 21, 2024

Industry: Aerospace & Defense
Jama Software Representatives: Karl Mulcahy,Global Sales Manager, A&D, Martijn Janssen, Senior Solutions Consultant, and Dora Gerő, Senior Inbound Marketing Representative
Booth Number: R46
About this Event: Join us at Space Tech Expo! Europe’s largest exhibition and conference for the space industry. Stop by the Jama Software booth R46!
Learn More: https://epc.space/event/spacetech-2024/

We’re excited to meet with you and explore how Jama Connect can optimize your complex projects. Don’t miss this chance to connect with our experts, dive into the latest innovations, and gain insights tailored to your specific needs. Be sure to mark your calendar and reach out to schedule a one-on-one conversation at any of these events!

Understanding ALKS 157: Ensuring Safety and Compliance with Automatic Lane-Keeping Systems

As the automotive industry shifts toward increased automation, technologies like Automatic Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS) are playing a crucial role in improving both safety and convenience. ALKS, regulated by the ALKS 157 standard, is a key technology driving the advancement of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles.

In this blog, we’ll explore what ALKS 157 is and how automakers can ensure they meet the rigorous standards set by this regulation.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Automotive

What is ALKS 157?

ALKS 157 refers to United Nations Regulation No. 157, which establishes the framework for Automatic Lane Keeping Systems. These systems allow vehicles to maintain a steady course within a lane under certain conditions, without the need for constant driver intervention. The goal is to enhance safety, reduce driver fatigue, and provide a foundation for more advanced autonomous driving capabilities.

Specifically, ALKS 157 applies to vehicles traveling at speeds of up to 60 km/h, often in urban environments or during congested traffic conditions. It defines how the system should function, including its ability to manage both lateral and longitudinal movements within the lane, monitor the driver’s readiness to resume control, and safely perform emergency maneuvers.

To comply with ALKS 157, automakers must ensure their systems can:

Maintain lane discipline: Vehicles must stay centered within their lanes, automatically adjusting steering to prevent departure.
Handle unexpected events: Systems must detect and respond to sudden obstacles, such as braking vehicles or pedestrians entering the roadway.
Ensure driver engagement and handover: Drivers should be able to seamlessly take control when necessary. Systems must issue clear alerts and provide enough time for the driver to intervene.
Record and log data: ALKS-equipped vehicles must log specific operational data to help authorities assess compliance and performance, especially following incidents.

RELATED: Jama Connect for Automotive

The Importance of Compliance and How Jama Connect^® Can Help

Automakers are under increasing pressure to ensure that their vehicles not only feature cutting-edge technology but also adhere to strict safety regulations. ALKS 157 is particularly stringent because it addresses both the technical capabilities of lane-keeping systems and the ethical considerations surrounding the move toward autonomous driving.

Non-compliance with ALKS 157 can lead to regulatory penalties, market delays, and—most importantly—safety risks. For this reason, manufacturers need robust processes in place to manage these complex requirements throughout the vehicle development lifecycle.

Jama Connect provides powerful tools for managing requirements, ensuring traceability, and verifying that every part of a system meets the necessary standards, helping automakers stay compliant with regulations like ALKS 157.

Here’s how Jama Connect can support compliance efforts:

Define and manage requirements: Jama Connect allows automakers to clearly define ALKS 157 requirements, break them down into manageable tasks, and track them across teams to ensure all aspects of compliance are addressed.
Maintain traceability: The platform ensures that every requirement is traceable throughout development, from initial design to testing and validation. This traceability is essential for proving compliance during audits or regulatory reviews.
Facilitate collaboration: Complex systems like ALKS require cross-functional collaboration between engineering teams, safety experts, and regulators. Jama Connect’s collaborative tools make it easier for teams to stay aligned and address compliance challenges early in the process.
Streamline reviews and approvals: With Jama Connect, automakers can manage the review and approval process for ALKS 157 requirements more efficiently, reducing delays and ensuring the final product meets regulatory standards.

In today’s automotive landscape, where rapid technological advancements and stringent regulatory demands intersect, Jama Connect provides the tools necessary to ensure compliance without stifling innovation. By leveraging Jama Connect, automakers can stay ahead of evolving standards like ALKS 157 and continue to deliver safe, reliable, and compliant vehicles.

Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Matt Mickle, Decoteau Wilkerson, and Kenzie Jonsson.

In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Building the Blueprint: Applying Requirements Management in the AEC Industry” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

What does effective requirements management look like in the AEC industry?

Discover how Jama Connect^® is transforming requirements management for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) projects by streamlining processes, enhancing collaboration, and tackling the industry’s unique challenges — from managing complex stakeholder needs and ensuring compliance to saving time, reducing costly rework, and minimizing project risks.

In this webinar, experts Patrick Garman, Principal Solutions Consultant, and Joe Gould, Senior Account Executive from Jama Software, share insights and demonstrate Jama Connect’s powerful capabilities tailored for the AEC industry.

What you’ll learn:

Streamlined approaches to capturing, verifying, and tracking requirements
Techniques for reducing costly rework through inefficient project management
Ways to enhance team collaboration in complex projects
Strategies to ensure regulatory compliance through the project lifecycle
Insights from real-world case studies and industry-specific examples for successful AEC project delivery

BELOW IS AN ABBREVIATED SECTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT

Building the Blueprint: Applying Requirements Management in the AEC Industry

Joe Gould: Let’s start by examining a critical aspect of our industry and that’s regulations in AEC. Understand why they’re so vital to our work in the broader community. Regulations in the AEC industry serve multiple essential purposes. First, keeping people safe. Organizations like OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act, establish regulations to ensure the safety and accessibility of construction sites. In 2023, OSHA charged businesses $132.3 million for violations of its 10 most cited regulations. This substantial figure underscores the importance of adhering to safety standards to protect our workers and the public.

Second, ensuring structures last. Local building codes in the International Building Code, or IBC, set the standards for durability and longevity of structures. Failure to meet these standards can lead to severe penalties ranging from monetary fines to criminal charges. So ensuring compliance not only avoids these penalties but also guarantees the integrity and safety of the buildings that we design and that we construct.

Third, preserving our natural environment regulations from the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and LEED, Leadership and Energy Environmental Design, are designed to protect our environment. Penalties for violating environmental regulations can be severe with fines up to $250,000 and prison sentences of up to 15 years. Compliance helps us minimize our environmental footprint and contribute to sustainable development.

Last, providing financial protection for all involved. Regulations enforced by the FTC, Federal Trade Commission, and EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, ensure that all parties involved in construction projects receive fair compensation for their work. These regulations aim to promote fairness and transparency, ensuring that everyone from contractors to laborers are paid appropriately. Non-compliance can result in project delays and financial losses.

RELATED: Whitepaper Six Key Challenges in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Industry and How to Solve Them with Jama Connect

Gould: The importance of adhering to these regulations cannot be overstated. These aren’t just bureaucratic hurdles. They’re the foundation of a safe, sustainable, and fair construction industry. And by following these regulations, we protect our workers, ensure the longevity and safety of our structures, preserve our environment, and promote fairness and financial integrity within our projects.

Construction is one of the most heavily regulated industries that exist. On top of regulations, the process of completing a long-term project requires an astronomical paper trail. However, this paper trail ensures that everything is done properly and that every worker is paid accordingly. To accommodate all of these moving parts, you need a dependable requirements management system to keep it all organized. As we navigate the dynamic landscape of AEC, there are various factors that contribute to the alterations and project requirements. Design modifications, compliance updates, stakeholder feedback, and other elements play a significant role in shaping project timelines and outcomes. Understanding these drivers is crucial for adapting to evolving project needs and ensuring successful project delivery. So let’s take a deeper look into the opportunity within the AEC industry.

There is a significant opportunity within the construction industry that has the potential to transform our sector and drive substantial economic growth. So let’s start with some key statistics that highlight the current landscape. 13% of the world’s GDP is driven by construction-related spending, 13%! This figure underscores the immense scale and economic importance of our industry globally. However, despite this substantial contribution, there’s a glaring productivity gap that we have to address. Over the past 20 years, the construction sector’s annual growth has increased by just 1%. This stagnant growth rate indicates that we are not maximizing our potential and that there are significant inefficiencies that are holding us back.

This brings us to the most compelling figure. There is a $1.6 trillion global opportunity to boost productivity in the construction sector annually. This isn’t just a number, this is a call to action. Imagine what we could achieve with an additional $1.6 trillion in value each year. It would revolutionize our industry, leading to faster project completion, reduce cost, and enhance profitability. The question we have to ask ourselves is how can we tap into this vast opportunity.

RELATED: AEC Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements and Compliance Management Solution for Complex Projects

Gould: Did you know that inadequate scope management can lead to significant cost escalations? According to McKinsey and Company, up to 20% of project costs can be attributed to scope adjustments. However, with Jama Connect we can save time and money by mitigating scope-related issues. So let’s explore how effective requirements management can be a game changer in controlling project costs.

See, we have a requirements management problem and we don’t even know that we have a problem. There’s a better way than managing this through a series of documents. Jama Connect is a purpose-built tool to centralize all project requirements from the inception of a project through commissioning. Imagine a world where scope creep, inconsistent documentation, and communication gaps no longer hinder project success. With Jama Connect, we step into a realm of streamlined communication, stakeholder alignment, and precise cost estimation. And by centralizing project requirements, Jama Connect acts as a beacon of clarity guiding us through the maze of regulatory compliance and project intricacies.

In the realm of AEC projects, focus, traceability, collaboration, and compliance play pivotal roles in ensuring successful outcomes. Jama Connect stands as a proven solution offering end-to-end traceability and requirements reuse for complex projects. So as we navigate the intricate landscape of construction, let’s explore how Jama Connect revolutionizes the way that we capture, manage, and validate requirements.

WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Building the Blueprint: Applying Requirements Management in the AEC Industry

In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Migrating from IBM DOORS: Learn Why and How Rockwell Automation Made the Switch” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

Migrating from IBM^® DOORS^®: Why and How Rockwell Automation Made the Switch

As a modern alternative to traditional legacy platforms like IBM DOORS, Jama Connect^® enables digital transformation with a more efficient and user-friendly approach to managing risk and compliance. And although the benefits are innumerable, some organizations hesitate to migrate to a modern platform because they believe it’s a painful, slow process.

You will hear directly from one of our customers, Rockwell Automation, about why they decided to migrate from IBM DOORS and how they were able to successfully move to Jama Connect.

In this session, the Rockwell Automation team answered the following questions, and more:

Why was now the right time to switch tools?
How easy was it to switch environments while preserving IP?
How did the Jama Software® team assist you in making the migration process as smooth as possible?
What are the drivers for continued and expanded use of Jama Connect?
What are the key benefits you have realized since the migration?

BELOW IS AN ABBREVIATED SECTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT ABOUT MIGRATING FROM IBM DOORS

Sheila King: Rockwell has some business units that have functional safety products with the 61508, and although it’s not widely used at Rockwell, teams have solved their traceability and requirements management at the business unit level using Classic DOORS. Other teams were using homegrown requirements tools and traceability, including Doxygen, and yet other teams were using Word documents and Excel spreadsheets and doing the manual brute force way of doing traceability and requirements. But then when the security landscape changed and we realized the vulnerabilities of industrial automation, the 62443 cyber security specification was invented and we decided that we needed to use it, so we needed a site certification and in the process we adopted the IBM CLM product with the DOORS Next Gen RTC for planning and RQM for test management.

Mario Maldari: What led you to consider making a switch away from the tools that you were using and why was that change needed?

King: We were already in the throes of adopting the CLM DNG tools and developing our product cycle in order to meet the 62443 certification, and we decided in that process that we really needed to up our game. We needed better planning tools for our test integration and continuous integration and delivery, and we needed better tools for requirements management. That included the ability to move data widely between products because that’s real life and in the current tools, the DOORS Next Generation (sometimes called DNG or DOORS NG) tools, we needed to use the ReqIF, which was really an administrative thing as opposed to people being able to move their own data. We also had the solution for DOORS NG and RQM and RTC and we hired a third party or we contracted a third party vendor to manage that and we decided we needed a better integration for that, for our vendor. For the tools themselves, we needed variant and configuration management and native real-time traceability.

RELATED: IEC 61508 Overview: The Complete Guide for Functional Safety in Industrial Manufacturing

Maldari: Can we spend a few minutes looking at the primary considerations you have for selecting Jama Connect as opposed to DOORS Next Generation?

King: Yeah. We actually created a grassroots working group to evaluate tools and we evaluated several. Our top two were of course Jama [Connect] and Helix. The tiebreakers were this, Jama Connect had functional safety-ready certification and anybody who goes through functional safety knows how much value that is for your audit. We needed a strong review center and Jama [Connect] has that. We needed baselines in order to be able to not have to use SAP for saving our documents. We like the rational database and the ability to configure different item types. We not only use Jama Connect for our requirements, but we use it for our threat models and our fault models, and we also liked a lot the structure, the permission structure that allows you to specify all the way down to requirement if you need to, how you’re going to protect your data in the tools. And with our fault and models or design for security and threat models, that is our business risk or business restricted setting.

Maldari: Thank you. We know the value of an organization’s environment is their data. You spend a lot of money buying tools and maintaining tools, but the real value is the data that you have inside of those tools. Can you share some of the concerns Rockwell had going into the migration?

King: First of all, we were going to having all our data in the cloud. And so we had our CISO team get involved in that and they did an evaluation because not only were we now putting requirements in the cloud, we were putting our source in the cloud with Git. We were putting our planning, our tests in the clouds, our anomalies in the cloud, some kind of scary stuff to have in the cloud, and so we had a CISO audit and they decided that it was very safe to do that. Secondly, when it comes to actually keeping our data safe, the truth is we asked Jama Connect to explain to us how they were going to keep it safe and they convinced us that they could, and so they’ll tell you how they kept our data safe.

Maldari: Maybe that’s a good transition to the next question. This is just a discussion around were there any specific steps you took to protect the data and IP?

King: Because we had such a short window for moving all the content over, we made backups as it was in our current tools and then moved them into the tools and we used the ReqIFs, the collections and all that stuff from DNG and just about every other way you can export data out of that and back it all up. And then once we moved it into Jama Connect, actually just handed it over to the Jama Software team and they imported it and then we migrated it and “Jama-tized” the data once we had it inside.

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

Maldari: Maybe we could bring Preston into this as well. Can you and Preston share some of the details around the migration approach?

Preston Mitchell: Yes. I’ll go ahead and let Sheila start and then I’ll jump in after.

King: So just as I mentioned, we had six months to do it, so we had three phases that we started with. We worked with our stakeholders to identify all the content to be migrated, and then we again had the extremely tight window we elected, like I mentioned, to adopt, to bring it over into Jama Connect as is.

Mitchell: Thanks, Sheila. Yeah, the slide that’s being presented right now basically illustrates the standard migration approach utilized by the Jama Connect team and our partners. Every migration is going to have unique elements, needs, but in the case of Rockwell’s migration, this template married very well. As Sheila was taking care of the planning, we transitioned really seamlessly into analysis and discovery. During the discovery and proof of concept stages. We did come across a few issues, very common in migrations, so we required some customized tool development, but once we had validated the integration tools and the approach, the final stages was fairly straightforward process.

Sheila was generating all of the extracts from the legacy systems and she would transfer those to the Jama Software team and then we would load them into Jama Connect. And as Sheila said, in some cases we go through a cleaning of the data prior to migration, but again, given the short window for this migration, we just elected to bring all the data over from DOORS Next Gen, which in some cases some of the modules had over 170 attributes, which we were able to consolidate and clean down quite a bit later. But again, with a short timeframe, we just elected to bring everything in as is cleaning up afterwards and Jama Connect because they were coming up against a pretty critical deadline where they were losing access to their DOORS instance.

Maldari: That sounds pretty comprehensive. Sheila, now that you’re at the other end, how would you rate your experience around migration and user your satisfaction?

King: Oh, well, the team was just great. They worked really hard to integrate and migrate our data. Anytime we ran into an issue, we got the software group and I keep forgetting the name of the team, I just call them the software group because that’s what we are, software. Anyway, but they’d come in and they would write some code to add to their data exchange to manage the data that was coming out of the tools, and it just worked really very well. The Classic DOORS group had a hundred and I can’t remember, seven fields, and we were able to talk them down into just, I think it’s 10 now.

WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Migrating from IBM^® DOORS^®: Learn Why and How Rockwell Automation Made the Switch

In this blog, we’ll recap a section of our eBook, “Best Practices Guide to Requirements and Requirements Management in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Industry” – Click HERE to download it in its entirety.

Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements and Compliance Management Solution for Complex Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Projects

Use a Single Platform to Streamline Complex AEC Project Requirements and Compliance Management

Architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) companies face numerous challenges in managing complex project requirements and compliance due to growing complexity and enhanced regulatory scrutiny and business competition.

Project delays and cost overruns are common for a variety of reasons. Poor planning, miscommunication, and unanticipated changes can create a chaotic environment. Incomplete or mismanaged requirements are often dispersed across various isolated systems. Keeping up to date and demonstrating compliance with the latest safety, environmental, zoning and land use regulations, building codes and permits, labor, and employment laws are time-consuming and resource intensive. Without a structured approach, identifying and mitigating risks in projects is challenging. Inadequate documentation and poor knowledge management can result in lost information, repeated mistakes, and inefficiencies that lead to higher project costs and delays. Traceability – the ability to connect the dots between requirements, standards, and tests – is fundamental for AEC projects to succeed.

Companies often make the situation worse by attempting to manage critical processes using Word, Excel, or PDF document-based technology. While this manual approach may be adequate for small, simple AEC projects, it fails as complexity and scale increase. Reliance on legacy document management software such as SharePoint for tracing, storing, sharing, and retrieving project requirements and compliance documents means dealing with data siloes, lack of interoperability, constant changes, security threats, and limited collaboration and analysis.

As a result, companies have difficulty:

Reporting compliance to standards
Directly tracing regulations and standards to project requirements
Managing updates and implementing changes across concurrent projects
Collaborating effectively at a granular level around standards and design requirements
Creating an audit trail around sign-off and implementation of requirements and compliance

BOTTOM LINE

The increasing complexity and reliance on outdated tools make it difficult for AEC companies to efficiently manage requirements and compliance for complex projects that meet both internal and customer needs.

RELATED: Six Key Challenges in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Industry and How to Solve Them with Jama Connect^®