Jama Software and :em AG Announce Strategic Partnership to Drive Efficiency in Requirements Management
Jama Software a leading provider of requirements management and traceability solutions, is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with :em AG. This collaboration brings together Jama Software’s industry-leading platform, Jama Connect®, with :em AG’s expertise in process and method consulting to help organizations streamline product development, enhance compliance, and mitigate risk.
Jama Connect empowers teams with real-time collaboration, Live Traceability™, and comprehensive requirements, risk, and test management, enabling them to navigate complex regulatory environments with confidence. Through this partnership, :em AG will support customers in seamlessly integrating Jama Connect into their development workflows — including variant management, risk management, and test management —while providing expert guidance on configuration and adoption.
“We are excited to partner with :em AG to expand the reach of Jama Connect and help more organizations overcome the challenges of increasingly complex product and software development,” said Tom Tseki, Chief Revenue Officer at Jama Software. “Together, we are enabling teams to accelerate innovation while decreasing risk by ensuring end-to-end traceability and regulatory compliance.”
Dr. Marcus Krastel, Member of the Board of :em AG, added, “We are delighted to have Jama Software, another leading provider of requirements management software, as a partner and to be able to address new customers with our services. Together, we are driving forward the digital transformation and offering solutions for the increasingly complex work with requirements and regulations.”
About Jama Software
Jama Software is focused on maximizing innovation success in multidisciplinary engineering organizations. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, software-defined vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect requirements management software to minimize the risk of defects, rework, cost overruns, and recalls. Using Jama Connect, engineering organizations can now intelligently manage the development process by leveraging Live Traceability™ across best-of-breed tools to measurably improve outcomes. Our rapidly growing customer base spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, financial services, and insurance industries.
For more information about Jama Connect services, please visit jamasoftware.com/
Best Practices: Unlocking the Power of the Digital Thread in Traceable MBSE™
In the world of product and systems development, integrating the digital thread throughout Model-Based Systems Engineering process isn’t just an advantage — it’s a game-changer.
In this engaging webinar, host Brian Kennedy, Principal Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, will show how the digital thread transforms MBSE, driving better traceability, stronger collaboration, and greater efficiency across the product lifecycle. You’ll also see how Live Trace Explorer™ helps connect your MBSE tools seamlessly, creating Traceable MBSE™.
What You’ll Learn:
The role of the digital thread in enhancing Traceable MBSE workflows
Best practices for building a connected thread across diverse systems
How Live Trace Explorer improves product quality, reduces risks, and accelerates delivery
Using coverage metrics to identify gaps and ensure process completeness
Proven strategies to reduce iteration loops and support regulatory compliance
Walk away with actionable insights to strengthen your Traceable MBSE processes — and see how Jama Connect® can elevate your engineering workflows.
Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.
Briand Kennedy: During today’s webinar, I’m going to be discussing the process of unlocking the power of the digital thread in Traceable MBSE. To begin with, let’s just take a step back and understand what exactly is the Traceable MBSE process and where did it originate from? Today, many products that companies produce are live for safety-critical and one of the requirements for life and safety-critical products is that the company must completely document how the product should perform. Additionally, they have to also prove that it performs as specified. As products have become much more complicated and sophisticated and systems have become much more integrated and difficult to model doing this process has become a greater challenge than it was maybe previously.
As a result of us interviewing various engineering leaders who are responsible for product release, we asked them what keeps you up at night? What are the top things that these engineering leaders say keeps them up at night? As we listened to them, we heard many common questions come up. These are the five top questions or issues that they indicated. The first one is, how do I know which product requirements have been missed in my design? How do I know which product requirements are not fully covered by my test cases that I’ve defined? How do I know which product requirements have failed to pass tests? How do I identify development activity that happens to be using incorrect requirements or maybe isn’t even directly connected to requirements? And finally, how do I know if changes that have been made in say, hardware impacts my software team or if a requirement change impacts either the hardware or software team? How do I understand this traceability? These are the things that we’ve heard a lot about. I bet one of these might resonate with you.
Kennedy: I’ll tell you what, why don’t we take a quick survey? There’s going to be a survey that pops up, and we’ll give you a couple of minutes to walk through these questions and tell us which one of these questions do you identify most with or is most pressing on your needs. Thank you very much for answering which one of these questions is the one you most identify with. At the end of this presentation, we’re going to come back to each one of these questions and show you how Traceable Model-Based System Engineering processes and the digital thread can help address each one of these items.
So, let’s talk a little bit about how we have developed Traceable MBSE to address these situations. To start with, let’s talk about where we came from. And we came from a paper-based system, and it doesn’t fully address these questions that we have here. And so, in order to solve these problems, we’ve performed a digital transformation, and that started with a very simple thing a long time ago of actually switching from physical paper over to electronic files. This provided significant improvements in efficiency and allowed each domain and discipline to be able to capture their data electronically versus on paper. It does improve communication, allows us to share data more easily, and allows us to reuse data in a much easier process. But fundamentally, this first step of converting from paper to electronic file, although it was a huge advantage, didn’t fundamentally change the process in which we did system engineering. We were still stuck with disconnected data.
So the next phase in this is what I call the decomposition phase. This occurred when we actually took those individual documents, for example, a complete requirement specification, and decomposed it to individual items. And this was very powerful. What we were able to do is instead of having a single document with all the specifications in it, we would decompose it to individual requirements, and each individual requirement could be referenced independently. And in fact, they allowed us to reuse this data and such. So you could have the same requirement being reused in multiple places, whereas before, you literally had two separate pieces of text that you were duplicating. Once again, another huge improvement in efficiency. This concept of decomposition doesn’t just isolate two requirements. It implemented various other things, such as the modeling systems for various other things. And it ended up creating a capability so that each discipline, each domain was able to create unique tools that address decomposition or analysis or simulation of their particular areas.
Kennedy: So what we saw was requirements identification and subsystem requirement identification, being executed in Word or Excel spreadsheets initially, and even going into some modeling techniques and different tools. So we ended up with a verification validation process that for each individual domain we were able to create some decent automation, but they weren’t connected. Each group was independently looking at their data and creating it, and there wasn’t consistent reuse across it and no consistent way of knowing what was the correct stuff. We depended on things like email and such like that. So it really created an impact on things like a lack of ongoing risk assessment, and change management became very difficult because even though we had decomposed some of the things and we had captured all the documents electronically, we still were not interconnected. We didn’t have a uniform interconnectivity, and this meant we had to take one more step in our digital transformation. And that final step was to create a true full model definition.
And when we talk about creating a full model, it involves quite a few things. First is governance. We have to create a structure and version control on top of the data. So we would classify the data in groups and control each one of those individual items, requirements simulations, functional definition, architectures as individual items and version control them in a controlled system in a database framework. So, we had a governance structure and control framework that needed to be defined. We then expanded from just having text-based or static images to having full diagrams where each item was interrelated and connected together. And we were able to create visual diagrams that illustrated how our systems were being designed, how functions and sub-functions and systems and subsystems were supposed to interact, and how data was supposed to flow from one part of our system to another. And we created these diagrams. Finally, we created a common data model, which allowed us to capture all these different pieces of data and define relationships from one item to the other and have consistent terminology and consistent use of that data. So we had one requirement defined in one place,e and it was used wherever it was needed by referencing that single item. And so that’s where we talk about a data model. We needed a complete data model to capture all this data that we were governing in the governance area and in the diagrams.
Jama Connect Features in Five: Requirements Management for Seamless Product Delivery
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 offers an effective solution for delivering software, products, and services. We will examine how key features, such as importing, the traceability information model, and the review center, can help streamline processes, reduce rework, and minimize scope creep.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Michelle Solis: Hello. I’m Michelle Solis, a Solutions Architect at Jama Software. In this video, we’ll explore how Jama Connect provides an effective solution for delivering software, products, and services. We’ll dive into how key features like importing, the traceability information model, and the review center can help streamline processes, reduce rework, and minimize scope creep.
Many teams gather requirements in Word or Excel while tracking development in separate tools, creating a lack of traceability between stakeholder needs and engineering work. This disconnect can lead to missed input, rework, and defects when requirements change. Without an integrated system, engineering may build outdated requirements, and QA may test against incomplete information, leading to costly delays.
Jama Connect bridges this gap by providing structured traceability and an efficient review process. Customers start by importing requirements from Word, Excel, or other tools. Once in Jama Connect, users can conduct structured reviews with stakeholders, enforce signatures, and track version changes. This ensures seamless traceability as requirements evolve, keeping teams aligned and reducing errors.
Solis: Let’s jump into the tool and see how Jama Connect provides a solution for the delivery use case. We’ll start by looking at the traceability information model for an example project. Here, our requirements, like the previous slide detailed, start as an intake questionnaire filled out in Word. Those questions and responses are brought into Jama and then decomposed into customer requirements. From there, they further break down into functional and nonfunctional requirements with potential development tasks or software configurations.
Those tasks are tested and defects are logged against those tests. This traceability model allows users to see the downstream impacts of changes and trace defects up to their customer requirement. To the left, we have our exploratory that holds and organizes the requirements. Our customer component opens up to those customer intake questions and customer requirements. The customer intake questions are brought in using our Word import tool.
On the right hand of our screen, we see an example of what that intake questionnaire might look like. Now, we can see those questions and responses once they’ve been imported. Let’s click on one of these items and see one method of collaboration. In the comment stream section, we can pose questions for discussions, ask for a decision, or raise an issue. Our stakeholders, in response, can answer those decisions, answer questions, or provide resolutions.
In this example, I asked for clarification on this specific question. Now, instead of having to look through emails and other channels of communication, Jama Connect can be my source of truth. Once we finalize these questions and answers, we can break these down into customer requirements, and then we can send off our customer requirements for a review. I’ll right-click on my customer requirements and send them out for review. Our review wizard will be initiated, and I’ll define the name. I have different options for settings. One setting I’ll leave on is requiring an electronic signature from my approvers. I’ll designate my participants. In this case, it’s Michael Scott, my stakeholder, and myself. And then, in the final screen, it’ll show me what that invitation looks like when it gets sent out to my stakeholders.
Solis: While this review is initiating, I’m going to switch and sign in to Michael Scott so we can see what it looks like from the stakeholders perspective. Now let’s jump into a review we just initiated as a stakeholder. When a reviewer logs in, they are brought into a review screen with all of the reviews they are actively participating in. This makes the review process easy to jump into, and your non Jama users will be able to ramp up into the reviews quickly.
In the review, participants can reject and approve items line by line. They can leave comments and highlight specific text when they want to specify spelling errors or specific details. Once the review is complete, we’ll approve and sign off. From here, we can export our review into Word or PDF with our signatures attached.
Jama Connect streamlines product delivery by enhancing traceability, collaboration, and review processes, ensuring that teams remain aligned and projects stay on task. From capturing stakeholder requirements to managing approvals and exporting finalized documentation, Jama Connect provides a structured yet flexible approach to a successful product development.
Thank you for watching this demonstration of how Jama Connect features solve for the delivery use case. If you would like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your product development processes, 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. Thank you.
Overcoming Top Challenges in the Energy Storage Industry with Jama Software
From aging infrastructure, to changing regulations, Jama Software® helps engineering teams meet demand with innovative, scalable solutions.
This blog explores the top challenges in the industry and how Jama Software’s cutting-edge requirements management solutions can help overcome them, including:
The energy storage industry is undergoing rapid transformation. Faced with aging infrastructure, evolving regulations, the push for energy efficiency, rising global demand, and cost pressures, engineering teams are tasked with delivering innovative, scalable solutions. This whitepaper explores the top challenges in the industry and how Jama Software’s cutting-edge requirements management solutions can help overcome them.
The Challenge
Decades-old energy infrastructure — from power plants to grids and pipelines — requires urgent modernization to prevent failures and increase resilience. Engineering teams must design cost-effective solutions to upgrade aging systems while maintaining operational reliability.
The Impact
Failing infrastructure can lead to costly outages, environmental hazards, and public safety risks. Engineering teams need robust tools to manage complex modernization projects with precision.
How Jama Software Helps
Jama Software – and our innovative solution, Jama Connect – empowers teams with real-time requirements management and traceability to:
Define clear modernization goals and align stakeholders.
Track progress across multi-phase projects, ensuring nothing is overlooked.
Mitigate risks through live traceability and impact analysis. 4. Document decisions for future audits and maintenance efforts.
2: Regulatory Compliance
The Challenge
Adhering to evolving safety, emissions, and sustainability regulations is a constant hurdle for energy storage developers. Regional and global standards demand rigorous documentation, traceability, and audit readiness.
The Impact
Failure to comply with regulatory standards can result in hefty fines, project delays, or operational shutdowns. Development teams need systems to ensure every design and process meets regulatory requirements.
How Jama Software Helps
Jama Connect provides comprehensive traceability and compliance management to:
Simplify regulatory adherence with pre-configured templates for industry standards.
Ensure complete traceability of requirements, tests, and results.
Streamline audits with real-time reporting and centralized documentation.
Foster cross-team collaboration to address regulatory challenges efficiently.
Improving efficiency across production, transmission, and consumption is critical to reducing waste and operational costs. Engineers are increasingly leveraging AI, IoT, and advanced analytics to optimize energy systems.
The Impact
Inefficient systems contribute to unnecessary costs and environmental degradation. Teams must integrate advanced technologies into their designs while managing complex requirements.
How Jama Software Helps
Jama Connect enables innovation through structured requirements management, allowing teams to:
Collaborate on defining requirements for AI, IoT, and analytics integration.
Validate designs against efficiency goals with built-in verification tools.
Identify risks early through impact analysis and proactive testing.
Drive continuous improvement with real-time insights and data integration.
5. Cost and Investment Pressures
The Challenge
Energy storage projects often face high upfront costs and long development timelines. Engineering teams are under pressure to deliver innovative solutions that offer faster returns on investment.
The Impact
Cost overruns and delayed timelines can jeopardize project success and stakeholder confidence. Efficient project management is crucial to meeting deadlines and budgets.
How Jama Software Helps
Jama Connect streamlines project delivery and cost management by:
Enabling real-time collaboration to reduce delays and inefficiencies.
Providing live traceability to track changes and manage scope creep.
Supporting iterative design and development for faster prototyping.
Enhancing decision-making with data-driven insights and reporting tools.
The New ARP4754B and Techniques in Jama Connect® for Airborne Systems
ARP4754B, released on December 20, 2023, is a standard from SAE International that provides recommendations for the development of civil aircraft and systems, focusing on ensuring safety and compliance with regulations. It covers the entire aircraft development cycle, from system requirements through verification and validation. The latest revision includes new methods for safety analysis, such as Model-Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) and Cascading Effects Analysis (CEA). It is mandatory for all aircraft and systems worldwide, including emerging eVTOLs and UAVs, to demonstrate compliance with aviation regulations. This guideline aligns with ARP4761A, which was released on the same date, for safety assessment processes and offers increased flexibility in selecting validation and verification methods.
ARP4754B Applied in Jama Connect for Airborne Systems
ARP4754B and ARP4761A are both crucial guidelines, and the alignment between the two new versions has been enhanced to streamline development and safety assessments. In addition to the inclusion of the two new safety analysis methods, ARP4754B now places a stronger emphasis on identifying and mitigating unintended behaviors. It now includes consensus methods for demonstrating compliance within the development planning process and has also enhanced its flexibility in validation and verification.
Jama Connect can be used throughout the system development process as the primary system to manage the requirements and full product traceability. Figure 1 from ARP4754B outlines the relationships between the lifecycle and integral processes, which provide guidelines for safety assessment, electronic hardware and software lifecycle processes, and the system development process described herein.
There are always numerous ways to tailor the use of Jama Connect. Here’s how the updates to ARP4754B influence requirements management and how our Airborne solution is pre-configured to support them.
1: Adoption of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)
MBSE Integration: Updates encourage the use of MBSE to handle the increasing complexity of aircraft systems.
Modeling Languages: Use of modeling languages like SysML to create detailed system models that include requirements, behavior, and structure.
Jama Connect for Airborne Systems Model-Based Techniques
Model-Driven Requirements: Requirements are captured and managed within the Jama Connect data model, providing requirements management techniques that support model-based representations. The Solution comes pre-configured with element types that correspond to the levels of requirements called out in ARP4754B, function elements, WBS, verifications and validations, and safety-related elements. Jama Connect constrains the data to follow the traceability rules which enable rapid analysis, automated trace matrix generation, and querying and reporting.
Synchronization of Models and Textual Requirements: Ensuring consistency between textual requirements and model-based representations requires synchronization mechanisms. Jama Connect is often used in conjunction with SysML tools and all leading vendors offer native integrations.
Figure 2: Model-based elements replace documents and the Jama Connect for Airborne Systems’ traceability schema maintains consistency.
2. Enhanced Integration of Safety and Requirements Management
Safety-Driven Requirements: The updates emphasize integrating safety assessments directly into the requirements management process. This means that safety considerations become a foundational aspect of requirement definition and management.
Iterative Feedback Loop: There is a stronger focus on creating an iterative process where safety analysis results inform requirement updates, and changes in requirements trigger reassessment of safety analyses.
Jama Connect for Airborne Systems Safety & Requirements Management Techniques:
Traceable Within the Model: The outputs from safety analyses are captured and managed directly in Jama Connect. Our Airborne Systems solution provides the data model for a consistent trace and data strategy between safety, requirements, and tests.
Requirements Annotation: Requirements have built-in attributes for safety-related information, such as hazard classifications and safety integrity levels.
Tool Integration: Jama Connect integrates seamlessly with safety analysis tools such as ANSYS Medini, the LDRA tool suite and others to ensure seamless data flow and traceability between safety assessments and requirements.
Figure 3: Jama Connect for Airborne Systems solution on the left and SAE ARP4754B (page 102) on the right.
Bidirectional Traceability: Enhanced emphasis on maintaining bidirectional traceability between requirements, design artifacts, implementation, and verification activities.
Traceability to Safety Objectives: Requirements must be directly linked to safety objectives and hazard analyses derived from updated safety assessment processes.
Jama Connect for Airborne Systems Solution Techniques:
Robust Traceability Matrices: The solution comes preconfigured with views and filters required by ARP4754B. These sophisticated traceability matrices that map requirements to design elements, test cases, and safety analyses are also exportable. The Airborne Systems solution has out-of-the-box export templates that can also be tailored.
Automated Traceability: Instead of authoring content and then creating a trace to its related content after the fact, use the “Add Related” functionality built into Jama Connect. This use of automated trace creation to manage traceability reduces the risk of human error and improves efficiency.
Figure 4: Constrained set of data choices ensures users create consistent traces.
We’ve shared 3 of the 6 ways Jama Connect’s Airborne Solution supports ARP4754B influence requirements management.
Want the full picture? Download the whitepaper to explore them all!
Jama Connect Features in Five: Release Management via Reuse & Synchronization
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, Máté Hársing, Solutions Manager at Jama Software, demonstrates how Jama Connect helps teams streamline release management with its reuse and synchronization capabilities.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Máté Hársing: Hello and welcome. My name is Máté Hársing, and I’m a Solutions Architect at Jama Software. In this video, we’re going to explore how Jama Connect helps teams streamline release management with its reuse and synchronization capabilities. Managing multiple product releases often introduces challenges such as tracking changes across different product versions, ensuring teams work on release branches without disrupting the main project, merging updates without losing critical information or creating inconsistencies, maintaining traceability and compliance in industries with strict regulatory requirements.
Without the right tools, these challenges can lead to delays, increased costs, and risks of errors. Jama Connect addresses these challenges with its reuse and synchronization capabilities.
By allowing you to duplicate projects or components, Jama Connect creates a release branch where teams can work independently. The platform provides powerful comparison tools at the item, set, and project levels, enabling you to see changes clearly.
When it’s time to merge updates, Jama Connect gives you full control, allowing you to select specific changes while maintaining traceability and alignment. Now let’s see this in action. I’ll start by showing the main branch of the project and how it’s in sync with a specific release branch, release 2.0. This release branch is a separate project that will include updates and modifications specific to this version once we start working on it. As you can see, so far, the synchronization is fully intact between these two projects.
Hársing: Now let’s take a look at the synced items widget starting at the item level. This widget shows the relationship between this specific operational time requirement in the main project and the release branch. You can see they are currently in sync, meaning there is no difference between them. If I change the operational time for release two zero to a higher number, as we want to ensure higher user satisfaction, you’ll see they are now out of sync.
By clicking on the button, we can see the red line differentiation between the main branch requirement and the release-specific requirement for release 2.0. Moving up to the set level, we can view how entire groups of requirements are synced. This provides a broader perspective, allowing teams to manage changes across multiple related items efficiently. Let’s add a new requirement to release 2.0 and delete an existing one so that you can see how the information will show up when comparing the two sets between the main branch and release 2.0.
Finally, at the project level, you can see an overview of synchronization across the entire project. This is particularly useful for tracking overall progress and ensuring alignment between the main branch and the release.
Now I’ll demonstrate how to merge changes back into the main project. Jama Connect allows you to make different kinds of merges. For instance, you can accept specific changes, reject others, or use the consolidation option to manage conflicting requirement descriptions side by side. This ensures the two versions of a requirement can be refined into a common denominator, maintaining clarity and consistency.
Hársing: I’d like to emphasize that both reusing and synchronizing are permission-controlled so that only appointed team members can execute these tasks. Each dedicated project can also be baselined creating a snapshot in time. This is invaluable for generating submission-ready documentation, especially in regulated industries such as medical device design and development. Additionally, any change made in either project, the main branch or the release branch, propagates reactive change management capabilities via the Suspect Link tool. This feature automatically flags impacted items, ensuring teams can quickly assess and address the downstream effects of any modification.
These features reduce risks, improve collaboration, and ensure compliance by keeping everything organized and transparent. Jama Connect simplifies release management so you can focus on delivering high-quality products.
Thank you for watching this demonstration of release management via reuse and synchronization in Jama Connect. If you would like to learn more about how Jama 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 release management via reuse and synchronization, please contact your Customer Success Manager or Jama Software Consultant.
Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively
Engineering organizations face challenges delivering complex products on time, within budget, and with high quality. Teams often work with different tools, creating data silos that slow the digital engineering process. These gaps lead to missed requirements, delays, and defects.
In this webinar, our Jama Software experts Preston Mitchell, Vice President of Solutions & Support; Mario Maldari, Director of Product & Solution Marketing; and Vincent Balgos, Director of Solutions & Consulting, discuss how Jama Connect®, and our Jama Connect Interchange™ add-on, address these challenges through key use cases.
What you’ll learn:
Traceable Agile: Integrate systems engineering and software teams using Jama Connect + Jira to drive quality and speed.
Scalable FMEA Process: Empower reliability and risk management teams with Jama Connect + Excel for efficient FMEA analysis.
Universal ReqIF Exchange: Seamlessly import, export, and round-trip ReqIF exchanges across requirements tools with Universal ReqIF, enabling teams to co-develop requirements with stakeholders and partners.
The video above is a preview of this webinar – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Preston Mitchell: We are here to talk about how to save precious engineering time, and each of us is going to cover a specific use case that we think will help your teams save a lot of time, utilizing both Jama Connect, as well as Jama Connect Interchange. And when you think about where is most of the time wasted in engineering teams, we typically find it’s something that visually looks like this. It’s siloed teams and tools across the system engineering V model, and we really find that these things are the number one cause of negative product outcomes.
You know them, you’re probably intimately familiar with them. It’s a lack of identification of defects, missed requirements, or lack of coordination. A lot of manual steps to connect things, maybe requirements that live in one tool, and your system testing that lives in a different tool. And a lot of this can be highly manual, which is really a tough thing when you have to satisfy some of the industry regulations that a lot of our customers work with.
As we all know, kind of late detection of issues really leads to a huge cost in order to correct that with a project. You can kind of see in this bar graph here, that I’ve got on the left the different phases, going to the right of a typical product development. So you’re starting in the requirements definition and design, and moving all the way to acceptance testing. Typically, the number of faults or problems are introduced very early in the requirements definition and design phase. But the problem is they aren’t found until later in the project, like during integration or system testing. And even if you get to the acceptance testing level, you can see the exponential increase in cost to fix these expensive errors. These is not Jama Connect’s numbers, these numbers are from sources at The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). So you can really take away from this is the fewer errors that we introduce early, or the faster or sooner that we identify those issues, the better off we’re going to be and the more engineering time we are going to save.
How do we do this? Well, Jama Software, we are the number one requirements management and Live Traceability™ product in the market. We really bring a lot of resources and technology to bear to help you manage your product development, whether that’s complex and highly scaled types of products. We help you bring all the collaboration and reviews online. And we help you, number one, integrate the different state of the product across the many disparate tools that you might have in your engineering departments, and, specifically, that’s going to allow you to then measure and improve your traceability.
Mitchell: We work with a lot of the key industries that you see here at the bottom, and in particular, like Vincent, you work with the medical devices. I think your use case that you’re going to cover is going to be very built off of that medical device industry. But really, a lot of the use cases we’re going to cover today are applicable to all of these industries.
We are the leader, and we’d like to be bold about it. We are number one according to G2 in terms of requirements management and traceability tools. So we encourage you to check out the different ratings and how we stack up against our competitors.
The ultimate goal that we want to get you to is saving that time. So moving from disparate, siloed teams and tools to an actual integrated system of Live Traceability. We actually have benchmark data from all of our cloud customers, where we can actually show a correlation between the customers that have a greater traceability score, meaning all the expected relationships have been built out. We find that they have 1.8x faster time to defect detection, nearly 2.5x times lower test case failure rates, and then typically a 3.5x higher verification coverage. So it behooves you and your engineering teams to think about how can we actually integrate, and save ourselves time, and that’s just going to create a higher-quality product down the line.
I’d be curious to pause right here. We have a poll. I’d be interested in asking, if you take a step back and think about your R&D teams, all the different tools and teams that you have, what percentage would you say today in your organization is actually fully covered by Live Traceability? 100%, 50%, 0%? I’d be kind of interested in the scale on that. So we should see a poll pop up here, and I’ll give you a couple of seconds to answer that.
Now, we see some answers coming in. Thank you. Yeah, as to be expected, it’s not anywhere near 100%. Most of the companies that we work with are struggling with this, and so this is where we really want to help them out. And how do we do that? Well, our Jama Connect Interchange add-on to Jama Connect is a really powerful tool that we’re going to walk you through today, and it’s going to allow you to automate the connection between your data and process.
So we’re going to cover three use cases. I’m going to talk briefly first about Traceable Agile™, and this is how we integrate systems and software teams, using Jama Connect and a very popular tool that a lot of our software organizations use, which is Atlassian Jira. So we’ll talk about that Traceable Agile use case. Then Vincent is going to cover the Scalable FMEA Process, so how to utilize the power of the functions that are in Excel, and bringing those functions to bear inside of Jama Connect, so that you can do risk management and reliability management, but tied in with your requirements and testing. And then, finally, we’ll end on Mario covering Universal ReqIF Exchange, and this really enables you to co-develop with partners and suppliers across Jama Connect, but also maybe even different requirements management tools. So let’s dive in.
Mitchell: So when you think about Traceable Agile, Agile software, it’s a methodology, as well as a philosophy. It’s been around software teams for a long time, and it works well. It’s been widely adopted, and widely successful. At the same time, a lot of complex products are not made up of solely software. They have to actually be integrated in with the hardware and perhaps other mechanical aspects of these products that you’re building. So there’s a balance, right? There’s a balance of being completely Agile, but also making sure that you follow some process.
And kind of where we find that Agile sometimes can break down when we talk with software engineering leaders. They have these very common questions that they bring up, and it’s what keeps them up at night. How do I know which requirements have been missed? Am I actually covering everything? How do I know that I’m actually testing all of my requirements, and which ones of those have failed? The fourth bullet there, how do I identify rogue developments? It’s like, how do I make sure my teams are not gold-plating the product, and we’re actually meeting the stakeholder or the user needs that we’re trying to deliver to? And then, finally, change. Change is a given in this fast-paced environment, so how do I know when impacts are made? When changes are made in the software or in the hardware, how do I know what those impacts are across?
So the solution to this is Traceable Agile. It’s really no change to how your software teams may work today using Atlassian Jira. Really, what we are adding on is the ability to auto-detect gaps and measure and take action on those. And so I’m going to step into Jama Connect to give you a little bit of a demonstration here.
In this blog, we recap our recent whitepaper, “Leveraging Jama Connect and Jira for Enhanced Requirements Management” – Click HERE to download it in its entirety.
Leveraging Jama Connect and Jira for Enhanced Requirements
Think you can manage your complex software requirements with Word and Jira alone? Think again.
In software development, teams need tools that enable them to manage requirements, ensure traceability, and adapt to changes without losing sight of their goals. Many companies rely solely on Atlassian Jira, often paired with Word or Excel, to handle requirements and track development tasks.
While Jira is highly effective for tracking implementation progress, it lacks essential features for managing requirements throughout the entire development lifecycle.
The limitations of using Jira alone can lead to costly setbacks, such as rework, missed deadlines, delayed rollouts, and compromised quality. These challenges stem from a lack of traceability, inefficient review processes, limited project visibility, and an incomplete definition of the system.
This eBook explores these issues and introduces a solution: integrating Jama Connect with Jira. Jama Connect enhances requirements management, enables Live Traceability™, streamlines reviews, and provides real-time insight into development progress.
Together, Jama Connect and Jira empower teams to achieve better software development outcomes
1. The Limitations of Using Jira Alone for Requirements Management
Lack of Traceability
The challenge of managing requirements with flat or disparate files like Word or Excel is significant. Teams that use these tools alongside Jira often struggle to keep requirements aligned with development tasks. Manual traceability in these formats is resource-intensive, prone to errors, and leaves significant gaps in coverage.
Without proper traceability, teams have limited visibility into their project’s true status, which can lead to costly rework and project delays. In fact, lack of traceability is one of the leading causes of negative project outcomes. When you can’t see how requirements connect to development and testing, the project suffers, and costs escalate — especially if defects are discovered later in the lifecycle. According to research done by INCOSE, the cost of fixing a defect can be up to 110 times more expensive if it’s found during validation rather than early on.
Jama Connect’s Live Traceability solves this problem by creating a digital thread through every level of development, from customer needs to verification and validation. This digital thread ensures that all requirements are covered and connected to development tasks, giving teams confidence that they’re meeting their goals and satisfying customer needs. Later in this paper, we’ll explore the many ways Live Traceability can dramatically improve your development process.
Reviewing requirements using Word documents can be frustrating and inefficient. A business requirements document often contains hundreds or even thousands of requirements. Teams must wait for the entire document to reach a draft state before circulating it for feedback. Stakeholders then provide comments through a combination of Word’s review features and emails, creating a fragmented and time-consuming process.
In this scenario, the burden falls on the business analyst to compile feedback, chase down reviewers, and manage multiple rounds of review cycles. This process is not only inefficient but also risks missed feedback or inconsistencies, as it’s difficult to track changes from one review cycle to the next.
Jama Connect’s Review Center streamlines this process. It allows teams to break down reviews into manageable parts and send specific sections out for feedback. Instead of waiting for an entire document to be finalized, teams can initiate reviews iteratively. The Review Center also automatically creates a baseline at the start of each review, providing a clear record of the requirements’ state before any feedback or changes are made. This reduces review cycles and accelerates consensus, saving valuable time and resources.
Business Analysts and Stakeholders are Frustrated
The lack of an end-to-end tool connecting stakeholders, business analysts, and software development teams is a major gap. Traceable Agile™ in Jama Connect is the answer. With Traceable Agile, there is no change for software teams and the development process is supported for both business analysts and stakeholders. Learn more here >>
2. The Value of Creating a Digital Thread with Jama Connect and Jira
Providing Development Insight
Jira is a powerful tool for tracking development tasks, prioritizing work, and managing sprint schedules. However, it lacks comprehensive visibility into whether requirements are actually being met. If development tasks, such as user stories, aren’t directly linked to requirements, it’s impossible to know how close the project is to meeting customer needs.
Unlinked development tasks open risks like scope creep, rogue development, or unintentional changes that affect other parts of the system. In these cases, teams may spend time on tasks that aren’t aligned with the project’s core requirements, leading to wasted resources and delayed timelines.
By integrating Jama Connect with Jira, teams can bridge this gap. Jama Connect retains the requirements context, while Jira provides insight into development progress. Each team can work within its tool of choice while sharing critical information, such as real-time updates on task status. This integration enables project managers to see how development is progressing against requirements, ensuring that every task is necessary, and every requirement is covered.
Only Jama Connect Delivers a Digital Thread that is Measurable and Live Traceable Across Best-of-Breed Tools Jama Connect’s digital thread connects best-of-breed tools like Jira and Cameo and enables you to auto detect risk early across all engineering disciplines. This has been shown to enable proven improvement to the product development process.
Clear Definition of System Requirements
A common misconception about Agile is that formal requirements documentation is unnecessary. Some teams try to decompose customer needs into user stories in Jira, thinking that’s sufficient. However, this approach has limitations. User stories describe specific interactions or functions from a user’s perspective, but they don’t provide the comprehensive requirements needed for a full system definition.
Traceable Agile ensures that every requirement and feature is documented, versioned, and kept up to date, providing a clear, evolving definition of the system. Unlike user stories, requirements offer a functional description of what the system must do, ensuring alignment with customer needs. With Jama Connect, you get a single source of truth for the system, one that evolves over time and reflects the current state of requirements, while also keeping a record of every change that’s made.
Companies Choose Agile for Speed, Jama Connect Delivers Speed AND Quality
Jama Connect solves common challenges with Agile initiatives, such as maintaining standards compliance, coordinating hardware and software teams, managing defects, reducing rework, and ensuring customer quality. Traceable Agile speeds the flow of software and hardware development and maintains the current and historical state of development quality to auto-detect issues early. Watch the demo >>
Use Cases and Strategies for Simplifying Variant Management
Variant management enables organizations to efficiently tailor requirements for diverse markets while maintaining alignment across teams.
Jama Connect® offers flexible strategies to simplify creation, adaptation, and tracking of multiple variants. These approaches facilitate efficient reuse, reduce complexity, and maintain traceability across complicated product lines.
Identifying and adapting product variants based on evolving market dynamics, regulatory requirements, and unique customer needs to ensure consistent compliance.
Streamlining variant creation by configuring specific versions of product components, optimizing reuse, and fostering alignment across complex product lines.
Leveraging a structured feature model to effectively manage options and better understand complex product variations.
Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.
The video above is a preview of this webinar – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Matt Mickle: We have a fun topic today, walking through variant management use cases with the goal of simplifying this sometimes complicated topic. I will start off by walking through some of the common use cases that we often hear, followed by some concrete examples of how we would see these within the industry. I’ll talk a little bit about how we’ll solve these within Jama Connect and then have some demonstration of this directly in the tool. I’ll do this for each use case as we proceed, and then we’ll move on to some Q&A and I’ll answer some of your questions.
So, what do I mean when I say variant management? Well, simply, I would describe variant management as any process or technique that is used to manage variability and assets within a project. This could be in the form of certain techniques, such as feature-based product line engineering, which we’ll talk a little bit more about later. Configuration management, product derivation, or branch and merge. A product can vary in many ways, such as different features, material or components, premium services, or levels of performance. Here are some examples you might recognize. Models of home appliances with different sizes or capabilities, like these refrigerators. Microcontrollers with a configuration of reusable IP blocks. Medical devices, such as insulin pumps or digital thermometers having an array of features based on setting, method of application or type of consumer. As well as everyday devices, such as smartphones or smartwatches with different uses or consumer profiles.
Nearly every product you could think of has some amount of variation. And the process of managing those variants extends from the conception of the products, all the way into their description at the point of sale, and maintenance thereafter. So, one of these methods, which we will mention in the discussion today, is product line engineering, or PLE for short. And for this, we’ll use the simple definition, a focus on engineering for a family of products with similar features, components or modules as a single product line to leverage commonality and variability, minimize the duplication of effort, and maximize reusability.
Mickle: Now, a couple of definitions that go along with that from the standards for product line engineering, from ISO 26550, the definition of a feature would be an abstract functional characteristic of a system of interest that end users and other stakeholders can understand. And from the product line engineering for feature-based product line engineering standard, ISO 26580, a product line would be a family of similar products with variations in features. So, product line engineering could be considered as the next step in maturity. Single system engineering. And as the ISO standard on software and system engineering for product line engineering and management states, product companies utilizing single system engineering and management approaches may end up with highly complex and low-quality products. Low productivity, high employee turnover, and less than expected customer satisfaction.
So, let’s instead talk about the benefits of moving from single-system engineering into product-line engineering. Product line engineering enables organizations to create product line architecture that allows for the systematic reuse of components, modules, and assets across different products within a product line. This promotes efficiency by reducing redundancy in the need to recreate similar functionalities for each product. By reusing existing components and assets, organizations can significantly reduce development costs. Product line engineering allows for economies of scale, as the investment in creating a core set of assets can be spread across multiple products, leading to cost savings in the long run.
With product line engineering, organizations can streamline the development process by leveraging existing components and architectures. Faster time to market for new products, since development efforts are focused on creating unique features, rather than rebuilding common functionalities. Product line engineering helps ensure consistency in products across the product line. By reusing well-tested and validated components, the likelihood of introducing defects or inconsistencies is reduced. And this will lead to higher overall product quality. As market demands change or new technologies emerge, product line engineering provides a framework that allows organizations to adapt and evolve their product line more easily. This enables the addition of new features or modification of existing ones without starting the development from scratch.
Mickle: Product line engineering supports efficient configuration management, allowing organizations to define and manage variations and products through configuration, rather than by creating separated versions or desynchronized copies of content. This simplifies the task of handling different customer requirements or market-specific adaptations. Product line engineering makes maintenance and upgrades more manageable. Changes or bug fixes can be applied to common components, and then the updates can be propagated to all of the products within the line, ensuring that each product benefits from the improvements without having to undergo individual modifications.
And finally, product line engineering helps mitigate the risks associated with product development by relying on well-established and proven components. Since these components have been used and tested across multiple products, the likelihood of critical issues arising is reduced. Now, of course, there are many benefits for product line engineering, but there are a lot of challenges that a company goes through in order to try and move towards product line engineering. For example, let’s say a company starts out with a single product and then begins to build variants on that product, turning it into a product line. As the number of variants and variation between them grows, the ability to manage them becomes more and more challenging.
When a change is made, it’s important to assess not only the impact of that change within the product, where the change is made, but also in any products that are part of the same product line. If the change is against common requirements, then the decision is needed on whether they need variation. New versions or configurations of components of a system will need to be thoroughly reviewed with regards to how they interconnect. This becomes even more challenging and complex when considered as the product development data moves from one development application to the next. Throughout the supply chain, information about progress and change needs to flow and be collected in order to see overall status.
This recognition is particularly meaningful because G2’s rankings are based on verified user reviews and insights from real customers, analyzed through their proprietary v3.0 algorithm. The Winter 2025 Grid Report reflects data collected through November 19, 2024, highlighting the best-performing tools in the field.
But that’s not all — Jama Connect received multiple accolades across all business sizes and regions, including:
Overall Leader
Momentum Leader
Small-Business Leader
Mid-Market Leader
Enterprise Leader
EMEA Leader
Europe Leader
Learn more about the Winter 2025 G2 Grid for top Requirements Management Software products: DOWNLOAD IT HERE
Why This Recognition Matters
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:
“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
“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
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.
![[Webinar Recap] Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively](https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2025/01/Transform-Engineering-Processes.png "[Webinar Recap] Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively")
