Jama Software is always on the lookout for news on our customers that would benefit and inform our industry partners. As such, we’ve curated a series of customer spotlight articles that we found insightful. In this blog post, we share content, sourced from Times Aerospace, about one of our customers, SITA titled “SITA unveils eVISA and ETA to transform borders” – which was originally published on July 28, 2022.
SITA unveils eVISA and ETA to transform borders
SITA has launched SITA eVisa and SITA Electronic Travel Authorisation to meet the growing demand from governments for digital visa systems to stimulate national economies after COVID-19.
Governments globally are shifting to modern travel authorization solutions, like electronic visas and Electronic Travel Authorisations (ETAs). According to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), traditional visas – applications made via a consulate or embassy – decreased from 77% in 2008 to 53% in 2018. There is a growing demand for digital travel solutions.
The advantages of digital authorization solutions include improved security, reduced administrative burden, easier travel, and increased visitor flows, promoting spending that benefits local economies and creates employment. For example, one government’s introduction of an eVisa scheme covering 40 plus countries in 2014-2015 led to a 21% increase in international visitor arrivals and the creation of 800,000 jobs accounted for around 20% of the growth seen in the country’s travel and tourism over the period.
The mobile capability of SITA’s new eVisa and ETA capability allows travelers to make applications and provide their biometric information using their personal devices before they travel.
SITA’s eVisa and ETA solutions provide visas containing ICAO’s Visible Digital Seal (VDS), an encrypted bar code that enables visas and ETAs, paper or electronic, to be digitally verified for authenticity, offering enhanced security and fraud prevention.
Jeremy Springall, Head of SITA AT BORDERS, said: “Adopting eVisa and ETA supports national prosperity. We’ve productized our proven and robust travel authorization systems to benefit more nations around the world as they shift to digitalize and future-proof their borders. The solutions help countries to cope with growing passenger volumes, improve security and efficiency, and deliver a more seamless travel experience that travelers demand, removing the complexities of applying for traditional visas”.
Springall added: “The adaptability of these two solutions means that they are fully interoperable with existing border control and airline systems. And, they comply with international standards and best practices.”
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https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/08/New-SITA.png5121024Decoteau Wilkerson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDecoteau Wilkerson2022-08-31 03:00:432023-10-25 12:32:49SITA Unveils eVISA and ETA to Transform Borders
Systems Engineering for Product Development with Live Traceability
Complexity of Product Development is Exploding
In today’s world, technological innovations across embedded systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) are aggressively pushing the envelope on product complexity and accelerating digital transformation. The next generation of autonomous cars, electric vehicles, robots, and space shuttles are all complex systems that need to seamlessly interact with multiple layers of software, hardware, and humans across different environments.
Because complex technology products require intricate interfaces with various systems or sub systems, there is an inherent challenge of coordinating the multiple development teams, who are often geographically spread across the world. Furthermore, large teams typically work on different stages of product development within their own silos. The different development tools, architecture, and IT environments used across various teams and organizations can significantly add to the challenges of developing new technologies.
Manufacturing sectors will reap the AI technology benefits of enhanced monitoring and supply chain optimization. In financial institutions, AI techniques can be used to identify which transactions are likely to be fraudulent. Through AI, the industry could also adopt fast and accurate credit scoring while automating manually intense data management tasks. Disruptions in the transport and logistics realm could include autonomous trucking and delivery on the roads and automated picking in warehouses.
Most complex system development starts with defining user needs and requirements, which involves design, software, and hardware teams developing deliverables that ultimately get tested and integrated for delivering the product. Given the disparate nature of these teams, there is an inherent need to optimize and continuously keep track of systems information from concept to development and delivery. However, there is often a gap in terms of how information is consumed across engineering departments, as well as its availability and traceability. The digital thread in engineering today is still a collection of different tools, which means traceability is usually accomplished in a cumbersome and manual fashion via time-consuming meetings and disconnected documents.
Challenges in Traceability
Traceability is a key both to product development and software engineering for tracking the systems development lifecycle. Helpful in achieving regulatory compliance, traceability can also be used within software engineering for running test cases and gaining valuable insights.
While some organizations make it a point to map product development stages and improve traceability to gain these benefits, traceability is often considered after-the-fact by others. This means that once an issue is identified, there is effort required to trace back where the error originally occurred to prevent that same failure from occurring in the future. This approach can cause multiple cost overruns, product delays, and inefficient management of change impacts. Think of addressing a car recall or fixing a complex medical device or industrial equipment— the costs can be enormous. By emphasizing the importance of traceability from the start, organizations can avoid the extra effort and cost associated with implementing it after an error has been made.
The solution lies in bringing a practical approach of Live Traceability™ to the systems engineering world. Optimizing and measuring the systems development process with Live Traceability is a crucial competitive advantage that companies can leverage. For any complex product, systems, or software development, the requirements and user needs form the first level of abstraction. Live Traceability can be measured and monitored by using systems requirements as an anchor to manage information used in different stages of the systems development lifecycle.
At Jama Software, we define live requirements traceability as the ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement— no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans. Live Traceability of system requirements is required by industry standards to ensure product safety and forms the foundation for digital engineering and model-based systems engineering. This enables the engineering process to be managed through data and its performance improved in real time.
Through better requirements management and a focus on traceability, companies can improve their systems development performance with higher quality products and improved cycle times. The industry is now embracing the idea that to improve engineering efficiency within the systems development process, we need to continuously monitor and measure traceability.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/08/2022-08-02-IEEE-v2-managing-complexity-systems-engineering-1.jpg5121024Nikhil Rai/media/jama-logo-primary.svgNikhil Rai2022-08-17 03:00:412023-01-12 16:46:26Managing Complexity in Systems Engineering for Product Development with Live Traceability
Launching spacecraft and satellites into orbit are highly complicated endeavors and like many large organizations, this rocket and spacecraft manufacturer was struggling to provide visibility, manage, changes to requirements, and meet aggressive schedules.
In 2010, this industry-leading space exploration technology company selected Jama Connect to help its team develop new ways of working to simplify requirements management, improve visibility, and customer communication, and create an efficient, paperless product delivery process.
They saw significant improvements to its requirements management process with Jama Connect, including:
Reducing meeting times, simplifying cumbersome specification docs, and improving overall communication to ensure all requirements were accounted for accurately
Better traceability from requirements to derived requirements to verification events
Improved customer relations with shared project visibility and enhanced communications
Jama Connect® helps an innovative aerospace company keep track of thousands of requirements by providing a platform for greater visibility and collaboration with its team and customers
This innovative aerospace launch company designs, manufactures, and launches the world’s most advanced rockets and spacecraft. In just ten years, the company has emerged as one of the fastest growing aerospace companies in the world working toward their vision to revolutionize space travel.
CHALLENGES
• Providing visibility and managing customer expectations
• Managing inevitable change to requirements and other important details
• Eliminating rework in order to meet aggressive schedules
EVALUATION
• Utilize Jama Connect’s Review Center for open customer and internal communication
• Track requirements for faster change management
• Maintain common requirements in one place to prevent repeats
RESULTS
• Helped reduce meeting times, simplify cumbersome specification docs, and improve overall communication to ensure all requirements were accounted for accurately
• Provided a method for traceability from requirements to derived requirements to verification events
• Improved customer relations with shared project visibility and enhanced communications
• Accounted for contract milestones and ensured timely payments
Launching spacecraft and satellites into space is a highly complicated endeavor. Like many other large organizations tackling complex projects, the company initially faced a few critical business challenges that Jama Connect could help them address:
• Providing visibility and managing customer expectations
• Managing inevitable change to requirements and other important details
• Eliminating rework in order to meet aggressive schedules
As a customer, NASA needed visibility into the company’s progress to ensure key requirements were being met. Prior to using Jama Connect, the company did not have an easy way to share quick status reports on requirements verification. As a result, many hours were spent compiling status and change-control reports.
This process, although effective, took too much time. Hours were spent in meetings reviewing large cumbersome spreadsheets – going line by line to review thousands of details. The company had to implement complex macros to pull information from Microsoft Excel into Word documents to create specific reports. This was time-consuming for everyone involved. The company wanted to share real-time information with NASA for their review and approval, but they did not have an easy way to accomplish this level of collaboration prior to using Jama Connect.
Solution: One Small Step for the Company, One Giant Leap for Efficiency
The company implemented Jama Connect in 2010, wanting to develop new ways of working to simplify requirements management, improve visibility and customer communication, and create an efficient, paperless product delivery process.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/08/2022-08-16-customer-story-innovative-aerospace-manufacturer-chooses-jama-connect-1-1.jpg5121024Decoteau Wilkerson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDecoteau Wilkerson2022-08-16 03:00:182023-01-12 16:46:27Innovative Aerospace Manufacturer Chooses Jama Connect® to Help Revolutionize Space Transportation
Eight Ways Requirements Management Software Will Save You Significant Money
Requirements management software helps development teams eliminate manual compliance efforts and significantly reduce product delays, rework, and cost overruns. Some platforms, like Jama Connect®, also include frameworks and templates aligned to industry standards — and enable live requirements traceability through siloed development, test, and risk activities, providing end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement.
In this post, we’ll share the eight ways that a requirements management platform can save your company significant money, making it a wise investment at any time — especially during challenging economic times.
Requirements Management Software can help your organization save money by:
1. Reclaiming Productive Work Time
A modern requirements management solution (like Jama Connect®) can help your teams reclaim hours of unproductive work time, resulting in money saved across the organization. Without a modern requirements management solution, highly skilled – and often highly paid – employees can waste up to 40% of their time on tedious, unproductive activities such as:
Searching for siloed information in static documents and/or disconnected tools
Manual/or duplicative data entry to update status in multiple systems
Working off old data and outdated versions of documents
Reformatting and migrating data back and forth between tools
Reconciling differences between data sources
Trying to understand ‘what changed?’ and assess the impact
After implementing Jama Connect, our customers on average, quantify that they are reclaiming one to two hours of productive work time per day, some even more. The engineers at Monolithic Power Systems can now quickly and easily produce required documentation and no longer need to spend time in multiple time-consuming meetings and scrums to get a clear picture of what’s happening with their products. And with Jama Connect, they can automatically generate — at times — 70-80 pages of documentation (entered correctly one time, in one place) and efficiently generate any additional documentation they need, saving their engineers countless hours of documentation time.
Another customer, RBC Medical Innovations shared that on one of their state-of-the-art capital equipment development projects, Jama Connect saved them 123 team-member days with an average cost savings per project of $150,000. And medical industry innovators and pioneers in the field of plasma science, Grifols, reports saving 80 hours or more per project after implementing Jama Connect.
Interested in the numbers?
Let’s take, for example, this simple calculation.
If you have 10 team members engaged in core requirements management activities, and each spends roughly four hours on the above-listed unproductive tasks per weeks, the annual budget reclaimed with Jama Connect would be $94,118.
Note: The calculation assumes 237 actual working days per year (at an average salary of $100K) with each author in Jama Connect reclaiming a conservative one hour per day.
Test this out with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!
2. Reducing Rework
How much money are you leaving on the table due to rework? See how much you can save by decreasing discovered and unplanned work due to:
Improperly defined requirements
Incomplete decomposition and missing coverage
Insufficient review and stakeholder alignment
Lack of rigor and impact analysis when managing change
Late-stage requirements churn
Again, let’s assume an organization has an average product development investment cost of $10,000,000. (Typical rework costs average about 30% of development costs, so in this case, it would be $3,000,000. And rework costs due to poor requirements management averages about 60% of rework costs, which, in this case, would be $1,800,000).
Our customer data shows that Jama Connect typically reduces requirements management rework by 40-60%. So, with these calculations, the organization can expect to reclaim, a not insignificant, $900,000 of annual budget with Jama Connect.
In one example, our customer, Arteris IP has seen not only seen reuse go up by 100%, and review times down by 30%, but also a significant 50% reduction in rework since using Jama Connect.
Test this out with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!
3. Streamlining the Review Process
For product developers and engineers, reviews are a cornerstone of the development process. How much are inefficient requirement review meetings costing your organization? Is your review process cumbersome, manual, in disparate documents, and challenging for distributed stakeholders to collaborate? If so, it might be time to (forgive the redundancy) review your review process. Healthcare leader, Grifols shared that with Jama Connect, they have reduced their review cycles from three months to fewer than 30 days.
Legacy solutions that are difficult to use can make the review process incredibly cumbersome, diverting frustrated team members out of the tool and onto ineffective (often quickly outdated) versions of disparate documents. This is a story we’ve heard repetitively from customers who’ve moved away from legacy tools and processes.
If that’s one of your frustrations as well, it might be time to see how much budget you can reclaim through review optimization, including:
Virtualizing reviews for asynchronous collaboration
Focusing key stakeholders on the most relevant information
Adopting a more iterative approach
Increasing upfront rigor and version control
Tracking participation and progress
For this calculation, we’ll assume three variables:
Total number of requirements review meetings per month
Approximate duration of each review meeting
Average participants in each meeting
Let’s assume six review meetings per month, each meeting lasting three hours, and an average of 10 people involved in each review meeting. Calculating with an average salary of $150K/per attendee, and with the above-defined variables, the annual cost of review meetings would be $162,000. The total number of people hours in review meetings would be 180 hours.
The calculated savings alone, by just reducing the time spent in meetings, would be $81,000.
Jama Connect typically reduces time spent in meetings by 40-60%. Notably, the Finnish Red Cross estimates that implementing Jama Connect has shortened their review cycles by an impressive 80%. What could you get done with all that time back?
With Jama Connect, you can simplify the review and approval process by capturing collaborative feedback from stakeholders, including voting for priority and electronic signatures for approver roles. In addition, Review Center in Jama Connect helps teams reduce risk, and save time and money by allowing teams to:
Increase participation in the review process
Retain a historical record of all decisions made and by whom
Provide visibility sooner in the review process
Generate approval-ready content for e-signature faster
Collaborate more often and capture tacit knowledge
Check out the potential savings you could realize with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!
4. Identifying Defects Earlier in the Development Process
Does your organization build complex software and systems? How much can you decrease the cost of development by addressing software defects earlier? Using a modern requirements management software solution can help you identify and address software defects due to:
Lack of rigor early in the development lifecycle
Low stakeholder participation in requirements definition/validation
Poor visibility into requirements changes and impact analysis
V&V/QA teams remaining disconnected throughout the process
For this sample equation, we’ll take an average total number of requirements managed annually (we’ll use 4,500) and the average number of hours it takes to fix a defect (we’ll use six hours for this example). The average number of requirements with defects typically equals around 60% of the total number of requirements. With these test numbers, the annual cost of defects would be $850,000. Jama Connect can reduce the number of requirements-related defects by 25-40%. Identifying and addressing these issues earlier in the development process can significantly help to reduce risk and reclaim significant budget.
For this calculation, we’ve used 30%. The calculation assumes 237 actual working days per year (at an average salary of $100K) with each author in Jama Connect reclaiming one hour per day.
With Jama Connect, the annual budget that could be reclaimed is $255,150.
Test the numbers for yourself using this ROI calculator to see how much you can save by reducing requirements-related defects by up to 40%!
Let’s face it, if software is difficult to use and the user interface is challenging, engineers just won’t use it, or only a select few will. We all want life to get the job done, run smoothly and easily — and the software we choose needs to reflect those desires. So, the right requirements management software not only needs to be powerful and have robust capabilities, but it needs to be easy to use.
“Jama Connect lowers the complexity and burden of having to manually keep requirements, architecture, and specifications all in sync and traced to each other. It’s a formidable problem that is virtually eliminated courtesy of Jama without the hassle of having to learn a clunky UI (IBM Doors).”
Alan M., Chief Product Officer – G2 Verified Review
“Jama is being used as a test management tool in my company. I [have been] using Jama [for] 3+ years, and I can tell you that this was one of the best Test management tools I’ve ever used. Everything is so easy to understand, and the interface is user friendly — easy to use and can learn this tool quickly.”
Team Lead in Engineering, Software Company – Verified Trust Radius Review
A smooth user experience that provides a pleasant and recognizable interface (one that teams will actually use) is critical to the success and effectiveness of any product development process. Jama Connect is award-winning for its ease of use, and that’s something we’re proud of. Customers love using Jama Connect to optimize their complex product, systems, and software development spanning industries such as aerospace and defense, automotive, medical device/life sciences, financial, semiconductor, insurance, industrial, software technologies, and more.
“Our team cannot stop saying great things about Jama Connect! Its efficiency and intuitiveness have turned requirement workshops from a multi-day event to a 6-hour meeting. Teams adopted the platform so fast, we needed to go back to Jama to get additional licenses (twice)!”
Jim Bolton, Director of Methodology and Tools – Workforce Software
“I told the team it was a very easy-to-use solution. But people were shocked at how fast it came together. Within hours, we were going and setting up the structure for our requirements. There were many other people in the company who had used Jama Connect before and supported our selection. It was a clear choice for medical device innovators like us.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio
6. Optimizing Communication and Collaboration
Modern, easy-to-use software can improve collaboration and communication across an organization, both for internal and external stakeholders. The right requirements management software will optimize communication and save money, frustration, resources, and time- across the board. One of our customers, the Finnish Red Cross, estimates that their testing team has improved their collaboration and communication by 50% with Jama Connect.
Legacy systems like IBM® DOORS® are notoriously difficult to use and often require individuals with specialized training to implement. This regularly forces engineers and other stakeholders to manage projects outside the software in disparate documents.
“Jama suited our need for collaboration and communication. Jama provides a very easy-to-use interface and communication system that brought in the buy-in from all stakeholders. Visure, Doors, TTA didn’t perform as well in the communication/ collaboration department where we really needed a boost.”
Stephen Czerniej P. Eng, Systems Engineer – Allied Vision
With Jama Connect, broader teams and stakeholders can collaborate on reviews, test cases, verification and validation in real-time. This kind of in-situ collaboration dramatically reduces risk across the entire development lifecycle to reduce the chance of delays, cost overruns, and expensive recalls, and in turn increases the opportunity for successful outcomes.
[Jama Connect] has allowed us to get more people from our other offices involved in the collaboration process because we’re not all having to sit on a conference call at awkward times. People can come into the system at a time that suits them and review things. And we know their comments will be seen by everybody else.”
Alistair McBain, Sr. Business Consultant – SITA
The fact that it is easy to share information and execute processes even when the team is not co-located (geographically dispersed). Changes are properly tracked, and people notified. It is also easy to organize, review, and monitor the review progress. My organization involves several scientists from 31 countries and more than 200 institutes. Jama Connect gets remote and distributed people informed and involved on processes related to requirements.
Francesco D., Senior Systems Engineer – Verified G2 Review
7. Centralizing Your Requirements Management with Best-of-Breed Tooling
Managing requirements in a single platform speeds up the product development process by saving time (time=money), strengthening alignment, and ensuring quality and compliance. Teams can create, review, validate, and verify requirements in one solution. With Jama Connect, teams can:
Have an authoritative source of truth for clear visibility throughout the product development lifecycle
Iterate in real time for informed decision-making and consensus
Support multiple product development methodologies and engineering disciplines
Configure the requirements management software to align with industry best practices
Visualize how tests track back to requirements to prove quality and compliance
Reuse validated requirements to quickly replicate features across products
Not investigating how you can leverage software within your organization is costing you money
“We are using [Jama Connect] from the design specifications/requirements till the test case reviews… Since Jama can be used as a complete project management tool, complete details of a product /project can be tracked in one place easily.”
Suhas Kashyap, Senior Test Engineer, L&T Technology Services – TrustRadius Verified Review
“Jama Connect has brought some new life to our requirements management (and how we see the inter-connectivity of functional requirements with System Requirement Specifications), better dashboards and reporting for everything it supports from printing test plans, requirements, specifications, and test runs.”
Fred Sookiasian, Senior Quality Assurance Software Lead – Advanced Bionics
The #1 problem product engineering organizations face is complying with traceability requirements spanning siloed teams and tools. And one dirty little secret in product engineering is the plethora of traceable data stored in Microsoft Excel. Jama Connect Interchange™ is purpose-built to deliver end-to-end Live Traceability™ (see section below) across best-of-breed tools, including Microsoft Excel — and it’s the first requirements management platform to make Excel data live traceable through a point and click integration interface.
Now teams can leverage the power of Jama Connect’s traceability model to continuously sync traceable information from other best-of-breed tools with no change required for engineering disciplines to continue using their chosen tools to maximize productivity.
“Jama Connect is one of the vital and advanced tools of the modern era. It has a methodology that can ensure complete project tracking from the first step to the execution, test cases, rectification, quality assurance, project timelining, and much more in a streamlined way which has been increasing the overall ROI and efficiency of the project. The important factor of Jama Connect is that all board members can analyze and collaborate on the performance on the same stage, and this has been increasing trust between the clients and organizations while doing large-scale management.”
Engineering Strategist, IT Services – Verified TrustRadius Review
8. Measuring and Improving Development Success with Live Traceability™
Live requirements traceability is the ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement — no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans. This enables the engineering process to be managed through data, and its performance improved in real-time.
“Right off the initial stage of just importing the data in Jama Connect and trying to create the relationships, we actually saw that we had traceability gaps, just based on what we had done before in the old system. Catching these gaps would’ve probably taken hours or days in our old system, while with Jama, it became obvious in a matter of minutes.”
Jama Software® is the first to measure traceability thanks to our clients’ participation in a benchmarking dataset of over 40,000 complex product development projects spanning aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, industrial, medical device, semiconductor, space systems, and more.
“We have achieved: better requirement communication across departments; a better home for verification and validation test cases with traceability to the sources; and a detailed overview of traceability of requirements from regulatory requirements all the way down to risk items.”
Stephen Cxerniej P. Eng PMP®, Global Platform Systems Engineer – Allied Vision
If you’d like to learn more on how to measure your traceability to improve product quality and accelerate time to market — and get your Traceability Score™, check out our Requirements Traceability Benchmark (the first large-scale, empirical research to confirm that higher levels of traceability correlate to cycle time and quality improvements.) In it, we show how higher scores equal improved product quality and faster time to market. examine how traceability is measured, and the business practices that separate top-quartile performers from the rest.
“Jama Connect establishes traceability proactively from user needs, risk controls, all the way through verification.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio
When asked, “What do you like best about Jama Connect?” One G2 reviewer shared this:
” …Traceability and the traceability matrix. The ability to establish relationship rules, relate items and item types, and then see where you have gaps is really powerful. After your relationships are established, if you make a change to an item, you can see which related items might be impacted. It makes management of requirements extremely easy.”
Marshall K, Senior Vice President, IT Solutions – G2 Verfied Review
To speed time to market, with reduced risk of negative budget impact, now is the time invest in a modern requirements management platform
Jama Connect enables the delivery of high-quality products, faster, by improving the systems development process through unified requirements management and traceability across the V-model (or any product development process you utilize such as Waterfall, Agile, etc.).
“Jama Connect enables a requirements-driven, systems engineering approach for deploying the V-model in product development. It helps us manage the complexities of vehicle hierarchy; interdependencies between vehicle, system & component; and establish traceability between requirements to validations.”
Anirban Niyogi, Systems Engineering Lead, Vehicle Integration – Nikola
The platform’s robust features coupled with an easy-to-adopt interface aligns people, processes, and tooling in one place to provide visibility and actionable insights into the end-to-end product, systems, and software development process. The result — improved product quality and accelerated time to market with reduced risk of costly delays, recalls, rework.
“We save a lot of time and effort in development and product management by using the well-made collaboration functionalities, especially in these current COVID times, when actors cannot always meet in person. We also save time by making use of the item reuse capabilities of Jama. With Jama we always know who made changes to an item, when the changes were made and sometimes even why. That helps us tracking down and understanding those changes. The ability to link pieces of information together in a relatively easy way, help us to achieve full test coverage, checking for impacts of changes upfront and oftentimes understand a requirement’s rationale. Jama [Connect] also provides good filter and search functions and especially the weaved in collaboration functions constantly prove to be useful. It is also worth mentioning that Jama [Connect] provides powerful customization options, so we were able to customize Jama to our needs and way of working.”
Olaf P., Requirements Management Enterprise – Verified G2 Review
Is Now the Right Time to Invest in Requirements Management Software?
Understandably, being on the edge of a possible recession can motivate extreme fiscal prudence, but now is not the time to duck and cover. It’s the precise time to make proactive decisions that will save your organization measurably in the long run. If you’re dealing with any of the budget-swallowing inefficiencies mentioned above — and can see the potential gains a modern requirements management solution like Jama Connect will offer — it might be exactly the right time to strategically think about making a change to optimize your development processes, saving money for your organization in the long run.
“We have achieved a significant ROI with Jama Connect in risk reduction and productivity gains: reuse is up 100%, rework is down 50%, requirements review cycle time is cut by 30% and audit preparation time is down 75%. Jama Connect is our single source of truth. If it’s not in Jama Connect, it’s not happening.”
Kurt Shuler, VP Marketing – Arteris IP
Are you ready to reclaim some significant budget? Give us a call to see how we can be of help or get started today with a free trial of our award-winning requirements management software platform.
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In this blog, we recap our “The Inside Story: Data-Model Diagnostic for IBM® DOORS®” webinar.
Organizations make investments in software tools to improve their product development process, but they often forget to invest in their data. A consistent data model is the best way to maximize the benefits of software tooling, but this can only be achieved by spending time on analysis.
Jama Software is well documented on the benefits of a common engineering data-model and the use of diagnostics to understand the true nature of your engineering data.
In this session, we will discuss the production of a return on investment (ROI) for cleaning your IBM® DOORS® data.
You’ll learn more about:
Why a common engineering data-model is important
The aims of a diagnostic tool
The breakdown of the IBM DOORS data-model diagnostic in terms of the measures that can be taken
Calculating the financial impact of cleaning your engineering data
Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.
The Inside Story: Data-Model Diagnostic for IBM® DOORS®
Richard Watson: Thanks very much. Yeah, I’m excited to be here today. As was said, previously, before Jama Software, I’ve been working with DOORS for a huge amount of time as the product manager for a long time, and I’ve moved to Jama Software. One of the main activities I’ve been working with in Jama is “How do we transform DOOR’s data into a new requirements tool of Jama Connect?” And this presentation is all about trying to understand the diagnostics or understand some diagnostics from your data to be able to understand data shape and size so that we can help see the business case and also help understand how we would transform it to improve the situation.
Let’s start at a very high level. I’ve presented a slide like this repeatedly for all of those 30 whatever years. We know that the earlier in the life cycle that we find a defect or a problem, the cheaper it is to resolve, but in Jama Software, we firmly believe that this is related to traceability. If we have traceability between the artifacts in our engineering process, then we have the ability of finding the information that has an error. For example, if you’ve been working on your needs analysis, and then you start to decompose your requirements, at that stage, if there is a traceability between the requirements definition and the needs analysis, you’ll start to see the errors in the needs at that stage, rather than having to wait all the way around to validation, and then finding out that mistake. And if you wait until the end, we all know that it’s been proven that it’s much more expensive, and there are many sources of this information, but you’ll see a link on the slides to INCOSE.
If we look at the reality of this V model, though, even with tools in place and some integrations in place, we find that there are many different types of silos of information in organizations, and this integration of framework between those different silos is just not established. As you’re documenting the requirements or the system design or the implementation, because you don’t have a viable connection back to the previous assets, you’re not encouraged to find the errors in those previous assets. And so if you work in different silos in this way, you don’t fix those errors. And by the time then you go through to verification, validation, and up that side of the V, then you’ll perhaps start uncovering those problems and it’ll be expensive. Even worse, you won’t find those problems; you’ll go into deployment, and you’ll find it in production, and that’s terribly expensive.
Richard Watson: Here in Jama Software, we believe that our live traceability model has resolved this. Jama Software provides an environment that keeps all of those different assets connected. Requirements actually are the common denominator. Everybody works against some form of specification. Maybe the name changes, maybe it’s a work instruction or a requirement or a project need, or a user expectation, but everybody’s working to something, everybody’s conforming to something. And here in Jama Software, we provide an environment to create your engineering data in something called a model-based framework. You have a model-based systems engineering framework for all of your engineering data, and we keep that data connected directly from the beginning. So rather than waiting to comply or give some sort of statement to say everything’s been covered and creating traceability, later on, we encourage this traceability to be established right from the very beginning.
And we do that in a way that does not force people out of their preferred environments. And so they work in their existing environments establishing traceability, but then we can see the end to traceability in a commonplace. And we can make sure that all the engineering assets are consistent. Jama Connect offers this environment. It offers a way of defining a model-based systems engineering data model over your engineering data and then facilitating which applications should be contributing to those bits of information. Be it Jama Connect for requirements or test and risk, or some other system for defect tracking and other assets in that way.
Great, we’ve got this understanding that information needs to be connected together from the get-go and not at some later stage. And so that would give you a perfect environment, right? But there’s a big but. This data model that we’ve been describing, we can describe it in something like a language. Your engineering data model is the language of your engineers. It’s the way that they create your systems, though the way they specify it, et cetera. But you want to be able to facilitate a common language. If you’ve got separate teams using a different way to engineer your systems, then they can’t communicate between each other effectively. They can’t move between teams effectively. And the cost of integration across that life cycle becomes more and more expensive.
Richard Watson: And so this language needs to become common, but it’s quite difficult because in traditional environments, so if we move the conversation to talk about some of the IBM tooling, so IBM DOORS or IBM DOORS Next, for example, we find that there aren’t many of these silos. IBM DOORS, for example, specifies requirements in what it calls DOORS modules. Each DOORS module stands on its own. Unless your organization have taken steps to try and rigorously make modules consistent with each other, each of those modules would end up being a silo of information. Multiple different sets of user requirements, for example, could be easily inconsistent with each other.
DOORS Next is the same. DOORS Next uses a component model, and each component stands on its own as a silo, and keeping the components consistent with each other is also difficult. Although we’ve got this wish to have a common language across our organization, it’s very easy and quite convenient to end up with lots of silos of organizations, each doing their own particular thing and not being able to communicate. Then that big question. The big question is if you have these silos, how do you move from having a silo-based organization to having a common language or a common engineering data model? And that’s when we should start talking about data-model diagnostics…
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/07/WB-2022-07-06_Data-Model-Diagnostic_Social-Image-2-1.png5121024Jama Software/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJama Software2022-08-02 03:00:332023-01-12 16:46:29[Webinar Recap] The Inside Story: Data-Model Diagnostic for IBM® DOORS®
Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn
Regardless of the state of the economy, organizations building complex products, systems, and software can always benefit from improved efficiency across the end-to-end development process. Making strategic changes that optimize processes and team productivity will undoubtedly save your organization significant time and money.
And, while it may seem counter-intuitive to invest in new technology during an economic downturn (dare we say the word recession), a modern requirements management tool like Jama Connect®, can provide a dramatic ROI in short order — making it a smart-sense move to invest in new product development software right now.
During economic uncertainty, spending capital on the right tools can improve product quality and increase productivity, well-positioning your organization to save time and money over the long term. But regardless of what happens with the economy, it is never going to be wasted effort to optimize your product development processes or begin to think about how to weather the impact of an impending economic storm.
Invest in Requirements Management Software Now to Save In Both the Short & Long Term
Many of our clients come to Jama Software to help optimize their product development process after experiencing some of the following core frustrations:
Using cumbersome legacy requirements management solutions that have non-intuitive challenging UI/UX
Engineers spending valuable hours of tedious manual documentation across disparate documents and tools
Engineers wasting time on in-efficient workflows that can be streamlined to save upwards of 80%
Insufficient, ineffective cross-team collaboration across various stages of the systems development process starting from requirements, design, development to testing and validation
Inefficient and cumbersome review cycles
Difficulty in easily producing the necessary documentation to prove compliance
Siloed tools and processes that misalign teams and workflows, and leave visibility gaps
Lack of Live Traceability™ which results in finding errors late in the development process which can cost upwards of 100x or more to resolve than if they had been found earlier in the development process
And the list goes on and on…
Think about the corresponding monetary burden these outdated solutions and misaligned processes place on the organization’s shoulders.
Making an investment in a modern requirements management platform isn’t simply about the time and money that will be saved or improving productivity and efficiency for just a few months — it’s about the savings and reduced re-work that will be realized from the moment the application launches and for years beyond. Depending on the organization’s goals, they either save costs with the gained efficiencies or they use it to be competitive, win new contracts, and bring products to market faster and more cost effectively. You may be thinking that now is the time to pause on spending, not invest. To the contrary, we’d like to share how investing in a modern requirements management solution now is the right decision to help your organization protect itself from an economic downturn and increase your ROI.
For Startups: Build Your House on Bricks, Not Sticks
For startups, investing in a modern requirements management solution, like Jama Connect, is a smart idea irrespective of the state of the economy.
While long established large organizations may be able to withstand a period of lowered sales and slow development, startups may not have that option. A startup’s ability to get to market fast – and first – often is a great indicator of success, and on the flip side, failure.
Doing things right the first time is crucial.
While startups might be hesitant to invest in software initially, a great number are investing in Jama Connect in order to reduce rework, speed development, meeting regulatory compliance, and get to the market before their competitors.
And it’s paying off.
For medical device startup, Proprio, VP of Software Engineering, Rama Pailoor knew it was imperative to establish a requirements-driven development process from the very beginning. Pailoor recognized that their existing approach of using only a Quality Management System (QMS) was not capable of supporting the level of complexity needed to develop their product. Like many document and spreadsheet-based processes, the Quality Management System (QMS) Proprio had in place technically supported requirements management at face value, but when it came to complex engineering efforts, the system came up short.
“Establishing a requirements-driven development process helps to formalize the user needs, getting all the stakeholders to come to a common forum, to express the requirements from their perspective, and avoid confusion. The right requirements management solution can facilitate all of that.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio
For medium to large organizations: Strengthen your foundation by investing in modern tools and digital transformation
While big enterprises have large teams spread across various geographies and different divisions working on multiple projects, there is a strong need to optimize processes and reduce inefficiencies to reduce costs — especially during challenging economic times. Putting resources towards digital transformation and modern software tools (which result in more ROI) will also reduce overall product development costs over the long term. Through these investments, companies can strengthen their foundation to remain competitive and be better able to weather external market forces.
It is also worth re-visiting how enterprises can improve the engineering efficiency of product development by investing in requirements management and traceability tools. Optimizing the systems engineering process by bringing in traceability across your development stages can immediately create a positive impact on cycle times, and faster execution of testing and validation.
Requirements management software, like Jama Connect, can help development teams improve product quality and accelerate time to market. The platform’s robust features coupled with an easy-to-adopt interface aligns people, processes and tooling in one place to provide visibility and actionable insights into the end-to-end product, systems, and software development process.
RELATED
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/07/2022-07-29-investing-in-jama-connect-economic-downturn-v2-1.jpg5121024Karrie Sundbom/media/jama-logo-primary.svgKarrie Sundbom2022-07-29 03:00:572023-01-12 16:46:29Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn
Jama Software is always on the lookout for news on our customers that would benefit and inform our industry partners. As such, we’ve curated a series of customer spotlight articles that we found insightful. In this blog post, we share content, sourced from InsideEVs, about one of our customers, Rimac Nevera titled “Rimac Nevera Receives US Homologation And Green Light For Deliveries” – which was originally published on July 12, 2022, by Mark Kane.
Rimac Nevera Receives US Homologation and Green Light For Deliveries
According to CARB, it has 287.28 miles (462 km) of UDDS range.
Rimac Nevera is one step closer to the US market launch, as the all-electric supercar received US homologation (on top of EU, secured earlier).
The company’s founder Mate Rimac shared info via Facebook, with screenshots of EPA and California Air Resources Board (CARB) documents, confirming certification of the Rimac Nevera.
“Last documents for US homologation arrived as well (EPA & CARB). Nevera is now EU and US homologated and ready for delivery.”
The CARB document includes the range value of the Rimac Nevera under Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule (UDDS) test cycle, which at 287.28 miles (462 km) is interestingly lower than anticipated for a car with a 120 kWh battery.
For reference, the WLTP range in Europe was targeted at up to 550 km (342 miles). We are curious what the EPA range will be, especially since it’s often below UDDS.
Anyway, the Croatian manufacturer is already completing the first cars for customers. According to Mate Rimac, the Nevara #002 (out of 150 planned) is on pre-delivery testing on roads around Zagreb, Croatia.
“Also, Production Car #002 is on pre-delivery testing on roads around Zagreb today. But not up to us to show pictures – that will be done by the customers when they want to. Probably coming in a couple of weeks…”
287.28 miles (462 km) of UDDS range
up to 550 km (342 miles) of WLTP range (preliminary)
120 kWh battery; liquid cooled
800V system voltage (maximum 730 V)
Lithium Manganese Nickel chemistry
Cell format: cylindrical 2170
number of cells: 6,960
Acceleration
0-60 mph (96.5 km/h) in 1.85 seconds (*high-friction surface, one foot roll-out)
0-100 km/h (62 mph) in 1.97 seconds (*high-friction surface, one foot roll-out)
0-300 km/h (186 mph) in 9.3 seconds (high-friction surface, one foot roll-out)
1/4 mile (402 m) time in 8.6 seconds
DragTimes’ run: 8.582 seconds at 167.51 mph (269.5 km/h)
Top Speed of 412 km/h (258 mph)
All-Wheel Drive
System output of 1,408 kW (or 1.4 MW; 1,914 hp) and 2,360 Nm
four independent surface-mounted, carbon-sleeve, permanent-magnet electric motors
four independent inverters and gearboxes
Rimac’s intelligent All Wheel Torque Vectoring system (R-AWTV)
front motors: 250 kW (340 hp) and 280 Nm each, combined with two single speed gearboxes (two independent gearboxes – one at each outer end of the axle)
rear motors: 450 kW (612 hp) and 900 Nm each, combined with double single speed gearbox (two gearboxes in one housing between the motors)
AC charging (on-board): 22 kW three-phase
DC fast charging: up to 500 kW (0-80% SOC in 22 minutes, using ultra-fast charger)
Tires: Michelin Pilot Sport 4S (Front 275/35 R20; Rear 315/35 R20)
RELATED
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/07/Rimac-Customer-Spotlight-1-1-1.png5121024Jama Software/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJama Software2022-07-27 03:00:072023-10-25 12:33:17Rimac Nevera Receives US Homologation and Green Light For Deliveries
A product team and an engineering team could be viewed as two sides of the same product development coin. So, ask yourself, “Who only uses half a coin?” It’d be like using just one side of your brain.
In a perfect product development world, communications are seamless, specifications are clear, and product and engineering teams work without friction. Except, we live in the real world where life is messy, responsibilities overlap, specifications change, and the way teams interact can introduce friction.
In the rush of product development, it’s important to establish boundaries for each team while also working as a unit and develop processes to head off trouble before it begins. This only gets more complicated with bigger and more technical projects.
The Product Team
Before the first line of code is written, someone needs to own the product and fully understand what’s being built and why.
It’s the product team that should understand the why, inside and out. From ideas that turn into research that guides specifications to conversations with customers, the product team is lining up the rubber ducks in neat little rows so engineers can focus on the technical problems. What do the ducks look like? How do they sound when squeezed? And what do users want?
Product teams tend to dream big, but they must also manage expectations and align goals with those of the overall business. That’s why it’s a good idea to get an engineering lead involved early in the planning process to build cross-team cohesion.
For example, if you’re building the next great blogging platform, maybe your commenting mechanism is the “killer feature” and the engineering team needs to focus on issues like authentication and moderation tools. How much of the apple can we bite off at a time? Such questions circle back to product team responsibilities like the business goals and strategy. Prioritization is the byproduct of open talks between teams to determine what is needed and what can be delivered on time.
It’s also worth noting that tension between teams is a natural and healthy aspect of working cross-functionally. Each team has its own set of internal goals, but those must align with overall strategic goals for the company (or product).
The product manager serves as the CEO for whatever is being built. If he or she asks for the moon, there must also be the understanding of the challenges that await.
We’ve probably all been in a meeting where something ambitious is proposed and the engineering team rolls their eyes, thinking, “If we could build that we’d all be zillionaires.” The balance here is one of awareness.
Technical teams need to be just as ambitious as their product counterparts, and that means understanding a little bit of each other’s worlds to know what’s feasible and what will cause deadlines to crash.
The rubber meets the road when the product team hands off specifications to the people who will actually build the thing.
Engineering is the technical team of developers and managers who write the code and create the front end, so the clearer the guidance they get upfront, the better. That doesn’t mean micromanaging from the product team, but it does mean regular check-ins to increase buy-in, build cohesion, and avoid surprises.
Going back to our blogging platform example, let’s say there are some whiz-bang features on the front end that will dazzle users. A product manager might tell engineering to focus on those features. If the product team has done its job, the tech leads can accurately inform them how long it will take to implement the features.
However, they could just as easily warn the product team that there are backend issues to tackle to enable those frontend goodies. There’s no way to have one without the other, and this is another area where the tension comes in, as timelines might have to be readjusted.
When teams understand that they’re on the same side, everyone can take a step back to see the full map and make sure they’re headed to the same destination. It’s also where teams who understand each other excel.
Product must comprehend the engineering team’s needs, and engineering must grasp the importance of the product planning that came before. Maybe it’s a matter of a few sprints to see where the marquee feature is in a week. Or perhaps a lower-priority feature that really puts a kink in the line just needs to be delayed.
Either way, the only solution is to drop the egos and hash things out in realistic terms. Again, if product has done the job, both teams should be like looking at the release like a big X on a treasure map and walking there together.
If all of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Everyone in these teams is working under a number of different dynamics.
It could be that product feels it has defined everything so thoroughly that the engineering team can take the ball to the goal after a simple handoff. Of course, that is rarely the case.
More likely, there’s a stream of reviews to comb through and see how things are advancing (which, if you’re using the right solutions, can be handled faster and with less meetings) while moving the goalposts when one side reports a change in the variables.
So, what do you do? Learn to function as one team while respecting each other’s territory. After all, you’re all headed to the same goal. Even if your organization compartmentalizes each side, find a way to cross the streams. For many, the move from Waterfall development to Agile created a more efficient, functional model for developers, and a variation on that theme can serve you here as well.
First, create a great set of fundamentals with your product team by bringing in engineers as early in the planning stages as possible. Ask what’s feasible and go to lunch and dream about unlimited budgets. Integrate the engineering team as best you can, because their insight will save squabbling down the road. Then create specifications that are realistic.
Next, empower each side of the table with respect. Product may want the moon tomorrow and engineering will explain how much lift is needed to get there, so friction is inevitable. In the big picture though, both sides are arguing for the same goal, so keep that front-of-mind and allow room for either side to concede territory as needed. Conflict is normal and necessary, but if one side is utterly powerless and is continuously overrun, the “team” notion falls apart and the idea of collaboration breaks down.
If both teams are aligned, truly listening and making necessary adjustments, there’s no reason even large, complex projects can’t be finished on time and on budget. It takes work, especially if an organization is averse to cross-functional teamwork.
The payoff, though, is happier, more productive teams who share in the product’s success. It’s up to both sides to come to the table ready to cooperate.
Does that mean having certain boundaries? Yes! It’s unlikely the engineering team has done the market research to say whether a feature is desired by users. And it’s equally unlikely that the product team will accept a major delay for technical implementation if it was in the original specification.
Each side has a job to do, but the key is understanding that everyone is marching under the same umbrella in the end. That’s why it’s important to play the role you’re in while listening and accepting the experience and knowledge of the entire team.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2019/07/the-fine-line-product-engineering-teams_1024x512-1.jpg5121024Jama Software/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJama Software2022-07-11 02:00:172023-01-12 16:46:33Where’s the Fine Line Between the Product Team and the Engineering Team?
FDA Inspection
Intro
In Part One of this two-blog series, I shared 5 best practices to prepare your organization for FDA inspection success. Inspections by the FDA can lead to regulatory action and consequences such as warning letters, recalls, and consent decrees. Thus, you want to put your best foot forward to demonstrate the compliance of your Quality Management System (QMS). In this Part 2, we’ll focus on the logistics for running a smooth and efficient inspection.
1: Tone and philosophy
First and foremost, everyone interacting with the FDA should be truthful, professional, and courteous. While this may seem like common sense, it is worthwhile to emphasize. The FDA is there to protect the public good by finding the evidence that your Quality Management System is compliant, so convey that you are there to help them in that goal.
In its aim to demonstrate compliance to FDA regulations, an organization is balancing 3 things: 1) Providing the investigator with requested documents, information, and subject matter experts (SMEs) in a timely manner; 2) Understanding what topics the investigator may request go to next and prepare accordingly; and 3) Keeping a record of what the investigator has examined.
To that end, here are roles to have during an inspection.
Host – Serves as the primary interface with the investigator. This role is typically best served by your Head of Quality, as that individual understands the organization’s QMS and understands the FDA approach. If there is more than one investigator, there should be one host per investigator.
Scribe – Takes notes on conversations with the investigator and what the investigator is examining throughout the inspection. Like the host, assign one scribe per investigator. Folks great at listening and typing quickly make for great scribes.
Back Room lead – This person runs the Back Room, coordinating all the requests coming in, sending requests to the front room, and prepping SMEs. Even more importantly, this person is monitoring what is happening in the front room, anticipating areas of inquiry, and preparing accordingly.
Doc Control – Whether your organization is paper based, 100% with electronic records, or a hybrid, Doc Control is key to retrieving those records in a timely manner and keeping track of what has been presented and reviewed by the investigator.
Tech Reviewers – These folks inspect records before they head into the Front Room to ensure it’s the right document and noticing any issues that the host should be aware of before they are presented to the investigator.
Runners – Individuals who can retrieve information and SMEs as needed.
3: Set up a Front Room and Back Room
Typically a conference room, the Front Room is where activities with the investigator(s) are centralized. Aside from the investigator, Individuals are limited the bulk of the time to the host, scribe, and SME’s.
The Back Room is where document, information, and SME preparation occurs. A large conference room works best, not too far from the Front Room.
4: Communicating between the Front Room and Back Room
Determine how information between the Front Room and Back Room will be shared. This includes document and information requests, as well as the conversations that are occurring. One way that works is a web-conference call (no audio or video) in which the scribe shares a document in which they are typing in live. This shared screen is then projected in the Back Room.
Direct chat channels between the scribe and Back Room Lead are also helpful to communicate information the Host should be aware of, like any delays in document retrieval, etc.
5: Documents/Request Management
Determine how documents and request management will occur. There will be time periods when requests are coming fast and furiously. Whether through a spreadsheet or database, it is important to keep track of what has been requested, when it has been presented to the investigator, and returning any hard copy records after the investigator is through with them.
Providing the investigator with the requests in a timely manner demonstrates that your organization’s QMS is under control and has nothing to hide. Keeping a file of everything the investigator has reviewed is key if there is any action taken by the FDA that requires formal response by your organization. It is vital to know what was specifically reviewed so it can be referenced and referred to as necessary to inform those responses.
Closing
Your organization has worked hard to build and run its Quality Management System and prepare for an FDA inspection. Implement these tips to run an efficient inspection and demonstrate your compliance to FDA regulations.
READ MORE
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/02/2022-02-02-v2-preparing-for-fda-inspection-part2-logistics.jpg5121024Michelle Wu/media/jama-logo-primary.svgMichelle Wu2022-02-02 03:00:432023-01-12 16:47:40Prepping for an FDA Inspection Part 2: Logistics
Derived requirements traceability is a form of requirements management focused on tracing requirements that aren’t explicitly defined in higher-level requirements, but which are necessary for meeting them and for making the overall system work as expected. In derived requirements traceability, teams will document the dependencies and logical links between these lower-level requirements and other system elements.
Derived Requirements, Explained
For example, let’s say a hypothetical automotive system has a higher-level requirement stating that it must be capable of traveling at very high speeds. A derived requirement in this case might say that the system also needs to be lightweight. While this requirement is not defined by the project stakeholders, satisfying it is essential to the engineering process of the entire system. If the end result is not light enough, the original requirement for fast travel won’t be met, either.
Another way to look at it: Derived requirements are decomposed from other requirements, including business and stakeholder requirements. Adequately tracing them serves several general purposes:
It facilitates impact analysis, by helping identify all the work products that might need modification before implementing a proposed change.
It follows the life of a requirement, both forward and backward in relation to customer needs, and from origin through implementation.
It creates a roadmap, showing at which points each requirement or business rule was implemented.
It simplifies the packaging up of requirements baselines, which are snapshots of approved requirements assigned to product releases at points in time.
In practice, proper derived requirements traceability will involve cataloging all of the connections between derived requirements and other types of requirements, plus business rules, architecture and design components, source code modules, test cases, help files, and documentation. This process ensures that the product in question is ultimately maintainable, compliant, and tightly aligned with customer expectations.
Enabling Traceability as Part of Requirements Management
For sufficient derived requirements traceability, each requirement must have a unique and persistent label that allows for unambiguous tracking throughout the project. A centralized, modern requirements management solution is preferable to numerous discrete requirements documents for this purpose.
Not only does such a management tool provide one convenient place for collecting feedback and collaborating in real time on reviews and approvals, but it also supports live traceability of upstream and downstream relationships, with clear visibility into the impact of changes on all levels of requirements as well as test coverage. Accordingly, project teams can set up four distinct types of traceability links for their derived requirements.
Figure 1. Four types of requirements traceability.
The Four Types of Derived Requirements Traceability
1. Forward to Requirements
When customer needs evolve, requirements may have to be adjusted in response. By making these adjustments, project teams can keep pace with changes in customers priorities, introductions of new business rules, and modifications of existing rules, among other events.
2. Backward From Requirements
Tracking backward from requirements can provide clarity into the origin of each derived requirement. For instance, a requirements management tool could show the link between the derived requirement, the requirement it came from, and the customer use case being addressed.
3. Forward From Requirements
Once derived requirements begin flowing into downstream deliverables during product development, it’s possible to draw trace relationships between requirements and their corresponding elements. This type of link provides assurance that every requirement is satisfied by a particular component.
4. Backward to Requirements
Finally, this type of link allows for visibility into why certain features were created. Consider how most applications include lines of code that don’t directly relate to stakeholder requirements. Even so, it is important to know why a software engineer wrote that code in the first place.
While a full accounting of all four types is beyond the scope of this piece, let’s look at a more in-depth example of the fourth type. Suppose a tester discovers unexpected functionality with no corresponding requirement. It could indicate two divergent possibilities:
The underlying code might have been implemented to meet a legitimate implied (derived) requirement, which could then be added to the requirements specification.
Alternatively, it might simply be orphan code that no longer belongs in the current product.
Traceability links create clarity in such situations, shining a light on how the different pieces of a system all fit together. Conversely, test cases derived from – and traced back to – individual requirements offer a mechanism for detecting unimplemented requirements, because the tester won’t find the expected functionality.
Figure 2. Some possible requirements traceability links.
There are many types of traceability relationships possible within a project, and not all of them will be needed on every project. However, there are good motivations for implementing derived requirements traceability, via a best-in-breed solution with flexibility that can be leveraged as needed for a given project.
The Main Motivations for Derived Requirements Traceability
At a high level, traceability contributes to a more efficient product lifecycle and superior project management. More specific reasons for implementing it include:
Certification
Traceability data can support certification of safety-critical products, by demonstrating that all requirements were implemented.
Impact analysis
By tracing derived requirements, it’s less likely that something will be overlooked when determining the effects of changes to requirements.
Maintenance
Clear traceability simplifies maintenance, as changes (e.g., in response to updates to government regulations or corporate policies) can be performed with more confidence. A modern requirements management tool makes it easier to show where each applicable rule was addressed in requirements.
Project tracking
Traceability information offers an accurate record of the implementation status of planned functionality, with missing links indicating work products not yet created.
Reengineering
List functions in a legacy system set for replacement and use traceability data to record where they were addressed in the new system’s requirements and software components.
Reuse
With derived requirements traceability in place, it’s more practical to reuse product components by identifying packages of related requirements, designs, code, and tests.
Risk reduction
Documenting component interconnections reduces risk in the event that a key team member with essential knowledge about the system departs the project.
Testing
The links between requirements, tests, and code help indicate the likely locations of bugs when a test yields an unexpected result. Also, knowing which tests verify which requirements will save time by allowing for the elimination of redundant tests.
The second article in this series discusses the requirements traceability matrix, and the final part proposes a procedure for making requirements traceability work on your projects.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2013/01/Requirements-Traceability.jpg497884Jama Software/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJama Software2022-01-16 11:37:392023-01-12 16:47:44Requirements Traceability: Links in the Requirements Chain, Part 1
