Tag Archive for: Product Development & Management Page 25
Tag Archive for: Product Development & Management
Jama Software is always looking 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 a press release, sourced from Cision Distribution by PR Newswire, about one of our customers, magniX titled “magniX Powers First Point-To-Point Flight of an All-Electric Helicopter” – originally published on November 4, 2022.
magniX Powers First Point-To-Point Flight of an All-Electric Helicopter
Flight of Battery-Powered Robinson 44 Helicopter Accelerates Path to Sustainable Delivery of Life-Saving Organs
EVERETT, Wash., Nov. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — magniX, a manufacturer of electric propulsion solutions for aviation, is pleased to have powered the first fully-electric helicopter flight between airfields, in partnership with Tier 1 Engineering. The modified electric Robinson 44 (eR44) helicopter powered with a magniX magni250 electric propulsion unit (EPU) made its historic journey from Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport to Palm Springs International Airport, arriving on 29 October 2022 at 11:00am PST, in a flight that lasted approximately 20 minutes.
Tier 1 Engineering is developing the magniX-powered eR44 for Lung Biotechnology PBC, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics Corporation, a biotechnology company dedicated to addressing the severe shortage of transplantable organs in the U.S. The magniX EPU was retrofitted into the helicopter together with a battery system developed by Tier 1 Engineering, specialists in the design and development of electric aircraft. The eR44 is designed to deliver human and manufactured organs for transplant with zero carbon emissions at the point of use.
“Building from our first flight of the eR44 helicopter last June, the successfully completed point-to-point flight takes us a step closer to the sustainable transport of life-saving organs,” said Nuno Taborda, CEO of magniX. “magniX is excited to be part of an initiative that will positively affect those in need of urgent medical care. This is only the start of the applications for electric helicopters, which have a bright future as low-cost, carbon-free, reliable alternatives to combustion engine models.”
magniX Celebrates Another Industry First
Since December 2019, magniX has also provided the technology to power a number of first flights, including that of Harbour Air’s “eBeaver”, a Cessna “eCaravan” and, most recently in September 2022, Eviation’s all-electric commuter aircraft, Alice. This point-to-point flight of an electric rotary aircraft represents the latest first for the industry-leading electric solutions company. Tier 1 Engineering is currently working with the FAA on the eR44 project to obtain a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC). Lung Biotechnology PBC plans to acquire a fleet of sustainable aircraft to transport transplant organs.
“We are committed to charting a new path forward for the zero-carbon delivery of life-saving organs,” said Dr. Martine Rothblatt, one of the helicopter’s pilots and CEO of United Therapeutics Corporation. “Saturday’s point-to-point flight proves that the technology necessary for our mission is already here, as we actively work with the FAA to certify the eR44 helicopter.”
“Together we achieved an incredible outcome for the world’s first airport-to-airport cross-country all-electric helicopter flight,” said Glen Dromgoole, President of Tier 1 Engineering. “magniX has again demonstrated the reliability and power of its electric propulsion units, and we’re proud to continue this journey to create sustainable options for organ donation and, ultimately, help save lives.”
About magniX
Headquartered in Everett, Washington State, U.S., magniX is dedicated to leading an era of environmentally-friendly and sustainable aviation. magniX has developed a family of flight-proven electric propulsion units (EPUs) and is fast maturing its energy storage systems (ESS) for commercial aviation. With high levels of reliability, unparalleled performance and operational practicality, magniX is leading the aviation industry into a sustainable future. magniX is a subsidiary of the Clermont Group, an international business group headquartered in Singapore. For further information, please visit www.magnix.aero.
DOD 5000 Series consists of policy guidance and is backed by a collection of directives that describe a disciplined management approach for acquiring systems and materiel to satisfy valid military needs.
Six pathways of the adaptive acquisition framework: urgent capability acquisition; middle tier of acquisition (MTA); major capability acquisition; software acquisition; defense business systems (DBS); and defense acquisition of services. Up until a few years ago, it used to be that every program large and small had to follow the exact same acquisition process. Today, programs that are small and short-lived can follow a different process than that of a large multi-decade weapons system acquisition program. DOD 5000.02 policy encourages program managers to tailor, combine, and transition between pathways to create their own program strategies.
All programs regardless of the pathway share functional areas that must be considered during program execution. Acquisition Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Intellectual Property (IP) Policy, Mission Engineering, Systems Engineering, and Test & Evaluation are key areas every program must practice. Digital Engineering is a key constituent of program execution, and its vision is articulated by the Department of Defense 2018 Digital Engineering Strategy. It clearly highlights model-based systems engineering (MBSE) as a new approach to take. Digital Engineering crosses these functional areas and is where Jama Connect® assists program managers the most.
Jama Connect® gives program managers and their acquisition team the ability to use Digital Engineering MBSE right from the start in an easy-to-use browser interface
The early phases of all DOD 5000.02 acquisition pathways require the definition of mission capabilities and needs. Instead of capturing this information in Word, Excel, or a SysML tool which requires a deep level of expertise; the Jama Connect solution will provide an Excel and Word-like experience but also segregate data as discrete model elements. An early acquisition MBSE approach in Jama Connect provides numerous benefits to the program team such as categorization of information; prioritization; version history of changes; status monitoring through workflow; real-time metrics on dashboards; exportable dashboard widgets for PowerPoint presentations; built-in document generation; activity monitoring; and more.
These MBSE data capabilities provide real-time monitoring of progress of the definition of mission needs and capabilities and more importantly gives all stakeholders the opportunity to participate in the capture and writing of the data. The learning curve of Jama Connect is five minutes to half a day compared to six months for SysML tools. This is especially important when there are urgent operational needs and other quick reaction capabilities need to be acquired. DoDD 5000.71 and DoDI 5000.81 both provide instruction for program management techniques to follow.
Jama Connect dashboard widgets.
DOD 5000.02 Acquisition Lifecycles
DOD 5000.02 instructions call for numerous reviews to take place throughout the acquisition lifecycles.
Acquisition Intelligence example use case: DOD 5000.86 Instruction provides policy and guidance on how to integrate intelligence information into the acquisition lifecycle. Typically, this is performed as a siloed activity with information captured in documents, passed back and forth, and reviews taking place in face-to-face meetings. Jama Connect enables the extension of the needs and requirements in the MBSE data model to threats, adversary capabilities, and adversary intentions. Jama Connect’s Live Traceability™ gives the program and intelligence teams the ability to share information and analyze it in a single model. Contextual collaboration mechanisms such as Review Center reduce cycle times spent on document review and approval. This integration of intelligence supports: (1) Characterization of the threat. (2) Identification of intelligence supportability plans, risks, and cost drivers. (3) Residual risk to inform stakeholders.
Cybersecurity example use case: DOD 5000.90 Instruction provides policy and guidance on how to incorporate cyber threat information produced by the Intelligence Community in development of their cyber security strategy and assessment of risk. Jama Connect lets the acquisition team see the relationships between designs and architectures and the identified risks. Live Traceability enables more informed decision making and could act as a conduit to the risk management framework (RMF) system. When new threats emerge, Jama Connect can provide instant impact analysis to a program’s existing mission requirements.
Systems Engineering example: DoDI 5000.88 begins by stating that engineering begins “at the identification of a military need and continues throughout sustainment of the end item.” Jama Connect can be used during all phases of the acquisition lifecycle and allows a systems engineering discipline to become central to program management rather than a siloed activity. Mission needs are captured in Jama Connect as discrete elements rather than Word documents or PowerPoint slides and can be reviewed, approved, and captured in the concept baseline. An element approach (aka digital engineering) allows for the easy consumption of data by digital tools in the tool ecosystem.
As ME products are developed in response to the mission needs and provide mission-based inputs to the requirements process, Jama Connect will establish trace relationships between needs, ME products, and the requirements. Live Traceability gives the ability for any stakeholder 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.
DoDI5000.88 calls for many technical and assessments throughout the life of a program. Digital engineering reviews in Jama Connect give the technical and non-technical engineer to not only redline, comment on, provide approval for the data itself, but allows for teams to give traceable reference. If the technical review is that of requirements, then reviewers would have the context to see the related mission needs, any analysis, architecture, any tests, as well as understand the evolution of change to each individual requirement in that review. Reviews in this manner provide significant reduction of cycle times and retains a traceable audit trail of commentors and approvers.
Jama Connect Review Center, participant progress view.
Jama Connect can provide capabilities to assist government program management teams execute parts of the adaptive acquisition framework and tie together information via Live Traceability and collaboration mechanisms. Program decisions are informed by real time data and is accessible to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders alike.
In summary, there are many opportunities to use Jama Connect as a key enabler of Digital Engineering across all phases of the adaptive acquisition framework no matter which pathway is chosen.
Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Review and Collaboration: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 4 of our Roundtable Chat series, Mario Maldari – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software® – and Vincent Balgos – Director of Medical Device Solutions at Jama Software® – walk us through reviews and collaboration in Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS.
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Vincent Balgos: Hi, welcome to part four of our vlog series. I hope you are enjoying the series so far. My name is Vincent Balgos, and I’ll be representing Jama Software today. In terms of experience, I’ve been working at Jama for over nine months now, but before joining Jama, I was a systems engineer in the medical device field working on requirements, reviews, risk and collaboration. I’m actually a former Jama customer and have been using the tool in practice for over six years developing complex medical products. I’m joined today by my colleague, Mario Maldari. Mario, would you like to introduce yourself and provide some background?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, thanks Vincent. My name is Mario Maldari. I’m Director of Solution Architecture at Jama. Spent about 20 years working in various requirement solutions, started with Requisite Pro back in the day and started working on the DOORS family. DOORS, DOORS Next Generation, so a lot of history with requirements management software in different industries.
Vincent Balgos: Great. How long have you been working at Jama?
Mario Maldari: Just about a year now.
Vincent Balgos: Oh great, so similar to myself. Welcome to the team and look forward to the discussion.
Mario Maldari: Thank you.
Vincent Balgos: As part of this series, we will be discussing actually the requirements, review and collaboration across different various tool sets. As many of you know, working and reviewing requirements are essential tasks that requires a significant effort sometimes from drafting the initial spirit of the requirement to the solidification of the final language. It’s an iterative and collaborative effort that usually requires lots of different teams across different function groups. There are many tools that can help with review and common ones that we’ve seen are generally emails, Word, Excel, PowerPoint to more complex tools, which is our focus today. Today we’d like to actually talk about the Review Center, a review and collaboration within the DOORS and how’s that compare to Jama, with Mario’s experience at DOORS, what’s been your experience with performing these tasks under the DOORS?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, it’s been interesting. I think some of the challenges that our customers faced at the time were difficulty with the tooling itself, the way that the collaboration and the review was done within the tool or facilitated within the tool. What would happen is they’d often go outside the tooling. They’d start using Word or documents and they’d email this back and forth. Besides going outside the tool, you’d end up losing a lot of history in terms of auditability, who made the decisions, and how the requirements evolved. It diminished the purpose and the value of a formal requirements tool. When it’s difficult, people just go outside the tool and that’s what we were seeing a lot with DOORS.
Then as DOORS Next started evolving, things didn’t get much better. It was very difficult to use the reviews within DOORS next. I was a test lead at the time trying to review requirements and test cases. I found that the UI itself was very difficult to use and facilitate. Again, it was just people going outside of the tooling to go with whatever was easier for them. It was quite a challenge from a usability point of view.
Vincent Balgos: That’s really interesting and that’s a little bit different workflow that we have actually natively within our Jama tool. Let me actually walk you through that. As you can see, Mario, here is actually the review center within natively within the Jama tool itself. This is actually a review that I just held with my team and we were reviewing actually five different requirements. We were able to collaborate, live and provide comment, feedback, approval, rejection or needs a revisit, and as a moderator, I can actually see and manage the whole review center within a single tool right through here.
For example, we highlighted this particular area and Carleda had some interesting comment here, but that’s a single point of comment. A more interesting one is one that we actually had here. We were talking about tolerances for a particular gain field requirement and I asked Jakob @Jakob, Hey, is this enough? What about X, Y, Z? Jakob responded as we had here. You can see this kind of maintains some of that audit trail traceability that you kind of mentioned that tend to get lost in different emails and different tools and stuff like that. But you can see that this is all collected in a single tool within the Jama space.
What’s also nice, as you know again, as you’re going through the review, you can see what the status of the review is in terms of the number of comments that we have here on the left, the number of approvals that we have, and then somewhere we may actually need a little bit more time. For example, this one here, I had a lot of conversation that I may want to have to go back with my team and kind of resolve that we have here. With that said, what do you think about Jam’s workflow?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, I think Jama’s workflow in terms of the review and approval, I think the usability is key here. When the tool itself facilitates a certain workflow and it makes it easy for the customers to use, I think that’s key. What I like about this is it stores everything within Jama. A year from now I can go back and look and say, who made the comment to get this approved and what was the discussion around that? I can easily see that. At the same time, I can easily get that information out of the tooling should I ever need to send it to an auditor or send it to management. The key is it’s all kept within the tool. I like that a lot.
Vincent Balgos: We just really just covered a very small snippet of the capabilities and power of the review center, but we can do exports, we can moderate this. There are additional capabilities here, but it’s great to hear that this is a more seamless flow. As you can see in the short demo, collaborating within Review Center is as easy as posting on social media where you can see comments, tag people, continue the discussion of the requirement or whatever you’re reviewing all within a single place. Jama allows live collaboration natively within the tool. Gone are the days, as you describe, Mario, about handling which email, which Word versions that we should be looking at. It seems a lot more efficient process than you described at DOORS.
Mario Maldari: Yeah, and it’s one thing too, you could formally manage your requirements in a tool and that’s great, but if you cannot have a workflow that facilitates a proper review and approval, then the tooling itself is very diminished. This kind of rounds off that whole workflow of requirements management. I like that a lot.
Vincent Balgos: Yeah, right. While I may have shown you a medical example, this tool is actually agnostic to any industry that you have within. This could be applied to aerospace, auto, semiconductor, other areas of the business. Again, just want to kind of share that tidbit.
Well, thank you for this discussion and your perspective, Mario. This kind of concludes our v-log on review and collaboration and the significance within the requirements management domain. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying the series so far. Stay tuned for the next entry in our series and we look forward to seeing you then.
Mario Maldari: Thank you, Vincent.
Thank you for watching our Episode 4, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Review and Collaboration. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.
In this blog, we’ll preview our customer story, “Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®.” To read the entire customer story, click HERE.
Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®
Graduates enter the workforce better prepared to tackle real-world engineering problems with modern technology
About Carnegie Mellon University
Master of Science in Software Engineering (M.S.-SE) is a unique program offered exclusively at CMU’s Silicon Valley campus by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Emphasizes a rigorous foundation in the core disciplines of software engineering
Offers students fundamental knowledge, skills, and first-hand experience in software engineering by balancing theory and practice, engaging students in active learning, and encouraging collaboration on projects drawn from real-world contexts
CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
As a co-founder of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Master’s Program, Dr. Cécile Péraire set out to prepare her students to enter the workforce by teaching modern software tools and processes with a hands-on approach. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon as a professor, Péraire worked for a decade at Rational Software and then at IBM.
As part of this modern approach to software engineering, Péraire teaches her students how to use Jama Connect® as the single source of truth for software product definition and uses the platform as a way to review her student’s work.
Principles of the Software Engineering Course
As a professor of Software Engineering for master’s students at Carnegie Mellon, Cécile Péraire teaches with a hands-on approach. Each semester, students are asked to select one real world challenge, and to come up with a software product that could help address the challenge. In the past, students have selected challenges like wildfires, food waste, and homelessness.
Instead of teaching a traditional lecture-based course, Péraire takes a mixed approach that combines flipped-classroom delivery and project-based learning, with students implementing dual-track Agile during their project. As the name suggests, it’s a process that has two tracks of work – one track aims at discovering what functionality to build next, focusing on requirements engineering and interaction design, and the other track focuses on delivering new functionality. The two tracks run continuously and in parallel with a strong focus on understanding the needs of the stakeholders and validating that the team is building the right product from the technical perspective, the user perspective, and the business perspective.
“In order to ensure that my students are building the right product, they must remain with the stakeholders during the entire semester and welcome changes at any time, principle,” said Péraire.
Selection Process
Prior to Péraire joining CMU, the requirements engineering course was taught in a more traditional and outdated fashion.
“When I joined CMU, I inherited a requirements engineering course that was taught using Word and Excel. I’ve always tried to teach fairly lightweight processes but having to create and structure documents introduced a lot of overhead for the students and made the process quite heavy and old fashioned,” said Péraire. “I could immediately see that it wasn’t working. When I had a chance to create my own course, I decided to do it differently.”
When Péraire set out to find a requirements management solution for her requirements engineering and interaction design course, she had a set of very specific criteria.
The new solution must have the following characteristics:
Cloud-based
Robust requirements management capabilities
Customizable to support all development practices
Reliable – free from bugs and crashes
User-friendly interface that is easy to learn
Resources and e-learning for students
Responsive and helpful support team and account management
After evaluating all available solutions, Péraire determined that Jama Connect stood out as the leader and fit her needs the best.
“After reading many reviews about the leading requirements management solutions, I ended up with a short list of about five tools that I evaluated very thoroughly. Overall, Jama Connect was the one that performed the best and met all of the criteria on my list,” said Péraire.
Using Jama Connect for Teaching Software Engineering
“…from interview notes to storyboards, prototypes, user stories, all the way down to working software. Every artifact that relates to the project is available in or accessible from Jama Connect. It’s the hub for all of the information we need.” CÉCILE PÉRAIRE, Professor of Software Engineering Carnegie Mellon
Now, with Jama Connect deeply ingrained in her software engineering course, students use the platform as their single source of truth for all software product definition activities.
Using Jama Connect for software product definition has been key to supporting her students in order to build the right product for their stakeholders. They use Jama Connect as a hub for all the artifacts that are created during the project, “…from interview notes to storyboards, prototypes, user stories, all the way down to working software. Every artifact that relates to the project is available in or accessible from Jama Connect. It’s the hub for all of the information we need,” said Péraire.
“My students use Jama Connect first to structure the information effectively, and then to share the information within their teams and with other stakeholders. They are required to stay in contact with their stakeholders throughout the semester and Jama Connect helps to facilitate that communication when they aren’t able to meet in person. Remote communication can happen synchronously or asynchronously as Jama Connect supports all those different ways of sharing information and getting feedback on the work done,” said Péraire.
Using Jama Connect to Review Work Provides Students with Real-World Project Management Experience
In addition to using Jama Connect to help students learn how to properly organize software development projects’ artifacts, Péraire also uses the platform to review, grade, and give feedback on her students’ work.
Improved Review Processes
“I use Jama Connect Review Center to grade and provide feedback on all deliverables. The process in itself is a learning experience for students because it actually mimics the real-world industry review. It provides me with the ability to very easily comment on any element of the project, ask questions, request changes, or have discussions related to a specific section of a deliverable,” said Péraire.
Enhanced Visibility into Revision History
“Jama Connect gives me visibility into the students’ work. At any point I can log into Jama Connect and see what is going on, who is doing what, and I can see the different discussion streams. I can see the revision history and who is contributing to what. Compared to Word and Excel, this gives me an improved ability to evaluate students individually while letting them work in teams,” said Péraire.
Effective Collaboration
“With Jama Connect, I not only have improved visibility into the students’ work, but I have the ability to effectively collaborate with students outside of the classroom for both mentoring and evaluation purposes. We can have a conversation around any project item,” said Péraire.
Because Péraire’s courses are hands-on and not lecture-based, her students learn by doing. By taking a project-based approach to learning, she’s able to mimic what happens in the industry, and her students get firsthand experience working through those challenges and interacting with stakeholders.
“Software product definition is a highly creative process supported by a combination of interactive design and requirements engineering practices. As students learn to apply those practices on their products during the course project, they document the outcome of their work in Jama Connect.” said Péraire.
“Jama Connect is really an effective way of teaching by example. The platform is fully customizable, so I created a structure for the students that nicely supports software product definition in the context of course projects. Students can use that as a good example of how to structure and share information in the future. That can be used as a starting point for a project and be customized to adapt to a different context,” said Péraire.
With Jama Connect, Péraire shares that her students can focus on content creation instead of building a complex document structure, which results in better learning outcomes and increased student productivity. Even if a student graduates and goes on to work at an organization that chooses not to use a requirements management platform like Jama Connect, Péraire believes her students are still more prepared to enter the workforce than those taught traditional, outdated software engineering tools and processes.
“Learning with Jama Connect gives my students a model of how to organize and structure artifacts related to software product definition. Even if they do not have a requirements management tool and have to go back to Word and Excel on their next project, they will have a good idea about how to organize and structure the information. While in that case they would lose the power of the tool, being exposed to an effective way of working should benefit my students greatly,” said Péraire
“Learning with Jama Connect gives my students a model of how to organize and structure artifacts related to software product definition. Even if they do not have a requirements management tool and have to go back to Word and Excel on their next project, they will have a good idea about how to organize and structure the information.”
How Jama Software® Supports CCMI
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University is the birthplace of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a framework used to evaluate the maturity of an organization’s software development process. The model describes a five-level evolutionary path of increasingly organized and systematically more mature processes.
Worldwide CMMI plays a key role in software development organizations that must showcase their development maturity. Teams are working hard to move their current CMM level to the next level and hence demonstrate their ability to deliver quality software.
Being CMMI certified is a common requirement for the Department of Defense (DoD) and U.S. Government software development contracts.
“While I am not a CMMI expert, my understanding is that during a CMMI appraisal, the organization must show evidence of implementation for each practice in the scope of the appraisal. For organizations that have a good process in place, Jama Connect can make this process visible. This can be beneficial during the CMMI appraisal in order to quickly identify evidence that the required practices are being implemented by the organization. Jama Connect can be leveraged to support demonstrating the alignment between CMMI and the practices adopted by the organizations needing certification,” said Péraire.
To read about the predicted future of Carnegie Mellon University and Jama Connect, download the full customer story HERE
In this blog, we overview Part 1 of our eBook, “A Guide to Good Systems Engineering Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond” in which we discuss the fundamentals of systems engineering best practices, the “V” model, the characteristics of good systems engineering, and lessons learned. To read the entire eBook, download it HERE.
A Guide to Good Systems Engineering Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond.
In the first part of this eBook, we discuss:
The fundamentals of systems engineering
The role of a systems engineer
Systems engineering process
The “V” Model of systems engineering
Part I: The Basics of Systems Engineering
What is systems engineering?
Systems engineering is an engineering field that takes an interdisciplinary approach to product development. Systems engineers analyze the collection of pieces to make sure when working together, they achieve the intended objectives or purpose of the product. For example, in automotive development, a propulsion system or braking system will involve mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and a host of other specialized engineering disciplines. A systems engineer will focus on making each of the individual systems work together into an integrated whole that performs as expected across the lifecycle of the product.
What are the fundamentals of systems engineering?
In product development, systems engineering is the interdisciplinary field that focuses on designing, integrating, and managing the systems that work together to form a more complex system. Systems engineering is based around systems-thinking principles, and the goal of a systems engineer is to help a product team produce an engineered system that performs a useful function as defined by the requirements written at the beginning of the project. The final product should be one where the individual systems work together in a cohesive whole that meets the requirements of the product.
What is a system?
A system is a collection of different elements that produce results that individual elements cannot produce. Elements or parts can be wide-ranging and include people, hardware, software, facilities, policies, and documents. These elements interact with each other according to a set of rules that produce a unified whole with a purpose expressed by its functioning. An example of a system is the human auditory system; the system includes individual parts in the form of bones and tissue that interact in a way to produce sound waves, which are transferred to nerves that lead to the brain, which interprets the sounds and formulates a response. If any single part in the auditory system fails or experiences disruption, the entire system can fail to perform its function.
What is systems thinking?
Systems thinking is a way of thinking that looks at the overall function of a complex system rather than breaking it down into smaller parts. For example, systems thinking would consider an automobile a complex system that consists of smaller, specialized elements. While an electrical engineer might only be concerned with the electrical system of the automobile, someone looking at the entire complex system would consider how the electrical system would impact other systems in the automobile — and how those other systems might impact the electrical system. If one piece of the electrical system fails, for instance, how would that failure cascade to other systems to impact the operability of the automobile? Systems thinking will take a “big picture” approach to the overall product.
What is the role of a systems engineer?
A systems engineer is tasked with looking at the entire integrated system and evaluating it against its desired outcomes. In that role, the systems engineer must know a little bit about everything and have an ability to see the “big picture.” While specialists can focus on their specific disciplines, the systems engineer must evaluate the complex system — as a whole — against the initial requirements and desired outcomes. Systems engineers have multi-faceted roles to play, but primarily assist with:
Design compatibility
Definition of requirements
Management of projects
Cost analysis
Scheduling
Possible maintenance needs
Ease of operations
Future systems upgrades
Communication among engineers, managers, suppliers, and customers in regard to the system’s operations
How can systems engineers help improve traceability?
For many systems engineers, balancing the needs of the individual systems and their engineers against the system as a whole results in addressing problems after the fact, holding unwanted meetings, and trying to persuade others to change behavior. Many organizations may not adequately focus on requirements and traceability, resulting in a lack of data that would allow a systems engineer to better evaluate the product. To avoid constantly chasing problems and start streamlining processes, systems engineers can use three best practices:
Baseline the current traceability performance:
Traceability spans the product development process, and product team members understand the value of data management, especially as concerns meeting industry requirements. By establishing a baseline of traceability performance, the entire team will be able to see existing risks and potential savings and improvements. In addition, a baseline can give a foundation for a plan of action to move toward Live Traceability™.
Build the business case for Live Traceability:
With a baseline in hand, systems engineers can offer a case for moving to Live Traceability based on data. The data can establish the ROI, productivity improvements, and risk reduction of moving from static traceability to Live Traceability.
Create quick wins:
Once the advantages of Live Traceability are established, the systems engineer can set up continuous syncing between requirements and task management programs, thus automating traceability from requirements to user stories. This simple shift can help demonstrate the value of shifting from after-the-fact traceability to Live Traceability.
The systems engineering process can take a top-down approach, bottoms up, or middle out depending on the system being developed. The process encompasses all creative, manual, and technical activities necessary to define the ultimate outcomes and see that the development process results in a product that meets objectives. The process typically has four basic steps:
1. Task definition/analysis/conceptual: In this step, the systems engineer works with stakeholders to understand their needs and constraints. This stage could be considered a creative or idea stage where brainstorming takes place and market analysis and end user desires are included.
2. Design/requirements: In this phase, individual engineers and team members analyze the needs in step one and translate them into requirements that describe how the system needs to work. The systems engineer evaluates the systems as a whole and offers feedback to improve integration and overall design.
3. Create traceability: Although we’re listing traceability here as the third step, traceability is actually created throughout the lifecycle of development and is not an isolated activity taking place during one phase. Throughout the lifecycle of development, the team works together to design individual systems that will integrate into one cohesive whole. The systems engineer helps manage traceability and integration of the individual systems.
4. Implementation/market launch: When everyone has executed their roles properly, the final product is manufactured or launched with the assurance that it will operate as expected in a complex system throughout its anticipated lifecycle.
Developed in the 1980s, the “V” Diagram of Systems Engineering is a way of specifying the specific series of steps that make up a systems engineering approach. While it was originally employed in a pre-Agile environment, it still has relevance to product development today and can enable faster, less risky product development. The “V” diagram allows system engineers multiple viewpoints and opportunities to evaluate systems as they integrate with each other. This approach starts with the desired outcomes and objectives and then deconstructs them into individual systems and system components for the purpose of design. Once the requirements and design details are established, individual systems can be tested and evaluated, then integrated into the overall piece for testing and verification. As the systems are integrated and become closer to the final complex system, teams have multiple opportunities to validate and verify concepts, requirements, and design.
For the systems engineer, the “V” Model can give a clear roadmap that allows the breakdown of the complex system into smaller parts and then the reintegration and reassembly of the pieces into a cohesive whole. With systems broken down to individual components, traceability, requirements management, and testing and validation become more manageable. In addition, as the pieces are reintegrated into the whole system, the “V” Model allows for an iterative process that gives a clearer view into potential risks and helps troubleshoot problems. Systems engineering is a discipline that’s vital to the success of a complex system. By including systems engineers in all stages of product development and requirements management, teams can reduce risks, improve time to market, and produce better products that more adequately meet end user requirements.
Why is Live Traceability Essential? Given the complexity of products today, it takes multiple team members to weigh in on key decisions. And the number of decision points are only growing as products get more complex, making it even harder to adequately weigh all the options and trace their impacts. Learn more.
To read Part 2 of “A Guide to Good Systems Engineering Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond”, download the entire eBook HERE.
Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Filters, Search, and Analysis: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 3 of our Roundtable Chat series, Richard Watson – Practice Director at Jama Software® – and Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture, Jama Software® – walk us through filtering, searching, and analyzing content in Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Richard Watson: Welcome to part three of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the vlog so far. My name is Richard Watson and I’ll be representing DOORS today. In terms of experience, I’ve been using DOORS for just over 20 years and all of those was as the DOORS and DOORS Next product manager. I’m joined today by Cary.
Cary Bryczek: Hi everybody. I’m Cary. I haven’t had the pleasure of using DOORS for as many years as Richard. I’ve been blessed by not having to use it, but I have used Jama for a very long time and I’m the Director of Solutions Architecture here at Jama, and I’ve been in the requirements world for more than 25 years.
Richard Watson: Thank you. So in this vlog we’re going to be talking about requirements analysis, that’s filtering, searching, dashboards, etc.
Analysis is probably one of the most important reasons that we actually pick a requirements tool in the first place. The risk of life or the risk of lots of money gets organizations imposing compliance needs or their industry will give them regulations that they simply have to meet. And document-based systems just don’t give the relevant granularity to enable things like live traceability. So we need a tool.
Over time, the way we’ve engineered complex systems has changed and we find a much wider community of stakeholders are interested in direct access to the requirements. They want to actually go into the tool. And so usability of that tool becomes key. We also continue to get a wide dynamic set of users and new users, certainly younger users expect the tool to almost be like their social media apps that they’re using.
Cary Bryczek: Yeah, right but aren’t developing with the social media tools that the younger folks are used to. We’re doing real engineering.
Richard Watson: So how to persuade them to use an engineering tool?
Today’s tool engineers are being overwhelmed by data. Data can have, of course, huge value, but if you can’t find the data, it can sometimes even hinder your process, let alone give you any value.
Cary Bryczek: To do that analysis, we need to know how the information is stored, maybe even over multiple systems and how it’s all related to each other. We need to have different views of all of that trace data to ensure that really everything is being done as expected.
Richard Watson: So, okay, let’s start digging into the details. If we start with filters and search. Looking at DOORS, DOORS obviously has a world that’s wrapped around individual modules, and so trying to filter and search information across modules is next to impossible.
Initially, when we started out using DOORS years ago, that was okay. Today it’s not. Today we’re finding organizations have got thousands of DOORS modules and millions of requirements in those are total modules. It’s really difficult to find the data that you need. When you’re in a module, of course, DOORS has got quite sophisticated, complex filter definitions, but even they’re frustrating because if you want to modify them for some reason, perhaps you need to change them or maybe they’re even wrong, you have to start from scratch and normally, you need help to do that.
If we jump the fence DOORS Next, DOORS Next is DOORS next generation. It should be the next generation of DOORS, but it’s hampered by its history. DOORS Next actually was developed on top of an original tool requirements composer. And in order to introduce the DOORS, facilities, modules were added. And as a secondary fun function, modules actually confuse the situation. For example, when you add a requirement to a DOORS Next module, it also gets added to what’s called a base folder. And so when you’re searching for information, you need to know whether you’re looking for the requirement in a module or whether inadvertently you find that requirement in the folder. Sometimes you can even count these requirements twice because they’re in two separate places.
Cary Bryczek: Richard, that sounds complicated even listening to you describe it. Jama is a modern tool and we took a completely new approach with a web-based UI that’s designed for anybody to get up and running. And filters and searches is one of the prime areas that make it really super simple and easy to use for analysis.
Let me just show you what I mean. When we created Jama, we wanted it to be easy to use right away, and finding information should be just intuitive as possible. You don’t have to write any kind of DXL. I can see filters that I already have. I can see just things that I’ve bookmarked creating and searching. Again, I don’t have to write any DXL. It should just show me the particular type of requirements. I can even find things across. What are the ones that don’t have any downstream relationships.
Richard Watson: Yeah. This is so much different to DOORS, and also it’s an improvement over DOORS Next, Cary, because you can do filters on the information at the other side of the relationships and that’s quite difficult to do in DOORS Next and you just can’t do that in DOORS at all.
Cary Bryczek: Yeah. Filters are built into almost any view that you’re on. So if I’m right in a view that I’m looking at requirements, I’m able to filter it right there, filtered by keyword, filtered by the types of things that are in the view, even through traceability.
Richard Watson: Yeah. That’s really interesting, Cary. I particularly liked the way you were doing filters over relationships. I mean you consider it trying to do a filter in DOORS Next, which is impossible saying show me requirements related to defects that have been raised against failed test cases. You just can’t do that type of filtering inside of DOORS Next. So it’s pretty cool in Jama.
Richard Watson: Also, you’re showing the dashboard functionality. Dashboards in DOORS just don’t exist. So it’s got a welcome screen so you can sometimes see information on that welcome screen, but that was introduced so late in the process or the release schedule that not many organizations use it.
DOORS Next, of course, has dashboards, but again that’s hampered by history. DOORS Next dashboards are very much focused on requirements in folders. So for our DOORS user moving into DOORS Next, you’ll find that the maturity of dashboards around module information is pretty limited.
Cary Bryczek: With Jama, our dashboard technology is built right into the tool. You don’t need any extra add-on servers to make it work. And it’s something that is used as a launchpad for different stakeholders to get to the information. Let me show you what I mean.
We have dashboards that are built right in. The reporting engine is native inside of Jama itself, and then so you can take those filters that we were creating earlier and turn them into widgets, into pie charts, into bar charts, then you can download the information. You can download a picture of the things. You can see which requirements don’t have tests, what are the suspect ones, which are the recently viewed things, what’s the progress, which are the things that I’ve touched in the past few days. So if I need to pick up where I left off, launch that directly from a dashboard review.
Richard Watson: Yeah, that’s cool. I like the traceability map there as well. That’s really good. So let’s move on and talk about analysis of requirements. Analysis of requirements is where the fund is and we can start with DOORS.
DOORS has some analysis for capabilities, but mostly organizations are expected to develop DXL solutions. DXL it’s a cool thing to fill in gaps. I remember going around many of the software conferences and people will actually proudly come to me and say, “Hey, Richard. Our organization’s got hundreds of thousands of lines of DXL scripts,” sometimes over a million lines of DXL scripts.
Think about what we’re saying. A million lines of customization code where the organization’s core business is not developing requirements tools. That DXL hampers the performance of DOORS. Sometimes you lose sight of what’s making DOORS go slowly. Is it DOORS itself or is it a customization? And also, as time moved on, the number of people that have got skills in developing DXL is diminishing greatly. And so if you try to, you are exposing your organization to risk because you can’t maintain or extend your current environment.
Jumping the fence to DOORS Next, there’s a different problem entirely. DOORS Next, of course, doesn’t support front end customizations. It doesn’t support DXL. When you look at DOORS Next, actually you start to look at traceability. We want a system that can see an overall view of live traceability between data so that you can analyze that information. And the only way you can do that in DOORS Next is either with an additional tool, so Jazz reporting system, or you start looking at OSLC techniques. OSLC is okay if you’re looking at your Jazz-based products only. It’s got some very big constraints if you’re starting to get tools from different vendors. So you get tied into a single vendor solution simply because of the lack of maturity of OSLC implementations.
Cary Bryczek: Gosh, Richard. Again, that sounds really complicated. And one of the great things that Jama software did was build all of that workflow capability, all of the bits and pieces that you’d have to do with DXL into the software. So people just come in to Jama Connect and just start using it. And the live traceability aspect is probably my favorite aspect about the tool and it’s super powerful. Let me show you what I mean. One of the things that’s great is that live traceability enables pretty much anyone to find anything at the current moment across boundaries. And so, one of the ways that we start live traceability is through that relationship rule diagram. I can see the schema for what’s traced, and this information might be coming in live from other tools in the ecosystem.
We give you an easy way to organize. So if I’m starting to analyze a system just following this explore tree, and seeing how the information is organized by system and subsystem for this aircraft. Now once inside, just navigating to find that information is super simple. I even have live traceability here in the tools itself, so in the requirements, so I can see this particular function requirement, it traces to a system requirement.
Traceability is in almost every view that we look at. So if I’m in this one detail view of a requirement, I know it’s got upstream and downstream traces. If I’m in the live tracing view, my live tracing view, this is a multi-level view of requirements. So I can see if I’m following these requirements on down to the validation level or the system level. I can walk that traceability all the way down, multiple levels of requirements to look at test runs, to look at any defects along the way. It’s really powerful. And then I can start and filter right where I need to be. So if I want to have a filtered start from a filter view, which are the ones that are causing suspect?
Now, this shortens the amount of information that I have on the screen. It really makes the analysis much faster to do than having to work with DXL scripts or exporting stuff to spreadsheets and looking at the information.
Richard Watson: Thanks very much, Cary. That insight to Jama Connect is just reminding me of my last 18 months in Jama. I’ve really enjoyed picking up the Jama Connect product, really excited by it.
That brings us to the end of this particular vlog. I hope you all enjoyed it, and please feel free to take some time to look at some of the other vlogs in this series. Thanks very much, Cary.
Cary Bryczek: Thanks, Richard.
Thank you for watching our Episode 3, Jama Connect vs. DOORS: Filters, Search, and Analysis. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Review and Collaboration; Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.
Jama Software is always looking 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 WIRED, about one of our customers, Illumina titled “The Era of Fast, Cheap Genome Sequencing Is Here” – originally published on September 29, 2022, by Emily Mullin.
The Era of Fast, Cheap Genome Sequencing Is Here
Illumina just announced a machine that can crack genomes twice as fast as its current version—and drive the cost down to $200 a pop.
THE HUMAN GENOME is made of more than 6 billion letters, and each person has a unique configuration of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts—the molecular building blocks that make up DNA. Determining the sequence of all those letters used to take vast amounts of money, time, and effort. The Human Genome Project took 13 years and thousands of researchers. The final cost: $2.7 billion.
That 1990 project kicked off the age of genomics, helping scientists unravel genetic drivers of cancer and many inherited diseases while spurring the development of at-home DNA tests, among other advances. Next, researchers started sequencing more genomes: from animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses. Ten years ago, it cost about $10,000 for researchers to sequence a human genome. A few years ago, that fell to $1,000. Today, it’s about $600.
Now, sequencing is about to get even cheaper. At an industry event in San Diego today, genomics behemoth Illumina unveiled what it calls its fastest, most cost-efficient sequencing machines yet, the NovaSeq X series. The company, which controls around 80 percent of the DNA sequencing market globally, believes its new technology will slash the cost to just $200 per human genome while providing a readout at twice the speed. Francis deSouza, Illumina’s CEO, says the more powerful model will be able to sequence 20,000 genomes per year; its current machines can do about 7,500. Illumina will start selling the new machines today and ship them next year.
“As we look to the next decade, we believe we’re entering the era of genomic medicine going mainstream. To do that requires the next generation of sequencers,” deSouza says. “We need price points to keep coming down to make genomic medicine and genomic tests available much more broadly.”
Sequencing has led to genetically targeted drugs, blood tests that can detect cancer early, and diagnoses for people with rare diseases who have long sought answers. We can also thank sequencing for the Covid-19 vaccines, which scientists started developing in January 2020 as soon as the first blueprint of the virus’s genome was produced. In research labs, the technology has become essential for better understanding pathogens and human evolution. But it still isn’t ubiquitous in medicine. That’s in part because of the price tag. While it costs around $600 for scientists to perform sequencing, clinical interpretation and genetic counseling can drive the price to a few thousand dollars for patients—and insurance doesn’t always cover it.
Another reason is that for healthy people, there’s not yet enough evidence of benefits to prove that genome sequencing will be worth the cost. Currently, the test is mostly limited to people with certain cancers or undiagnosed illnesses—although in two recent studies, around 12 to 15 percent of healthy people whose genomes were sequenced ended up having a genetic variation that showed they had an elevated risk of a treatable or preventable disease, indicating that sequencing may provide an early warning.
For now, researchers—not patients—will likely benefit most from cheap sequencing. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” says Stacey Gabriel, chief genomics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, of the new improvements. “With greatly reduced costs and greatly increased speed of sequencing, we can sequence way more samples.” Gabriel is not affiliated with Illumina, but the Broad Institute is something of an Illumina power user. The institute has 32 of the company’s existing machines and has sequenced more than 486,000 genomes since it was established in 2004.
Gabriel says there are a number of ways that researchers will be able to apply added sequencing power. One is to increase the diversity of genomic datasets, given that the vast majority of DNA data has come from people of European descent. That’s a problem for medicine, because different populations might have different disease-causing genetic variations that are more or less prevalent. “There’s really an incomplete picture and a hampered ability to translate and apply those learnings to the full population diversity in the world,” Gabriel says.
Another is to boost the size of genetic datasets. In the early 2000s, when the Broad Institute started a project to search for genes related to schizophrenia, researchers had 10,000 genomes from people with the condition, which didn’t yield many insights, Gabriel says. Now, they have amassed more than 150,000.
Comparing those genomes to those of people without schizophrenia has allowed investigators to uncover multiple genes that have a profound impact on a person’s risk of developing it. By being able to sequence more genomes faster and more cheaply, Gabriel says they’ll be able to find additional genes that have a more subtle effect on the condition. “Once you have bigger data, the signal becomes clearer,” she says.
“This is the kind of thing that shakes up everything you’re working on,” agrees Jeremy Schmutz, a faculty investigator at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, of new sequencing technology. “This reduction in sequencing cost allows you to scale up and do more of those large research studies.” For Schmutz, who studies plants, cheaper sequencing will allow him to generate more reference genomes to better study how genetics influence a plant’s physical characteristics, or phenotype. Large genomic studies can help improve agriculture by accelerating the breeding of certain desirable crops, he says.
Illumina’s sequencers use a method called “sequencing by synthesis” to decipher DNA. This process first requires that DNA strands, which are usually in double-helix form, be split into single strands. The DNA is then broken into short fragments that are spread onto a flow cell—a glass surface about the size of a smartphone. When a flow cell is loaded into the sequencer, the machine attaches color-coded fluorescent tags to each base: A, C, G, and T. For instance, blue might correspond to the letter A. Each of the DNA fragments gets copied one base at a time, and a matching strand of DNA is gradually made, or synthesized. A laser scans the bases one by one while a camera records the color coding for each letter. The process is repeated until every fragment is sequenced.
For its latest machines, Illumina invented denser flow cells to increase data yield and new chemical reagents, which enable faster reads of bases. “The molecules in that sequencing chemistry are much stronger. They can resist heat, they can resist water, and because they’re so much tougher, we can subject them to more laser power and can scan them faster. That’s the heart of the engine that allows us to get so much more data faster and at lower costs,” says Alex Aravanis, Illumina’s chief technology officer.
That said, while the cost per genome is dropping, for now, the startup cost for a machine itself is steep. Illumina’s new system will cost around $1 million, about the same as its existing machines. The high price tag is a key reason they’re not yet common in smaller labs and hospitals, or in rural regions.
Another is that they also require experts to run the machines and process the data. But Illumina’s sequencers are completely automated and produce a report comparing each sample against a reference genome. Aravanis says this automation could democratize sequencing, so that facilities without large teams of scientists and engineers can run the machines with few resources.
Illumina isn’t the only company promising cheaper, faster sequencing. While the San Diego-based company currently dominates the marketplace, some of the patents protecting its technology expire this year, opening the door for more competition. Ultima Genomics of Newark, California, emerged from stealth mode earlier this year promising a $100 genome with its new sequencing machine, which it will begin selling in 2023. Meanwhile, a Chinese company, MGI, began selling its sequencers in the United States this summer. Element Biosciences and Singular Genomics, both based in San Diego, have also developed smaller, benchtop sequencing machines that could shake up the marketplace.
Ultima’s machine design has replaced the traditional flow cell with a round silicon wafer just under seven inches in diameter. Josh Lauer, the company’s chief commercial officer, says the disc is cheaper to manufacture and has a bigger surface area than a flow cell, allowing more DNA to be read at once. Because the disc rotates like a record under a camera instead of moving back and forth like flow cells do, Lauer says it requires smaller volumes of reagents and speeds up imaging. “We think this will enable scientists and clinicians to do more breadth, depth and frequency of genome sequencing,” he says. “Instead of just looking at tiny parts of the genome, we want to look at the whole genome.”
Ultima’s machine isn’t widely available yet, and the company hasn’t released the price, though Lauer says it will be comparable to other sequencers on the market.
The increased competition could be a boon to the genomics field, but research is often slow to translate to health improvements in real people. It will likely take time before patients see a direct benefit from cheaper sequencing. “We’re at the very, very beginning,” deSouza says.
A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Adoptability for All Stakeholders
Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 2 of our Roundtable Chat series, Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture, Jama Software® and Susan Manupelli – Senior Solutions Architect, Jama Software® – walk us through the importance of adaptability, and ease of use, for all stakeholders in a requirements management tool.
Watch this short video below to learn more and find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Cary Bryczek: Hi everybody. Welcome to part two of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the series so far. My name is Cary Bryczek, and I’ll be representing Jama software today. In terms of experience, I’ve been using Jama for nine years, but have used DOORS and numerous other requirements tools for the past 20 years. I’m joined today by Susan.
Susan Manupelli: Hi there. My name is Susan Manupelli. I’m a solutions architect here at Jama Software. Prior to joining Jama, I was a test architect working on the engineering lifecycle management suite of products, particularly on Rational DOORS Next Generation and the Global Configuration Manager. So I’m happy to be here with you today to talk requirements management adoptability
Cary Bryczek: Thank you Susan. In this vlog, we’re going to be talking about the adoptability for all stakeholders. Adoptability, it might be the most important aspect for a requirements tool and sometimes it’s the most overlooked. Adoptability isn’t just about being able to get users to actually use the software, but it’s about how well it fits into the IT ecosystem. How hard or easy it is to maintain, or even whether or not the organization recognizes its benefits.
UI, Ease of Use, and Adoptability
Susan Manupelli: Right. Let’s talk… One of the first challenges in the adoption of DOORS Classic is that many dev teams are distributed globally. DOORS is a legacy client server application, which doesn’t scale well over the WAM, so DWA, DOORS Web Access, was released as the answer to that problem, but it lacks significant functionality only available in the desktop client.
Another challenge with DOORS Classic is that the UI look and feel is very dated. Modern engineering teams are energized by utilizing the very latest technologies for developing state-of-the-art products for the future, and then they’re asked to use a requirements tool that was designed some 30 years ago. So that just doesn’t fly very well.
Let’s talk a little bit about DOORS Next Generation. It was marketed as a new modern alternative to DOORS Classic. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to use. There are too many different options for use and a lack of direction on best practices. So we’ll go through some of these challenges in the vlog.
The first place where users struggle to adopt DOORS Next Generation is a very basic question; whether to use modules or not. DNG originally only allowed you to organize requirements in a tree view hierarchy of folders. And later, to accommodate users that were more familiar with DOORS Classic, modules were added to DNG. Modules provide a document-like view for requirements, but these same artifacts outside of the module view show up in alpha numeric order in the true view, it makes organization of artifacts outside of the module very confusing.
Cary Bryczek: Wow. Yeah, that does sound complicated to comprehend. Jama was developed as a web-based solution from scratch. We wanted to fulfill the lowest common denominator stakeholder so anybody could come in and use our software. Our UI is modern and intuitive. Let me show you what I mean.
This is what I mean about our UI. It’s very streamlined. There’s hardly any button clicks or menus to learn how to use. There’s four main menus. And then the rest of them are kind of like right click kinds of options. We have the dashboard built right in. Our views are super simple. The explorer tree matches exactly what you see in our list view. And our views are very simple to navigate. So if this is the list view, and I wanted to see a document or a reading kind of view, I can just toggle the buttons to show those different types of views.
Teaching someone how to use this is really super simple, and it doesn’t take that much time at all. In fact, analysts have even recognized Jama Software as being the easiest user tool in the marketplace. You can go out there and see something like from G2, which queries users without us even knowing about it to get their direct feedback on the tools.
Link Relationship Rules and Traceability
Susan Manupelli: Well thanks, Cary. That was great. Another area that’s confusing in DNG has to do with linking. Linking behavior is different between module artifacts and non-module artifacts. A lack of understanding leads to incorrect or incomplete traceability analysis. In DNG, if you link to artifacts that are outside of a module, the link is placed on the core artifact. If you link to artifacts within a module, the link only appears in that particular module. If you then print a traceability report, you’ll only see links made in the module context. So links to core artifacts won’t be displayed. So as a user, that behavior is very confusing.
Another gate to adoptability has to do with enforcing link relationships. Enforcing relationship rules in DNG it’s just hard to do. Either all links are allowed, which means that users can kind of willy-nilly apply link rules that don’t make sense really for relationship, or allowed link rules are specified in a list form for a given component, and then they must be recreated across all components in the project. There’s also no visual representation of link rules in DNG, and there’s no notion of enforcement of required link rules, so compliance is hard to maintain.
Cary Bryczek: Gosh, just listening to that sounds really confusing to me, and I’ve even used DOORS. In Jama, linking is just straightforward. If an item is linked to another item, that link relationship will be visible wherever you are in the UI. We also have the capability to see what our relationship schema looks like and enforce a consistent way to apply traceability. Let me show you what I mean.
There’s a couple of different ways to look at the traceability. I can see that traceability right away. So I know that this standard aircraft platform requirement is traced to another object downstream. I can see the traceability numbers, so this one in this list view. I can see that this one requirement has five different traceability things. I can see it also in the trace view. We’ll tee up a live real-time version of what’s currently traceable out there. It’s very easy to see where there’s gaps in traceability because there’s just no information there.
We have our traceability rule set. Think of this picture as being the schema for what types of objects are allowed to be traced to one another. So I might have four levels of requirements traceability. I might have test cases in there. And so this set of rules would enforce the users to create consistent traces. And then I can follow those rules down in the live trace view as well. So if I’m following this aircraft level requirement, I can see the system requirements, and any kind of lower level objects, whether those are high level software requirements. Here I see some verification tests and agency test runs. Traceability is really made to be super intuitive, real-time, live, to allow anybody to understand and analyze the current situation.
Susan Manupelli: Another common issue is that DOORS Next is hard to administer and maintain. Upgrades are often a challenge. As major architectural changes have occurred in recent releases of the DNG, the time and effort and ultimately the cost to upgrade has been daunting.
Another area of maintenance in DNG has to do with the type system. The type system, that’s the part of DNG that keeps track of your artifact types, your attributes and your values and their relationships. And that needs to be consistent from project to project for cross component and cross project reporting. And there’s no global way to keep these items in sync from project to project or component to component.
Cary Bryczek: Cool. That’s really different than the experience here at Jama. Our host of solutions get updates just about every 60 days. Middleware and security updates are handled as necessary. And sometimes the middlewares might take six months to a year or so. Very stable releases and changes to the ecosystem. We have self-hosted solutions and even customers that have air gap, we can satisfy those sort of ecosystem environments. Very easy to set up and deploy.
Now, it was interesting that you talked about, Susan, though the type rules. In Jama, we’re a little bit different for item types and attributes. We define those globally. Here’s an example.
Our type rules are defined globally, like I said. Here’s an example of schema for the types that are relevant to this particular achiever one project. When we define them globally, it’s all point and click kinds of experience of dealing with that. These attributes are now consistent from project to project to project. And that way you can have really easy reuse scenarios. If you’re doing complex scenarios like product line engineering or if you have complex libraries of data that you use from one project to the next, having that consistent type definition really makes it easier for you to do analysis, leverage reuse, have shorter project startup times.
Susan Manupelli: Yeah, sure. I can definitely see that. One other area that I wanted to talk about has to do with reporting. For all the effort that’s put into DNG to maintain the projects, to build up the requirement specs, the reporting needed to meet certifications is hard or sometimes impossible to create. Mistakes or inconsistencies in the type system that we just talked about, those often manifest as issues once you try to do some traceability reporting. Keeping data consistent between DNG in the reporting data stores has proven to be a challenge, so we’re talking about the data warehouse and LQE. And basically robust reporting out of DNG requires the use of additional IBM tooling, either Jazz Reporting Service, or RPE, the Rational Publishing Engine, and those products are outside of DNG.
Cary Bryczek: That sounds complicated. Again, one of the great things that we have at Jama is our reporting engine is built right into Jama itself. And Jama is a single application, so there’s no deploying 11 different servers of applications that are sort of cobbled together through an integration under the covers. Jama is just a single application. And exporting is super easy. Let me show you what I mean.
We have lots of built in reports. Lots of different kinds of reports that you can add in. We have the capability to export directly to Excel, Word, right there. All a user has to do is configure the view that they’re looking at, whether that’s the reading view or the list view that’s customized to match what they need to have. And then they can have the built in export templates that are just creatable via Microsoft Word templates, so there’s no custom coding in most cases that a user has to do to run these kinds of reports. Doesn’t that sound much easier, Susan?
Susan Manupelli: It sure does.
Cary Bryczek: That brings us to the end of this particular vlog. I hope you all have enjoyed it. Please, I hope you also take some time out to look at some of the other vlogs in this series. Thank you so much, Susan, for your perspective on DOORS and DNG as well.
Susan Manupelli: Thank you Cary. Happy to be here.
Thank you for watching our Episode 2, Jama Connect vs. DOORS: Adoptability for All Stakeholders. To watch Episode 1 of this video series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Adoptability for All Stakeholders; Filters, Search and Analysis; Review and Collaboration; Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.
As the developer of a coastal transportation vehicle, REGENT must adhere to rigorous safety standards for both aviation and maritime travel, and they take that process very seriously. And in order to create the safest, highest quality vehicle, they know that they must implement a world-class development process. With that in mind, REGENT implemented Jama Connect.
After implementing Jama Connect®, the REGENT team has realized the following outcomes:
Ability to complete an entire design review in three weeks
Reuse library of compliance with more than 25 sets of external regulations and standards
Documenting verification and collecting artifacts for compliance is a simple, automated process
Electric Transportation Startup, REGENT, Speeds Time to Market by Choosing Jama Connect to Simplify and Prove Compliance for Complex Safety-Critical Product Development with Strict Regulatory Oversight
ABOUT | REGENT
Founded in 2020 by MIT-trained, ex-Boeing engineers
Building their flagship product, the seaglider, a wing-in-ground-effect craft
Sub-scale prototype built and a goal of having paying passengers on their 12-passenger seaglider Viceroy by 2025
Headquartered in the Boston area
With a mission to drastically reduce the cost and headache of regional transportation between coastal cities, REGENT is building a revolutionary new category of electric vehicle called a seaglider that will service routes up to 180 miles with existing battery technology, and routes up to 500 miles with next-gen batteries. The vehicles will be as safe as aircraft and have better wave and wind tolerance than existing seaplanes and WIGs.
By coupling the high speed of an airplane and the lower operating cost of a boat, REGENT is revolutionizing regional coastal travel.
Founded in late 2020, REGENT has already built a sub-scale prototype of the seaglider and will have a full-scale prototype by 2023.
Backed by many big-name investors, including Mark Cuban Companies, Hawaiian Airlines, and Founders Fund, REGENT aims to safely transport commercial passengers by 2025.
REGENT CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
As the developer of a coastal transportation vehicle, REGENT must adhere to rigorous safety standards for both aviation and maritime travel, and they take that process very seriously. And in order to create the safest, highest quality vehicle, they know that they must implement a world-class development process. With that in mind, REGENT implemented Jama Connect®.
OBJECTIVES
Demonstrating compliance with stringent aviation and maritime safety standards
Meeting aggressive development timelines in order to safely transport commercial passengers by 2025
Building an inclusive, efficient review process
EVALUATION
Cloud-based solution
Easy-to-use platform with a modern, intuitive interface
Ability to scale multiple projects
Industry experience and aviation market presence
OUTCOME
Ability to complete an entire design review in three weeks
Reuse library of compliance with more than 25 sets of external regulations and standards
Collecting artifacts for compliance is a simple, automated process
As a new company, REGENT knew that they needed to get things right the first time around. With little wiggle room for error, the team set out to find a requirements solution that could help the team turn their ideas into reality.
The main objectives that REGENT needed their requirements management platform to support were:
Demonstrating compliance with stringent aviation and maritime safety standards
Meeting aggressive development timelines in order to safely transport commercial passengers by 2025
Building an inclusive, efficient review process
“As a developer of seagliders which are essentially flying boats, REGENT connects the aviation and maritime domains. In the future we will also need to comply with international maritime regulations as well. Because of this, we knew we needed to take a rigorous approach to safety and vehicle development. It was important for us to find a solution that could track requirements and be used to generate the artifacts necessary to certify a flying boat,” said Ted Lester, Vice President, Certification at REGENT. “We wanted to lay the groundwork for the kind of safety-critical development that’s used in the aviation industry. Ultimately, we knew that if you’re developing a new aerospace vehicle from scratch, a good requirements management tool is key.”
From the start, REGENT knew they needed the best available requirements management platform available.
As part of their evaluation process, they began searching for a solution that met the following criteria:
Cloud-based solution
Easy-to-use platform with a modern, intuitive interface
Ability to scale multiple projects
Industry experience and aviation market presence
REGENT evaluated a number of solutions, including IBM® DOORS® and Intland codebeamer, but Jama Connect was the only platform that met all of their needs.
“As a startup, we were working with a very small, agile team. We knew that we couldn’t stand up a hosted solution, so it was important to us that we find a solution that could be Software as a Service (SaaS). And with Jama Connect, we were able to stand the platform up very quickly with very little IT work” said Ted Lester, VP, Certification.
“It was also very important to us that our team could easily use the platform. We knew we needed a solution that allowed us to easily trace requirements from design all the way through verification and validation,” said Lester. “Between the more than 25 sets of external regulations and standards we need to follow, our requirements, and our sub-system requirements, we knew were going to have an extensive number. The ability to scale and do traceability easily was key to our selection process, and nobody did that better than Jama Connect.”
Another factor that played into REGENT’s decision was Jama Software®’s deep knowledge of the aviation industry, extensive resources, and industry templates that help teams build the infrastructure for regulatory
compliance with aviation standards.
“Although IBM DOORS and IBM Telelogic probably have the largest market penetration in aviation, we had many people on our team who had worked in the tool in the past and did not have good experiences. With
Jama Software, we had templates available for DO178 and ARP4754 available to help us get up to speed faster.” said Lester.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Interchange™
Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect®’s powerful features… in under five minutes.
In this Features in Five video, Debbie Mitchell, Product Manager at Jama Software, will introduce viewers to Jama Connect®’s dedicated integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange™.
In this session, we will explore:
Benefits of integrating Jama Connect
Features of Jama Connect Interchange
Common Jira and Excel Functions integration workflows
Follow along with this short video below to learn more, and you can find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Debbie Mitchell: Welcome. I’m Debbie, a Product Manager here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to introduce you to Jama Connect’s dedicated integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange. In this video, we will explore the benefits of integrating Jama Connect to other best-of-breed tools, the features offered by Jama Connect Interchange, and some common workflows using our Jira and Excel Functions integrations.
When developing new products, organizations typically employ an entire suite of best-of-breed tools. Requirements management tools like Jama Connect, task management tools like Jira and Microsoft Azure DevOps, and charting and spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel.
Working across disconnected tools can present a problem, though. Information quickly becomes out of date, and teams get out of sync with one another, leading to product delays, defects, cost overruns, rework and recalls. This is why we built Jama Connect Interchange, a new integration platform that delivers seamless integration between Jama Connect and other best-of-breed tools.
Unlike other integration tools in the marketplace, Interchange is built, supported, and continually enhanced by dedicated teams at Jama Software. This means Interchange is deeply integrated with Jama Connect configurations and workflows, providing you with a smart and seamless sync while you continue to work in your tool of choice.
Let’s take a common example. Suppose my company is building a new product that includes a software component. Using Jama Connect, I finalize a list of software requirements which will now be decomposed into individual user stories. Those stories will be sent to Jira, the software development team’s tool of choice, for the software engineers to complete.
Debbie Mitchell: Let’s see what this looks like in Jama Connect. Using Interchange, I have set up an integration that allows the user stories that I’ve created in this set to automatically flow to a specific project in Jira. In Jira, the software development team can then refine the stories and create additional tasks and subtasks as needed to complete the development work.
In the Interchange admin hub, I’ve specified exactly how information should flow between Jama Connect and Jira for this particular project. I can specify whether each field flows one way or bi-directionally, and the frequency with which changes are synced. Updates can flow as fast as every 15 seconds, so both systems always have the latest information.
For this particular scenario, I’ve configured Interchange so that when development work is complete in Jira, the user story status is automatically synced back to Jama Connect to a field called Development Status. Now I can use the trace view in Jama Connect to easily identify when all user stories associated with a particular requirement have been completed.
To further automate this workflow, I can use the Interchange Excel Functions module to apply additional logical transformations to my data in Jama Connect. You can think of Excel Functions as a calculator that runs in the background while you continue to work in Jama Connect. A Jama Connect administrator maintains the formulas and calculations in an Excel template, and those formulas are then applied to fields in Jama Connect based on the settings and rules the administrator sets up in Interchange.
In this simple example, I’ve set up a rule in my Excel template stating that when all downstream user stories have a status of Development Done, I want the upstream software requirement in Jama Connect to also be marked as Done. Now, this is just one example of how Interchange Excel Functions can be used.
Debbie Mitchell: Jama Connect clients today derive much deeper value from Interchange for scenarios like complex risk calculations, automated field inheritance or data population between related items, customized test case status rollups, and more. You can find out more about Excel functions, use cases, and capabilities by joining the Jama Connect interchange sub-community on the Jama Software community website.
Jama Connect customers can now leverage the power of Interchange to continuously sync information between Jama Connect and other best-of-breed tools. This means teams can continue using their tool of choice to maximize productivity while ensuring that critical project requirements stay in sync. Unlike other solutions in the market, Interchange has been specifically designed and developed to work seamlessly with Jama Connect. It’s easy to deploy, configure, use, and expand, driving efficiency and further lowering your total cost of ownership.
For more information about Interchange, contact your Customer Success Manager today, and thanks.
