Tag Archive for: Requirements & Requirements Management

In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Manage by Exception: Data-driven Practices to Improve Product Quality”. Click HERE to watch the entire webinar.

Curious how data-driven practices unlock successful product delivery?

Our recent webinar explores the transformative approach of managing by exception in reducing product failure risk. In this session, we walk through why managing by data is crucial, how data “exceptions” uncover gaps, and real-life examples in product development.

During this informative session, Preston Mitchell, VP, Global Solutions at Jama Software®, offers insights on how Jama Connect® helps teams proactively prevent gaps in requirement quality and traceability to streamline their product delivery process.

Check out this webinar to learn:

  • Why data-based management is important
  • The definition of a data “exception” and how it uncovers gaps
  • Examples of “exceptions” in daily product development and requirements management
  • How Jama Connect’s unique features, such as Advanced Filters and Dashboards, can help your team manage by exception
  • How to proactively prevent exceptions using Jama Connect Advisor™ and Live Traceability
  • Discover how Jama Connect can help your team manage by exception and navigate product development with precision.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Manage by Exception: Data-driven Practices to Improve Product Quality

Preston Mitchell: Hello everyone and thank you for joining today. My name is Preston.. I’m the VP of our solutions department at Jama Software and I lead our rockstar team that delivers solutions and services for all of Jama Software’s customers. I’ve been with Jama Software for over 10 years and held several positions within the company and over the course of my time here, through hundreds of client engagements to onboard and deploy Jama Connect, I have learned a lot from our customers and our customers really are our inspiration. They’re building next-generation products like self-driving cars, life-saving medical devices, futuristic robots, and the thread that ties all of these customers together is the central theme of how we can make better decisions to improve the success rate of our R&D function or our product development function. So I’m really excited to talk to you all today about the theme of managing through data to do just that. How can we bring measurable improvement to your process?

So for the agenda today, we’re going to talk about the power of data, how Jama Software empowers our customers to use data and exception management, and some key measurements that we prioritize such as requirements quality and the traceability score. And then finally we’ll close out with how you can plan for success in this and just some Q&A from the audience. So we’ll have my colleagues helping out with the chat. Juliet’s going to share some of the questions, so don’t hesitate to use the chat to ask questions.

RELATED: How to Develop IoT Products with Security in Mind

Mitchell: All right, so it should be obvious to most, but managing through data brings several benefits to your organization. Software is a part of our day-to-day work and it’s enabled an exponential increase in collaboration and visibility. And increasing visibility to that critical data and the workflows allows teams to have a more shared understanding of the goals, the problems, and the action items that all go into making successful products. And rolling up this data allows the R&D and product development leaders to have more real-time metrics and make better business decisions. So when you start to manage through data, this increased visibility really encourages process improvement and also really professional growth. But at the same time, there’s a challenge that comes along with this. This increase in the amount of data that is available often is overwhelming given that the time that you have in a day is really a fixed resource.

We want to make this a little bit interactive. I’d be curious to hear from the audience, how do you use or maybe how do you not use data today in your decision-making with regards to developing new products? So Juliet, why don’t we pull up our first poll? What’s the primary method that your organization uses for major decisions in the development of the products and systems that you build? So we’ll give folks about 20 seconds to answer this.

Okay, and I see some interesting results coming in here so far. Well, I know it’s hard to pick just one primary as the reality is there are likely multiple of these here for really large decisions. I was wondering how many folks would pick the first and the last option. Intuition or just plain not sure. So let’s move forward here.

I have linked a very interesting Harvard Business Review article called Don’t Trust Your Gut. But if I were to summarize it, intuition is often glorified quite a bit in the business world and especially when people are wildly successful. So for example, if you make a big business or a personal bet that pays off, these are often celebrated. But in business, we hear a lot about failures too, and they’re often blamed on things like poor timing, and poor market fit, maybe a lot of it is poor execution, but one adjacent failure symptom is the lack of an alarm to trigger a change. So we often hear the old adage, that it’s better to fail fast than early so you have a chance to course correct.

RELATED: Reduce Project Risk in the Product Development Process

Mitchell: With the right data and the right alarm triggers, this is possible and for the customers that Jama Software works with, you have smart engineers, product managers, and business analysts, oftentimes biased and emotional. They can play a real role in making bad decisions that eventually lead to some sort of R&D or product development failure. And when your engineering leaders or even yourself don’t have the data on execution progress when your teams are not actually tracing requirements to the why or the need for customer validation. And when we don’t have insight into things like verification coverage, and all that missing data, you’re going to find that we encounter these problems way too late in the development cycle.

And we see this very often in the news, these failures that happen too late. Investigations happen, and recommendations are made, but how can we make data available to the right people so that we can prevent these issues from ever occurring in the first place? That’s what we’re going to talk more about today. And as the famed management guru, Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” So being able to use data to measure allows your teams to see recurring patterns or anomalies and then individuals can then take care of these before they become a larger problem. Or better yet, how can we create preventative measures and automation to improve the process overall?

So that leads us to the key principle that we’re going to talk about today. Management by exception. So management by exception is a methodology that’s really meant to empower your team with the data around early warning indicators so that you can make smarter and faster decisions. It also allows leadership to focus their time on the exceptions and not micromanaging or intervening with the teams if the majority of the engineering data shows that the product development is going as expected, and I really want to reemphasize that because it’s not meant to micromanage. In fact, it should lessen that. A common hurdle that teams face when you introduce a change where you’re transforming the organization by managing through data is resistance.

To watch the entire webinar, visit:

Manage by Exception: Data-driven Practices to Improve Product Quality


In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Accelerate Your ECSS Standards Compliance with Jama Connect®“. Click HERE to watch the entire thing.

Streamline your systems engineering efforts and ensure your products meet all the necessary industry standards.

Jama Connect® enables digital transformation with a more efficient and user-friendly approach to managing space systems development. It can optimize your systems engineering efforts and ensure your products meet all the necessary industry standards.

Learn how to incorporate regulations governing European space systems development into your Jama Connect solution. In this webinar, we discuss how customers can leverage a library of the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) standards right inside their Jama Connect instance.

Cary Bryczek, Director of Aerospace & Defense (A&D) Solutions at Jama Software® along with fellow A&D experts Alisa Eikanas and Martijn Janssen, provide a high-level overview of the ECSS standards, along with best practices for leveraging them within Jama Connect, including:

  • ECSS Process workflows and how they align with processes managed within Jama Connect
  • Establishing an ECSS Library in Jama Connect to provide a Single Source of Truth
  • Explanation on how to tailor the ECSS requirements and leverage Jama Connect’s Reuse capability

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Accelerate Your ECSS Standards Compliance with Jama Connect®

Cary Bryczek: So welcome to today’s webinar. I am Cary Bryczek, the Director of Aerospace and Defense Solutions. I lead up a global team of industry and Jama Connect experts. For today’s webinar, two esteemed members of the team will be speaking. First to speak is Martijn Janssen. Martijn is a senior consultant at Jama Software. He has been working with PLM and requirements management solutions for over 15 years and is very proficient in not only Jama Connect but the Siemens industry software solutions as well as PTC Windchill. He currently works on implementing space-related systems such as satellites, launchers, and space-related components in the European Union for our Jama Connect partners. Martijn is a specialist in both systems engineering and information technologies.

We are also joined by Alisa Eikanas. Alisa is a senior consultant at Jama Software. She has over 15 years of experience supporting multi-discipline engineering teams and brings more than 10 years of experience as a business analyst to Jama’s customers. She works with our largest US government and commercial space customers in the US and she’s an expert at helping customers migrate data from legacy requirements tools such as Doors to Jama Connect. And with that, I’ll pass it over to you Martijn.

RELATED: Jama Connect® for Space Systems Datasheet

Martijn Janssen: Well, thank you for the introduction there, Cary. So welcome everybody to our webinar on ECSS. I’m very excited today to introduce you to the way we manage ECSS standards within Jama Connect. Over the past couple of years, we’ve been working with a lot of customers on managing ECSS standards within our solutions, and today we’re going to show you some examples of how we manage to do that.

So without further ado, I’m going to go over some of the ECSS standards, which include,  the use cases our customers face, and then afterward Alisa will dive into the system and show you some of those use cases in action in Jama Connect. Let’s dive into the presentation.

When we talk about ECSS, and I presume many of you here already are aware, but for those of you that are not aware of ECSS, ECSS is a European Cooperation and it’s a collaboration between the ESA, the European Space Agency, and many different other space agencies across the world to make sure that we have a single set of standards that we can use across companies working in the European space activities. Many of our customers around the world are looking to those standards, making sure they’re compliant with them, and working with those standards in different projects and at different levels.

So ECSS is a standard. You can find a lot of information on the website for ESA about the standards. They’re all there to be found if you’re not aware of them already. The way that ECSS is organized and set up is something you will see in the standards on the website itself, but we also have the organization within our Jama Connect application. So once Alisa’s going to show the demo, you will recognize a lot of those structures in Jama Connect.

RELATED: CIMdata: Digital Thread in Aerospace and Defense

Janssen: So when we talk about the standards, the standards are divided into branches and disciplines. So you will find, for example, the different branches on the top level there. So for example, the space project management branch or the engineering branch. Below those branches, you will find a lot of disciplines detailed per section. They are numbered in a specific way. Again, when we look into the demo, you will see a lot of those specific annotations come back and we maintained that same structure within Jama. So many of our customers use a subset or a number of these standards in their Jama Connect application to make sure they are compliant and they are working towards the standards that ESA has set for these specific projects. So the main structure in here is recognizable towards what is on the websites and in the organization of ECSS.

Outside of the actual organization of the disciplines and the branches, the disciplines themselves are even further, let’s say detailed in documents. All these documents fall into one of those disciplines. So for example, when we look at the discipline of system engineering, you can see a large number of documents below that, talk about different topics. So for example, on testing, on verification, on referencing coordinate systems, all kinds of documents describing the standard, what you need to do to be compliant towards those standards.

Now these documents are pulled into Jama Connect. And as you will see later on, we have all these documents available for you to start tracking and tracing compliance. So the structure from a branch to a discipline to all the documents is something that you will recognize in the demo later on by Alisa and where you can find and filter and search for certain topics that are numbered and maintained by the ESA.

To watch the entire webinar, visit:

Accelerate Your ECSS Standards Compliance with Jama Connect®


Blog image for MIL-STD-810 showing engineer holding a clipboard.

MIL-STD-810: Ensuring Quality and Reliability in Challenging Defense Environments

From the desert to swamps to the frozen tundra, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) created the Military Standard 810 (MIL-STD-810) to enforce manufacturers deliver a product that will not fail in operational environments. This compliance regulation outlines environmental engineering considerations for testing equipment’s durability, performance, and quality in challenging and harsh environments. The blog will explain the significance of MIL-STD-810, its purpose, and how it impacts industries and consumers worldwide

Understanding MIL-STD-810

MIL-STD-810, widely used by commercial, non-military entities as well, prescribes a series of tests and procedures that have been created to measure the durability of equipment and its ability to survive in tough conditions.

Initially published in 1962, the standard has been regularly updated to keep up with technological developments and the varying environmental conditions. MIL-STD-810 thus serves as a useful tool for manufacturers, guaranteeing that their products can withstand the toughest circumstances.

The Purpose of MIL-STD-810

Defense contractors and manufacturers are required to meet the requirements outlined in this standard to sell their equipment to the U.S. military. MIL-STD-810 is used to ensure operability of equipment in conditions it may come across during its service life. The standard provides a broad selection of environmental factors and tests to go with them, allowing companies to find any weak points and make the necessary changes. By following this standard, it will help to improve the reliability and robustness of their product, resulting in successful harsh environment operation and a longer life in the field.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Airborne Systems Solution Overview

Key Environmental Factors Tested under MIL-STD-810

  • Temperature: Equipment is exposed to a broad range of temperatures, from frigid cold to blazing hot, to make sure its performance and security are up to the task in different climates.
  • Humidity: Checking the humidity level helps to guard the device from harm and ensure it functions properly in areas with high levels of moisture.
  • Shock: Devices are tested by subjecting them to mechanical shocks, such as drops and vibrations, to replicate real-world conditions and to evaluate their structural soundness and operation.
  • Vibration: The MIL-STD-810 outlines a variety of different vibration tests to simulate any transportation or operational movements that may affect the performance or parts of a device.
  • Sand and Dust: The capability of the equipment to resist being exposed to tiny particles such as sand and dust that are commonly seen in desert and arid areas is appraised.
  • Altitude: Checking the equipment’s operation at various altitudes determines its capacity in different air pressures, guaranteeing its dependability in high-altitude zones.
  • Solar Radiation: Evaluating the equipment’s response to solar radiation helps manufacturers understand its performance in outdoor environments with direct sunlight exposure.
  • Rain: Devices are tested to withstand exposure to rain and water, preventing water intrusion and potential short circuits.

Impact on Industries

    • Military and Defense: MIL-STD-810 is mandatory for military and defense contractors. Ensuring equipment works well in harsh conditions is vital for military operations. Compliance reduces the risk of equipment failure in critical situations.
    • Aerospace and Aviation: The aerospace industry uses MIL-STD-810 to make equipment for aircraft and space missions. The standard makes sure that equipment can handle extremes in flight and space conditions.
    • Consumer Electronics: MIL-STD-810, originally intended for military use, has been embraced by consumer electronics producers. This has resulted in the production of rugged smartphones, tablets, and laptops for those with a fast-paced lifestyle or who do their work in demanding settings.
    • Industrial Equipment: Industrial equipment and machinery often must endure difficult conditions, such as those found at construction sites and mining operations. By following MIL-STD-810 guidelines, manufacturers are able to produce sturdy and resilient machinery that can endure these types of settings, reducing the need for maintenance and repairs.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability Diagnostic

Conclusion

The MIL-STD-810 is of major importance in the assurance of the quality and dependability of equipment across myriads of industries. By undergoing multiple environmental examinations, companies can notice and tackle possible problems before their equipment is delivered to customers and stakeholders. This guideline has not only ensured reliability of military devices but has also played a role in the construction and production of commercial electronics and industrial machines.

In a world where technology is more and more ubiquitous, MIL-STD-810 remains a fundamental point of reference in managing the difficulties of hostile and unpredictable environmental conditions. Its impact will remain, prompting manufacturers to construct reliable and rugged devices that meet the requirements of the DoD and commercial customers across the world.

How Can Jama Connect® Help?

Jama Connect®‘s digital engineering strategy is essential for any organization seeking to increase efficiency and reliability. It serves as an essential bridge between teams, optimizing design and engineering processes. With its comprehensive system view and dependable source of information, it is an invaluable asset for achieving success.

Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Decoteau Wilkerson and Cary Bryczek.


In this video, we demonstrate the Baselines feature in Jama Connect®. 

Jama Connect Features in Five: Baselines

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 the powerful features in Jama Connect… in under five minutes.

In this Features in Five video, Jama Software® subject matter expert Julie Goodner, Senior Product Manager, demonstrates Baseline capabilities in Jama Connect.

 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Julie Goodner: Hi. My name is Julie Goodner. I’m a Senior Product Manager here at Jama Software. In this video, I will walk you through Baselines in Jama Connect. I’ll cover what a Baseline source is, what Baselines are, when to create one, and some of our new Baseline features.

A Baseline source in Jama Connect is a collection of all versions of the requirements or other items that have been selected for a Baseline. A Baseline in Jama Connect is a snapshot in time and you can create a baseline to capture any milestone. In addition, a Baseline is also automatically captured when a review—or a revision to a review—is created.

A Baseline allows our users to capture the state of their content in alignment with key points in their product development cycle, such as during peer reviews, at key approval gates, or when generating documents from Jama Connect. In addition, utilizing Baselines allows our users to compare items as they change over time.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability Diagnostic

Goodner: With Baseline sources, you can see if the Baseline or Review contains signatures, see Baseline statuses, quickly navigate to a Review, or do a comparison summary between two Baselines and export the redlined report.

With Baselines, you can add electronic signatures, compare two Baselines with redline edits from within Jama Connect, compare items in your Baseline items to their current state in the project, add a status, and navigate to the Baseline version in the project view.

So now let’s get into the demo.

RELATED: The Benefits of Jama Connect®: Supercharge Your Systems Engineering and Development Process

Goodner: The Baseline can be manually created in many ways:

  • Right-clicking on a container, set, folder, or item, and adding a Baseline.
  • From the Filters tab, select any filter, and add a Baseline.
  • From the Baseline tab, you can select “Add a New Baseline” from the dropdown, or you can right-click on an existing source and add a Baseline.
  • From our new Baseline source header, you can add a Baseline from there.

Again, a Baseline is automatically created with any Review or revision of a Review.

RELATED: Reduce Project Risk in the Product Development Process

Goodner: From the Baseline source, you can see high-level information about its corresponding baselines that used to be hidden within a baseline details section. When selecting two Baselines, you can choose to do a comparison. This comparison summary model informs you have any updates that have been changed. You can also export that report and view the red line edit.

From a Baseline in the List View, you can see what relationships, categories, or other metadata were used to associate with the items at the time of the Baseline. When selecting the link in a Baseline, it will take you to the historical view from within the project.

From the Baseline Document View, you can choose to compare and see the differences in redline edit within Jama Connect, no longer needing to download reports.

If you would like to learn more about Jama Connect, how Jama Connect can optimize your product development process. Please visit our website at jamasoftware.com. If you’re already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information about Baselines, please contact your customer success manager or a Jama Software consultant.

Thank you.

To view more Jama Connect Features in Five topics, visit: Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series

INCOSE Handbook Overview

In this blog, we discuss INCOSE’s System Engineering Handbook V5. To download this handbook, click HERE.

Empowering Engineers: Exploring INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook V5

What is INCOSE?

The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) was founded as a collaborative effort to bring systems engineers together and provide them with resources to progress in their field. Their mission is to cultivate a strong network of professionals, supply educational materials, and create tools that will help systems engineers be successful. INCOSE is dedicated to elevating the global profile of the systems engineering (SE) profession.

RELATED: A Guide to Good Systems Engineering Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond

INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook

According to INCOSE, the Systems Engineering Handbook “shows what each systems engineering process activity entails in the context of designing for affordability and performance. On some projects, a given activity may be performed very informally (e.g., on the back of an envelope, or in an engineer’s notebook); or, on other projects, a more formal response is required with interim products under formal configuration control.”

The handbook provides assistance for individuals of various backgrounds and experience levels, such as those just beginning their systems engineering journey, engineers from different disciplines needing to apply the principles of systems engineering, and experienced engineers looking for a handy reference.

INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook V5

The newly released INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook V5 is a comprehensive guide to the discipline of SE which outlines the current best practices and serves as an informative reference for understanding SE in terms of content and application.

Some of the topics included in the latest handbook include:

  • Elaboration on the key systems life cycle processes described in ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2023;
  • Chapters covering key systems engineering concepts, system lifecycle processes and methods, tailoring and application considerations, systems engineering in practice; and
  • Appendices, including an N2 diagram of the systems engineering processes and a detailed topical index.

DOWNLOAD: INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook V5

Applying INCOSE Standards Using Jama Connect Advisor™

System engineers focus on making each of the individual systems work together into an integrated whole that performs as expected across the lifecycle of the product. In order to deliver successful products, they need the right user needs and requirements. Efficient, precise, and professionally written requirements form the foundation of the product development process so that various teams (design, software, and hardware systems) can all work together with a shared and clear understanding of the project goals.

Jama Connect Advisor™ is a state-of-the-art requirements authoring guide and optimizer powered by natural language processing for engineering that helps a system engineer or a product developer write effective, well-organized requirement specifications based on industry-accepted INCOSE rules and the EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation.

To learn more, download our Jama Connect Advisor™ datasheet.


Medical Device & Life Sciences

In part two of this two-part video series, will demonstrate the latest solution offerings for Medical Device & Life Sciences in Jama Connect®. Click HERE for part 1 and  HERE to watch our related and full-length webinar, “Elevating Your Medical Device and Life Sciences Product Development Processes with Jama Connect.”

Jama Connect Features in Five: Medical Device & Life Sciences Solution 2.0 – Part 2

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 the powerful features in Jama Connect… in under five minutes.

In part two of this two-part Features in Five video series, Jama Software® subject matter expert Vincent Balgos, Director, Medical Device Solutions, continues his demonstration of the latest solution offerings for Medical Device & Life Sciences in Jama Connect.

Click HERE for part 1 and HERE to watch our related and full-length webinar, “Elevating Your Medical Device and Life Sciences Product Development Processes with Jama Connect.”

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Vincent Balgos: Hi. My name is Vincent Balgos, and I’m the Director of Medical Solutions here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to talk about our updates to our Medical Device and Life Sciences Solution 2.0. For the agenda, there are quite a few improvements I’d like to share with you today.

So the first thing I want to show is our Jama Connect Advisor™ example data. Released in 8.80, this new feature enables EARS and INCOSE rules for requirement quality authoring. Additional licenses are required, but wanted to share some of the capabilities examples right out of the box. So as you can see here, what we’ve shown, is, you know, the general use case description, but also an example requirement with the Jama Connect Advisor output. Again, this is a nonfunctional screenshot. We just wanted to share some of the information that you may see when having Jama Connect Advisor. Here’s, for example, for a green status, which means generally a good requirement, but let’s take a look at what a yellow requirement or maybe something that may need some rework and you can see which of the rules, particularly INCOSE, that is now flagged that is, you know, has some potential issues. And then the same is true with our red level of requirements.

So again this is potentially a useful tool to kind of share while authoring requirements for your project.

RELATED: The Top 5 Challenges in Digital Health Solution Development

Balgos: The next use case that we’d like to talk about is the industry standards trace. So in the standards use case, the first thing I want to share is this relationship rule diagram. As you can see here, we have user needs trace to system requirements, which is, you know, aligns with [21 CFR] 820.30, but also we have this new item type called standards reviewed is now traced to system requirements.

If you upload your standards into Jama Connect, what we can see for this particular item type is that we’ve identified now the standard, the clause number, the clause text, and identified does the standard apply for this particular project. What’s nice about once this is in Jama Connect, I can now actually do a trace downstream to the system requirement. Note, this project does not provide any standards due copyright issues, customers won’t need to vision their own standards for use and apply appropriately. The last thing we want to talk about is really the reports on this medical device framework update.

RELATED: Jama Connect® for Digital Health Solution Overview

Balgos: What I wanted to share is if I go into the admin area and I take a look at the reports, you can see now that we’ve now had the ability to upload and, you know, manage our own reports, but we’ve provided some additional categories and information to help organize the many reports that we have. As you can see here, we’ve identified some trace reports and some new SaMD reports. So if I go back to the project and let’s take a look at, let’s say, system requirements, I want to show you a new trace report that shows requirements to verification-only events. So for example, let’s say if we go on to, let’s say, our subsystem requirements that we have here I’m gonna pick this one.

I’m going ahead and go at export. Again, this is available now into the Medical Device Framework 2.0. What I want to show you is requirements to verification trace report. So if I go ahead and hit run, create a report, I’m gonna download it, and then what wanna share is this new trace report that we have, which now shows you the requirement, the verification test case associated with the requirement, But in addition, the latest test run and its test result status.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability Diagnostic

Balgos: So this helps clearly identify the requirement to verification traceability that’s may needed and they may be able to submit to your DHS. We have a similar one called the user needs to validation transport that falls the same above. The other thing we wanted to show is that we’ve added a couple popular and useful GitHub reports to this solution update. These are located up in our run reports area where we actually now included the test results report group by test case and the test result report grouped by test cycles, which are really, really helpful for understanding test management scenarios.

Okay. That’s for the general update for the the standard medical device framework. We have an additional updated solutions such as software as a medical device, research use only, and our new self-guided onboarding framework. So we definitely encourage you to look at that further.

Please contact your Jama success manager or consultant to learn how to implement these new solutions at your organization.

Thank you.

 

To view more Jama Connect Features in Five topics, visit: Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series


In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Effectively Managing Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries”. Click HERE to watch the entire thing.

If you’re in the automotive or semiconductor industries – cybersecurity is likely top of mind.

During this informative session Effectively Managing Cybersecurity in Jama Connect for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries, Kevin Dibble, Principal Consultant at Reinnovate Consulting, and Matt Mickle, Director of Automotive Solutions at Jama Software®, offer insights on how the right tooling solution can make a difference in managing a cybersecurity case.

In this webinar, attendees will see exactly how to:

  • Define cybersecurity goals, requirements, and concepts
  • Conduct threat analysis and risk assessment
  • Establish traceability to the architecture design and verification/validation of cybersecurity measures
  • Document the cybersecurity case and manage changes
  • Identify and classify assets for the subject of the cybersecurity case
  • Discover how Jama Connect can help you optimize your cybersecurity processes and stay ahead in the Automotive and Semiconductor industries.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Effectively Managing Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries

Kevin Dibble: Well, first I’m going to talk about what we’re going to talk about, so these are the topics that we’re going to cover. And without reading this slide, really we’re going to cover the development life cycle of creating, the example we’re going to use is a 48-volt power assist system. You might also think of it as a battery management system. And so I’ll go over the agenda, but what you can see on the is we’re going to cover everything from the planning in the case through the TARA work and down through the left side of the V and some of the right side of the V activities as well. And here’s how we’re going to do it. First, to get everyone oriented to 21434, we’re going to talk about the standard itself briefly and highlight some of the benefits of implementing a cybersecurity case in a tool, in a requirement management tool.

Then we’ve got some workflows to look at, the steps of the development life cycle for 21434 from the perspective of an OEM and then again from the perspective of a tier one. And then Matt is going to show the work products, the traceability, and what we’ve talked about at the beginning actually in the tool in a built-out project for a 40 volt power assist system. And then we’ll finish with some takeaways. So that’s what’s on tap for today. And so I want to make the case for managing cybersecurity and the cybersecurity case and the work products in a requirements management tool. So I’m going to just look at each one of these points. The first item is to improve collaboration between OEMs, tier ones, and tier twos.

Jama Connect supports ReqIF, which can be used for bidirectional communication of requirements, item definitions, et cetera, as well as updates to those assets. And so it supports better collaboration. One thing that Jama promotes is this idea of trace as you go. So traceability is not an afterthought handled by a requirement engineer at the end of the project that takes weeks to implement on a complex project. It’s something that the engineers are doing as they’re creating the requirements tracing to parent requirements, design blocks for requirement allocation, et cetera. And so this tool supports that traces you go methodology along with some views of the progress of tracing.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Automotive

Dibble: The impact analysis is a powerful tool when you trace as you go and the requirements left and right side V model assets are linked together. Then running impact analysis reports as changes come in midstream in programs, which they do in automotive for sure. You get that as a benefit. Like I mentioned earlier, requirements allocation. So allocating requirements to design blocks or interconnecting the requirement management system to design tools and doing allocation in those tools like Design Architect gives you some powerful analytics like test coverage reports automatically generated. Also connecting the tools through connectors gives you a toolchain view instead of disjointed tool. And finally, Jama Connect offers some analytics that we’ll see some of these in the demo that will give you a very clear indication of where you are in the project, especially in terms of requirements that are allocated, tests that have been covering requirements, and so on and so forth.

So with that, I’m going to orient everybody to 21434 in terms of the V model, which it’s centered on, and two other standards that you may be more familiar with. ISO 26262 and Automotive ASPICE. And so just a couple things here. If you are familiar with these other two standards, you’ll see that 21434 fits nicely alongside and that was intended by the ISO folks that did the standard. They very much aligned it with ISO 26262, and really even in nomenclature. So whereas in safety we have safety goals, in security we have security goals, in safety, we have the HARA, the hazard and risk assessment. In cybersecurity, we have the TARA, threat, and risk assessment, and so on and so forth. And also the common supporting processes like configuration management, change management, project management, document management, even confidence in use of software tools that all of these standards rely on are again repeated and required in 21434.

RELATED: A Guide to Road Vehicle Cybersecurity According to ISO 21434

Dibble: So just some basic organization of the standard in terms of the V model and then we’ll look at it in one more view in terms… this is directly out of ISO. And at Jama, we’ve added some color coding and I’m going to explain that. And so if you’re not familiar with this view, 21434 is oriented by clauses and sub-clauses. And so you can see the clause here like clause five is organizational, that’s policy and tool management and quality management and things. And then clause six, et cetera, and on down, that’s how this is organized. Jama has capabilities that support these sub-clauses. And so we’ve used a color system here to highlight that. The sub-clauses that are colored in green are fully supported and in fact, recommended to implement in Jama. The yellow are optional, they could be implemented in Jama.

And for most of these, we have customers that are implementing these types of things in Jama, but they also use other systems to implement them. And then this kind of yellow-green is partially supported. Jama can support some of the requirements but not all. And then of course red is not recommended for support in Jama and it’s usually house and other tools or things like production tools, et cetera. Okay, so what Jama brings to the table in terms of capabilities to support these green and yellow items are document building and generation. So the document management functionality as well as the exporting functionality. As you’ll see in the demo, you can export what has been entered in a requirements tree or in one view can be exported into a more of a document-style view that perhaps suppliers or other people might want to consume.

It has built-in collaboration tools for reviewing, which is very important because 21434, like 26262 requires review records, and all the work products are reviewed. Traceability and impact analysis, I already talked about. VNV verification and validation with the test manager tool as well as interconnections to other tools and analytics. There’s a nice support for the right side of the V activities. Using a common tool does bring alignment between different engineering disciplines, whether it’s hardware, software in systems, or if it’s QA tests and V&V activities versus development activities. Release planning and coverage through dashboards and status metrics and then of course baselining and reuse and whatnot.

And so this slide shows all of the items from the previous slide that were recommended or are optional and just shows how they would look in a project tree format. Again, Matt’s going to go through most of these items for our 48-volt power assist item that we’ve built out. Okay, one of the important features of Jama Connect as well as any requirement management tool is the ability to develop traceability. Here we’re showing the traceability model, which is their traceability models come with the product, but they also can be customized. And then I’ve got a little animation here to show for cybersecurity, some of those standard parts and tying them back to the standard. So for instance, in the model, I don’t know, it’s small print, but you can probably see cybersecurity asset, attack path, damage scenario, threat scenario. Those all correspond to the TARA and here are the sections that those are discussed in.

To watch the entire webinar, visit:

Effectively Managing Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries


CMMI Blog Part 2In part two of this two-part blog series, we continue the overview of our recent whitepaper, “How to Achieve Higher Levels of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) with Live Traceability™” Click HERE for part one of this blog and HERE to read the entire whitepaper.

How to Achieve Higher Levels of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI): Part 2

Benefits of Live Traceability™

The main benefits of Live Traceability across best-of-breed tools are as follows:

  • Reduce the risk of delays, cost overruns, rework, defects, and recalls with early detection of issues through exception management and save 40 to 110 times the cost of issues identified late in the process.
  • Achieve CMMI Level 2 maturity for Requirements Management with no after-the-fact manual effort.
  • Eliminate disruption to engineering teams that continue working in their chosen best-of-breed tools with no need to change tools, fields, values or processes.
  • Increase productivity and satisfaction of engineers with the confidence that they are always working on the latest version, reflective of all changes and comments.

Another core goal of CMMI Level 2 is to involve stakeholders in the requirement review and approval process (see table below). Let’s examine how companies achieve this goal either through meetings or online reviews.

CMMI Level 2 (Managed) Requirements Management

CMMI Chart

There are two ways to implement this practice: meetings or online reviews. Most engineering organizations still address stakeholder approvals through large and lengthy meetings that involve all relevant engineering disciplines scrolling through the requirements document for feedback. This is a highly inefficient approach that negatively impacts engineering productivity, morale and fails to capture relevant comments, feedback, revisions, and approvals from stakeholders given the format. More mature engineering organizations have brought the review and approval process online to improve the quality and timeliness of feedback, capture all version and approval histories online, and improve engineer productivity and morale. Let’s examine how companies have brought reviews online with Jama Connect® Review Center.

Review Center allows teams to send product requirements for review, define what’s required, invite relevant stakeholders to participate, collaborate, and iterate on resolving issues and approving agreed-upon requirements. By simplifying the revision and approval process, Review Center streamlines reviews and facilitates collaboration, giving stakeholders easy access to provide feedback where required. Jama Connect enables both informal and formal online review processes to support this CMMI best practice.

RELATED: Extending Live Traceability™ to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) with Jama Connect®

Formal Reviews

The formal review process enabled by Review Center is shown below:

Formal Review Center Chart

Review Center enables teams to define a review, invite participants, gather and incorporate feedback from relevant project stakeholders, iterate, track a review’s overall progress, and monitor progress and capture approval signatures if required. Reviewers can respond to a conversation that’s taking place, as well as mark items as “Approved” or “Rejected” to complete the review. Inside Review Center, reviewers can also add electronic signatures to reviews in order to comply with regulatory standards. Jama Connect captures the date and time of completed reviews for auditing, tying each signature to the document under review.

Informal Reviews

Organizations that still want the quality review aspects of Jama Connect but are not bound by producing formal documents of requirements may take a more iterative approach. A “rolling” review is a review that changes the scope of which requirements are included in each revision. For example, each requirement has a “state” field – Draft, Ready for Review, or Approved. In the project side of Jama Connect, requirement owners will mark requirements they feel are “Ready for Review.” Moderators can also edit requirements directly in the review based on feedback from Approvers. Using a Jama Connect Advanced Filter, a review will be started by pulling in only requirements that are marked “Ready for Review.” Using this methodology, the review is much smaller in scope and can typically be completed faster. On a regular cadence, the moderator will review feedback, make changes to requirements as necessary, or potentially update the requirement status to “Approved” if the required stakeholders have approved the requirement. When publishing a new revision, Jama Connect will pull new requirements into the review and cycle out requirements that are “Approved” (these requirements no longer meet the filter criteria of state = “Ready for Review”). This allows teams to review requirements on a regular cadence — or sprint — and cycle requirements into the review when they are ready for feedback and out of the review when they are “Approved.” Almost any item of content you create in Jama Connect may be sent for a review, including requirements, design, test cases, test plans, and test cycle results.

RELATED: Tracing Your Way to Success: The Crucial Role of Traceability in Modern Product and Systems Development

“Review Center is facilitating communication. It has ensured a shared view of the world and agreement from all stakeholders. There are no surprises anymore. Jama Connect enables us to review documents and make decisions easily with everyone coming to a shared conclusion. If we compare it to reviewing the spreadsheets and Word documents versus doing a review in Jama Connect Review Center, it’s about an 80% reduction in time, for sure.” – Craig Grocott, Head of Systems Engineering

To achieve CMMI Level 2 requires defining a development process and adhering to it. Below is a core goal for CMMI Level 2 – evaluate adherence to requirements management process.

CMMI Level 2 (Managed) Requirements Management

CMMI Table

Achieving this goal requires the ability to decompose requirements across engineering disciplines and maintain traceability up and downstream as the project progresses with significant changes and rework. Without an underlying system architecture and common data model, this goal becomes unattainable for most organizations. Attempts to manage through Word and Excel, become unwieldy and unable to meet the requirements for Live Traceability, leading to defects, delays, cost-overruns, and recalls. Below, you can see how easy it is to manage traceability and view up and downstream multiple levels in a trace view of requirements in Jama Connect. Jama Connect’s Traceability Model defines the data model across best-of-breed tools to capture actual behavior for traceability and management by exception.

Trace Vie

To achieve CMMI Level 3 requires defining a development process and adhering to it. Below is a core goal for CMMI Level 3 – establishing a verification process and adhering to it.

CMMI Level 3 (Defined) Verification

CMMI Level 3

Companies are achieving this goal through Jama Connect by establishing a Traceability Model that requires test verification for requirements and managing by exception through dashboard reporting to ensure verification happens across all requirements. Below is a sample verification dashboard to achieve this goal with customer-specific info redacted. Here you can see how the Verification Leader manages their function through exception management. Specific widgets on the dashboard track requirements without tests, failed tests, tests without requirements linked to verify, bugs without tests, and risks without upstream or downstream traceability. The Traceability Model established in Jama Connect defines the expected behavior against which all activity can be compared to generate exceptions that can be managed through the dashboard. Without this system architecture and data model, managing by exception becomes extremely manual and productivity killing, if not impossible.

CMMI Level 4 requires organizations to have developed predictive scores and benchmarks that enable management to identify product development risk early and remediate at much lower cost than if not identified until late in the development process or after product release into the market. The table below shows the definition of this core, Level 4 goal.

CMMI Level 4 (Quantitatively Managed) Process Performance

CMMI Level 4

Leading companies are achieving this goal by applying Jama Software’s Traceability Score™ and benchmarking engineering projects internally and externally against peer companies. Jama Software is the first to measure traceability thanks to our clients’ participation in a benchmarking dataset of over 40,000 complex product development projects spanning aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, industrial, medical device, semiconductor, space systems, and more. All of this is made possible by our core product, Jama Connect®, which enables the largest community of engineers using requirements management SaaS (Software as a Service) in the world.

To formally measure traceability, we have established the Traceability Score. The Traceability Score measures the level of actual process adherence to the expected traceability model and can be used to compare performance across projects, teams, divisions, and companies. This score can also determine impacts to schedule, budget, cycle times, risk, and quality.

RELATED: New Research Findings: The Impact of Live Traceability™ on the Digital Thread

Traceability Score definition

Traceability Score = # of established relationships among model elements as specified by the project’s traceability model.

The following diagram provides an illustration for the buildup of the calculation:

  1. At the individual requirement level, we can identify each expected relationship defined in a project’s traceability model (i.e., user needs defined by requirements, further refined by sub requirements, and test cases that should verify the requirement, etc.). We can then identify how many of these relationships have been established to get an individual requirement’s traceability.
  2. As we go one level higher and measure traceability within a particular element type (e.g., user needs, requirements, tests, etc.) we can sum up the number of expected and established relationships across the set of items, giving us traceability at the element type level.
  3. Finally, we can sum up the number of expected and established relationships across all element types, giving us the project’s total Traceability.
Chart showing three levels of traceability

Correlations & Hypothesis Test Results

As a process management tool, the value of a Traceability Score is to quantify actual adherence to the specified approach. To determine best practices from the data, statistical tests were run to understand how differing levels of project adherence to Live Traceability can impact desired outcomes. As we have shown, the Traceability Score measures actual adherence to the defined traceability model. The systems engineering discipline, the V model, quality engineering, and more – all rely on the intuition that this approach will yield better results. Anecdotal evidence abounds to support this intuition, but the dataset has been lacking to conduct statistical tests to test this hypothesis. Using our dataset, we were able to determine that Traceability Scores exhibit statistically significant correlations to the following outcomes and rejected the null hypothesis that these correlations were purely random.

1. Faster time to market

The first three tests focus on how Traceability Scores impact cycle time. Do higher Traceability Scores lead to faster test case execution and defect identification? This is a fundamental value asserted by systems engineering and the V-Model – that earlier detection of defects leads to fewer delays and much lower cost to correct. We measured the following times below and noted performance improvements in top versus bottom performers of 2.1X to 5.3X. Higher Traceability scores were found to lead to faster test case execution and defect detection having passed both of our statistical tests.

  1. Median Time to Execute Test Cases (2.6X faster)
  2. Median Time from Test Start to Defect Detection (5.3X faster)
  3. Median Time to Identify the Set of Defects (2.1X faster)

2. Higher quality

The last three tests focus on how Traceability Scores impact quality. Do higher Traceability Scores lead to a higher quality product? This is a fundamental value asserted by systems engineering and the V-Model – that a commitment to test case creation and execution leads to a higher degree of requirement verification and product quality. We measured the following aspects of testing and verification below and noted performance improvements in top versus bottom performers of 1.9X to 2.9X. Higher Traceability scores, having passed both of our statistical tests, led to more tests being completed and a higher percentage of passed tests.

  1. Percent of Requirements with Verification Coverage (1.9X higher)
  2. Percent of Requirements Verified (2.1X higher)
  3. Initial Test Case Failure Rate (2.4X lower)
  4. Final Test Case Failure Rate (2.9X lower)

Conclusion

The CMMI defines its best practices in terms of goals, practices, and artifacts. The CMMI does not address the underlying systems and data architecture required to enable these practices, deliver these artifacts, and achieve these goals. The systems architecture reality for most engineering organizations is highly fragmented with the necessary data to manage the engineering product and process (user needs, system level requirements, approvals, component level requirements, model designs, component requirement decompositions, interface definitions, test cases, test results, risk analysis, validations, traceability analysis, etc.) spread across hundreds of siloed tools, spreadsheets, emails, and chat tools with high degrees of uncertainty that any information reflects the latest version continually updated with all interdependencies.

As we have shown, it is extremely challenging if not impossible to move up the CMMI maturity model without addressing the underlying systems architecture and data model. Carnegie Mellon has chosen to use our software to train their students and leading companies have deployed Jama Connect in the ways noted above to achieve their CMMI objectives.

For those interested in exploring this topic further, we encourage you to reach out and have a conversation with one of our experts

Sources:
https://www.cmmi.co.uk/cmmi/cmmi.html
https://resources.jamasoftware.com/whitepaper/requirements-traceability-benchmark
This has been part two of a two-part blog series overviewing our recent whitepaper, “How to Achieve Higher Levels of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) with Live Traceability™” Click HERE to read the entire thing.


In part one of this two-part video series, will demonstrate the latest solution offerings for Medical Device & Life Sciences in Jama Connect. Click HERE to watch our related and full-length webinar, “Elevating Your Medical Device and Life Sciences Product Development Processes with Jama Connect®

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Medical Device & Life Sciences Solution 2.0 – Part 1

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 the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in under five minutes.

In part one of this two-part Features in Five video series, Jama Software® subject matter expert Vincent Balgos, Director, Medical Device Solutions, will demonstrate the latest solution offerings for Medical Device & Life Sciences in Jama Connect.

We will share part two of this video series here once it’s published.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Vincent Balgos: Hi. My name is Vincent Balgos, and I’m the Director of Medical Solutions here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to talk about our updates to our Medical Device & Life Sciences Solution 2.0. For the agenda, there are quite a few improvements I’d like to share with you today.

So the first thing I want to show is the general organization and layout of our new Medical Device & Life Sciences Solution 2.0. The first thing I want to show is that this new folder that actually has our new Medical Device framework and our other additional popular frameworks such as SaMD and Consumables frameworks. The other folder to mention is really kind of our new use case library that highlights additional use cases that we’ve seen across our three hundred-plus customers and their practices using Jama Connect.

So now let’s go ahead and jump into the tool. We’ve updated the relationship rule diagram with some minor improvements. The first thing we’ve done is really streamline the risk stream where we remove the validation trace and trace this now to an external resource item type. The purpose of this item type is a general documentation catch call for a lot of various traces that you may have.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Customer Success Programs

Balgos: The most common example is associated with risk. Not all risk controls are requirements, so we still need a way to trace to these non-requirement risk controls. These controls may vary depending on your risk management procedures. This provides additional risk coverage traceability that provides flexibility for your organization.

Another thing that we’ve done is actually updated our hazards library to include general hazards identified in ISO 14971. So you have pretty much a starting place with your hazard library The next item that I like to talk about is the risk Lookup Matrix. Available in [Jama Connect] 8.74, this feature allows a new Lookup Matrix risk analysis approach that automatically outputs the desired content based on the preconfigured Lookup table. This really aligns with [ISO] 14971.

Let me show you a quick demo of this. We’ve now implemented this as part of our Medical Device & Life Sciences Solution 2.0. As you can see here on the screen, I have a new item type called Risk Evaluation 2.0 that kind of again follows the general [ISO] 14971 schema of hazard sequence events, hazard situations, harms, but here is now where we’ve implemented this new Lookup Matrix feature. Where now I’ve identified the input pick list where I may be able to change this, and then that automatically updates my risk level based off that matrix.

RELATED: Elevating Your Medical Device and Life Sciences Product Development Processes with Jama Connect®

Balgos: So for example here, if I went ahead and increased this to frequency and I increase my severity from here and this one as well. I can see that both my p total and risk analysis has been updated per the Lookup Matrix. We have an additional Features in Five video that shows cases a little bit more. So we definitely encourage you to look at that further.

The other thing that we wanted to share with particularly this Medical Device update is we have now included preconfigured FMEA item types for ease of implementation for your risk processes. If I go ahead and look into my admin area, when I look at my item type, I’ve now included preconfigured D FMEAs, Process FMEAs and, Use FMEAs that you may configure based on your organization.

RELATED: G2 Again Names Jama Connect® the Standout Leader in Requirements Management Software in their Summer 2023 Grid® Report

Balgos: The intent of this is really to continually improve and provide new solutions to our customers based on customer feedback, industry trends, and best practices.

The industry vertical solution updates expand new use cases and solutions to address complex challenges while continuing to comply with industry regulations. Please contact your Jama Connect success manager or consultant to learn how to implement these new solutions at your organization.

Thank you.

To view more Jama Connect Features in Five topics, visit: Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series


CMMIIn part one of this two-part blog series, we provide an overview of our recent whitepaper, “How to Achieve Higher Levels of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) with Live Traceability™” Click HERE to read the entire thing.

How to Achieve Higher Levels of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI): Part 1

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, is a recognized standard for engineering best practices that reduce the risk of defects, delays, cost overruns, and recalls. Organizations that choose to adopt CMMI strive to progress up the five levels in the maturity model by implementing sequentially more advanced best practices spanning the engineering development process.

Jama Software® is honored to be chosen by Carnegie Mellon as the primary tool used to in its Master of Science in Software Engineering to train the next generation of software engineering leaders in best practices for requirements management, reviews, verification, validation, and process performance management.

The CMMI defines its best practices in terms of goals, practices, and artifacts. The CMMI does not address the underlying systems and data architecture required to enable these practices, deliver these artifacts, and achieve these goals. The systems architecture reality for most engineering organizations is highly fragmented with the necessary data to manage the engineering product and process (user needs, system level requirements, approvals, component level requirements, model designs, component requirement decompositions, interface definitions, test cases, test results, risk analysis, validations, traceability analysis, etc.) spread across hundreds of siloed tools, spreadsheets, emails, and chat tools with high degrees of uncertainty that any information reflects the latest version continually updated with all interdependencies.

The main reason for this landscape of siloed tools is that each engineering discipline is empowered to choose a best-of-breed tool to optimize engineer productivity within their team. The breadth of functionality covered in total by all of these tools — spanning all engineering disciplines — precludes the potential for a single software vendor to provide one software tool which could replace all these best-of-breed tools to the satisfaction of every engineer across disciplines. Generally speaking, each engineering field uses their chosen best-in-class technology to accomplish their objectives. That said, the data needed to achieve CMMI goals, practices, and artifacts is unstructured, unrelated, unconnected, and unmeasurable, which poses a serious challenge when it comes to achieving goals, practices, and artifacts that must span multiple disciplines to control, manage, and improve the engineering process. In order to advance along the maturity model, each engineering organization (regardless of size) needs a unified data model architecture and automated synchronization spanning best-of-breed tools. Without these improvements, most engineering organizations struggle to achieve Level 2 (Managed) and can only do so in a highly manual, after-the-fact manner that generally fails to deliver the desired outcome benefits.

Let’s take a look at a few specific examples from CMMI to demonstrate the need for a unifying data model and an overview of how to achieve it. The first one we will examine is a core practice from the Requirements Management section for Level 2 (Managed) that specifies bidirectional traceability from high level requirements through decomposed requirements and work products across engineering disciplines to generate and maintain a traceability matrix.

CMMI Level 2 (Managed) Requirements Management

CMMI Level 2 (Managed) Requirements Management

RELATED: Tracing Your Way to Success: The Crucial Role of Traceability in Modern Product and Systems Development

There are two ways companies can approach achieving this traceability practice: after-the-fact traceability or Live Traceability™.

  • After-the-fact traceability occurs after the product has been developed and is typically a highly manual effort to try and re-create artifacts to demonstrate traceability that should have occurred during the development process but did not. This effort is undertaken solely to comply with industry standards and satisfy auditor requests for demonstration of process maturity.
  • Live Traceability occurs in real time as the product development process progresses to improve overall productivity (by ensuring engineers across disciplines are always working off the most recent and correct versions) and to reduce the risk of negative product outcomes (delays, defects, rework, cost overruns, recalls, etc.) through early detection of issues. The benefits of early detection of issues are significant. Research by INCOSE found that issues not found until verification and validation are 40 to 110 times more costly than if found during design. For this reason, most companies want Live Traceability but are stuck with legacy tools and spreadsheets that do not support it. Since each engineering discipline is allowed to choose its own tooling, the result is a large number of tools with no relationship rules or mechanisms to create Live Traceability across them.

So how do you achieve Live Traceability?

STEP 1: Define a Traceability Model

Live Traceability requires a model of the key process elements and their relationship rules to monitor during the development process. Below you see a sample relationship rule diagram from Jama Connect® that defines a common data model that spans best-of-breed tools which enables engineering organizations to manage traceability in real-time and improve process performance. Relationship rules vary by industry and company-specific requirements. Best practice templates are provided to comply with industry standards and configured to meet client-specific needs. The definition of a traceability model forms the foundation for model-based systems engineering (MBSE) since it defines model elements and their relationship to each other in a consistent manner across the entire system architecture.

 

Step 2: Setup Continuous Sync for Siloed Tools/Spreadsheets

Once the relationship rules are defined, the next step is to set up continuous sync with best-of-breed tools and spreadsheets used by the various engineering disciplines. The traceability diagram below shows a typical example of best-of-breed tools and where they sync in the Jama Connect relationship model to deliver Live Traceability.

CMMI Relationship JIRA chart

Most companies prioritize the areas of the traceability model that are most prone to lead to costly issues in the absence of a continuous sync. Most commonly, these areas are:

  • Software task management – directly linking the decomposition of requirements into user stories enables Live Traceability through the software development process through testing and defect management.
  • Test automation – test cases are managed in Jama Connect to align to requirements and ensure traceability across all engineering disciplines with the test automation results sync’d to the traceability model at the verification step.
  • Risk analysis (DFMEA/FMEA) – is most often conducted in multiple Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and the assumption has been that Live Traceability was not possible with Excel. Jama Connect is the first requirements management solution to enable Live Traceability with Excel functions and spreadsheets. Risk teams can now work in their preferred spreadsheets AND for the first time achieve live traceability to stay in sync with changes made by any engineering team.
  • Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) – the first step in MBSE is to define a relationship model between all product requirements. Once a relationship model is defined, then specifications can be determined through modeling. Jama Connect uniquely provides model-based requirements to sync logically with a SysML modeling tool like Cameo No Magic.

RELATED: Traceability Matrix 101: Why It’s Not the Ultimate Solution for Managing Requirements

Step 3: Monitor for Exceptions

Live Traceability provides the ability, for the first time, to manage by exception the end-to-end product development process across all engineering disciplines. The traceability model defines expected process behavior that can be compared to actual activity to generate exceptions. These exceptions are the early warning indicators of issues that most often lead to delays, cost overruns, rework, defects, and recalls. Below is a sample exception management dashboard in Jama Connect.

traceability exception dashboard in jama connect

 

This has been part one of a two-part blog series overviewing our recent whitepaper, “How to Achieve Higher Levels of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) with Live Traceability™” Stay tuned for part two and click HERE to read the entire thing.