As of early 2020, half of all workers had never worked from home. And it’s likely that workers won’t return to the office for quite some time. For some, maybe never at all.
Remote work may be beneficial — or even essential — for employees and organizations, but it comes with its own set of challenges. As telework becomes more common, it will be essential to ensure that engineering teams can effectively collaborate — in real time — from anywhere, using a modern product development platform offering detailed feedback and context, plus visibility into the development process for informed decision-making.
“In the long distance between California and Spain, I feel like I’m connected to the team.”
– Carmen Pazos, Diagnostic Divisions R&D Instruments Senior Manager, Grifols Read the whole story
Editor’s Note: This post on ways traceability has changed to support the remote workforce was originally published here on DevOps.com on June 24th, 2020, and was written by Josh Turpen, Chief Product Officer at Jama Software.
Traceability has always been a useful tool in the development process, but it has become especially important since the COVID-19 outbreak and the increased remote workforce.
Where developers and engineers were once working side-by-side, with the ability to discuss their process and keep their team informed, they are now navigating a remote collaboration landscape. According to a 2017 study done by Stack Overflow, there is a correlation for developers between remote work and job satisfaction, and the highest job satisfaction ratings are seen from developers who work remote full time. As technology has grown to make this process easier, remote working is expected to become a norm.
Advanced traceability has the potential to hold teams together by allowing increased visibility into each move throughout an entire project. Without traceability, it would be nearly impossible to keep remote teams aligned and on schedule.
Product development tools have continuously been forced to evolve to keep up with the multi-dimensional nature of requirement, test and risk management. For these processes to be successful, all related variables must work together continuously, at scale, and across teams.
We’ve only just started to see how traceability tools can use updated capabilities to streamline the product development process, but we know enough to discuss two things: what’s happening now and what the future may hold.
Traditionally, traceability could be compared to a map. While not limited to a single view, maps exist to help you navigate your way to a destination. Similarly, traceability leads product developers through every step of their processes, eventually helping them reach their goal. If your map was constantly changing you’d never be able to figure out where you were going, but what if people ahead of you could update it as they went along? This would keep you in the loop of the upcoming twists and turns, and no one would feel blindsided. Traceability makes it easy to share similar production changes with your entire team, all at once.
In the traceability process, links are built automatically which lets major decision points, reviews and approvals be captured in final documents and reports. This allows for faster and more informed decision making and these live references can exist across versions.
With the switch to remote work across the globe, and no immediate end in sight, developers don’t have the option of working side-by-side with their colleagues. Because of this, it is pertinent that they are able to streamline their work in every way possible, and increased traceability is expected to be a pillar of that transition.
At the end of the day, connecting the dots is all about making sense of everyone’s decisions. Why did they follow that process, and what factors led them to make the choices they made?
In the early days of traceability there wasn’t always room to include every piece of information that you might find relevant down the line. Legacy tools such as the act of manual reporting through Word documents left much to be desired. Today, that’s becoming less of an issue, as developers are allowed more meaningful accountability and insight into interconnections as they happen.
As we look ahead, we can expect to see these capabilities grow in five different ways.
Updating your traceability reports with as little manual effort as possible will be essential to a streamlined, remote workforce. As traceability becomes more advanced, the work to create and maintain it should not become more difficult.
More Nuance Captured, Related and Parsed for Meaning
Improvements in software will make data gathering more precise, and increase the number of items a team can consider relevant, traceable information. This will take additional workloads off of the developers as more items are automatically traced and easily accessible.
More Attributes Can Define and Predict a Project’s Success
If you have a more data-rich, detailed record of activities, it is possible to understand the past with more context and less reliance on costly manual documentation or memory.
Dispersed Systems Holding Relevant Information Will Start to Feel Closer and More Interconnected
Through more dense integration and aligned processes, systems feel more controlled and connected, giving users a more seamless experience.
Expansion of Communication and Review Capabilities for Stakeholders Who May Be Impacted by Changes
The availability of a full audit trail of participation will make a big difference in the ease of the review process. The ability to easily see who is impacted by changes will allow teams to proactively manage the effects of said changes.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the number of companies who are maintaining their remote work policies, we can expect to see more innovations related to product development workflows. These innovations will enable easier remote collaboration between colleagues and across teams, overall streamlining the product development process.
Jama Connect’s Requirements Management Enables Live Traceability™ Across Your Development Process
Bridge engineering siloes across development, test, and risk activities. Provide end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement with our intuitive, award-winning requirements management platform. Learn more!
Want more best practices and tips? Watch a recording of our webinar, “Ask Jama: Best Practices for Remote Collaboration with Jama Connect.”
Cities may be opening up, but many engineering teams continue to work remotely on product development as companies slowly reopen.
Has your team found its rhythm? If your organization hadn’t planned for a distributed team, staying aligned without jeopardizing quality, efficiency, or timelines could still feel challenging. Jama Software helps the distributed engineering teams of global companies like Grifols, SITA, and Einride work seamlessly and successfully, and has for years.
Here’s what they say works best to keep the product development process on track.
1. Intuitive technology
Intuitive technology is user-friendly by design. It improves efficiency and momentum on a distributed team. Technology like this helps onboard team members, keep them aligned to projects, and connected to team members and their work.
Healthcare leader Grifols adopted Jama Connect™ to help manage the product development process between teams in different countries. They cite the user-friendly, intuitive platform as a key reason they can bring everybody up the speed on changes so quickly. Right away, teams feel comfortable and encouraged to participate, comment, and engage in robust discussions.
“In the long distance between California and Spain, I feel like I’m connected to the team.”
– Carmen Pazos, Diagnostic Divisions R&D Instruments Senior Manager, Grifols Read the whole story
2. Centralized change management
Scattered engineering teams still face evolving regulations and requirements for increasingly complex products. When teams can manage change like reviews and requirements from a single, central location the risk of rework or miscommunication goes down. Relevant stakeholders that collaborate, iterate, and issue approvals in a visible area never lack context.
Multinational company SITA wanted to align remote teams and facilitate effective collaboration around requirements. They chose Jama Connect to get an efficient, easy way for cross-functional teams to review requirements and a centralized, accessible repository for all the company’s requirements.
“Jama Connect has allowed us to get more people from our other offices involved in the collaboration process … 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.”
The product development process requires teams that work with structured, live data, even when remote. They need to be able to define, review, and validate it at any time. Critical functionality of the product they’re working on could depend on it. Communication among teams and stakeholders needs to go beyond the basics of collaboration. It’s about more than just a conversation or a simple text edit.
Einride’s feature-based development process uses the Jama Connect platform to identify which feature should receive the highest priority for development. The collaborative elements of the Comment Stream feature helps distributed engineering teams communicate critical changes to each other as part of their daily operations. For example: Einride develops features at a fast pace, often enhancing the functionalities of their electric freight vehicles after they’re deployed. Teams need to react fast and change tracks if necessary — and collaborate with each other early in the process.
“This is the biggest challenge — to know what feature has the highest priority to be improved and/or developed…as we don’t have hundreds of developers, it’s crucial for us to know this as soon as possible.”
Hear stories about how the shift to remote workimpacts product developmentpriorities and learn what best practiceswork effectively. By the end of the 50–minute webinar, you’ll see a path forward. You cansupport collaboration and innovation throughout your product development process—withoutjeopardizing quality, efficiency, or timelines.
Seehowcollaborative requirements tools in the Jama Connect™ platform help teams work remotely.
Jama Software has 10+ years’ experience helping distributed engineering teams stay aligned throughout the product development process. Clay and Aaron apply that experience as they guide you through your new remote work reality. During the webinar, Aaronlogs in toour requirements management platform Jama Connect anddemonstrate how its capabilities help you:
Conduct entirely remote reviews.
Drive collaboration across distributed teams.
Manage change remotely.
You’ll see howJama Connect can help you on a day-to-day basis. The demonstration also touches on how integrationwith your systems can facilitate change management overall—a helpful benefit even after we all return to a regular work mode.
Remote collaboration is here to stay. Your remote engineering teams can adapt to the new reality without jeopardizing quality, efficiency, or product development timelines if they plan ahead. But first, they have to know what to look for.
Anticipate new challenges in remote collaboration.
Face-to-face, quickly assembled meetings and hallway chats aren’t options anymore. That matters when it’s time to make critical decisions. Suddenly, speed and consensus seem impossible, even though they’re crucial to your product development process.
Tools like Zoom, Slack, and shared docs can only help to a certain extent. They remain important communication tools for remote workers. But they can’t keep up with the communication demands for your virtual engineering teams building complex products.
Maintain alignment in team communication and collaboration.
Successful communication among remote engineering teamsrequires alignment.Teams need to be able to define, review, and validate requirements in real-time to ensure the right team has the right information at the right time. Critical functionality of the product they’re working on could depend on it.
Successful collaboration goes beyond a conversation or a simple text edit. It has to be structured, to:
Focus on the product being built.
Include context to inform the conversations and decisions being made.
Provide broad visibility into the development process to manage change.
Four best practices to help engineering teams adapt to remote work.
All this is easier said than done, especially when remote collaboration wasn’t expected and hadn’t been part of a business’ regular product development process. But Jama Connect customers who already support remote teams in their daily business shared their insights with us. We’ve collected them here to help you.
1. Establish a common definition of success.
Teams need alignment on what they’re building so they don’t waste time. Clarify expectations up front. What do the terms “define,” “build,” and “test” mean, for instance? What does success look like based on feedback loops such as customer interviews and design reviews?
2. Empower better decision making.
Ensure the whole team clearly understands the “why” at the beginning of a project. You’ll equip everyone with what they need to make better decisions. Good decisions require situational awareness, comprehension of impact, and a way to gather input from others – and these all start with the “why.” Clearly defined responsibilities empower those involved to initiate and resolve follow-up questions and issues.
3. Tighten up your traceability. Certain industries need to demonstrate compliance with regulations. Traceability analysis proves your system holds up under regulatory demands and meets contractual terms. Coverage analysis tightens this process, and helps teams find gaps and understand positive and negative progress. Extend traceability beyond engineering processes to link development and test activities back to the business rationale.
4. Collaborate with purpose.
Connect everyone on the team to relevant data that’s tied to the work. Don’t make decisions outside the process, such as in documents or emails. This can help speed the decision process, reduce costly rework, provide proof of critical decisions for compliance and ensure teams hit development timelines.
