Tag Archive for: Requirements & Requirements Management Page 28
Tag Archive for: Requirements & Requirements Management
Jama Connect® vs. IBM®DOORS®: Reuse and Variant Management: 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 8 of our Roundtable Chat series, Mario Maldari – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software® – and Gary Hayes – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – discuss the importance of reuse and variant management for product teams.
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Mario Maldari: Hello everyone. Welcome to episode eight in our vlog series. Hope you’ve enjoying the series so far. Today, we’ll be discussing the important topic of requirements reuse, and I’m joined by my friend and colleague Gary Hayes today. Gary, would you like to introduce yourself?
Gary Hayes: Sure thing, Mario. Thank you. My name’s Gary Hayes. I am part of Mario’s team. I’ve been working with systems and software engineering teams for the last 25 plus years, just recently have joined Jama. Prior to that, I spent 18 years working with Rational Software and IBM, supporting their systems and software engineering tools suite. Got a lot of experience in the early days with Requisite Pro as part of Rational Software before being acquired by IBM and then, morphing into the Jazz-based tools and Requirements Composer, acquiring Telelogic and DOORS, and then, DOORS Next Generation. So, been around tools for a long time.
Mario Maldari:
Thanks Gary. You’re like me. We’ve been in Requirement Space for many years, so thanks for that, Gary. As both of us know, being in the requirement space for a while, requirements reuse is an extremely important concept. Whether you’re creating a common library set of requirements or you’re doing variant development, this is something that we experienced through many years of working with requirements tools. Very important concept, and curious as your perception working with other requirements tools regarding reuse and in particular, maybe the DOORS family of products. How has that been for you?
Gary Hayes: Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. In the early days of Requisite Pro and actually, my first exposure to requirements tools were with Technology Builders and Calibre. Calibre version 1 as a matter of fact. Back in those days, they were client server tools that really didn’t have any kind of reuse features except copy and paste. Clone and own, if you will. And DOORS, my first exposure to DOORS was that same way. You could create linkages, you could copy modules and reuse those and different projects as they got spun up, but the real reuse didn’t come into play until you got to more modernly architected tools like DOORS Next Generation. DOORS Next Generation has a variety of ways in which they could reuse components or reuse different artifacts with the environment. For one, you could start off a project, and clone an existing project, and use everything that you had before.
But what they really started to do was use the change sets, which was really change sets with code development where you could branch and merge. You really started seeing a lot more sophisticated ways to do reuse within a project. It made it really interesting and it is fairly easy to understand for people using requirements. You really wanted to have a use case that matched up with one, what you needed in an environment. And then also, you wanted to match up with the maturity of your organization. You didn’t want to overwhelm them with a process that they couldn’t handle. DOORS Next Generation took that to the new level by Introducing Global Configuration Management or GCM for short. Very complex way to do business. And it was really a way to include not just requirements for reuse, but all of the artifacts across the software and systems engineering lifecycle.
Really interesting, sounds really great, but like I said, very complex, and once you turned it on to use in your environment, you couldn’t turn it off, so it did not lend itself to a lot of flexibility. It was flexible from the point of view that yeah, I can make components in different disciplines and mix and match them as I chose to, but you really had to have a mature organization and a mature administration group to keep it under control, and make sure everything stayed on track.
Mario Maldari: Yeah, the complexity, I think it’s a challenge for adoption. And I think targeting some of the very large, big customers and modeling their use case, I think that becomes very difficult for smaller customers when they try to use some simple use cases and take them forward. So, I think that that complexity is a challenge. Well, let me show you something. I want to talk a little bit about how reuse is done in Jama, and I’d like to show it to you. Some of the common reuse scenarios that I’ve seen here at Jama, but as well as an industry is developing common libraries of requirements where you’re wanting to develop once and be able to reuse these requirements across the board in different projects, even within the same project. Parallel development. Very common to reuse requirements for your parallel development as well as variant reuse, being able to use them across your variants. These are very common scenarios that we see in industry today.
Jama has a very simple implementation for reuse, but it’s quite powerful. Anything in Jama can be reused, whether it’s a set of requirements or an individual requirement. And to do so, you simply will click on the requirement, and you can say reuse item. And here, you can share this requirement. Within the same project, you can reuse it, or you can reuse it in a different project. And you have a few different options here as well. You can add a relationship from the original item, so you have a link back to it. You can include all tags, attachments, and links. You also have the ability to include the relationships from the source item, include related items as well in minor relationships. A lot of different options when you go to reuse the requirement. And once it’s reused, you can take a look at the requirement itself, and see where it’s been reused. You can see in this case, the current item I have here I’m looking at, but then this requirement’s also shared across and reused in two different projects.
And you’ll see it’s out of sync. That means the requirement’s been evolving and changing in these different projects, which is what you’d expect in this case. Now, if I wanted to get a little bit more information and see okay, well, how are those requirements evolving and changing? I can take a look at the synced items here across the whole project. And if I want to take a look at this particular requirement and see how it’s been evolving and changing, I can take a look at it and I say, “It’s out of sync.” And I can say, “Well, let’s compare.” And here, I can get a side by side comparison of how the requirements he has evolved in this project. You can see the source project, I have the name with a global impact. And in the project that I’ve reused it in, I can see easily that this requirement has changed to a North America scope only. A really nice side-by-side comparison in terms of how the requirements are evolving.
Even more to that, there’s a nice UI here where if I decide that the requirement, that’s evolving, I want to override it with the source, I can do that easily. Or perhaps this requirement that’s evolving should be the new standard. I can overwrite the original with the evolved requirement. A lot of options in terms of managing your reused requirements. But I think the key for me, from my perspective with the Jama implementation, it’s very simple, very easy to use. You can build from a very simple case to a very complex case as you go incrementally, so you’re not overwhelmed instantly with the reuse scenario itself. A nice supporting UI to deal with reuse within Jama. Let me just stop there, Gary, and see if you had any perceptions. You’re relatively new to Jama, so just curious to your thoughts.
Gary Hayes: Yeah, what I really like about this is that it’s easy to enable. It’s really kind of straightforward. It has a variety of use cases that it supports. Got some basic features, but it also supports some advanced features, so you can turn on as much or as little as you need to be effective. Also, the people that are part of the project, the common users, they get that visual cue. I noticed that in the interface, anything that was in a reuse state had the little dot next to it. If I was curious about the reused state of it, I could drill down on that and do some comparisons myself to see how it evolved over time. I think that one, it’s important that it’s easy to use and people aren’t afraid of using it. They can investigate it and it’s very simple. Simple, yet powerful in my estimation.
Mario Maldari: Yeah, I think that’s a good way of saying it. And of course, you and I have been in requirements for 20 years plus, we know that reuse is such an important concept, but it’s really about striking the balance between features and functionality and ease of use. It’s something that every requirement tool needs to have and needs to support. But the question is how easy is it to adopt? And how easy is it to use? You want to find yourself being productive and not wasting a lot of time and energy out of the box.
Gary Hayes: Exactly. Yep, absolutely.
Mario Maldari: Well, Gary, I want to thank you very much for your time today, and want to thank everyone watching this vlog series, and look forward to seeing you on the next one.
Gary Hayes: Thank you.
Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including Requirements-Driven Testing and Total Cost of Ownership.
Jama Connect® vs. IBM®DOORS®: Industry Templates: 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 7 of our Roundtable Chat series, Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software®– and Danny Beerens – Senior Consultant at Jama Software®– discuss the importance of industry templates in requirements management.
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Cary Bryczek: Welcome to part seven of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the series so far. My name is Cary Bryczek, and I’m from Jama Software. I’ve been working here at Jama for over nine years, and I’m the director of aerospace and defense solutions. You’re in for a really special treat today. And I’m excited to be joined by my colleague Danny Beerens, who is a longtime IBM expert. Danny, tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
Danny Beerens: Hi, Cary. Thanks for this introduction. Yes, my name is Danny Beerens. And within Jama, I am both a solution architect for pre-sales and a senior consultant for post-sales. So I’m not going to sell you anything I can’t deliver myself. I’ve been in the requirements management field for the last 15 years, starting with DOORS Telelogic, and after the acquisition by IBM, I moved to IBM Jazz, the ELM Suite, and I actually started out with implementing Rational Requirements Composer. It was the prelude to DOORS Next.
Cary Bryczek: Oh wow. That’s awesome. So today’s topic of industry templates, I think, is a really interesting one. Requirements tools have been around for decades and were originally designed to be just a database. They had some rudimentary capability to control versions and add attributes, and that was about it. There were very few concepts, and still today there are very few concepts of a pre-configured template that were specific to the processes of a particular industry such as automotive or medical devices. When there are no templates and organizations start adopting a new tool, they’re forced to then configure the requirements management system to match the processes to be able to generate reporting information and documentation. Now, this just takes a lot of time, and it forces organizations, in many cases, to have teams of workers whose job it was to just engineer and maintain the tool itself. Danny, what’s been your experience with IBM tools with regards to templates?
Danny Beerens: Well, in general, IBM does offer some industry templates, what they call solution process assets. And for those, there is not a lot of templates available. So you have system software engineering templates. You have a template to support DO 178B and ASPICE ISO 26262.
Cary Bryczek: So in your experience in using DOORS, is there even the concept of creating a template? Is that hard?
Danny Beerens: Yeah, you can create your own templates, but yes, like you mentioned in your introduction, it takes a lot of time and effort from your own organization to implement your own templates to support your own industry. So setting up everything to get ready to start using the application, it takes a lot of effort for your own organization to be set up.
Cary Bryczek: Oh gosh. Well, it’s so easy in Jama. I think maybe I should let the tool talk for itself. Our templates come right out of the box pre-configured. Let me show you maybe what the building blocks look like. In Jama, totally web-based, our pre-configured industry templates come with item types that represent the nomenclature very specific to the industry. So in A&D and space defense, you’re looking at different types of element requirements, different failure analyses, functional requirements, high-level and low-level requirements for avionic systems, parts. All of these are pre-configured with the most common types of attributes ready for you to use right out of the box. And then where we start talking about how to interconnect all of that kind of data is where we have, in Jama, our relationship rules. And our relationship rules, we have relationship rules for the NASA product breakdown structure.
So if you are following the NASA systems engineering handbook and you’re going all the way from stakeholder expectations to component level requirements, we have this pre-configured for you with all of the correct relationship types. We have one for avionics development that matches all of the DO 178 and ARP 4754. We have templates for MBSE. We have templates for defense system V. We have templates for automotive as well. So all of those are basic automotive framework. If you’re having to do ASPICE or ISO 26262 or both of them together, we have these pre-configured data models for you to start just creating and authoring the requirements right away.
If you’re doing automotive development within the semiconductor industry, we have a template that is developed by industry experts. So we at Jama have hired people that have worked in these industries and know what are the types of compliance reporting that you have to do and then put together these just easy and ready-to-go templates that allow you to get started right away. If you need to do functional safety in automotive or cybersecurity, our templates are built right in, letting you do the safety and cybersecurity right away along with your design development of your requirements. Danny, doesn’t that look like it’ll save organizations time to get started and eliminate the army of DOORS admins?
Danny Beerens: Oh, definitely. If I look at that, your type system is already there. Your relationships are already defined. It saves a world of work there.
Cary Bryczek: So what, Danny, about DOORS NG? What’s the state of industry templates with that tool?
Danny Beerens: If you look at the entire IBM ELM suite, the main focus nowadays is automotive, ASPICE ISO 26262, cybersecurity. And although there are many other multiple templates for different industries like aerospace, medical devices, rail end, they mostly seem to focus on EWM or RTC, as it was called previously. So there is hardly any good templates to support industries endorsing NextGen.
There is an additional application that would allow you to have specific templates or to configure your templates and migrate those to DOORS Next. It’s called Method Composer, but then you also need to know how Method Composer works because you get your templates out of the box. You need to adapt those templates in Method Composer to suit your business processes, and then from there, export it to DOORS Next. So you need an additional application. You need to know how that additional application works to customize it to your processes. Then you need to make sure that DOORS Next gets those templates.
So you need another application, additional infrastructure, and there’s a lot of knowledge in Method Composer. So you need either an IBM expert like I was, an IBM business partner to help you out with that. And in my experience, there is hardly any company that also acquires Method Composer. So you are stuck with setting up your templates in DOORS Next Gen yourself, again.
Cary Bryczek: Wow. God, that just sounds so complicated. So there really aren’t any really ready-to-go templates made for an industry. You still have to do a lot of work.
Danny Beerens: You need a lot of hand work yourself, so you take time away from your own engineering team, from your own process engineers implementing everything in DOORS Next Gen or, like I mentioned previously, in traditional DOORS. So it takes a lot of time away and costs a lot of effort to get you started.
Cary Bryczek: Wow. Is there any process documentation that the end users would use? Anything like that? Or you just have to make that yourself too?
Danny Beerens: Well, you look at your own process or the customer’s process documents, and you try to translate that into a configuration of DOORS or DOORS Next Gen. So there’s really not an easy way to set things up for your industry.
Cary Bryczek: Jama Software, we’ve hired, like I said before, industry experts to put together, not just the templates themselves, but also put together the process manuals that guide users to follow their required industry standards such as the automotive ASPICE and ARP 4754 or IC 6304. Maybe we can take a look at and look at that from a user’s perspective. Let me share my screen here.
Our templates are not just pre-configured in Jama itself, which is very nice. It also comes with a user guide. How do you use Jama itself to follow? This one is a airborne systems process guide. How do I make sure that I really am following ARP 4754 and DL 178? How do I use the system from a high-level process standpoint? So we have these process guides that make it really easy. And then from a user’s perspective, I jump in, I really like the automotive project, we have fantastic sample projects that you can look at, as well as a bare bones skeleton template that you can just start filling in. We have places where you can implement your planning documents in addition to the requirements. We have the dashboards that show you processes that are taking place within your requirements. It’s very easy to follow from the user’s perspective at all.
So I can see what are the different types of requirements, what are the different types of validation testing, or what are the risks that you’re following, and even how the particular system that you are engineering is subdivided from a systems engineering standpoint. So if I want to define the mechanical engineering or the software, I can dig right down in. And this configuration of how the information is organized, how the information is related to one another, it’s all part of the solution, so users don’t have to spend time studying the standards that you have to adhere to or the organization’s process. That’s already built for you. You can just start using it right away, which I think is really cool and a huge time saver and what really differentiates Jama Software from IBM itself.
Danny Beerens: And if you look at your type system and then the documentation that comes along, I must say in my 15 years, I’ve learned that having industry templates is a really great stepping stone to getting a customer quick up and running and achieving their industry compliancy goals. They don’t have to figure it out themselves. It’s already there. You will have guiding documents that explain to you why those templates are set up like they are, what the purpose is, and it comes fully guided with Jama experts. They are experts in the industry, so they can also talk you through the templates if you have any questions. It just simply helps you adjust the framework that comes out of the box to your specific situation within your industry. So you’re already there. You just need to apply rough tweaks to make it your own, and that’s it. And that’s what I love about Jama, working for Jama. How about you?
Cary Bryczek: I love that too. If I’m an end user, I just install Jama, tweak it a little bit here and there and give a minimal amount of training to my users, and then they’re ready to use it. And working at Jama in the aerospace and defense, I really enjoy putting together these solutions and seeing the companies not have to work so hard at using the tool, but actually spending more time innovating on the products and the systems that they’re building. Thanks so much, Danny, for your perspective on the IBM side. That was really insightful. I learned a lot.
Danny Beerens: You’re welcome.
Cary Bryczek: This concludes our vlog on the industry templates and its significance within the requirements management domain. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying the series so far. Stay tuned for our next entry in our series. We look forward to seeing you then.
Danny Beerens: Thanks for having me.
Cary Bryczek: See you next time.
Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: 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 recap our press release, “Jama Software® Is the First to Deliver a Complete Requirements Authoring Solution” – To read the entire thing, click HERE
Jama Software® Is the First to Deliver a Complete Requirements Authoring Solution
Requirements can now be authored in free text form, natural language analyzed, and managed as distinct items
Jama Software®, the industry-leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, has announced enhancements to Jama Connect®’s user experience. As part of the update, Jama Connect now includes a Document View, which allows users to author, read, and edit items in-line in a single view while maintaining an item-based structure within project hierarchies. This enables the streamlined authoring of requirements leading to material efficiencies gained and time saved.
The new Document View augments Jama Software’s atomic, item-based requirements approach. It allows users to easily learn and adopt Jama Connect whether moving from a documents-based approach or a legacy requirements tool. The seamless user experience combines the best of model-based requirements engineering with an enhanced, quick-editing Document View functionality. This improves time-to-adoption for Jama Connect users.
In addition, the enhancements also improve consistency and accuracy of requirements quality by incorporating built-in support for Jama Connect Advisor™ (add-on to Jama Connect). With this, users can seamlessly see EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) and INCOSE (International Council for Systems Engineering) rules suggestions while actively authoring and editing requirements.
Jama Connect is the only comprehensive requirements management and traceability solution that allows:
Requirements authoring in free text form;
Analysis in natural language to maintain quality; and
Management of requirements as distinct items.
These capabilities make Jama Connect an incredibly powerful platform that delivers immense value for optimizing and accelerating systems development across various industry verticals.
“Jama Software is committed to continuously improving the adoptability and useability of Jama Connect. These powerful enhancements strengthen Jama Connect’s best-of-breed requirements authoring and Live Traceability™ offering, which continues to make Jama Connect the highest-rated solution for ease of use and adoptability in the industry, “said Josh Turpen, Chief Product Officer of Jama Software.
To learn more about Jama Connect’s features, please visit our product features page. If you would like to speak with one of our industry experts and/or book a free Jama Connect trial, click here.
About Jama Software
Jama Software® is focused on maximizing innovation success. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, autonomous vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect® to minimize the risk of product failure, delays, cost overruns, compliance gaps, defects, and rework. Jama Connect uniquely creates Live Traceability™ through siloed development, test, and risk activities to provide end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement. Our rapidly growing customer base of more than 12.5 million users across 30 countries spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, financial services, and insurance industries. For more information about Jama Connect, please visit www.jamasoftware.com.
As we enter 2023, Jama Software asked selected thought leaders – both internal Jama Software employees and our external partners – across various industries for the trends and events they foresee unfolding over the next year and beyond.
In the final blog of this five-part series, we asked Steve Neemeh, CEO / CTO of LHP Engineering Solutions – Danny Beerens, Senior Consultant at Jama Software – and Richard Watson, Practice Director at Jama Software – to weigh in on automotive product and systems development trends they’re anticipating in 2023.
Read more about the authors at the end of this blog.
2023 Predictions for Automotive Product Development
Design Trends – What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in your industry right now? How will they impact automotive product, systems, and software development?
Steve Neemeh: A generation ago software was introduced in engine controls that changed the automotive industry and allowed for efficiency and emissions improvement that mechanical systems could not provide. In today’s world, software is entering a new stratosphere of complexity. Rather than focusing on emissions, the goal is the user experience. High-tech meeting transportation changes the paradigm for automotive companies.
Danny Beerens: I don’t see a lot has changed in this regard. What is changing is what’s being built, not how it is being built.
Richard Watson: Taking advantage of Live Traceability™ will become increasingly important.
Definition of Live Traceability: The ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete up and downstream information for any requirement, no matter what stage of development it is in 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.
Biggest Challenges – What are some of the biggest challenges you think automotive companies will be working to overcome in 2023?
Neemeh: The commercialization of the zero-emissions vehicle is the biggest challenge for 2023. The price points are a challenge. The supply chains are limited and not optimized for worldwide expansion. And, the energy grids are outdated in many places, such as California.
In terms of product and systems development, what do you think will remain the same over the next decade? What will change?
Beerens: More and more brands will move to electric vehicles, making those vehicles and specifically their motor management components more software driven. The various other components (primary functions, driver assistance/automation, as well as onboard entertainment) will also become more electronically controlled and thus software driven.
[Side note] Autonomous driving vehicles even sparked new fields in Software Engineering, like Ethical Software Engineering (studies the interactions of human values and technical decisions involving computing).
Clearly the Automotive Industry is shifting from Hardware/Mechanical Engineering and Electo-Mechanical to Software Engineering, forcing Product Data Management, or Product Lifecycle Management, vendors to start including Application Lifecycle Management into their environments. Hence you see Siemens Teamcenter has acquired Polarion and PTC Windchill acquired Codebeamer recently.
The Holy Grail will be an ALM/PLM environment that truly embraces Configuration Management for all engineering disciplines involved, combined.
Anticipating a new player not hindered by their already existing PLM or ALM application, neither their customer base, to develop a truly all incorporating ‘Engineering Assets Configuration Management’ environment, platform or application.
For the next decade, next to fully autonomous driving vehicles, flying cars might be the new way to fight congestion and a more personalized way to get around.
Regulations – What changing regulatory guidelines do you anticipate having an impact on companies in 2023?
Neemeh: With any new products in automotive, recalls will drive governments to regulate safety more closely. Functional safety is now a common term in automotive and most large OEMs are trying to find a way to comply and keep themselves from facing potential liability. The implementation of functional safety in the software development process will keep inching forward until a trigger makes it mandatory.
How do you foresee regulations shifting in Automotive Product and Systems Development over the next decade?
Beerens: Certainly, autonomous driving will introduce regulations to control not only functional safety and cybersecurity, but also for road safety (and legal responsibility) to interact with non-autonomous driven cars, until we’ve reached an era where none of us drive ourselves and all cars are controlled centrally to manage traffic flows.
Demands on alternative powertrains (e.g., hydrogen, or fuel cells) and existing electric driven cars’ necessity for fast charging and/or quick exchange of batteries, will spark off new technologies.
Apart from the obvious increase in data points and data exchange of the vehicle itself (sharing information for predictive maintenance, or usage of the car; tachograph in trucks) and its manufacturer and/or service station, G5 Connectivity of (autonomous driving) vehicles interacting with new traffic control instruments in, next to or on the road that assist with difficult traffic situations (automatically move to the side to allow emergency vehicles to pass), or location (purposely slow down at intersections that don’t have clear visibility of oncoming traffic) and react to traffic lights.
As a reaction to reduce CO2 emissions (cars sales are in a slow decline for a few years now already) new forms of mobility will arise where MaaS (Mobility as a Service) are being offered, sparking off disruptive newcomers to the traditional car sharing companies (renting: Hertz, and even taxi: Uber), like for example Lynk&Co, offering “memberships” for more flexible car usage and for car sharing with family and friends.
Tool Innovation – From an automotive engineering toolset perspective, what are some of the processes you think forward-thinking firms will be working to leverage or incorporate into their process and why?
Neemeh: Functional safety requires a strict development process and tools that support that process. Traditional tools only meet a small piece of that. They need to be integrated into an overall workflow and safety culture.
Any major disruptions to the Automotive Product and Systems Development industry you’re anticipating in 2023?
Watson: Political environment, supply chain issues, increased cost of specific items (such as chips). This increased cost is pushing the buyers into higher income areas, changing what kinds of cars will be successfully built.
Because of cost issues, refurbishing and retrofitting existing cars will become increasingly important. Similarly, car sharing will be increasingly wanted to control costs.
What role will cybersecurity play in automotive development in the coming year and beyond?
Neemeh: Safety can’t be achieved without cybersecurity. Assessment of your system’s vulnerability and its inclusion in your safety case is key to overall product acceptance. The more that cars become connected, the more this becomes important. Autonomous driving will be the pinnacle of connected cars. The more we move in that direction the more cybersecurity becomes a concern.
What sorts of process adjustments do you think development teams will need to make to be successful in 2023?
Watson: Automotive systems continue to have a stronger focus on software and this shift will continue. Different categories of software are provided in a vehicle from safety-critical to entertainment and this drives complexity sky-high.
With regulations continuing to get more stringent, development practices for non-safety-critical software systems must be tightened and this drives a focus to improve Agile practices. “Agile” is not an excuse to “throw something together” and must be supported by improved specification and verification techniques.
In your opinion, what are the biggest differences between an automotive company that survives to see 2030, and one that doesn’t?
Neemeh: Getting prototypes on the road and small-scale production with new technology (EV/Autonomous) is a monumental feat. The next step, however, is the commercialization of that technology into a transportation industry that is concerned about public safety. Those that consider that in the rollout and enable the scaling of safety-critical infrastructure will win, while the others will hit a brick wall of regulation.
Watson: A combination of sustainability with control of spiraling costs. There is a world shift in planetary awareness and the automotive market is at the forefront of reducing our consumption of fossil fuels. Car prices are increasing beyond inflationary rates and this increase will price out much of the lower market. Only organizations that can shuffle sustainability, quality and costs will survive this decade.
What role will cybersecurity play in automotive development in the coming year and beyond?
Watson: A shift towards Internet of Things (Iot) has exposed almost all aspects of automotive systems to the internet and social media. Cybersecurity will take a stronger focus, especially for those software systems that already interact with our social networking applications.
Beerens: Not only for our social networking applications; for long all systems utilizing the various onboard connections simply accepted instructions, without checking if that instruction was from a valid source. The infamous hack of a Landrover during Black Hack 2014 proved that. Encryption and intrusion detection are a good line of defense, but Zero-trust (or validating the source of the commands) Cybersecurity will be increasingly important for onboard systems from entertainment systems, connections like CAN, wifi, bluetooth or NFC, to motor management.
What advice would you give to new companies entering the automotive industry?
Neemeh: Get your workflows set up and your tools ready and optimized before you start throwing bodies at problems. Engineers are expensive. When they are set up properly, they can create miracles. But if they are burdened with administrative problems, they will get frustrated and leave.
Beerens: Look at established tool chains and industry templates to have a running start at the get-go. The European Union has an advisory board with such tool chains and templates. Concern yourself with compliancy from the beginning. Which compliancy standards you concern yourself with will depend on what parts of the auto you are working on.
Watson: Don’t try and define and invent the wheel and get help. There are many development tools available, find which tools work best based on tool reviews. Once selected, ask the vendor for the best way of working and don’t force the tool to do inefficient practices.
What topic(s) do you wish companies were paying more attention to?
Watson: Understanding how to address complex problems without the systematic nature we have relied upon. This is the only way to keep control of costs.
Predictions – What do you think will remain the same in your industry throughout 2023?
Neemeh: The adoption of electric vehicles will continue. Governments are behind it and the adoption rate is increasing.
What do you predict for regulation in the Automotive industry in 2023?
Neemeh: Involvement in the design process and review of ADAS features will become more important. The NHTSA has already started putting frameworks in place for that in the USA. In Europe, functional safety is commonplace and regulated already.
Will those trends still be prevalent 5 years from now? 10 years?
Neemeh: Yes, and it will move as fast as ADAS features move forward. Any autonomous Level 5 applications will jump-start this trend.
Where do you see Jama Software fitting in as the product development landscape evolves, and what can our customers expect as 2023 approaches?
Watson: Jama Software® is perfectly positioned to help the automotive industry allowing extended stakeholders to be directly involved with authoring and reviewing specification and verification activities rather than relying on tool super-users and PDF reports.
Beerens: Jama Connect® is a perfect fit for Product Design and collaboration with all its Stakeholders to refine, expand and improve Product Design, before any of these (proposed) changes are even visible in a PLM environment thereby preventing disruptions in Production before consensus has been reached.
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About the Authors:
Steve Neemeh joined LHP in 2015 to lead the expansion of the west coast operations. He is the leader of the strategy and solutions architects as well as president of the delivery consulting organization. Steve has over 25 years of Functional Safety experience prior to joining LHP. Steve has launched multiple start-up operations and has taken them to full production. Notably, a complete ground up electronics and software development group to service commercial aerospace electronics and military vehicle power electronics. For LHP, Steve pioneered the implementation of safety critical applications in California, launching functional safety for autonomous driving applications as well as air mobility.
Danny Beerens has 15 years of experience implementing, training, maintaining and supporting Application Lifecyle Management processes and their environments. Danny started in Software Configuration and Change & Defect Management (i.e., Workflows.) After joining Telelogic, he moved into Requirements and Test Management over the last decade, in roles as Support Engineer, Process Engineer, Consultant, and System Architect. Throughout his career Danny’s worked on projects and collaborated with customers in the Medical Devices, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, and Semi-conductor industries. “The need to integrate ALM and PLM (and even beyond!) is apparent across all industries.”
Richard Watson is the Practice Director for horizontal solutions, engaged in identifying and creating services and assets spanning the Jama Software vertical solutions. Richard has a client first attitude and is passionate about Requirements and Systems Engineering. Based in the UK, Richard has been working in the systems and software industry for nearly 35 years and has been directly involved in most aspects of Systems Engineering from testing flight systems, through to software development of modeling tools, and Product management of IBM DOORS. Richard joined Jama Software as Practice Director in 2021.
As we enter 2023, Jama Software asked selected thought leaders – both internal Jama Software employees and our external partners – across various industries for the trends and events they foresee unfolding over the next year and beyond.
In the fourth part of our five-part series, we asked Shawnnah Monterrey, CEO at BeanStock Ventures – Romer De Los Santos, Senior Consultant at Jama Software – Vincent Balgos, Director of Medical Device Solutions at Jama Software – Michelle Wu, Medical Device Consultant at Wu Consulting – and Ivan Ma, Medical Device Program Leadership – to weigh in on medical device product development trends they’re anticipating in 2023.
Read more about the authors and their organizations at the end of this blog.
2023 Predictions for Medical Device Product Development
What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in the medical device and life sciences industry?
Shawnnah Monterrey: Biggest trends we are seeing include a rapid migration to the cloud this includes: IoMT, Digital Health, Digital Therapeutics and Big Data such as Genomics, Biotech, and Pharma.
We are seeing a rapid shift towards newly derived clinical insights using pre-existing data from existing medical devices, such as:
Companion diagnostics which combine a diagnosis outcome with a therapeutic and monitoring of that treatment
Digital therapeutics which use software ONLY to treat patients as opposed to a drug or instrument
Novel clinical insights where two or more measurements are combined to produce a clinical determination
AI based diagnostics which often consume numerous inputs that could be measured, demographical or even genetic to derive new clinical insights
Romer De Los Santos: Digital health continues to be a major source of growth as personalized medicine, wearable devices, and mobile health gain wider acceptance. Cloud computing, AI, and machine learning are improving patient outcomes by encouraging innovation and making personalized medicine possible. As these constantly evolving technologies continue to grow in complexity the regulatory framework around medical devices that incorporate them are also evolving to keep up.
For many years, medical device manufacturers secured their devices by disabling or designing out interconnectivity. The rise of electronic medical record keeping has forced manufacturers to support limited interconnectivity. They usually depended on security measures taken by their customer’s IT department as the primary risk control measure. That’s no longer acceptable in our interconnected world. The FDA requires manufacturers to consider cyber security threats and to design controls to reduce these risks as much as possible. This has led to developers having to learn more about threat modeling to limit touch points into their software and to creating plans on how to handle data breaches.
The 21st Century Cures Act amended the definition of a medical device to exclude certain software functions. The FDA intends to focus oversight on software functions that affect patient data and therefore pose the greatest threat to patient outcomes. Wise developers architect their software systems based on clearly defined software functions that can be individually evaluated for risk, leading to a reduction in the regulatory burden. Designing and documenting modular software facilitates re-use and therefore faster time to market for novel medical devices.
Michelle Wu: AI and Machine Learning: I continue to see AI and Machine Learning as a trend for 2023. Any pitch competition I attend includes multiple products that are incorporating AI or machine learning. There’s attention now on companies to look for and counteract bias in the data sets and algorithms.
Health equity: A spotlight on health inequities shines brighter since the pandemic and fortunately many companies are looking to do good and do well. Telehealth, remote patient monitoring, digital health apps, are the top areas of innovations that I see to address these disparities.
Vincent Balgos: The pandemic continues to drive the industry, regulators, and the market for COVID-19 related products and services, so I would expect continual development in these areas as new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerge, or other as other diseases arise.
Continual integration of medical life products, and interoperability amongst devices. As software to grows as a critical part of medical device industry, whether standalone SW or integrated with other components, there are many areas for 2023 innovation such as:
Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), Software in a Medical Device (SiMD)
Cybersecurity
Complex data analysis such as bioinformatics, genomic sequencing, imaging processing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
New or modified regulations (EU IVDR, EU MDR, and potential US VALID Act) continue to change the landscape in how medical device and life science organizations develop, manufacture, and maintain products.
The new FDA Computer Software Assurance (CSA) guidance that revisits validation in context of the current Computer System Validation (CSV) approach. Many medical companies are looking at this new risk-based approach to streamline their activities, documentation and outputs as the current standard practice can be complex and cumbersome.
Biggest Challenges – What are some of the biggest challenges you think medical device and life sciences companies will be working to overcome in 2023?
Monterrey: Two of the biggest challenges I see are: monetization and regulatory clearance.
Medical devices revenue models rely heavily on reimbursement from CMS which require a CPT code. Obtaining a new CPT code requires a significant investment and burden on the medical device manufacturer to provide clinical evidence which not only shows efficacy but also provides A reduced cost of care when compared to existing methods and treatments. We are seeing that digital therapeutics are struggling in this area. One strategy has been for digital therapeutics to partner with an existing reimbursed pharmaceutical via revenue sharing. But on the upside CMS has recently provided a new code which allows prescription digital behavioral therapy to be reimbursed as a medical benefit which is trailblazing the path for other digital therapeutics to follow.
While digital health applications that are intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease are medical devices and have been regulated by the FDA for many years, there has been new entrants in the recent years that have gone under the radar. With the recently issued guidance from the FDA on Clinical Decision Support Software, FDA attempts to make it clear which products are regulated medical devices, and which are not. This will slow the reduction in the barrier to entry as many digital health applications begin to play catchup.
Ivan Ma: The supply chain for components and materials continues to remain constrained. With lead times stretching well past 6 months, and sometimes getting close to 12 months. Programs should plan for contingencies and with expectations that milestones that require physical materials will be impacted by the last part in. Be wary of strategies that start early but require more total effort to execute.
In terms of product and systems development, what do you think will remain the same over the next decade? What will change?
De Los Santos: The need to ensure traceability between requirements, testing, risk, and design will continue to be important in the next decade. Changes in what is considered medical device software will lead to revised regulatory strategies by companies agile enough to take advantage of these changes. Documentation must become more modular to match the software they describe.
Balgos: Based on my past 17 years in medical product development, the time pressures to launch safe and effective products quickly to the market has always been a constant theme.
Many attempt the “faster, better, cheaper” approach, but schedule has always been the driver when comes to the project’s managements iron triangle (scope, budget, schedule). While this “faster, better, cheaper” approach may work for other industries, the medical field is especially constrained in that a patient’s safety is non-negotiable.
What will change is how companies adapt to the complexities of the regulation landscape, innovative technologies, and ever growing knowledge of diseases, illnesses, etc. The adaption for advanced tools, processes, and digitization of information will continue to grow industry as scientists/engineers evolve their practices.
What changing regulatory guidelines do you anticipate having an impact on companies in 2023?
Monterrey: In addition to FDA’s guidance on Clinical Decision Support Software there are a few other draft guidance in the works such as Computer System Validation (CSA), Cybersecurity, and AI.
Tools that are used to implement part of all the quality system require validation to ensure that the tool is fit for purpose and mitigates the risk of failures that could pose undetected harm in the medical product. We have seen many of our clients spend significantly more effort on validating tools that do not pose significant risk to their medical device than the medical device itself. FDA’s Computer Software Assurance for Production and Quality System Software draft (CSA) guidance provides great insight on how to take a risk-based approach when validating your tools.
Cybersecurity affects all products in development and on-market, regardless of if they are fully embedded or even connected. For medical devices manufactures that have many legacy devices on-market, this new guidance can pose a significant risk and cost.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) Software as a Medical Device Action Plan provides some additional insights into FDA’s current thinking behind AI. Although there is no current guidance from the FDA, AI devices continue to be cleared under existing guidance increasingly year or over.
Balgos: The US VALID ACT could have major disruption to lab developed tests (LDT’s) and how they are regulated in the US market. The additional restrictions may impact the growth of new tests, but provide additional oversight to help improve safety. This controversial topic has been a continual discussion point in industry, and that the new VALID ACT provides some additional clarification and guidance.
How do you foresee regulations shifting in medical device and life sciences over the next decade?
De Los Santos: There is a growing understanding among regulatory bodies that cloud computing companies are developing technology that will significantly improve patient outcomes.
Tool Innovation – From a medical device and life sciences engineering toolset perspective, what are some of the processes you think forward-thinking firms will be working to leverage or incorporate into their process and why?
Monterrey: From an engineering toolset perspective – finding automated tools that support the regulation and the team’s ability to be agile for the full development cycle will have a significant impact. Typically, we see our clients taking 6 to 18 months back tracking design activities in order to satisfy the FDA when the product is almost completed. If development is done in a more automated and iterative way – time to market can be significantly reduced, more predictable and lead to higher quality products.
Wu: Tools that make regulatory compliance more efficient. The best tools make it easy for companies to enhance, instead of hampering, their product development and business strategy.
Human centered design. While not a new concept, it is not universally practiced and incorporated. Those that do this well have medical devices that resonate with users and have better product adoption.
Ma: Requirements matter more than ever. Avoid building the wrong thing by keeping track of requirements and risks management using a tool like Jama Connect. If you are paper tracing, you’re operating in the 20th century.
Any major disruptions to the medical device and life sciences industry you’re anticipating in 2023?
De Los Santos: AI, machine learning, and cloud computing were instrumental in the response to the pandemic but have far bigger implications for improving patient health. As companies shift focus away from the pandemic, I expect more innovation around personalized medicine and clinical decision support software, both of which take advantage of these emerging technologies.
Balgos: The US VALID ACT could have major disruption to lab developed tests (LDT’s) and how they are regulated in the US market and industry.
What sorts of process adjustments do you think development teams will need to make to be successful in 2023?
De Los Santos: Development teams should take advantage of the guidance on software functions to improve the architecture of their code and their documentation. The sooner development teams create re-useable code and documentation building blocks, the better.
Balgos: Aligning with new regulations, such as the potential VALID ACT, and new FDA draft guidances such as CSA, Human Factors, and others
For the EU market, organizations need to start early. Notified Bodies engagement as the backlog continues to be longer than expected for re-certification for Medical Devices and IVD’s to the new regulations.
In your opinion, what are the biggest differences between a medical device or life sciences company that survives to see 2030, and one that doesn’t?
Monterrey: Companies that strive to maintain agility while being regulated leveraging tool automation as opposed to paper-based and stage gate processes will have a competitive advantage and higher chance of survival by having the ability to:
Address cybersecurity demands in an ever-changing eco-system
Derive new clinical insights using real-world data
Innovate by releasing product and features in more frequent cadences
Stay ahead of obsolesce issues
De Los Santos: The ability to organize software, hardware, and documentation into re-useable building blocks are key to winning in this kind of environment. You must be fast while maintaining a level of quality that ensures patient safety.
Ma: Products that bring true clinical value will win in the long run. The challenge is finding organizations and sources of capital that are methodical enough to identify true clinical value and have the grit and determination to stick with programs that take more than 5 years to reach human use.
Balgos: Adapting to the environment will be key for a company’s survival. Whether new regulations, innovative technologies, or another global event changes in how industry operates, companies that has the ability, resources, and willingness to pivot will likely survive.
What role will cybersecurity play in medical device development in the coming year and beyond?
De Los Santos: Cybersecurity is here to stay! The FDA requires device manufacturers to document how they handle cyber security threats and breaches. Companies can’t depend solely on risk control measures made by the customer’s IT department.
What advice would you give to new companies entering the medical device and life sciences industry?
Monterrey: Invest in tools, training, and infrastructure upfront and hire industry and technological experts to help you navigate the complexity of the cloud environment and regulated space.
De Los Santos: Take some time to define a simple design and development process. Don’t overdo it! You don’t get extra credit for adding extra process work. Use a risk-based approach to determine how much is too much.
Wu: Understand that the path to commercialization is much longer for a regulated medical device or therapeutic as compared to a consumer good.
Gain an appreciation for the regulations, what claims you want to make for your product, and how those two impact your timeline.
Human-centered design, including addressing diversity and inclusion, will differentiate your product from others.
Ma: A mentor told me that medical devices are a hard but worthwhile sport. Play the sport with the intent to bring positive clinical value to people everywhere. The rest, as they say, will take care of itself.
Balgos: Understand the market, regulations, and intended use of products/services and the associated risks.
Encourage good documentation practices early and consistently, as documentation is the lifeblood of the industry. Because if it wasn’t documented, it never happened.
What topic(s) do you wish companies were paying more attention to?
Monterrey:
FDA requirements pre-development – implementing a QMS and following a design process.
Customer needs – developing with the end user in mind.
Software as a profit center – focused on the revenue opportunity software can bring.
Tool validation – focus on value-add activities, if you’re spending more time and money validating tools that verifying your medical device you should revisit your QMS for inefficiencies.
De Los Santos: I wish companies would take a little more time cleaning up their processes. Where are you wasting effort? Putting band-aids on your development process costs you more in the long run. What is a working medical product with a poor or non-existent design history file? It’s a brick. It’s a very expensive brick that will require months of remediation work. Design documentation created after the fact is always poor and you’ll also have trouble retaining great engineers if they must spend months remediating documents.
Wu: Women’s Health: While women make up 51% of the population, less than 1% of VC funding is going to FemTech. With an estimated market size of $1.186 Trillion by 2027, the medical device industry is slowly taking notice of the unmet need and market potential of innovation focused on women. Consumer product goods, digital health, and diagnostics are top three product addressing issues unique to women, including menstruation, maternal health, and menopause1. It’s an under tapped area that continues to be prime for disruption.
What do you think will remain the same in this industry throughout 2023?
Monterrey: I think we will continue to see slow economic recovery as a result of the side-effects of COVID as it relates to supply chain, pivots, and lower year end earnings. The businesses that end up striving will be those who are focused on long term strategy as opposed to short term reactions to the economy. Reinvestment and patience will be essential to staying ahead competitively.
What do you predict for regulation in the medical device and life sciences industry in 2023?
Monterrey: There will be a watchful eye on cybersecurity, additional thinking around AI and significantly longer wait times for approval.
Wu: While not significant changes in regulation, the change to MDR and IVDR in the EU continues its impact to the industry, especially as companies’ previous MDD certifications lapse, but have yet to obtain their MDR certifications. As of a July 2022 MedTech Europe Survey Report, >85% of existing medical devices that had MDD certification have received MDR. And unfortunately, it is the patients and public that live in the EU that will be affected when they no longer have access to the same medical devices and diagnostics that they had previously. With the 13–18-month time-to-certification with MDR-designated Notified Bodies, nearly double the time historically needed, this influences the worldwide go-to-market strategy of companies.
Will those trends still be prevalent 5 years from now? 10 years?
Monterrey: Digital health applications will begin to dominate the market over traditional hardware devices with new and innovative, diagnostics treatments and therapies leveraging cloud, AI and real-world data. FDA trends over the next 5 to 10 years will move towards harmonization to reduce complexity and improve ease of use. The reduce wait times the FDA will continue to extend devices in the break-through designation and rely on the use certification bodies or 3rd party FDA reviewers like BeanStock Ventures.
Where do you see Jama Software fitting in as the product development landscape evolves, and what can our customers expect as 2023 approaches?
De Los Santos: When properly configured and coupled with a simple design control process, Jama Connect significantly reduces the documentation burden for our customers. In the same way that a good source code management system facilitates code reuse, Jama Connect facilitates re-use of requirements, test cases, and risk documentation. There have been some recent improvements to the Jama Connect that I’ve been requesting since I was a Jama Software customer. I hope people take time to take advantage of them.
Shawnnah Monterrey – CEO, Beanstock Ventures
20+ years’ experience in the medical industry, Shawnnah Monterrey knows a thing or two about guiding innovative products to market.
Prior to founding BeanStock Ventures, she obtained a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of California, San Diego and an executive MBA from San Diego State University, then went on to hold product development management positions across numerous global firms, including Illumina, Invetech, Medtronic and Carl Zeiss Meditec. Through this work, she continued to develop a passion for innovation in medical devices, life sciences, and biotechnology.
BeanStock Ventures
BeanStock Ventures is 1 of 9 FDA-accredited Third Party Review Organizations globally which provides software development and regulatory compliance products and services to minimize complexity, and reduce cost and time to market of innovative medical devices.
BeanStock Ventures has over 140 years of combined experience in software development for the healthcare and life science space.
833.688.BEAN (2326)
Michelle Wu – Principal Consultant at Michelle Wu Consulting
Michelle Wu is a senior leader with 20 years of experience in the medical device and life sciences industries with roles in executive leadership, product and process development, manufacturing, and quality. Michelle has a history of successful medical device product development, strategic planning and execution, building teams, process evolution, and managing organizational change. She values a collaborative and diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment, believing that diverse perspectives lead to the best ideas, more cohesive teams, and better results.
Ivan Ma
Ivan Ma has nearly two decades of experience in the medical device industry holding leadership and design positions spanning a wide range of medical devices; from single use devices and active implantables to complex surgical robotic systems. Ivan specializes in bringing early phase projects through development in preparation for FDA submission and human use by introducing balanced discipline to an inherently chaotic process.
Vincent Balgos
Vincent Balgos currently leads the Medical Solution at Jama Software. Prior to joining Jama Software, he worked in the medical device / IVD industry for over 17 years with roles in systems engineering, product development and project management. Vincent has successful history in launching new products to the global regulated market, and is experienced in product development, risk management, quality systems, and medical device regulations.
Romer De Los Santos
Romer De Los Santos has been developing software and firmware in the medical device industry since 1999. He is proud to have been involved in the development of a wide variety of medical devices including insulin infusion pumps, continuous glucose sensors, solid state mobile SPECT cameras, sequencers, liquid handling robots, and various IVD assays. He’s served in the roles of software developer, product owner, scrum master, internal auditor, systems engineer, software project lead, core team leader, and technical product manager before joining Jama Software as a senior consultant this past February.
In this blog, we announce Jama Connect® for Robotics, which leverages functional safety and best practices for robotics product development.
Jama Connect® for Robotics
Reduce deployment time, ensure best practice adoption, and increase the success rate of innovation in robotics development
Leveraging functional safety and best practices for robotics product development based on the IEC 61508 industrial standard.
Jama Software®, the industry-leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, has announced the launch of Jama Connect for Robotics, which incorporates product development and functional safety best practices based on the IEC 61508 industrial standard for robotics product development.
Jama Connect for Robotics is a complete set of frameworks, example projects, and procedural, export, and configuration documentation that helps teams reduce deployment time, ensure best practice adoption, and increase the success rate of innovation. This solution comes with a fully equipped package that contains a robotics dataset, a procedural guide to functional safety based on IEC 61508, and other relevant guides. All these items help companies accelerate robotics product development with comprehensive reporting to document the process and improve compliance.
”Jama Software is proud to release a first-of-its-kind solution to the market that caters to all companies innovating and developing robotics applications,” said Tom Tseki, Chief Revenue Officer of Jama Software. “Jama Connect for Robotics enables companies to rapidly innovate, reduce risk, implement Live Traceability™, and optimize their systems development process.”
“Jama Connect for Robotics provides a consistent and comprehensible way to specify, analyze, and create critical products in compliance with IEC 61508,” stated Nicole Pappler, Senior Functional Safety Expert, AlektoMetis. “This solution allows for a structured approach to assigning functionality and safety functions to components. In addition, the solution provides a framework to accumulate the relevant and necessary documentation and evidence needed for getting the functional safety capabilities of the final product confirmed by the certification bodies.
About Jama Software
Jama Software is focused on maximizing innovation success. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, autonomous vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect® to minimize the risk of product failure, delays, cost overruns, compliance gaps, defects, and rework. Jama Connect uniquely creates Live Traceability™ through siloed development, test, and risk activities to provide end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement. Our rapidly growing customer base of more than 12.5 million users across 30 countries spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, financial services, and insurance industries. For more information about Jama Connect services, please visit www.jamasoftware.com
Read the entire press release here! Jama Software® Launches Jama Connect® for Robotics
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Collaboration
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, Carleda Wade, Senior Consultantat Jama Software, walks through how to collaborate with others users in Jama Connect.
In this session, viewers will learn how to:
Use the comment widget to @mention a user or group
Leverage action tags to designate high-priority comments
Use the Stream tab and the project dashboard stream view to see comments
Filter for comments that require action
Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Carleda Wade: Hi, I’m Carleda Wade, Senior Consultant at Jama Software. By the end of this training, you’ll be familiar with how to collaborate in Jama Connect and have the confidence and basic skills to begin interacting with other users in the application. In this session, we will use the comment widget to @mention a user or group, leverage action tags to designate high-priority comments, use the stream tab and the project dashboard stream view to see comments, and we will filter for comments that require action.
Wade: So now let’s jump back into Jama Connect. As you can see, I’m back on the homepage. You can see bookmarks and recently viewed items on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand side, you’ll see active reviews and then stream activity in the bottom right-hand. If I click on the view all stream activity link here, it will bring me to this stream tab. From here, if I want to I can see all of the comments that are across the various projects within my Jama instance.
I also have the ability to apply a filter to, let’s say, look for any open questions, and when I do that, you’ll see any question that doesn’t have a resolution that’s being open. I can choose to reply to this or answer this question directly from here by clicking on answer question. And then when I answer this question, not only will you see it presented here in this stream, but if I go back to my project, this information, once I refresh this, will show up here in my activity stream. So here you can see both the comment as well as the response. From my dashboard, this activity stream will be a comprehensive viewing of not only changes made in the project but also comments that are made within the project. Here if ever I could choose to do a search for, let’s say, Joe, and anything that either was created by Joe or has Joe tagged will show up. Also, from this dashboard, I can click on the stream.
Wade: This stream view will show me only comments that are made within my project. And once again, just like in the stream view for the full instance in the top header, I can apply filters if I like. Back to my project explorer, if I choose to, let’s say, look at my system requirements and maybe I want to look at climate monitoring, in this single-item view, I also have the ability to review comments. So if you have it enabled, you can click on review comments and see any comments that are made as part of the review module, or clicking on the comments will allow you to be able to interact directly with this particular requirement. So I could choose to create this comment, and maybe I want to have the person who owns this. So I want to have Joe, so I can @mention Joe to say, “Hey, can we clarify this?”
And then I can actually mark this action as a question. And when I do this, Joe will get an email notification that says that he needs to come into Jama and be able to reply to this. Joe would also have the ability to reply to his email, and that information will be added to this thread. But not only can I @mention a single user, but I also have the ability to @mention, let’s say, my risk team. And when I send this notification, every person who’s a part of that user group will get a notification, and once again, they can come in and start making comments directly. But let’s say, for whatever reason, after I make a comment that I decide that I need to delete it, or I inadvertently delete it.
So even though I just added this comment for the risk team, let’s say I choose to delete this, you’ll see the confirmation message that says to confirm, and let’s say I choose to delete it. But fear not because anything that happens in Jama stays in Jama. So now if I navigate out of the single item view back to the dashboard, when I… Let’s clear that. When I refresh my page you can see for the activity stream that this item is showing that it has been deleted. But if I want to, now I can click on restore, and all is well. Now you’ll see this comment is showing as un-deleted. So just to summarize, there are a number of different ways to be able to collaborate and comment on content within Jama. So just pick what works best for you, depending on where you are within the system at the time.
Thank you for watching.
To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Jama Connect Features
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Features in Five topics, including Risk Management, Reviews, and more.
As we enter 2023, Jama Software® asked selected thought leaders – both internal Jama Software employees and our external partners – across various industries for the trends and events they foresee unfolding over the next year and beyond.
In the third part of our five-part series, we asked Beau-Colby Thomson – Associate Account Executive at Jama Software – Vlad Tanasescu – Global Industrial Sales Lead at Jama Software – and Steven Meadows – Principal Solutions Lead at Jama Software – to weigh in on Industrial and Consumer Electronics (ICE) product and systems development trends they’re anticipating in 2023.
2023 Predictions for Industrial and Consumer Electronics Product Development
What product, systems, and software development trends are you expecting to take shape in 2023 as it pertains to the ICE industry?
Beau-Colby Thomson: Industrial robotics and automation adoption will continue to grow at a rapid pace to combat labor shortages and growing product demand.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) + edge computing use cases are growing year over year. This will introduce complex software development to product lines that historically may have been mostly hardware + firmware. The addition of a new discipline into product development organizations may result in disruptions to existing processes.
Energy Storage continues to be an area of focus for the world. As more utility infrastructures fail and the cost of renewable energy decreases, the demand for energy storage systems will grow.
Fusion/Fission/Nuclear is becoming more widely accepted (more so in Europe than in North America). The development of these products takes many years at a time to complete, however the headcount of the engineering organizations for these companies continues to grow now.
Steven Meadows: The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to become more prevalent across all industries. Everyday consumer electronics like laptops, home appliances, and tablets are manufactured with an increasing number of sensors and inputs that transfer data to different networks and applications. Improved remote monitoring of these systems can also be enabled through IoT helping customers to maintain their products with ease.
Cloud computing also continues to grow across the software industry. Cloud is becoming the golden standard allowing for more flexible, cheaper, and sustainable solutions. Companies increasingly rely on cloud computing for projects and daily activities, without the need for managing system administration, upgrades, and security.
DevOps is constantly evolving with more companies utilizing a unified software development approach, allowing for code to be delivered faster with improved quality. This means there is less time spent on the integration of teams, infrastructure management, and the deployment of code. Product managers continue to push for the implementation of DevOps, finding it critical to deliver their products at a lower cost, and with better quality outcomes.
Vlad Tanasescu:
Robotics: autonomous factories, warehouse and delivery robots, AgriRobots (agriculture), humanoids.
In terms of product and systems development, what do you think will remain the same over the next decade? What will change?
Thomson: The increasing level of connected products will drive more systems development maturity in organizations that fall under Industrial, Consumer Electronics, and Energy (ICE).
I believe over the next decade the struggle with writing ”good” requirements will not change.
Tanasescu:What will remain the same?
More software (SW) in systems, intelligence and autonomy in systems.
More autonomy.
Focus on smart / green energy (wind farms, etc.)
Innovation within roboticsand IoT.
What will change?
Functional Safety will become more important for industrial products.
New regulations will be introduced for robots as the technology evolves.
Meadows: Product development companies will continue to invest heavily in digital platforms which will help to streamline their processes, improve quality of their products, and improve team collaboration. Excel and Word are antiquated solutions that do not give product teams the necessary capabilities to handle complex development, so requirement solutions and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools will continue to see an uptick in investment going forward.
There will continue to be an emphasis placed on functional safety with the functional safety devices market set to hit $10 billion by 2030. This means teams will need to prioritize functional safety throughout their development process to ensure that products are safe for industrial or private use. Development companies will continue to invest in the certification of their products, conforming to functional safety standards such as IEC 61508. This gives vendors and customers increased confidence in the overall quality of their manufactured systems.
How do you foresee regulations shifting in ICE product and Systems Development over the next decade?
Thomson: We will definitely see more safety regulations imposed as products are introduced to the real world and unforeseen risks occur. I believe these will be both safety and cybersecurity related regulations.
This is mostly for automated technologies and energy products, potentially cybersecurity for connected consumer tech or IIOT applications.
Tanasescu: More dedicated FuSa (functional safety) standard will appear for robots, IoT devices, and autonomous systems as these technologies become more embedded in society.
Requirements engineering, traceability, risk analysis will become increasingly important.
Any major disruptions to the ICE product and systems development industry you’re anticipating in 2023?
Thomson: The predicted recession may have an impact on consumer spending therefore consumer technology development. Companies may also be reducing funding to innovative R&D or incubation projects.
Tanasescu: I’m not sure about 2023, but I believe that over the next 10 years the robotics sector will grow exponentially.
Over the next years the traditional home appliance manufacturers will need to become IoT companies and focus on connected devices.
What sorts of process adjustments do you think development teams will need to make to be successful in 2023?
Thomson: Standardization & maturity.
Tanasescu: Work as agile as possible, even in regulated fields, while maintaining engineering rigor. Embrace a best-of-breed tooling approach. Enable collaboration across many global stakeholders.
What do you think will be some of the differentiators between a company surviving to see 2030, and those that do not?
Thomson: The ability to achieve executive initiatives to get products to market quicker while minimizing defects found after launch
Tanasescu: Investment in engineering. Understanding the value of structure and measurable product definition. Understanding of the future trends and the importance of software driven & connected devices, autonomous systems and digitalization.
Meadows: Development companies need to embrace a proactive approach to safety and quality when developing their systems. By incorporating functional safety throughout the product lifecycle, companies are much more likely to release safe and market leading products. These companies, and their customers, will experience greater long-term benefits than those companies that manage their safety and quality processes reactively.
By educating development teams on how to define requirements from the stakeholder level down to component, companies will have a better chance of building exactly what they intend to. By incorporating AI to help with requirements definition, teams can gain a competitive edge and author requirements in a concise and meaningful way.
What advice would you give to new companies entering the ICE industry?
Thomson: Build your house on bricks, not sticks. Leverage as much outside expertise/tools and focus your engineer’s efforts on innovation.
Tanasescu: Start with a structured, process driven approach when it comes to the use of development tools and traceability processes early on to best enable scale across the development programs, as the business will grow.
Meadows: When entering the industrial and consumers electronics industry, there are a lot of areas to consider when it comes to product development. Primarily, new companies should educate themselves on applicable standards and product development best practices. They should also consider certification in different areas including functional safety to make their products more marketable across a broader range of geographies and customer profiles.
What topic(s) do you wish companies were paying more attention to?
Thomson: It would be ideal if companies analyzed their engineering deficiencies and understood the amount of capital that gets wasted money in product development.
Tanasescu: Engineering predictability. Advantages of using a best –of-breed toolchain.
Where do you see Jama Software fitting in as the product development landscape evolves, and what can our customers expect as 2023 approaches?
Thomson: Hopefully as an integral part of the best of breed landscape. The biggest expectation we can point our customers towards is our ability to measure project health through traceability and requirement scores.
Tanasescu: Jama Software will continue accelerating the time to market efforts of ICE companies, make development more predictable and measure product development efficiency. Jama Connect® will keep enabling ICE innovators to succeed globally. I see Jama Connect as an expert in complex requirements engineering, traceability in systems engineering which serves its customers as a trusted innovation partner.
Our customers can expect continuous investment in and commitment to our product and ICE industry solutions.
Meadows: As systems become more complex with increased connectivity between interfaces and networks, the need for a best-in-breed product development platform that enables Live Traceability™ is critical. Gone are the days when teams could get by documenting requirements, tests, and risks in Excel and Word.
To speed time to market, produce better and safer products, teams need to adopt digital solutions, giving them a competitive advantage. Jama Software continues to invest heavily in its core platform, Jama Connect. We have been incorporating AI capabilities to improve requirements authoring, enhancing integration options with other best in breed applications and always bringing out new capabilities to support the development of some of the most complex devices on the market today.
Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Migration & Data Mapping: 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 6 of our Roundtable Chat series, Richard Watson – Practice Director at Jama Software® – and Alisa Eikanas – Senior Consultant at Jama Software® – discuss migration & data mapping, and how to migrate your DOORS® data to a new tool.
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: Hi everybody, I hope you’re all enjoying watching the vlog so far and that you take the time to watch some of the others. I’m Richard Watson, and I’m part of the solution management team at Jama Software. In this vlog, I’ll be giving the DOORS angle on things. I’ve been a systems engineer for about 35 years, 20 of which was as the product manager for DOORS and DOORS Next. I now spend much of my time advising clients on migration strategies to Jama Connect. Today I’m joined by Alisa, who’s going to give the Jama side of things.
Alisa Eikanas: Hello everyone, and good morning Richard. My name is Alisa Eikanas, and I’ve been a consultant here at Jama Software for just about five years. In that time, I’ve supported hundreds of successful implementations and have extensive experience supporting customers with complex migration needs, so I’m tickled to be here.
Richard Watson: Organizations are often black and white when it comes to migration. Either they believe migration is too risky to form, and so they’re stuck in their current tool, or they trivialize things, and they think it’s as simple as pressing a button and everything is done.
In my experience migration isn’t complex, but it does involve taking a lot of very small decisions and then repeatedly executing against those decisions when you’re migrating the data itself.
Alisa Eikanas: Mm-hmm, I couldn’t agree more. I often use the analogy of moving to help illustrate this very same point to customers. When you’re making the decision to move to a new house, the benefits are obvious. A bigger house, better schools, et cetera, and there’s things you can do to make that moving process more efficient. You can hire a mover and do all of that stuff, but there’s no shortcutting the fact that you still have to label the boxes, tell the movers where they have to go.
So again, we can take care of the heavy lifting, but that attention to detail is something that’s not ever going to be avoided. And it might seem tedious, but it’s so necessary in order to avoid unnecessary frustrations if not given the proper attention at the proper time. There are typically two blocking points regarding migrations.
So first, management would like to… The migration process itself to be predictable so that they can follow the progress and predict how long it will take. Ultimately, what they’re trying to avoid is disruption to work, additional costs, making sure that the proper resources are available during that process. And secondly, for end users themselves, they expect the migration to run smoothly and for us to be able to demonstrate that the migration task has been executed without error.
For example, I was recently working on a migration with a team and the data that we were migrating from DOORS Classic, they’ve been working on that data for 20 years and some of the original engineers are still involved in the project. And so, you can imagine for them how stressful it is to consider 20 years of their work being moved and just wanting to make sure and not have any fears or reservations.
That as the data was moved, that there would be no negative impacts to that data. So it’s completely understandable, but again, these are things that Jama Connect has found ways to address proactively to ensure that both of those concerns… Having the efficient be predictable so that it can be efficient and not overly expensive. As well as for end users, just ensuring again that data integrity is maintained from point A to point B.
Richard Watson: Generating a business case for migration is also often terribly difficult. In fact, it’s very difficult to justify moving from IBM DOORS to IBM DOORS Next because it’s more of an emotional decision. One reason to move away from DOORS is the aim to adopt more of a model-based systems engineering approach. If you have that, then it becomes consistent for your engineers, easier to create reports, and cheaper for integrations.
We all know that without DLX, it’s terribly difficult in DOORS to keep a consistent data model between your different modules. Thinking about consistent data types between modules, for example. DOORS Next, unfortunately, is very much the same as DOORS. While it has got shared information types within a component, those types are independent of other components and other projects. So you can very quickly have different data sets in DOORS Next that diverge apart exactly the same as you do inside DOORS.
Alisa Eikanas: Yeah, I would add that there’s typically always a great deal of desire to migrate, but defeating the perception that it’s an insurmountable obstacle can be tricky. This, as in many other cases, is where Jama Software really excels and exemplifies our customer-centric approach to solutions. We don’t treat or expect our customers or their data to be the same.
So, before we even begin a migration effort… Or for those of you that are considering looking into migration, Jama Software offers a free DOORS data model diagnostic service, providing a financial breakdown of the benefits, removing your DOORS data to an MBSE approach. And following that migration, your data, both old and new, we’ll consistently respect the data model defined by your organization within your Jama Connect instance.
Richard Watson: Another fallacy is that sticking to a single vendor for migration makes things simpler. Migration tools must be stronger between those tools from the same vendor. So DOORS, migration to DOORS Next is not the case, unfortunately. So DOORS Next is a wholly new requirement system, it’s just like moving to a different tool from a different vendor.
The data inside of DOORS Next is very different to DOORS, so it’s not a natural upgrade. You do have to do data migration. When adopting a new requirements tool, it’s really important to establish that data model so that you can exploit the benefits of the new tool with a consistent data model.
Migrating your data from DOORS to DOORS Next attempts to recreate your DOORS data in DOORS Next exactly as it used to look like in DOORS, and that leaves the reshaping of that data to the end user. We all know that the end user will typically not clean the data once he starts using DOORS Next, and so inefficient data in DOORS effectively becomes inefficient data inside of DOORS Next.
Alisa Eikanas: Absolutely, and what you’re talking about is a missed opportunity. That opportunity to recognize we can look at our data, see that perhaps we’re not treating it consistently or in a standardized way. And as we’re migrating that data, there is an opportunity to, again, apply a data model that’s going to be consistent and afford you so many benefits.
So, when approaching migrations here at Jama Software, firstly we identify. We work with organizations to identify and define the data model most appropriate for your development process, and then we migrate your DOORS data into that model. This doesn’t result in compromised data in any way, but it avoids the mass reshaping or cleaning of data after it’s been migrated.
Jama Software brings over 150 years of shared DOORS experience that we can bring to bear in helping clients migrate to Jama Connect. And in addition to that, we have extensive experience supporting customers going through that actual process of moving their data from DOORS or D&G into Jama Connect.
Richard Watson: Alisa, perhaps the best thing to do next is simply to take a look at the tool. Should we take a look at Jama Connect?
Alisa Eikanas: Absolutely, let’s take a look at a project in Jama. But before we actually start poking around the project itself, let’s start with that data model we’ve been talking about. So, what we’re looking at here on this project dashboard is a rendering of that data model. So if we take a look at this example, we see that we have user needs, we have system requirements, system architecture, subsystem requirements, et cetera.
And in addition to showing each of those artifact types or item types, we also show the traceability paths between them. So for example, here we see our system requirements, and we see that we have those traceability lines established between the appropriate artifact types. We’re not ever going to see a user need directly connected to a subsystem requirement because through our data model, we’re just ensuring that that proper decomposition path is respected.
So again, that process of… As we’re migrating our data, taking the opportunity to identify and to establish a data model is just incredibly powerful and beneficial to our teams. Once we establish that model, and again, we’re going to migrate your data into that defined data model, we want to ensure that that transition is still comfortable for DOORS users. So again, this data model might be new, but the data is still the same.
It’s the same data that they had in DOORS. So that transition from DOORS to Jama is, for the most part… Or, it is a very comfortable one. Navigating around the project itself feels very similar for DOORS users, and I’ll give you an example of that. So, for example, if you’re looking at a DOORS project, you might see a folder with a number of modules located underneath that folder. And then of course, within our modules we’re going to have our individual objects.
So here we’re looking at a Jama project, and what we’re looking at is the project explorer. This will probably visually look similar enough to DOORS users, and what I’ve done is I’ve built out just a quick little example here. So, Jama has a different container name for this, but it’s essentially a DOORS folder. And then underneath that DOORS folder we’re going to see our individual modules listed out, and then if we open up one of our modules we’re going to see our individual objects.
Heading objects as well as our regular requirement or text objects. And that same hierarchical document structure that was established in DOORS, we’re able to carry that over seamlessly in Jama so that for DOORS users, again, it’s… Everything looks and is organized the same way that they’re used to seeing it, and it just makes it very comfortable.
But going back to that added benefit of having an established data model, for example, if I open up this system requirement, if I’m looking at the traceability information, here I can see that the system requirement has a parent, it has a child. But in this downstream bubble right here, I see that it’s red. That’s telling me that there’s a problem, it’s obviously not that it doesn’t have any children because I can see that, again, this user need has…
Or, that this system requirement has a parent user need and a downstream subsystem requirement. So, taking this example of a system requirement where Jama is telling me, “Hey, we’re missing some required coverage.” If I go back to that data model and I take a look at my system requirement, I can see that yes, I’ve satisfied that need to have a parent user need, and I’ve satisfied that need to have a child subsystem requirement. But I’ve yet to satisfy that need for a downstream architecture and a downstream verification.
So again, this is a very brief glimpse of the many benefits of having that established data model. But most, I would say the key takeaway again is that we can kill two birds with one stone. We’re migrating you to a more efficient system and tool as well as just ensuring that we’re able to also bring in efficiencies to your process by establishing that data model.
Richard Watson: That’s cool Alisa, thank you very much. So, that brings us to the end of this vlog for today. Hopefully, you’ve had some high-level overview of migration. Alisa, thank you very much for your discussion and perspective, that was super useful to actually see the tool.
I hope those listening to the vlog do have a reasonable starting point for migration, and I look forward to hearing about your successes in the future. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying this vlog series so far, stay tuned for the next entry in our series, it’ll be coming in a few weeks’ time. Thanks very much, Alisa.
Alisa Eikanas: Yep, thank you.
Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: 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 we enter 2023, Jama Software® asked selected thought leaders – both internal Jama Software employees and our external partners – across various industries for the trends and events they foresee unfolding over the next year and beyond.
In the second part of our five-part series, we asked Craig E. Miller, PhD – Principal Engineer at Ansys, to weigh in on product and systems development trends he’s anticipating in 2023.
Visit part 1 of this series, 2023 Predictions for Product & Systems Development Teams here. We will link the remaining 2023 Industry Predictions as they are published.
Read more about the author at the end of this blog. Note: The opinions expressed are those of Craig E. Miller, PhD.
2023 Predictions for Aerospace & Defense Product Development
Design Trends – What are the biggest trends you’re seeing in your industry right now? How will they impact A&D product, systems, and software development?
Craig E. Miller: The most common design trend — one that will continue in the short and long term — is identifying how a digital transformation can enable a connected digital thread. A connected digital thread enables an organization to realize efficiencies encompassing all design teams, how these teams exchange data, and how enterprises will exchange data. A&D companies that can weave the design digital thread with business will become industry leaders. The digital thread can significantly improve efficiency relating to supply chain, energy, and safety. For example, virtually certifying subsystems — to quickly add suppliers to approved vendor lists — can add flexibility to supply chains. Coordinating digital hardware design, embedded software, and data (from T&E and/or the field) can enable trade studies to optimize energy efficiency of complex systems and can identify failure modes and expedite design modifications on existing (and future) platforms for continuous improvement.
Biggest Challenges – What are some of the biggest challenges you think A&D engineering firms will be working to overcome in 2023?
Miller: Probably the biggest problem that A&D firms need to solve is balancing resource allocation. How do you fulfill your future digital strategy without compromising short-term production work? Another significant challenge is managing supply chains, as global conflicts and inflation threaten to disrupt them. I would also add workforce enablement and cross-pollinating primary engineering efforts across aeronautics, space, and cyber as important challenges with respect to maintaining a competitive edge.
Regulations – What changing regulatory guidelines do you anticipate having an impact on companies in 2023?
Miller: Enabling virtual certification and coordinating virtual hardware design with software and data both require standards and regulations on virtual engineering. Such standards and regulations need to be coordinated among government, academia, and industry, and consortiums should start as soon as possible.
Tool Innovation – From an A&D engineering toolset perspective, what are some of the processes you think forward-thinking firms will be working to leverage or incorporate into their process, and why?
Miller: Aerospace and defense firms recognize that making the right choices, early, is the only way to succeed against the dual problems of increasing complexity and decreasing timelines. And one of the best ways to improve decision making is through engineering simulation standards, some of which are being developed right now. These standards should capture contextual metadata, facilitate collaboration, and make it easier to share knowledge within an organization — all of which contributes to faster, better-informed decisions.
It will be vital for the industry to support and adopt effective standards in the years ahead. And the challenge goes beyond development and adoption, because you have to manage the transition, too. In other words, if you adopt a standard without defining a clear path from “here” to “there,” you risk your teams developing ad hoc approaches, and that leaves you once again without a standard.
In your opinion, what are the biggest differences between an A&D company that survives to see 2030, and one that doesn’t?
Miller: The biggest discriminator has to be the ability to adapt to increasing complexity on shorter time-scales. These two pressures are everywhere, and they compound each other.
What advice would you give to new companies entering the A&D industry?
Miller: Take advantage of hard-earned wisdom and start with the right approach. Common traits of successful digital transformation initiatives are an open ecosystem, mission-centric alignment across teams, and a connected digital thread to facilitate and maintain that alignment. This is the what established firms are trying to achieve, but to get there they must contend with their legacy data and processes, as well as promoting a cultural transformation to enable this journey.
What do you predict for regulation in the A&D industry in 2023?
Miller: Certification for process and people. Regulation of training standards for people supporting a digital transformation. What coursework, certifications, etc. are required when matriculating from traditional design and manufacturing into modern environments? And this isn’t a question just for design and manufacturing engineers — it applies equally to management, to track that change process.
Will those trends still be prevalent 5 years from now? 10 years?
Miller: The trend of digital transformation will evolve for the next 5-10 years. There are many aspects of an A&D business that digital transformation will affect, and each will have its own prioritization that dictates the short- and long-term tasks to enable their digital strategy.
About the Author:
Craig E. Miller, PhD – Principal Engineer at Ansys
Craig Miller is a Principal Application Engineer with ANSYS Inc, where he leads several multiphysics simulation efforts for the Aerospace & Defense industry. Prior to ANSYS, he designed and analyzed a range of products, from nuclear reactors to fiber optic devices. Craig was a Graduate Research Fellow while earning his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland and earned his BS in Engineering Science at Penn State.
