Tag Archive for: jama connect Page 2

Tag Archive for: jama connect

The Jama Support Community is a forum for Jama Software users to interact and collaborate with other users and with Jama support engineers. It’s full of resources for everyone from novices to masters, including tutorials and webinars, help guides and FAQs, feature requests and announcements and a robust knowledge base. For today’s post, we spoke with one of our Jama Support Community power users — frequent contributors with great questions and powerful insights into using Jama — about how their organization uses Jama and the value they’ve seen from the Support Community.

Harald Hotz-Behofsits is a product owner at Frequentis AG, an Austrian tech company with staff in 50 countries. Its core business is mission-critical software for the air traffic management sector, but Frequentis also builds voice communications and information systems for defense, public safety, public transportation and the maritime market. After graduating from university, Hotz-Behofsits worked in the Austrian office of Scientific Games until joining the team at Frequentis in 2001.

As a product owner, Hotz-Behofsits works on an agile software team tasked with developing mission-critical software in accordance with international standards. His team needs a product development platform that generates documentation to support traceability from requirements to design to test cases to test results.

Frequentis relied on IBM Rational RequisitePro until 2012, when the team grew “quite unhappy” with its drawbacks, says Hotz-Behofsits, and began looking for alternatives. Jama Software popped up on the company’s radar early on, and in June 2013, Hotz-Behofsits became Frequentis’s first Jama Connect user. Five years later, Frequentis has about 400 projects in Jama Connect.

Hotz-Behofsits cites Jama Connect’s “intuitive user interface” as one of the things he likes most about the platform: “It’s easy to get new people on board,” he says. Hotz-Behofsits’s team uses Jama’s REST API and Jira integrations and makes heavy use of Velocity reports. The team also exports data into Office templates. Jama Connect’s Review Center, Hotz-Behofsits says, gets “daily use,” with what he estimates are 5,000 to 6,000 reviews. Review Center gives teams context and visibility by illuminating the relationship between stories and activities. In addition, Review Center helps teams achieve traceability by demonstrating what happened and why throughout the product development process. Hotz-Behofsits also relies on Review Center to understand how defects have been detected and addressed during the development process.

Hotz-Behofsits uses the Jama Support Community for “inspiration and innovation.” “By sharing solutions,” he says, “everybody gains.” Questions asked by other users, he says, can spark new ideas. When users share their insights or workarounds on the Support Community, everyone has the opportunity to experiment with and even improve upon others’ solutions. Just as the Jama Connect platform empowers collaboration between stakeholders and across teams, the Support Community allows users working in different roles at different organizations to collaborate on how best to leverage Jama for success.

As a seasoned Jama Connect user and a regular presence in the Support Community, Hotz-Behofsits recommends that new users of the Jama Support Community start by querying the existing content, since the chances are that at least some of their questions have already been answered.

Hotz-Behofsits would recommend Jama to a colleague who needed to manage requirements, test cases, test activities, traceability and – “of course” – the review process. For Frequentis, Jama Connect has become a crucial platform for achieving traceability across requirements, clarifying work order (i.e., why something was changed when), and reporting and addressing defects.

Connect with Harald and other fellow Jama users on the Jama Support Community.

Jama Connect captures real-time feedback and decisions to give you visibility into every stage of the product development cycle, from benchmarking and monitoring team progress to enabling stronger collaboration between stakeholders.

You have a wealth of information available to you in Jama Connect, but it’s only helpful if you can find what you need when you need it. Here are three tips for finding data quickly and easily.

Search Bar

OK, you probably thought of using the search bar, but you may not be using it to its full potential.

When you search for a term like “hardware,” Jama Connect’s robust search functionality will pull up every item containing that keyword, including Word, PDF, and text attachments. Your search isn’t restricted to items with the word “hardware” in the title or description; Jama Connect will show you every item that contains the word “hardware” anywhere. This powerful functionality tends to be underused.

You can also limit your search to a specific field, like the item name, just by adding a colon to your search. “Name: Hardware” will locate all items with the word “hardware” in the document name.

Say you’re looking for something more specific, like a client’s name. If there’s only one result for your search term, Jama Connect will automatically open a window taking you to that item, so you can hit the ground running.

Note: For the next two tips, we’re assuming a certain level of familiarity with Jama. For a more granular guide to these features, start with the Jama Connect User Guide or get your questions answered in the Jama Support Community.

Find Me 

Jama Connect’s Find Me feature allows you to locate the item you’re working on within the project structure, represented by the Explorer Tree. At any moment, you can get a comprehensive, integrated view of the project and see how each item fits in. The Find Me feature keeps you from missing the forest for the trees by putting the holistic vision for the project top-of-mind. At the same time, Find Me helps you orient each task you’re working on in relation to the project as a whole.

Trace View

Trace View offers live traceability within the product development cycle, showing you upstream and downstream items, missing relationships and item details in the context of relationships.

To access Trace View, select it from Projects. The items you selected in List View will appear in the Source column, with related items downstream from the source to the right and related items upstream from the source on the left. From there, you can use the blue arrows at either side of your screen to toggle upstream or down.

You can also apply filters to Trace View to see items by type — like subsystem requirement, verification or design description.

Additionally, Jama Connect lets you save a Trace View and bookmark it on your homepage for easy access. You can save multiple views to facilitate working on or managing items in different capacities.

Finally, you can export saved Trace Views as CSV files or share them with team members by copying and sharing the URL. (Note that Trace Views cannot be made public, so the best way to give every team member who needs to see a specific upstream or downstream view is to send them the URL.)

For a deeper dive into maximizing Jama Connect, check out the Ask Jama webinar, or explore the Jama Connect User Guide, which is full of tools to plan and track progress and performance.

Engineers and testing teams can celebrate! Gone are the days of being at your wits’ end searching for buttons in the Microsoft Word Equations Editor. With MathType, engineers can formulate complex chemical and mathematical equations directly in Jama Connect.

It’s well documented that the expense of fixing engineering errors in systems increases exponentially over the product lifecycle. For instance, the cost to fix a bug during implementation was found to be roughly six times higher than those discovered during the design process, according to the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM.

Since so many engineering errors originate with poorly written requirements, it’s important to fix them at the source. And that can be easily done by just adding a little bit more detail to your requirements with MathType.

The first step to writing any engineering requirement is properly translating it to a verifiable engineering specification. That is why engineers, testing teams or anyone who uses complex mathematics, chemistry or physics will find a great deal of use from this latest add-on feature to Jama Connect.

For example, let’s say an engineering requirement calls for an engine subsystem with a maximum RPM of 5,500. The dependencies of the subsystem are inertia of the engine, torque of the engine and torque of the propeller.

Calculating the total RPM requires a differential equation which an engineer could not traditionally import into Jama Connect. Now with MathType, you can add the precise formulaic details of the system to the requirement while staying in Jama Connect.

This works by typing equations directly into the MathType text editor. The cloud server then creates an image of the equation and stores it in the cloud. Jama Connect imports a visual image of the equation into the requirements dashboard, which ultimately saves time, eliminates risk, and reduces costs across teams.

Check out how it works below:

 

To learn more about how MathType can alleviate the headache of writing cumbersome equations in Microsoft Word and then transferring them to Jama Connect, contact us.

Product development teams face incredible pressures to deliver more innovative products, faster and with sustained high quality.

At Jama Software, we’ve been working with innovative companies at the forefront of this endeavor. One of the common challenges we’ve seen is product and engineering leaders lacking visibility and critical insights into their product development process.

In the constant struggle stay on task and on track, they’re looking for insights and analysis to understand how their teams are performing, identify opportunities to reduce risk and communicate that information quickly across the organization.

We’ve set out to address this challenge with the launch of Jama Analyze.

As part of the Jama Product Development Platform, this new solution builds upon the product development data that teams generate with solutions like Jama Connect™, Atlassian Jira Software, GitHub and more, to give product leaders a far-reaching view into performance and the insights needed to mitigate risk and impact product success.

With simple accessibility and easy-to-understand charts, graphs and other visual indicators, Jama Analyze allows business leaders and product developers to connect the dots between teams, decisions and data sets that existed only in isolation before. This ability allows teams to drive strategic insight and sustain competitive advantage.

The benefits of this new addition to the Jama Product Development Platform spans entire organizations, from product to engineering, quality analysts to executives. Here are some of the key features of Jama Analyze.

 

Standardizing process and performance is easier when you can remove data silos and compare KPIs across all teams in a single chart or dashboard. Create as many dashboards as needed, give context to product development data, compare performance across teams and products or use private dashboards to keep sensitive information within groups.

 

Establish New Operational Benchmarks
By gathering and analyzing information across your product development process, teams can reveal roadblocks and inform actions. Jama Analyze also enables your teams to own the analysis they need and reuse critical information for higher-level product and program views. It also uncovers important quality trends that until now have been buried in spreadsheets, low-level reports or simply missed.

Highlight Early Warning Signs of Risk and Opportunity
As development teams move at faster speeds to meet market demand, it’s easy to get lost in the process. With teams so focused on hitting deadlines, they can overlook the areas of their process that could be refined to minimize errors and maximize innovation. Shared insights from Jama Analyze help teams surface these data points and take quicker action for better business outcomes.

Improve Organizational Performance
Align your product development organization around common company-defined goals and KPIs to establish baselines for performance and measure progress. Organizations can leverage our best practices in the form of suggested recipes and templated metrics, as well as build out their own dashboards, to create common standards across groups.

Jama Analyze unlocks new universes of strategic insights for product development companies to make better products. And, when used in conjunction with Jama Connect, organizations begin to unleash Predictive Product Development.

With recent updates, Jama Connect has never been more powerful for understanding your full product development lifecycle and proving you built the product you set out to build. Here are some highlights of its features and updates to help you hit your product launch target.

Validation, Verification and Test Management

Product quality matters, and Jama Connect lets you maintain traceability and confirm that each requirement, system and component spec has been tested. Now, Jama Connect has been radically improved to enhance how verification and validation data is handled within the application. By simplifying the visibility of how test results are connected to your requirements, you get better context and capability.

Review Center

Cancel lengthy approval meetings, as Review Center allows your teams to make better, faster decisions on approvals. New upgrades allow test plans to be sent to Review Center, making it easier to collaborate and negotiate approvals. Afterward, the results are sent to Test Center to review for feedback and sign-off. Review Center also now enables you to quickly identify what’s changed since you last viewed the content, and highlight and respond to targeted comments immediately.

 

With Jama Connect as your single source of truth for definition, verification and validation, you can benchmark and monitor team performance over time. You can also get insight into current progress to goal to drive execution. Plus, Jama Connect illuminates risk, and eases the path towards product compliance.​

Requirements Management

Jama Connect still lets you write requirements and create cross-team review groups for a more streamlined approval process. Teams also have the ability to prioritize requirements validation, problem statements, engineering responses, negotiation and more. With updates to how requirements are presented within Jama Connect, we’ve made it easier than ever to view and share content more easily.

Risk Management

Analyzing risk is an integral part of developing safety-critical products. With Jama Connect, risk and hazard analysis are directly integrated within your development process to give better clarity to associated requirements and mitigations.

Real-Time Collaboration

One of the key features of Jama Connect has been its ability to simplify communication around complex systems and processes, and we’ll continue to build on that. By allowing teams to get the answers and data they need to be more productive, milestone phases are tightened, risks are identified and opportunities to innovate are uncovered faster than ever.

End-to-End Traceability

Eliminate blind spots within your development process. Follow the connections between requirements, specifications and tests, including decision tracking, ensuring all teams understand the impact of product changes.

Built for Ecosystems

Not every development team uses the exact same solutions to build great products. Jama Connect allows teams the flexibility to use a variety of tools through our expanding group of reliable partners.

See if Jama Connect would be the right choice for your organization by checking out our eBook, “Selecting the Right Product Development Platform.”