For complex product development, the ability to trace through systems, hardware, electrical, risk, verification, and validation teams requires live requirements traceability.
To comply with industry standards, engineering teams in regulated industries must achieve requirements traceability across siloed teams and tools. Most software development teams have chosen Jira® as their preferred task management tool and refuse to switch to cumbersome legacy ALM tools that would negatively impact their productivity. Attempts to try and achieve Live Traceability™ with Jira or Jira plugins break down quickly as the complexity of approvals, versioning, change impact analysis, baselines and variant management overwhelm a task management approach.
The best practice approach implemented by hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies and startups alike, is to use Jama Connect to create Live Traceability across a best-of-breed toolchain including Jira or Azure DevOps for the software development team.
This approach simultaneously solves the need for Live Traceability AND causes no disruption to existing tools, processes, and even field names for the software development team in Jira.
Achieve Live Traceability across your best-of-breed toolchain. To make this continuous sync as easy as possible, Jama Connect Interchange is purpose-built to achieve Live Traceability between Jama Connect and Jira through a point and click interface.
Key Benefits of Integrating Jama Connect with Jira
Stay Aligned to Market and User Needs
Integrate upstream planning, requirements, and test plans into an iterative development process. Ensure what you build satisfies market, compliance, and user requirements.
Maintain Visibility into Downstream Development
Accurately capture and communicate requirements, goals, progress, and interdependencies to remove friction throughout the development process.
Eliminate Late-Stage Rework and Quality Gaps Due to Misalignment
Capture needs and maintain agreement on what you are building. Guarantee everyone is working off the most current spec, so the product/system ultimately delivers its intended value.
Support a Formal Change Management Process
Identify change impact implications of product requirements alterations and impacted owners so development teams make informed decisions as requirements evolve.
Development teams need the most effective solution to manage product development complexity, but can’t afford to restructure their entire process and workflow.
That’s why integrating leading product development solutions like Jama Connect™ and Jira Software is the best answer. We recently explored some of the benefits of bringing the two solutions together in a recent webinar, “Managing Hardware & Software Product Development Complexity with Jama & Jira,” and wanted to share a few of the advantages with our readers.
The Document Dilemma
In the past, Microsoft Excel or Word may have done a passable job at housing requirements and specifications. However, even those who believe those types of tools were once effective have long since realized that they are no longer practical when it comes to complex product development.
It’s likely you’ve been there — staring at a worksheet with 100+ rows and 10+ columns of data. In an effort to add clarification, you also have a Word doc with a list of specifications. You send the documents via email for your team to read through, and then attempt to comprehend and submit actionable feedback that will impact the outcome of the entire project.
You dread getting the responses back because you know everyone has a different method for submitting feedback and version control will be a nightmare. Even with tools like SharePoint or wikis, collaborating via documents makes it impossible to get timely and actionable feedback from multiple team members in a way that maximizes efficiency.
The Answer: Database Solutions
Database solutions like Jama Connect and Jira Software ease the pain of managing complex product development.
These solutions are purpose-built to help you execute specific pieces of the product development lifecycle, and are known to outperform competitors in those functional areas. Here’s a quick glance at how the two platforms complement each other.
Jama Connect Answers the questions: What are we going to build? Why are we building it?
Areas of focus: The upstream definition process — making sure you’re doing the right things to successfully build the right product.
Jira Software Answers the questions: How are we going to build it? When are we going to do it? Who is going to do the work? Areas of focus: Task tracking and making sure those tasks are being completed.
Integrating Jama and Jira Creates a Juggernaut
Bringing together Jama Connect and Jira Software allows you to work in the solution that best fits your workflow, not the other way around. They are both flexible solutions that adapt to your process — whether that’s Waterfall or Agile or something in between.
Jama Connect is used for business objectives and epics (i.e., requirements), as well as status and relationships in the stories phase. It puts all the content in one location so the versioned document dilemma you’ve experienced disappears. Within the system, you can:
Collaborate with ease using communication and review capabilities
Seamlessly capture and manage decision history and version control
Ensure requirements are tied to test cases with coverage analysis upstream and downstream
To complete the loop, Jira Software tracks tasks and progress. It’s the bidirectional synchronization between the two systems that allows you to maintain consistency and alignment throughout the development process.
If tests fail and will create a defect as a result, that information is passed to Jira Software for those defects to managed and fixed.
Furthermore, team members who work in Jama Connect can change the priority of a defect in that system. The information is then available to team members who work in Jira Software. Team members working in Jira Software can continue doing their burn downs and execution, with visibility into where the defect originated and what high-level requirements might be impacted.
By integrating best-in-breed solutions, day-to-day users of each specific software don’t have to bounce back and forth between different tools or change their workflow or process. Yet they can still benefit from sharing the necessary information between both solutions.
A Closer Look
We get many inquiries about Jama’s integrations, and most frequently they involve Jira Software. To hear more about the key benefits of using these two first-class product development solutions, watch our webinar.
There’s no escaping that the more exciting and fast-paced the product you’re developing is, the more challenging it is for decision makers to access the information they need to move quickly. In this complex workspace no one person, single team, or discipline can make all decisions alone. Modern product development requires working with product data a bit differently – everything from high level requirements to test cases need to be handled more iteratively, collaboratively, and even across multiple development tools. While this trend is still evolving, managing networked product data doesn’t need to be a burden.
In fact, Jama data is most powerful when it’s connected. Jama houses all the essential context needed to drive an organization, including the core requirements defining the “what” and “why” of what you’re building. However, that data becomes more powerful and actionable when it’s part of an end-to-end picture of your product delivery process. That means anchoring your requirements upstream to your market analysis, team goals and company objectives as well as downstream to all development tasks, tests, and statuses from outside tools such as Jira, Rally, VersionOne, TFS, and HPQC. Here’s one example of how that might look in a Jama relationship diagram:
Integrations make the whole network of product data available in Jama, and traceability makes sure that data is meaningfully mapped to reflect how teams think and work. Together, when changes inevitably need to be made, it’s possible to see who is impacted and move swiftly with context powering your decisions.
The NEW Tasktop Integration Hub makes these integrations simpler, particularly at scale. While this data connectivity is hugely valuable, setting up an integration is a deliberate and sometimes tedious exercise. If you have ever set up an integration, you likely have experienced the complex, interrelated, non-obvious choices required to map distinct systems together. That’s why I’m pleased to announce that Jama users now can take advantage of a new integration hub that takes this challenge head on. The Tasktop Integration Hub (TIH) is built to perform at enterprise scale, and designed to make integration setup intuitive, easily repeatable, and manageable over time as your teams’ data volume and complexity grows.
While the increasing complexity of product delivery is daunting, the tools at a product developer’s disposal, like Jama, are becoming more sophisticated, too. Jama is holding true to our mission to simplify complex product development. We are continuing to evolve how we collect, connect, and share the information decision makers need across their tool ecosystem. More capabilities to come!
To learn more about the TIH, and how successful teams are keeping their data connected:
