Community Event Week 2025: Exclusive Roundtables for Jama Connect® Users
At Jama Software, we know the power of community. That’s why we’re thrilled to invite you to our Community Event Week, happening from May 12 to May 16! This exclusive event is just for our valued Jama Connect users, offering attendee-led sessions packed with insights, opportunities to grow, and meaningful connections with other professionals in your industry.
Each day focuses on a specific vertical, ensuring that the topics, challenges, and triumphs discussed are truly relevant to you. Whether you’re tackling compliance hurdles, managing intricate development cycles, or looking to exchange ideas with peers, our Community Event Week is your chance to level up your expertise and meet like-minded professionals.
Why Attend Community Event Week?
This isn’t your typical webinar or conference. Community Event Week is all about fostering connections, sharing real-world solutions, and growing together. Here’s what you can expect:
Relevant Sessions: Each day is tailored to a specific industry vertical, so the topics resonate with your professional challenges and goals.
Expert Guidance: Gain insights from Jama Software solutions leads who’ll moderate discussions and help answer your burning questions.
Peer Connection: Build relationships with other professionals in your field who use Jama Connect.
Practical Takeaways: Leave your session armed with actionable insights and strategies to tackle your day-to-day challenges.
Community Connect Schedule
May 12 – Community Connect for Automotive & Semiconductor
Kick off the week with professionals from the automotive and semiconductor industries. This session is all about addressing the intricacies of these fast-evolving fields. Share your experiences, discuss challenges, and get answers to your questions, all while gaining expert insights from fellow attendees and our Jama Software Solutions Lead.
Who it’s for: Automotive and semiconductor professionals
Why attend: Network with peers, talk about the complexities of the industry, and exchange real-world solutions
May 13 – Community Connect for Medical Devices & Life Sciences
Dive into the complex world of medical devices and life sciences. Whether you’re managing compliance challenges, curious about effective regulatory strategies, or simply looking for innovative perspectives, this session offers something for everyone.
Who it’s for: Medical device industry professionals
Why attend: Take part in attendee-led discussions with peers, exploring strategies to deliver safe, effective products in a fast-paced and evolving market.
May 14 – Community Connect for Oil, Gas, Architecture, Engineering, and Software
Join a diverse group of professionals from industries like oil, gas, engineering, construction, and software. This open discussion will tackle both common and industry-specific challenges, sparking ideas and solutions to help you move forward.
Who it’s for: Professionals in software, oil & gas, engineering, and construction
Why attend: Tap into collective expertise across these important and complex industries
May 15 – Community Connect for Aerospace & Defense
Aerospace and defense teams know the stakes are high. From managing complex requirements to complying with strict regulations and timelines, this industry requires precision. This session offers a space for collaboration and innovative problem-solving with fellow experts.
Who it’s for: Aerospace and defense professionals
Why attend: Swap ideas and discover new strategies for mission-critical projects
May 16 – Community Connect for Industrial, Consumer Electronics, & Energy
Wrap up the week with an opportunity for cross-industry connection. Professionals in industrial, energy, and consumer electronics will share their experiences, lessons learned, and fresh ideas. Expand your network while learning from peers in diverse yet complementary fields.
Who it’s for: Industrial, electronics, and energy professionals
Why attend: Engage in attendee-led sessions that foster peer collaboration on creating reliable, high-quality products while navigating the complexities of a dynamic marketplace.
These roundtables are designed for current Jama Connect customers to provide the most relevant and enriching experience possible. If you’re a current user, you’re in for some invaluable sessions that could transform the way you work.
However, if you’re not yet a Jama Software client, but are exploring how we can help your organization streamline complex development, we’ve got plenty of resources to get you started:
And if you’d like to speak directly with our team about your specific challenges, we’d love to set up a personalized consultation. Contact us here.
Jama Software Provides a Single, All-in-One Solution for Requirements, Risk Management, and Validation
Organizing requirements, managing risk, and ensuring validation are complex processes on their own. For teams in the medical device industry, these tasks are even more challenging due to stringent regulatory standards and the critical nature of the products themselves. Jama Connect®, a robust software tool designed specifically for such pressures, offers a seamless, all-in-one solution.
What to Look for In a Requirements Management Tool
At the 2024 INCOSE Healthcare Conference, one of the presenters delivered an insightful presentation highlighting the essential features their organization identified as necessary in a requirements management solution to effectively support complex risk management procedures.
This blog post provides a detailed breakdown of how Jama Connect is specifically designed to address each of these critical areas discussed during the presentation.
End-to-End Traceability for Risk Analysis and Validation
Why It’s Important: Without clear traceability, unverified requirements or overlooked risks can result in delays, missed compliance, or worse, product failure.
How Jama Connect Helps:
Jama Connect provides traceability across all items in the development process, linking risk analysis elements to requirements, mitigations, and verification items.
Suspect triggers and impact analysis. Any upstream change triggers “suspect links,” highlighting potential downstream impacts, so no critical changes are overlooked. Impact analysis features allow for a proactive approach to understanding the scope of a change BEFORE it occurs.
Configurable views and export templates ensure efficient reporting to compliance agencies, showing validation evidence clearly and concisely.
Example: Teams can easily export views with verification columns from Jama Connect into Word or Excel for seamless external reporting.
Supports seamless data imports from applications like Microsoft Excel or Word, using reusable import wizards for faster and repeatable imports.
Pre-configured framework for Medical Device & Life Sciences, reduces time-to-value, allowing teams to get up and running quickly.
SOC2 Compliance, combined with the robust capabilities of a Validated Cloud and Validation Kit, provides systems engineers with effective solutions to meet stringent security and regulatory compliance requirements.
Additionally, the focus on user experience allows for a fast time to value across project teams.
Flexible Configurations for Different Workflows
Why It’s Important: Medical device companies don’t all operate under the same workflow, and tools must accommodate that diversity.
How Jama Connect Helps:
Pre-configured frameworks for compliance streamline setup time while allowing for configuration to suit unique organizational processes.
Provides users with the Traceability Information Model, visualizing traceability chains to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
From aligning with new SOPs to creating testing and validation workflows, customization ensures this tool adapts as projects evolve.
Scalable Solution for Large Projects
Why It’s Important: Medical device development often spans multiple teams and product lines, increasing complexity.
How Jama Connect Helps:
Provides for the ability to break large projects down into smaller, manageable subcomponents while maintaining traceability across product lines.
Supports cross-project traceability and reusability, which is ideal for future scaling.
This modular approach makes it easy for businesses to simplify operations without losing sight of critical compliance elements.
Risk management and requirements traceability go hand-in-hand, forming a critical component of any successful project. A well-configured tool should seamlessly align with your existing processes while offering the flexibility to adapt to your specific needs.
To illustrate, here are three examples of how Jama Connect’s Traceability Information Model can be configured to enhance and support a comprehensive risk management process. These configurations are designed to streamline workflows, improve traceability, and ensure better alignment with your risk management objectives.
Example 1 (from Jama Connect’s Medical Device Framework)
Example 2 (from Jama Connect’s Medical Device Framework)
Example 3: Customized Workflow
Conclusion:
Jama Connect is a purpose-built solution designed to meet the complex and stringent requirements of the medical device industry. Offering robust capabilities like end-to-end traceability — from risk analysis through to verification — it ensures seamless oversight across the entire development lifecycle. With capabilities, such as FMEA and alignment with critical regulatory standards for the medical device industry, Jama Connect simplifies compliance and elevates requirements management to the next level.
With award winning usability, Jama Connect features an intuitive interface, customizable configurations, and powerful change management capabilities. These features enable teams to work efficiently while staying aligned with regulatory needs. By fostering real-time collaboration and bridging the gaps between stakeholders, Jama Connect empowers organizations to accelerate product development without compromising on safety or quality.
[Webinar Recap] Empowering Complex Development with Responsible AI
AI is reshaping the way teams manage complexity in product development — but in regulated industries like aerospace, defense, automotive, and medical devices, responsible AI adoption is critical.
In this webinar, our expert Katie Huckett will explore how AI is transforming modern development processes, the ethical considerations of AI adoption, and the latest AI-driven innovations in Jama Connect®.
What You’ll Learn:
How AI is streamlining requirements management with automation and predictive insights
Best practices for responsible AI adoption in compliance-heavy industries
Jama Connect’s AI-powered features that enhance requirements quality, traceability, and risk mitigation
Our Amazon Web Services (AWS) partnership and how it enables secure, scalable AI-driven workflows
Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.
Katie Huckett: Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this exciting webinar. Empowering Complex Development with Responsible AI. In today’s rapidly evolving world, industries like aerospace, defense, automotive, medical devices and financial services are facing unprecedented challenges. As products and systems become increasingly complex, ensuring regulatory compliance requirement clarity, and test coverage has never been more critical. Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we approach these challenges, offering powerful tools to automate tedious processes, enhance decision-making and improve requirement quality. But with AI’s potential comes a responsibility to ensure fairness, transparency, security, and compliance.
By the end of this session, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how AI can accelerate development while maintaining accuracy, compliance, and ethical integrity. I’ll be your speaker today. My name is Katie Huckett. I bring over 15 years of product management experience and enterprise solutions. I’m one of Jama Software’s senior product managers, where I play a key role in bringing Jama Connect Advisor™ to life, as well as our AI strategy and roadmap for the future evolution of our AI offerings. In this webinar, we’ll explore the role of AI and complex product development in regulated industries. What is responsible AI and how is it used? Our partnership with Amazon Web Services, including our commitment to AI governance and security, ensuring AI aligns with industry standards and best practices.
Jama Connect’s AI-driven innovations leveraging AWS AI tools and discuss how AI enhances traceability, compliance verification, and validation while keeping human expertise in control. We’ll have a brief question and answer portion before we conclude today. Let’s dive in. Starting with Jama Software and our role in the product development ecosystem. Our vision and our purpose is to make sure that innovators can efficiently achieve success, and as you’ll see from today’s discussion, that’s really at the core of what drove our introduction for Jama Connect Advisor. From a broader solution standpoint, Jama is the number one requirements management provider in the marketplace.
We help teams with requirements management and product development through live traceability that also spans not only requirements, but the validation and verification components on the test side, risk management, and other key data that drives those processes forward. The value that we hope these innovative organizations or customers derive is really focused around things like cycle time reduction, helping speed time to market, enabling through live traceability, the ability to gain visibility and control over the organization’s product development processes, and really drive a tremendous amount of value and ultimately ensure compliance and risk management.
Huckett: As far as organizations that we work with, we span medical device, automotive, industrial machinery, software. This is just a sampling of customers that we have the pleasure to partner with. We have over 800 customers globally. These organizations span from smaller startup companies to large global enterprises. So with that very short intro to Jama Software, I would now like to review some of the complexity and challenges that we see today in product development and of course to introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor. Today’s systems have become much more complex and the emergence of the system of systems architecture has become the dominant approach for devices in all sectors, whether it’s aerospace, automotive, medical, and even consumer products.
The system of systems is actually a collection of independent subsystems that are integrated into larger systems and deliver the unique capabilities required by users. The challenges that is difficult to predict accurate, predictable models of all emergent behaviors. So Google’s systems of systems performance is difficult to design. That leads to testing and verification verifying upgrades to existing systems of systems is difficult and expensive as well, which is hard to scale. These are some of the factors that led us to think about how we can help. In today’s landscape, complex product and software development and manufacturing require organizations to balance innovation, compliance, and efficiency.
Industries today face increasing regulatory scrutiny, rising product complexity, and pressure to accelerate time to market. Let’s take a look at the role of AI in modern requirements’ management. Modern products are no longer purely mechanical. They integrate hardware, software, AI, and cybersecurity. For an example, a self-driving car must integrate advanced driver assistance systems, cloud connectivity, AI-powered decision-making, and functional safety. AI-driven requirement validation ensures that specifications are complete, testable, and free from ambiguities, preventing integration failures later. There’s also regulatory pressures and compliance challenges.
Industries such as aerospace, medical device, automotive, again, must comply with strict safety and cybersecurity standards. AI can map requirements to relevant regulations, ensuring compliance is automated and continuously monitored. There’s also a push for faster development cycles. Traditional product life cycles are shrinking due to market competition and innovative demands. AI-powered predictive impact analysis helps developers understand the effects of changes instantly reducing rework and speeding up time to market. There’s also a huge burden of manual processes. Many organizations still rely on spreadsheets, disconnected documents, and siloed teams to manage requirements.
AI-powered natural language processing can automatically detect inconsistencies, duplications, and incomplete requirements, improving efficiency. As well as a large need for better communication, collaboration, and visibility. So as teams become more distributed, cross-functional collaboration is more difficult. AI-powered requirement linking and automated traceability ensure that all stakeholders have real-time insights into requirement changes. AI is transforming requirements management by automating manual error-prone processes such as automatic requirement classification. AI can analyze text and categorize requirements by priority, risk, or compliance relevance.
Huckett: There’s also duplicate and conflict detection. AI can identify duplicate or conflicting requirements, reducing errors. There’s also a need for enhancing accuracy and requirements traceability, so AI can help ensure that every requirement is properly linked to tests, regulations, and design components, reducing compliance risk. We also have improved decision-making through predictive analytics. AI enables teams to make data-driven decisions faster and with more confidence. As product complexity increases, traditional requirement management cannot scale effectively. AI-driven tools and Jama Connect will automate compliance, enhance traceability, and improve decision-making, helping industries stay ahead of regulatory and market demands.
AI is not replacing engineers, it is augmenting their capabilities, enabling teams to develop safer, more compliant, and more innovative products faster. The rapid adoption of AI-driven tools in highly regulated industries brings immense opportunities for efficiency, automation, and innovation. However, AI also introduces ethical regulatory and governance challenges that must be addressed to ensure fairness, compliance, and trustworthiness in AI-driven decision-making. This section will explore the principles of responsible AI, regulatory hurdles, best practices for governance, and real-world examples of AI successes and failures.
As AI systems increasingly influence safety-critical industries, organizations must ensure their AI solutions adhere to ethical AI practices to prevent bias, misinformation, and harm. Responsible AI encompasses the following core principles. Fairness, which is your AI models must be free from bias to ensure equitable outcomes. Transparency, AI decision-making should be explainable and understandable. Accountability, organizations must take responsibility for AI-driven decisions. And of course, privacy and security, AI systems must protect sensitive data and prevent misuse.
AI is used in mission-critical applications such as aerospace and defense, where we have autonomous drones and AI assistance surveillance. In automotive, we have AI-powered advanced driver assistance systems, and in medical devices we have AI-driven diagnostics and robotic surgery. If AI models are not carefully designed, tested, and governed, unintended biases, errors, or security vulnerabilities could lead to catastrophic consequences. Not to mention the complexity of navigating regulations in a variety of industries. So for example, in aerospace and defense, AI and avionics and defense systems must comply with several standards.
Medical devices, we have the FDA Good Machine Learning Practices sets guidelines for AI-driven medical software. And in the automotive industry, AI in autonomous vehicles must meet ISO 21448 and ISO 26262. AI relies on large data sets, often containing sensitive information. Organizations must ensure compliance with regulations such as GDPR, which protects EU citizens data from misuse. There’s HIPAA, which governs healthcare AI solutions in the US and the California Consumer Privacy Act, which regulates AI handling consumer data. To build trustworthy and responsible AI organizations need robust governance frameworks that ensure AI models remain fair, explainable, and compliant over time.
Organizations should implement structured AI governance frameworks such as NIST AI Risk Management Framework, which provides a structured approach for assessing AI risks. In the way of the ISO/IEC 42001, which is an AI management systems standards, which establishes best practices for AI governance. We also have the IEEE Ethically Aligned Design, which focuses on human-centric AI development. For example, a medical device manufacturer developing an AI-powered diagnostic tool can use the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to ensure the model’s explainability, fairness, and reliability.
Huckett: AI models degrade over time as real-world conditions change, so organizations must continuously monitor AI performance for bias and drift, gather feedback from domain experts, users, and regulatory bodies, and implement AI auditing mechanisms to detect unintended outcomes. Let’s talk about a few real-world examples. So we have here a couple of case studies of successful AI adoption. So AI-assisted radiology tools have improved early cancer detection by 30% leading to better patient outcomes. One of the key factors in the success was the AI models were trained on large diverse datasets and continuously validated by human radiologists.
Another example, AI-driven predictive maintenance in commercial aircraft has reduced downtime by 25%, saving airlines millions in operational costs. One of their key factors for success was AI predictions were cross-validated with human engineering teams before implementation. And here we have a few real-world examples that are really cautionary tales in AI adoption. In 2018, an AI-driven hiring system was found to be biased against female candidates because it had been trained primarily on resumes for male applicants. So the lesson learned here is that AI models inherit bias from historical data emphasizing the need for bias audits and fairness checks.
And several self-driving car crashes occurred due to AI, misidentifying obstacles, pedestrians, or unexpected road conditions. So their lesson learned is that AI models require continuous real-world testing and human oversight to handle edge cases effectively. By proactively managing AI risks, organizations can unlock AI’s full potential while ensuring safety, fairness, and compliance in their industries. At Jama Software, we are committed to delivering responsible, scalable, and secure AI solutions to help our customers manage complexity in highly regulated industries. By partnering with AWS, we ensure that AI and Jama Connect is secure, responsible, and purpose-built for the industries we serve.
Enhancing efficiency without compromising compliance. AWS is at the forefront of AI and machine learning innovation, offering scalable, secure, and cutting-edge AI solutions that power businesses across many different industries. With industry-leading AI services, AWS enables organizations to automate complex tasks, extract insights from data and enhance decision-making with state-of-the-art machine learning models. From natural language processing to generative AI and predictive analytics, AWS provides flexible enterprise-grade AI tools that drive efficiency, improve accuracy, and accelerate product development, all while ensuring security, compliance, and responsible AI governance.
By leveraging AWS AI, companies can turn vast amounts of data into actionable intelligence, unlocking new possibilities for innovation and transforming the way they work. AWS’s AI and machine learning solutions are designed to scale effortlessly with business needs, supporting everything from small AI experiments to large enterprise applications. AWS AI services comply with industry-specific security standards, including HIPAA for healthcare applications, GDPR and CCPA for data privacy, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and FedRAMP for cloud security and governance. Amazon Web Services is deeply committed to the responsible development and deployment of artificial intelligence.
Jama Connect® Maintains Its Position as the Top Leader in Requirements Management Software
Jama Connect has once again earned the #1 spot in G2’s Spring 2025 Grid® Report for Requirements Management Software—our fifth consecutive quarter as the overall leader.
This recognition further cements our position as the top-rated solution for requirements management, ahead of competitors like Polarion, IBM® DOORS®, and Codebeamer.
G2’s rankings are determined by real user feedback, along with data collected from online sources and social networks, all analyzed through their proprietary v3.0 algorithm. The Spring 2025 Grid Report, based on data gathered through February 25, 2025, highlights the industry’s top-performing tools.
And that’s not all — Jama Connect was recognized with multiple prestigious awards across various business sizes and regions, including:
This accomplishment underscores our commitment to helping customers transition from document-based processes to a modern requirements management platform. Jama Connect empowers teams to manage complex product, systems, and software development with unmatched clarity and collaboration.
We owe this success to the incredible feedback from our users. Here’s what they’re saying:
“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 to 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
Thank You to Our Customers
Being named the Overall Leader by G2 is a direct result of the trust and support of our customers. Your feedback fuels our innovation and drives us to deliver the best possible platform for modern requirements management.
Thank you from all of us at Jama Software!
Mastering Configuration and Customization in Jama Connect®
Jama Connect® is a powerful platform designed to streamline requirements management and foster process standardization across organizations. Its flexibility allows teams to tailor the system to their unique workflows while maintaining consistency. This article delves into effective strategies for configuring and customizing Jama Connect to align with your organization’s processes.
Embrace Process Standardization
While Jama Connect offers extensive configurability, it’s essential to prioritize process standardization. Aligning team-specific needs with a unified process ensures consistency and efficiency. Before implementing custom configurations, evaluate whether existing setups or minor adjustments can meet your requirements. This approach minimizes complexity and promotes a cohesive workflow.
As your team interacts with Jama Connect, new configuration needs may emerge. Establishing a Configuration Change Control process helps manage these requests systematically. Form a configuration change board responsible for reviewing and approving configuration changes. This board assesses requests to determine if they can be addressed through process alignment, existing configurations, or user training. Such governance ensures that changes are deliberate and beneficial.
Customize Item Types Thoughtfully
Item types in Jama Connect define various artifacts like requirements, test cases, and risks. While creating custom item types can cater to specific needs, it’s advisable to limit their proliferation. A streamlined set of item types simplifies management and enhances reporting consistency across projects. Before adding new item types, consider adapting existing ones to serve multiple teams, ensuring they are not over-configured with unnecessary fields. Remember, changes to item types affect all projects, as they cannot be customized individually.
The Explorer Tree is central to navigating projects within Jama Connect. Users can tailor this feature to display information most pertinent to their roles:
Access Explorer Settings: Click the gear icon at the top of the Explorer Tree.
Adjust Preferences: In the settings window, choose options such as displaying item IDs, showing only folders, or enabling outline numbering.
Apply Changes: Save your settings to customize your view.
These adjustments enhance usability and focus, allowing users to concentrate on relevant project components.
Jama Connect allows you to fully customize your workflow process to align with your unique organizational needs. Whether your workflow follows a simple pattern, such as “Draft → Reviewed → Approved,” or a more complex series of states, you have the flexibility to define and manage it directly within Jama Connect. This customization ensures alignment with your team’s processes, facilitating smoother transitions between stages and maintaining clear visibility into the current status of your work items. By tailoring workflows, teams can improve efficiency, maintain compliance, and ensure that the right steps are followed throughout the project lifecycle.
The Review Center within Jama Connect also supports significant levels of configuration and customization, empowering teams to manage reviews effectively. For example, you can enable features like voting mechanisms to gather stakeholders’ input, implement electronic signatures for requirements to ensure traceability and compliance, or lock items automatically once they reach a specific state in the review process. These configurable options provide enhanced control over collaboration, allowing teams to tailor the review process to meet business goals while fostering accountability and transparency among all participants.
Enhance Test Execution with Custom Fields
During test execution, capturing specific data can be crucial. Adding custom fields to the Test Run item type allows testers to input additional information:
Access Test Run Configuration: Go to Admin > Item Types > Test Runs.
Add Custom Field: Click ‘Add field,’ complete the form, and save.
Utilize in Test Runs: The new fields will appear during test execution for data entry.
This customization enables teams to collect all necessary information during testing, enhancing the quality and traceability of test results.
As projects evolve, so do processes and requirements. Regularly revisiting Jama Connect configurations ensures they remain aligned with current needs. Schedule periodic reviews to assess the effectiveness of existing setups and make necessary adjustments. This proactive approach keeps the platform responsive and relevant.
In conclusion, effectively configuring and customizing Jama Connect involves a balance between flexibility and standardization. By thoughtfully implementing changes, governing configurations, and maintaining regular reviews, organizations can harness the full potential of Jama Connect to support their unique workflows while ensuring consistency and efficiency.
Editors Note:This blog post was written using our Jama Software Help resources and leveraging AI assistance for organization and streamlining purposes. This article is not meant to be comprehensive. For help configuring or customizing your Jama Connect instance, please reach out to your customer success manager. If you are not yet a Jama Software client, but interesting in speaking more about Jama Connect, please visit this page: https://www.jamasoftware.com/platform/jama-connect/trial/
[Webinar Recap] Navigating AI Safety with ISO 8800: Requirements Management Best Practices
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in automotive and semiconductor applications, ensuring its safety is critical.
In this webinar recap, Matt Mickle from Jama Software and Jody Nelson from SecuRESafe (SRES) dive into the newly introduced ISO/PAS 8800 provides a framework for managing AI-related safety requirements in road vehicles, addressing the challenges of functional safety, system reliability, and risk mitigation.
What You’ll Learn:
The importance and framework of ISO/PAS 8800 for AI safety in road vehicles
How to derive and manage AI safety requirements effectively
Addressing insufficiencies in AI systems and ensuring traceability to related standards
Practical strategies for integrating ISO 8800 into a structured requirements and systems engineering workflow
Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.
Jody Nelson: Appreciate the invitation from Jama Software for this discussion. I think it’s a very important topic as we’re going to be talking about a newly released standard, the ISO/PAS 8800. And our agenda for today, we’re going to first start out and talk about the framework and importance of the 8800. In order to do this, we have to pull in other standards. So as we’ll discuss in this discussion, the 8800 is not a standalone standard. It does have dependencies on ISO 26262 and ISO 21448. So we’ll start out from some framework for ADAS, automated drive systems, and then we’ll go into deriving and managing AI safety requirements. And this is a very difficult topic to go through. So this is where it is really great in this partnership with Jama Software to walk through it with a requirements management tool because it’s much easier to see once we’re in a tool environment.
And we’ll talk about addressing insufficiencies. This is something that we talk about a lot in Safety of Intended Functionality (SOTIF.) Now, we’re going to drive that down into lower levels into the AI system, including down to the machine learning model level. And with all of these safety standards that we talk about and with all these aspects of safety, we need traceability. So we’ll talk about in 26262 traceability between requirements to verification testing to your safety analysis. And these are the aspects that we want to show in today’s webinar. And then we’ll actually jump into the tool itself and show you a practical example of how to use 8800 and just show that flow.
So before we get into that, I do want to lay out a little bit of an AI requirements landscape. And before we jump into the AI safety landscape, let’s take a step back because it’s very important that we harmonize and ground ourselves with where we’re at now prior to these AI safety standards.
Well, the Automotive Functional Safety Development, as most of you know, the ISO 26262, was released in November of 2011. We have this pyramid of development. And it’s very common, and one of the biggest advantages of 26262 is almost everything’s built into the standard. So we don’t look out of the standard much when we’re in the traditional functional safety world. It’s all built into the standard.
Well, we start out with this quality management system (QMS) layer, this quality management system layer, and that’s the one exception to that last statement. This is where we point out to an outside standard such as ISO 9001, IATF 16949. These are the most commonly used in automotive, and that sets up our basis for our quality management layer. So that’s setting the initial processes.
Nelson: But that’s not sufficient enough for safety. So we build on top of that functional safety processes, functional safety policies, which we call our functional safety management. And the majority of that is captured in Part 2 of the standard ISO 26262. So that’s the layer that we build on top of the QMS.
And then of course, we need a path forward. We need an understanding of the steps that we need to follow, and this is within our functional safety lifecycle. Again, this is built within the standard. We can jump into Part 2 of ISO 26262. It provides us an overall life cycle from concept phase all the way to decommissioning. So we’re talking about 15, 20-year lifetime.
And then on top of that is where we do the actual development, and that’s where in the standard’s Parts 3 through 7 goes into the concept phase, driving functional safety requirements, technical safety requirements, driving down into your hardware and software, and then coming back up to this V cycle where we do verification and eventually validation.
Now, this framework is well established. As I mentioned, since 2011, we’ve been following ISO 26262, and nearly the entire framework is built in. As we transition into autonomous drive and to AI safety, it gets a little bit less clear and less straightforward as this. So I readapted that first pyramid and looked at now the AI safety aspects of our development in automotive.
So in the bottom layer, we’re going to have to have an AI management system. So we’re still going to use our 16949 or 9001 QMS, but we need to extend beyond that. And what was released in 2023, late in 2023, is a standard called ISO/IEC 42001, which I’ll discuss briefly today. This sets up the nuances that we need to consider when we’re talking about AI, data governance, ethical concerns. All these kinds of responsible AI aspects are included into this framework of the 42001. 42001 is not meant to replace 16949. It’s meant to play with it to work together with your QMS. So it’s not about getting rid of your QMS processes. It’s about adding in the inclusions for our concerns or relevance with AI.
Well, just as we had in functional safety, we have to build in an AI safety management on top of that. Now, we’re going to start pulling in, for example, ISO/PAS 8800 that we’ll be talking about today, but in conjunction with the 26262 because 26262 still helps us establish the safety management. 8800 gives us the specific aspects of AI to that.
Nelson: And then our lifecycle, we will be following aspects of 26262 lifecycle, but also SOTIF. So the ISO 21448 will be a critical aspect as well because we’re going to be combining both of these ideas into what will lead into the aspects that we need for the ISO 8800. So all three of those will be incorporated to build in this AI safety lifecycle.
Then of course, for the AI safety development, we’re going to have aspects of 26262. We’re going to have aspects of SOTIF, 8800 as we discussed today. And then we have some kind of complementary standards that will help us round this out. The ISO/IEC 5469, this will be replaced by an actual technical standard in the future. But as of now, this is a technical report. It is informal so it provides us only guidance that there’s no shells or requirements in it, but it’s going to help us. And we’ll see in the 8800 as you go through the standard, it points out to 5469 in some cases. And then soon to be released or currently released, the ISO 5083, which will be a replacement to the ISO 4804. This will help again align to ISO 26262 to that V cycle, that V-Model that we’re commonly used in 26262 world. But help us with more of the verification, validation activities in autonomous drive.
So I called this the new automotive model. As I mentioned before, we do have to point out to a few other standards. I do understand there is in some cases standards fatigue. We’re trying to boil this down into the most condensed version that we can present here.
So just briefly, I’ll look into a couple of these standards. As I mentioned ISO/IEC 42001, if you’re not familiar with this, it was released late in December of 2023. It is agnostic to industry, it’s agnostic to size of company, and it’s for both organizations that use AI or that develop AI. So it’s a very broad standard. Again, it is our QMS layer, but with the specific aspects of AI that we need to talk about. So it helps us ensure this responsible development of using AI systems. It does address ethical considerations, transparency, safety, and security, and it does provide a risk-based approach. Most of our functional safety standards and safety standards that we talk about in automotive are a risk-based approach. So within 42001, we talk about risk analysis, risk assessments, risk treatment, how we’re going to control these risks, and then an impact assessment of the overall risks that remain. So that’s our bottom layer.
And then I just wanted to point out the ISO/IEC 5469. Again, this is informative, meaning there’s no shells in the standard or in the technical report. It just provides us guidance and draws in this connection between functional safety and using AI systems either as a safety mechanism or somehow the AI system can impact safety.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Solution
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, Michelle Solis, Solutions Architect at Jama Software, explores how Jama Connect helps the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Industry manage complex requirements and streamline project communication.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Michelle Solis: Hello, I’m Michelle Solis, a Solutions Architect at Jama Software. In this video, we’ll explore how Jama Connect helps the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) industry manage complex requirements and streamline project communication.
AEC projects, whether it’s building a structure, designing a rail system, or developing an airport, come with complex requirements involving multiple teams. Communication is often fragmented and mid-project requirement changes can add confusion. Traditionally, the process unfolds in a linear workflow. The owner issues an RFP, teams respond, and the project is awarded. Once the project is underway, however, the owner may change requirements, making it hard for teams to see what parts of the project are affected.
Managing this process with documents alone, whether in Word, Excel, or PDF, is insufficient for managing these changes effectively, leading to missed updates, delays, and financial losses. Project management tools store documents but don’t provide visibility into relationships between requirements and tasks, making it hard to track changes across teams.
Solis: Jama Connect addresses these challenges by shifting from a document-centric to a requirements-driven approach. Instead of static Word documents, Jama Connect allows you to break down requirements into actionable items, improving clarity and manageability.
AEC projects often involve strict compliance requirements, such as LEED or ADA regulations, which can be difficult to track in traditional documents leading to missed updates or compliance gaps. With features like traceability, Jama Connect ensures these requirements are continuously monitored and managed throughout all project phases from the bidding process to construction, helping teams stay aligned with project goals.
By eliminating document silos, Jama Connect fosters collaboration across teams, providing real-time visibility into requirement changes, and ensuring that all requirements remain clear, traceable, and adaptable.
Let’s dive into Jama Connect and take a look at how this solution works. Here’s an example of a project with requirements entailing a new building. This project includes a traceability information model that begins with owner requirements. These requirements represent the written specifications and expectations set by the project owner. They are imported into Jama Connect, and then broken down into project requirements.
Those further break down to system requirements, design documents, and regulatory compliance, all of which we can validate and link to evidence provided by subcontractors ensuring full traceability across different aspects of the project lifecycle.
On the left panel is the explorer tree where the requirements live. If we click on a set of our requirements, we can see them in our List View, which is similar to Excel with rows and columns that we can adjust by dragging and dropping, or our document view, which is similar to working in Word and functions like a live document that we can edit by double-clicking and making our changes.
Jama Connect’s traceability features illustrate to us as end-users how change impacts our project. If I want to make changes to a project requirement, like this example of vertical circulation, I can first run an Impact Analysis to see if there are any potential upstream and downstream impacts. This shows me all of the requirements that may be impacted if I change this requirement. If this requirement changes because there’s a new weight capacity regulation to the elevator, then downstream, we should make the according changes to the elevator control system requirement and further downstream to the elevator validation and load monitoring subsystem requirement.
Solis: There are requirements here that will not be affected if I were to make these changes because it’s specific to the elevator functionality, so some of these escalator downstream requirements won’t be impacted. Impact Analysis shows us all of the potential impacts, but it’s up to us to decide if there’s indeed an impact and to make the necessary changes.
Jama Connect also has a full version history for all of our projects and other types of requirements. If I click on the version history, I can compare version two to version three and see all of the red and green line differences. So it looks like I removed some text and added that weight capacity regulation compliance.
With Jama Connect, AEC teams can move beyond static documents to a dynamic, requirements-driven approach, breaking down complex project requirements into actionable items, ensuring traceability, and maintaining compliance with industry regulations like LEED and ADA. By fostering real-time collaboration and eliminating silos, Jama Connect helps teams stay aligned, adapt to changes seamlessly, and keep projects on track from design to construction.
Thank you for watching this demonstration of Jama Connect for AEC Industries. If you would like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your AEC projects, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com. If you’re already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information, please contact your customer success manager or Jama Software consultant.
The Clear Choice: Why Jama Connect® Surpasses Codebeamer for Requirements Management and End-to-End Traceability
To adapt to increasing industry challenges and complexities, innovative organizations are now requiring best-in-class software to scale development, reduce risk, save time, and ensure compliance to quality, safety, and security regulations.
As organizations strive to deliver innovative products while navigating regulatory requirements, the tools they use for requirements management and traceability can make or break their success. This eBook is designed to help you understand the critical differences between Jama Connect and Codebeamer, two leading requirements management solutions, so you can make an informed decision.
The Requirements Sector
The landscape of requirements management has undergone significant transformation. Traditional tools (like IBM® DOORS®) which once dominated the market, are now considered outdated. These legacy systems often lack the flexibility, ease of use, and integration capabilities required by modern teams. As a result, organizations are turning to modern solutions like Jama Connect that are built to meet the needs of today’s dynamic development environments.
Why Jama Connect?
Jama Connect stands out as a leading requirements management solution because it is designed with the user in mind. Its modern, user-friendly interface, combined with powerful features like comprehensive traceability and real-time collaboration, ensures that teams can manage requirements and risks effectively throughout the product, systems, and software lifecycle. Jama Connect also emphasizes customer success, offering expert support and training to help teams maximize their investment. Ease of use, rapid deployment, pre-configured, well-documented industry frameworks, and in-house subject matter experts provide the fastest time-to-value/ROI without sacrificing quality or safety.
The Clear Advantages of Jama Connect Over Codebeamer
If you’re comparing Jama Connect to Codebeamer, one thing is clear — Jama Connect is the only purpose-built requirements management platform that delivers Live Traceability™ which allows engineering and other teams toquickly 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. In addition, Jama Connect accelerates your product, systems, and software development by managing user needs and product information across the end-to-end development lifecycle.
Only Jama Connect Delivers Live Traceability™ Across Best-of-Breed Tools
Other vendors lock you into inferior platforms. Only Jama Connect seamlessly integrates with your tools-of-choice across engineering teams. And, only Jama Connect can manage the state of development across all integrated teams and tools. Jama Connect’s unique and industry-specific Traceability Information Models define the relationships and expected behavior across teams and tools.
Our customers consistently tell us that they chose Jama Connect over Codebeamer for the following reasons:
1. Ease of Use and High Adoptability
Jama Connect’s intuitive design and user-friendly interface make it easy for teams to adopt and use. Unlike Codebeamer, which can be complex and challenging for new users, Jama Connect ensures that teams can start managing requirements effectively with minimal training. Users insist on a requirements management and traceability solution that is easy to use so that both internal and external stakeholders can efficiently access, share, and review information in a single source of truth, increasing and speeding up the adoption across teams for a better ROI.
The ease of use is not only imperative for users but also for administrators. Jama Connect offers an intuitive and user-friendly administration interface that enables admins to adapt the tool to their organization’s needs without having to learn overcomplicated configuration settings and concepts.
2. Modern Integration and Collaboration Capabilities
Jama Connect provides comprehensive traceability and impact analysis, enabling teams to manage change effectively and reduce the risk of errors. The platform seamlessly integrates with other best-of-breed tools (including Jira and Azure DevOps) in the development ecosystem, ensuring that teams can work efficiently without having to change their other development tools. In contrast, Codebeamer focuses on working solely with other PTC tools and its own limited application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities.
Modern product and software development requires optimal real-time collaboration between stakeholders. Jama Connect provides an enhanced collaboration experience with its communication streams and advanced Review Center, enabling both internal and external stakeholders with the capabilities to perform formal and iterative reviews.
Jama Connect empowers Intelligent Engineering Management by addressing a critical challenge faced by engineering and product development organizations: the lack of real-time KPIs and metrics during development. This gap often leads to delays, budget overruns, and product defects or recalls. Jama Connect uniquely transforms traceability into a measurable instrument, enabling teams to track real-time metrics and KPIs throughout the product development process. By providing a comprehensive overview of project progress and aligning it with required processes, teams can identify gaps early, mitigate risks, and avoid missed requirements. With its Live Traceability™ and integrations with other best-in-breed engineering tools, Jama Connect ensures that both internal and external data are seamlessly managed, driving informed decision-making and on-time project delivery.
4. Strong Customer Support
We know that our customers need a support team that makes them a priority. That’s why Jama Connect offers unparalleled customer support (including 24/7 support for any production outages), with dedicated customer success teams that work closely with you to ensure you achieve your goals. In contrast, Codebeamer’s support can be limited, making it difficult for your teams to get the help they need when they need it.
5. Scalable and Flexible
Jama Connect is highly adaptable, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and project sizes. Whether your organization is in automotive, aerospace, medical devices, or another industry, Jama Connect can be tailored to meet your specific needs, often getting you up and running quickly with custom-built data frameworks to satisfy your industries regulations and best practices. Additionally, the platform offers flexible deployment options, including cloud and self-hosted, giving you the freedom to choose the best setup for your organization.
6. Fastest Time to Market/ROI
Deploy Jama Connect’s easy-to-use interface in weeks, not months, with easy updates and high performance. Preconfigured frameworks are built-in to satisfy industry regulations and help teams ease the path to compliance, along with in-house industry-focused subject-matter experts and exceptional customer support.
7. Lowest Total Cost of Ownership
With simple and straightforward administration and no need for custom scripting or continuous updating, Jama Connect has the lowest total cost of ownership in comparison to Codebeamer. Jama Connect scales easily without big infrastructure investment, and with unlimited no-cost access for extended internal/external stakeholders, all team members can be involved with additional costs.
Understanding ISO 26550: Managing Variability in Systems and Software Engineering
As products become more complex, companies need better ways to manage different versions and configurations. ISO 26550 helps organizations handle variability in systems and software engineering, making it easier to develop, maintain, and update product lines while ensuring quality and compliance.
What is ISO 26550?
ISO 26550, Software and Systems Engineering — Reference Model for Product Line Engineering and Management, provides a framework for managing product variations. It helps organizations develop multiple product versions efficiently by identifying shared components and differences, reducing duplication, and improving consistency.
Jama Connect makes it easier to follow ISO 26550 by providing:
Live Traceability™: Tracks changes across product versions to maintain compliance.
Variant Management: Helps teams manage multiple configurations efficiently.
Requirements Management: Organizes and links requirements across product lines.
Collaboration & Reviews: Improves teamwork and decision-making.
Compliance & Audit Support: Provides workflows and reports to simplify audits.
Conclusion
ISO 26550 helps organizations manage product variability effectively, improving efficiency and compliance. Jama Connect supports this by providing tools for traceability, variant management, and collaboration. If your organization needs a better way to handle product variations, Jama Connect can help simplify the process.
Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Matt Mickle, McKenzie Ingram, and Decoteau Wilkerson.
Utilize Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to Produce High-Quality Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™
When discussing the requirements management process with my clients, I’ll often say, “the first step in maturing your requirements management process is to use an enterprise tool such as “Jama Connect.” This allows for scalability of their process and more importantly, the ability to manage change across their product lifecycle. Features such as the Review Center, Baseline Capture and Compare, Collaboration, Suspect Triggers and Variant Management are all necessary parts of the process that allow for tight control and the ability to meet the most rigorous of standards. Once that message becomes clear to my clients and the benefit realized, the next aspect of the conversation is, “Can you write GOOD, high-quality requirements?” It’s one thing to get your requirements into a formal tool, but what if the requirements aren’t any good to begin with? As the old adage says, “garbage in, garbage out”. This problem becomes magnified to a dangerous extent when your requirements define life-saving devices or mission-critical hardware and software.
How Jama Connect® Uses Natural Language Processing to Improve Quality
Enter Jama Connect Advisor to the conversation. Jama Connect Advisor is a state-of-the-art requirements authoring guide and optimizer powered by natural language processing that helps a system engineer or a product developer write effective, well-organized requirement specifications based on industry-accepted INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) rules and the EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation.
Jama Connect Advisor allows you to analyze requirements text to provide a quality score based on the INCOSE and/or EARS rules the user chooses to validate against. This analysis can be done on a single item or “in bulk” against multiple requirements. Reports provide a detailed overview of the quality and score of the requirements. This allows for requirements authors to iterate on their requirements and improve the scores, ultimately resulting in better quality requirements across the entire lifecycle.
When all of your downstream requirements and tests are dependent on how a requirement is defined, it is extremely important that the quality of the requirements are there from day one. With the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, it is a natural extension to apply these techniques to requirements management creation and elaboration.
A Continued Investment in AI and How it Relates to Better Requirements Management
Jama Software continues to make strides in this area and we have recently relaunched our Jama Labs Website. Some of the exciting functionality we are exploring includes:
Automatically detecting high-risk areas in requirements by analyzing review comments
AI-generated test cases derived from requirements
Auto-scanning existing IP, to discover reuse candidates, which improves efficiency and saves time.
The maturity and scale of your requirements process doesn’t end with managing them in a formal tool. There must be a focus on defining good, quality requirements and the ability to detect and report on the quality in real time easily. This visibility allows for authors to quickly update their requirements for better quality from the beginning. When everything downstream depends on it, the quality of your requirements truly does matter.
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