Change Management Best Practices: Protecting Your Software Tests
In the world of software development, ensuring the quality and reliability of a product is paramount. Yet, as teams face increasing pressure to deliver more features faster, maintaining disciplined processes can become a challenge. This is especially true when it comes to managing changes and ensuring that tests remain accurate and up to date.
The Value of Traceability
Traceability is a cornerstone of effective software quality management. By mapping feature requirements to test cases, teams can establish a clear connection between what needs to be built and how it will be validated. This approach not only ensures comprehensive test coverage but also enables teams to quickly identify and update tests when requirements change.
When supported by a requirements management tool, traceability becomes even more powerful. Features like traceability matrices and suspect triggers allow teams to see exactly which tests are impacted by upstream changes. This visibility enables faster reactions to changes, reducing the risk of defects slipping through the cracks.
However, as development teams grow smaller and the demand for rapid delivery increases, maintaining this level of discipline can become difficult. Detailed specifications may become less frequent, and the traceability between requirements and tests can erode.
Without traceability, managing changes becomes a manual and error-prone process. Late-stage changes, if not communicated effectively, can introduce regressions that go unnoticed until after release. This can lead to critical defects being discovered in the field, often by customers, which can have significant financial and reputational consequences.
The Cost of Defects
The cost of addressing defects increases exponentially the later they are discovered in the development lifecycle. Defects found during early stages, such as requirements definition or initial testing, are far less expensive to fix than those identified after release.
When defects are discovered in production, the impact extends beyond the immediate cost of fixing the issue. It can involve customer dissatisfaction, increased support workload, and even audits or reviews of the development process. These situations are not only costly but can also damage trust and relationships with key customers.
To avoid these pitfalls, teams must prioritize traceability and leverage tools that support it. Requirements management tools with built-in testing capabilities can provide features like suspect triggers, which notify teams of changes and help ensure that tests remain aligned with requirements.
By staying informed and proactive, teams can prevent costly mistakes and maintain the quality and reliability of their products. Traceability is not just a best practice; it’s a critical safeguard against the risks of rapid development cycles.
Looking Ahead
Proactive measures like traceability and impact analysis are essential for managing change effectively. In the next article, we’ll explore how impact analysis can help teams stay ahead of change and ensure that their processes remain robust.
Until then, remember: good tests deserve good processes. Don’t let bad things happen to them.
Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Mario Maldari.
Unlocking the Power of Jama Connect Interchange™ and MathWorks Integration
Keeping requirements and engineering tools in sync is crucial for effective product development. In complex product development, connecting requirements management with engineering tools is crucial for success.
When teams work in disconnected environments, the risk of errors and compliance gaps grows. An integration between Jama Connect Interchange™ and MathWorks tools like MATLAB and Simulink bridges this divide, creating a seamless, bidirectional flow of information. This connection ensures every team member, from system architects to design engineers, works in alignment with the most current data.
This powerful integration offers significant benefits that streamline development cycles and improve product quality. By automating the exchange of requirements and design data, teams can achieve greater efficiency and collaboration.
Key advantages include:
End-to-End Traceability: Create a clear, auditable link from high-level requirements to detailed model elements.
Reduced Errors: Minimize manual data entry mistakes and miscommunication between teams.
Streamlined Collaboration: Enable systems and design engineers to work together effectively in their preferred tools.
Time and Cost Savings: Automate processes to shorten development cycles and allow teams to focus on innovation.
WATCH THE FULL DEMO BELOW
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Patrick Garman: Hello, my name is Patrick Garman. In this demo, I’m going to walk through an example of using Jama Connect Interchange to share requirements with MathWorks tools, then bring that information back into Jama Connect® for complete traceability. Here’s what you’ll see.
First, I’m going to export a set of requirements from Jama Connect to a ReqIF file using Jama Connect Interchange. Next, I’ll import that ReqIF file into the requirements editor in MATLAB and link those requirements to model elements in Simulink. Once those links are in place, I’ll use MATLAB’s native ReqIF export feature to create a new ReqIF package that includes both the requirements and their Simulink connections.
Finally, I’ll import that ReqIF file back into Jama Connect using Jama Connect Interchange, which will update any requirements that were edited in MATLAB, and also create a new set of model items in Jama Connect to represent the Simulink model elements.
By the end of this process, you’ll see how Jama Connect maintains end-to-end traceability between requirements and model elements, bridging the gap between systems engineering and model-based design. So here I have a Jama Connect project, and you see I have a set of functional requirements here. And these are some requirements that I want to link to elements of a model that I’ve built in Simulink. And I’m going to start this process by exporting these requirements into a ReqIF file. And ReqIF file is essentially an XML file type, but it is a format that is specifically designed to be a standard file type for requirements management tools to enable this kind of exchange of information.
Garman: All right, so I’m gonna start. I’ve already connected my Jama Connect instance to my Jama Connect Interchange. And so I’m going to come to our conversations page, and I’m going to start a new conversation. Just gonna give it first, I need to tell it what tool I’m going to be connecting with, and so we’re going to go with Simulink. And next. And then we need to pick if we have more than one Jama Connect connector, we’ve gotta tell it which one we want to export and import with, and then we just need to pull the project ID. So here we can see this is project two fifty one. So I can search by project using the API ID, or I can use a text search using this drop-down menu.
So this project is a Simulink demo. There we go. Just type a few letters. It pops up for me. And then I’m gonna give my conversation a name, and this is how I can know if I’m having several projects or even several sections of a project that are exchanging information with Simulink. We want to have separate conversations for those. So now I’ve created the conversation space in Jama Connect Interchange, and I want to start by exporting. So I’m gonna come to my export page. And here, I’m gonna start by selecting a location.
Step one: Location. There are a few different ways that our locations can export a baseline. For this situation, I’m going to stick to the container and I’m going to select my functional requirements, even that set of. So I need to select either the project root or a component, and I’ll have a chance to filter items out. But here, I’m gonna select this component and click next. And within that, if there were other sets of items, I could filter those out, but this is the one that I want. So I’m going to save.
Now then, on export, there is field mapping that I can select. For example, if I had more than one item type, more than just functional requirements, I could select which item types I want to include. But I can also set which fields I want to keep for each of these. So there may be several fields that I just don’t care about bringing into MATLAB Simulink because they’re not relevant to the work that I want to do there. Or I just don’t need them and that other thing. So I can turn off any of these fields that I don’t care about or don’t need to have in in Simulink. So I’m only exporting the specific data that I want to import into Simulink.
Alright, so in this case, I’m really just keeping the name, description, and rationale fields. So I can save that export mapping, and Jama Connect will also capture all of your relationship types just in case we again we’re pulling the relationships back in, but those are all mapped automatically. So from here I can just initiate export. And confirm. And depending on how many items this is, you know, six or seven items, it’s going to be really fast. Depending on how many items you are trying to export into ReqIF, that could potentially take longer. But from this log screen, can see the progress, especially if you use the funnel icon, include debug, it brings in, it gives you some status, but ultimately, it gives you this link where you can download the ReqIF file. So here, I’m just gonna drag and drop that onto my desktop so I can find it. And now I’m going to switch over to MATLAB. So starting here in Requirements Editor, because I need to import those requirements that I did previously. Here, I’m gonna delete. So for that, I’m going to first clear out what I had done previously. I can’t do that. So I’m just gonna import. We are importing from ReqIF, and I’m just gonna browse to find the file that I saved to my Desktop.
Garman: So here we have that ReqIF I just created from Jama Connect. So we’ll open that. In these other settings, MATLAB automatically selects some things. I would say, you know, it automatically detects that it’s coming from Jama Connect. If you want to save this in a different location, you can do that here. Ultimately, we’re going to import these requirements. Alright. So here I have my second import, and you can see that these requirements have come through. Now then, I export the description rationale field. So why are they not showing up here? Because this is the MATLAB description and rationale field. For those Jama Connect elements, we need to come down here to custom attributes. And here we can see all of those, all of those fields as set that we exported. Alright. Now that we’re in MATLAB, this is our model that I want to start connecting things to. So in MATLAB, I’m going to select a model element here at the controller. And we will say that one point one is the one, so I can just right-click it and link from the controller. And I could even say, here we go, my Dryden Wind gust models are part of one point three. So again, I can create the link there. And let’s do one more. Let’s do this small gain one. We’ll link that to one point six. Okay. So now we’ve made we’ve added all of our links And and so now what we want to do is we want to take what we’ve done, I want to save it, but then I’m going to export this back to ReqIF.
Here, I can just reuse the original mapping from Jama Connect. If there are, you know, attributes that you want to remove, you can do that here. But the most important thing is we want to export links. So make sure that this export links box is checked, and then we can set a location. I’m gonna move this to our desktop again for easier finding. When we’re ready, we can just click export. So it’s running through everything. It’s gonna save that to our desktop. So, what we can do now is let’s come back to Jama Connect Interchange, and I’m going to switch to import because now we’ve pulled that data from MATLAB and Simulink and we want to bring it into Jama Connect. So I’m gonna go to my import in the same conversation. Click upload.
I’m gonna select that file that I just pulled out of Simulink. And we’ve already set the location, which we can edit if we need to, but we’re gonna leave it at the same location. And here we’re gonna map for the import. So we want to have our functional requirements mapped back to functional requirements in Jama Connect. And these others, these are those model elements that we want to bring back in. And so I’m gonna bring those in as Models. So I can select what item type in Jama Connect I want to have as a reference to those elements back in MATLAB Simulink. So I’ve turned those on. Now I’m gonna, oops, save our item type mappings. And I can switch to fields. And here, the same thing. I just want to map everything back to what it should be in Jama Connect. So here, I’m looking at those model elements. So we want to create this as a set. And we want to bring in the name of the set to the or the name of the collection from MATLAB to a set name in Jama Connect. But then we also have to establish these object types. So here are just Simulink objects. If we had, say, headers or information items, we could maybe map those differently. But we want to tell Jama Connect the Simulink objects should be brought in as folders, text, or models? And in this case, that’s the actual model elements. So we’ll bring them in as models, which is the item type that we map to in the first step.
So now Jama Connect is going to generate the mapping. So we are gonna pull here are the elements, the metadata elements that are found on these Simulink objects, and we just wanna map these back to an item in Jama Connect. So here description will go to description, name goes to name. And if we want to keep if there is a, you know, key, we could map that to an additional field. But once we’re done, we’re gonna click save.
Garman: Now we will move on to our next item type, which is functional requirements. And, again, functional requirements will come back in as a set. And we really only have to map those fields that we want to update. So here I can just leave that as a name, and here a functional requirement. We’ll go back to the functional requirement. And, again, we really don’t have to map many of these fields back if we’re not actually bringing in field-level updates. So here, I’m just gonna map the name. If I had made changes to the other fields in MATLAB, I would change those here. And the final step, I wanna go to relationships, and I just need to map these back into the appropriate even though they’re originally pulled from Jama Connect, and mapping them back to the relationship types that they were pulled from. The good thing about doing this import mapping is that you really only have to do it once. Once you’ve mapped everything in this conversation, you can just keep reusing this conversation and make updates as necessary.
Okay. Another thing you’ll notice with each of these relationships, have this option to reverse direction. And there, that is because some tools treat traceability in a slightly different direction. So, what is happening right now in Simulink, the way I created those is that the model element is actually upstream of the requirement. But in Jama Connect, we want the requirement to be upstream from the model. So I can just I can fix that by clicking this box to reverse direction. On each of these so that when it brings it in, they will be in the correct the relationships will be in the correct cardinal direction. Alright. So once we’ve done that, we can click save.
And now that we’ve mapped everything, we can initiate import. And Jama Connect is gonna ask us, “Do we want to update existing items?” And that’s what we want to choose for this, because we want to update the existing functional requirements, and those model elements will be brought in as new items. Now then, in future iterations, if we export these functional requirements and these model elements into Simulink again, say we’ve made updates, we want to redo it again, it’ll update the existing models that you’ve already imported. If you select create new items, it will only create new items. It will not update any existing items. So in this situation, I want to update the existing items. So we’ll confirm. And tells us to take a look at the logs page, and it’ll take a little bit for this to finish. So again, we’ll get a complete message when it’s done. But if we want to see more, we can enable this debug option.
And you can see that Jama Connect Interchange is evaluating, and it’s saying like, “look, no field changes happened” with these, so we’re not going to update those. But here we go. We do have a few fields that we had to update, and we’re creating those relationships because again, we linked three items. All right, so let’s go back into Jama Connect, and if I refresh my tree, you see that there’s this additional component here under my functional requirements. If I expand that, I have this set of models. And then here I have each of those models. So here is the controller. And you can see it has a link back to that element, the description field. And it is related to the transfer history with a “Satisfied By” Marker.
And that concludes the demo. You’ve now seen how Jama Connect Interchange makes it possible to seamlessly exchange requirements with MATLAB and Simulink through the ReqIF standard. By moving requirements into MATLAB, linking them to model elements in Simulink, and then bringing those links back into GeometConnect, we’ve established full traceability between the system requirements and the model-based design. This integration helps your teams reduce errors, streamline collaboration across engineering disciplines, and maintain compliance with industry standards. Thank you for watching, and please reach out if you’d like to explore how Jama Connect can support your development process.
A Quality Leader’s Guide: How to Improve Quality Metrics in Medical Device Development
As a Quality leader in the medical device industry, you face constant pressure to not only ensure products are safe and effective, but to make sure your team is staying compliant with all applicable regulations. Passing audits, hitting project deadlines, and achieving first-time regulatory approval are always at the top of your mind. However, these important goals are often undermined by inefficient processes, disjointed systems that hinder collaboration, and teams not following your quality system procedures. The result? Delays, compliance risks, and, at the very worst, potential product issues.
This article provides a practical guide on how to overcome these challenges. We’ll explore how a modern, collaborative solution can help you improve key quality metrics, foster a true culture of quality, and turn compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage.
TL;DR: Discover how to improve your organization’s quality metrics by implementing a single source of truth for requirements, risk, and test management. With Jama Connect®, you can leverage live traceability, out-of-the-box workflows that are compliant to medical device regulations, and powerful reuse capabilities to reduce risk and streamline product development.
The Challenge: Why Traditional Quality Management Falls Short
If your teams are still relying on a mix of documents, spreadsheets, and siloed tools, you’re likely all too familiar with the pain points. Disconnected systems make it very difficult to maintain a clear, up-to-date view of the entire product development lifecycle. This leads to common problems that directly impact your quality metrics:
Inconsistent Processes: When information is scattered, it’s difficult to enforce standardized procedures, leading to deviations and errors.
Lack of Collaboration: Functional groups struggle to work together effectively, causing misalignments between design requirements, risk analysis, and testing.
Inefficient Workflows: Manual tracking and excessive paperwork consume valuable time, slowing down innovation and delaying time-to-market.
Audit & Compliance Risks: Without a clear, traceable line from requirements to verification, proving compliance during an audit becomes a stressful, time-consuming scramble.
The key takeaway: Disjointed systems don’t just create inefficiency; they actively increase risk and make it harder to deliver high-quality, compliant products on schedule.
How to Improve Quality Metrics with a Modern Solution
Transitioning to a modern requirements management platform like Jama Connect provides a structured path to enhancing your quality metrics. It’s not just about new software; it’s about adopting a more integrated and transparent approach to product development.
Step 1: Establish a Single Source of Truth to Foster a Quality Culture
The foundation of any high-performing quality system is a single source of truth. When all functional groups, including engineering, quality, manufacturing, and more, collaborate within one platform, you eliminate confusion and create consistency.
Jama Connect provides this centralized environment where design requirements, risk management, test management, and design reviews are all interconnected. This ensures that everyone is working from the most current and approved information.
Benefit: Teams follow procedures correctly because the system guides them through structured workflows.
Impact on Metrics: Reduces errors, rework, and inconsistencies, allowing you to hit project deadlines.
Step 2: Leverage Live Traceability™ to Reduce Risk and Ensure Completeness
Passing an audit requires demonstrating that every requirement has been addressed from a risk management perspective, verified and/or validated, and properly reviewed., Manually creating and maintaining traceability matrices is prone to error and incredibly time-consuming.
Live Traceability in Jama Connect automates this process. It creates a real-time, dynamic map that links every requirement to its corresponding tests, risks, and design reviews. If a requirement changes, you can instantly see the downstream impact on testing and risk mitigation.
Benefit: You gain complete visibility into your project’s health and can prove compliance with a few clicks.
Impact on Metrics: Drastically reduces audit preparation time and minimizes the risk of findings. It ensures 100% test coverage, directly improving product quality and safety.
Step 3: Streamline Product Development with Out-of-the-Box Compliance
Meeting medical device regulations like ISO 13485, FDA QSR (soon to be QMSR), ISO 14971, and IEC 62304 demands meticulous documentation and adherence to specific processes. Jama Connect helps you streamline this with pre-configured frameworks and workflows designed specifically for medical device compliance.
Instead of building your compliance structure from scratch, you can use these out-of-the-box solutions to get a head start, ensuring your Medical Device File is built correctly from day one. All information can be easily exported into submission-ready documentation for your Quality Management System (QMS).
Benefit: You can reduce paperwork and focus your team’s efforts on innovation rather than administrative tasks.
Impact on Metrics: Accelerates project timelines and increases the likelihood of achieving regulatory approval on the initial submission.
Step 4: Boost Efficiency and Consistency with Reuse
Do your teams develop multiple versions of a similar product or use common components across different devices? Rewriting and re-verifying or re-validating the same requirements and test cases is a major source of inefficiency.
Jama Connect features powerful libraries that allow you to store, manage, and reuse requirements, risk analyses, and test cases across multiple projects. When an item in the library is updated, the changes can be synced to all projects that use it, ensuring consistency.
Benefit: Saves significant time, reduces the risk of inconsistencies, and frees up engineers to focus on innovation.
Impact on Metrics: Improves development efficiency, reduces costs, and ensures a standardized level of quality across your entire product portfolio.
FAQs: Improving Quality Metrics with Jama Connect
Q: How does Jama Connect specifically help with FDA compliance?
A: Jama Connect helps you adhere to FDA design control regulations like 21 CFR 820.30 by enforcing design controls within a structured environment. Its Live Traceability feature is critical for demonstrating the link between design inputs, outputs, verification, and validation. The platform also simplifies the creation and management of your Design History File (DHF), making it audit-ready at all times. For more details, see our guide on FDA Design Controls.
Q: Can we use Jama Connect without completely overhauling our existing toolchain?
A: Absolutely. Jama Connect is designed to integrate with popular engineering tools (e.g., Jira, Azure DevOps, TestRail). It acts as the central hub for requirements and risk management while allowing your teams to continue using the specialized tools they know best, creating a connected, best-of-breed toolchain.
Q: How does this platform help us use quality as a competitive advantage?
A: By streamlining compliance and improving process efficiency, Jama Connect allows you to get safe, effective products to market faster. This speed, combined with reduced development costs and lower compliance risk, gives you a significant edge over competitors who are still bogged down by manual processes.
Take Control of Your Quality Metrics
Stop letting disjointed systems and manual processes slow down your projects. By embracing a modern, integrated approach, you can improve your quality metrics, pass audits with confidence, and empower your teams to deliver innovative medical devices safely and efficiently.
Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Tom Rish, McKenzie Jonsson, and Mark Levitt.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Nuclear Reactor Design and I&C Development Solution
Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! We always want to be respectful of your valuable time. Still, in this Features in Five video, we do go beyond the promised five-minute format to include an information-packed session, hosted by Vlad Tanasescu, GM, Industrial & Consumer Electronics, Jama Software.
Designing nuclear reactors is a complex, high-stakes process requiring precision, safety, and collaboration. Jama Connect’s out-of-the-box framework simplifies this complexity by guiding engineering teams through requirement decomposition, safety assessments, and risk analysis while ensuring traceability across the entire digital thread.
With AI-driven automation, real-time gap detection, and seamless tool integrations, Jama Connect empowers teams to streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and accelerate time to market, all while maintaining the highest safety and compliance standards.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Vlad Tanasescu: Hi, I am Vlad. I lead our energy business unit here at Jama Software, and today I will walk you through a brief live demonstration of our new out-of-the-box nuclear reactor design and instrumentation and control (I&C) system development framework. Our engineering management platform, Jama Connect, enables an intelligent, guided, and measurable product development approach. In Jama Connect, we use process rules to define end-to-end engineering and design processes. Jama Connect will leverage this process to automatically guide the engineering organization through their development, intelligently measure system and process completion, and automatically detect gaps and risks so that engineers know where to take action.
On a high level, our nuclear reactor design framework starts from the decomposition of the requirements and the parallel decomposition of our designs and architectures from the highest level of the plant all the way to the mechanical and software implementations. The framework natively enables the initial deterministic safety assessment, the classification of initiating events in design-based accidents, the categorization of security and safety functions, and the classification of structures, systems, and components in alignment with the guidance of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and local nuclear reactor design assessors.
The framework also includes the probabilistic safety assessment, the accident, and those consequence analysis and the analysis of combined risks. Nuclear reactor design is highly iterative. As our design and construction progresses, we will continuously find new safety and security requirements and functions as well as new reliability requirements and special treatments, all of which will need to cascade and feedback into the functional and non-functional levels of our reactor. Nuclear reactor design practitioners integrate model-based systems engineering, product life cycle management, pipeline and instrumentation diagramming and software development tools to Jama Connect to extend the traceability from the definition of our reactor to how our reactor is being implemented in mechanical software and electronics disciplines.
Tanasescu: These integrations will enable us to programmatically measure traceability and system completion across all of our tools, part of the engineering digital thread. For example, from one of our high-level mission needs, energy efficiency, we can directly visualize the allocation to a plant design coming from a model-based systems engineering solution, and then we can follow the decomposition of the requirement and the plan design all the way down to the mechanical implementation.
For example, from this plan design, we have derived multiple system architectures of the key reactor systems, which are further decomposed into multiple subsystem designs, which are further decomposed into component designs, which are ultimately decomposed into mechanical implementations like parts and key assemblies. This end-to-end traceability across the entire digital thread will enable us to understand the impact of changes starting from a requirement all the way down to the lowest implementation level. For example, if I were to change this energy efficiency requirement, I could run an impact analysis in Jama Connect, and then Jama Connect would show me that multiple design levels would be impacted by the change, but five levels down, I would also be impacting implementations in mechanical parts. I would be impacting safety mitigations and risk mitigations as well as executed tests, which is very powerful to understand before the change.
Jama Connect will use intelligent engineer management features like the Live Trace Explorer to intelligently measure the completion of our traceability across the entire digital thread. These intelligent measurements will programmatically summarize the completion of the decomposition of the requirements, the decomposition of the designs, the test coverage, the risk mitigations, as well as the completion of the implementation of our system. Due to the integrations with other tools like product lifecycle management or model-based systems engineering applications, we can start measuring to what extent our component designs have been implemented in parts or our software requirements in software implementations. For example, here we can see that only 2% of our component designs have been implemented in parts or only 2% of our component designs have been analyzed and taken into account in the initial deterministic safety assessment. These intelligent measurements will enable companies to mitigate, rework and reduce their time to market. We will always be able to understand where we have gaps and risks in our system so that we know where to take action.
Tanasescu: In Jama Connect, we use the project tree to visualize and access all of our engineering data in one view. The project tree will also enable us to set up our product breakdown and systems engineering structure. Here, we can see the key subsystem of the reactor and the balance of plant, each subsystem having its respective requirements, designs, and tests, and then one level down, we can visualize the key components of our subsystem. Each component, including requirements, designs, tests, and mechanical software, electronic specific implementations like parts or software user stories. Our out-of-the-box nuclear reactor design framework also contains data models for the automatic calculations and classifications of initiating events and design-based accidents for the categorization of safety and security functions and for the classifications of structure systems and components. The Jama Connect Nuclear Reactor Design framework will also enable the automatic export of initial, preliminary, and final design safety reports and will enable the programmatic creation of security and safety cases.
Our I&C system development framework is reduced to the scope of the development of nuclear reactor subsystems. And in accordance with standards like EEC or EEC61508, the I&C development decomposition starts at the level of the safety design base. The I&C systems development framework also enables codevelopment. Nuclear reactor OEMs, I&C system T1s, and external engineering partners can use Jama Connect as a central source of truth for the entire design and engineering-related collaboration, and they can use Jama Connect’s intelligent engineering management capabilities to measure system completion and identify gaps across the entire engineering data coming from all the partners from our development ecosystem.
We view the adoption of artificial intelligence as essential for reducing time-to-market and increasing efficiency in nuclear development. Jama Connect’s engineering AI enables engineers to highly automate day-to-day and manual tasks like the definitions of tests or the decomposition of requirements. For example, here I have a requirement related to the nuclear fuel and instead of me deriving the test manually, I will use Jama Connect’s engineering AI to derive multiple tests automatically*, and then Jama Connect’s AI will proceed to derive multiple tests that our engineers could choose to take over and relate in traceability with the requirement.
This way, both the test generation and the traceability creation will be highly automated. Thank you very much for your time. If you want to learn more about our nuclear reactor design and IC system development framework, please visit our website. Thank you.
*Test Case Generation available through our add-on product, Jama Connect Advisor™
Jama Connect Best-in-Class API for Creating Interoperability Across Your Development Toolchain for Live Traceability™
Siloed data creates significant roadblocks for businesses. Isolated information across teams and systems obstructs collaboration and slows critical decision-making. Open APIs provide a solution to this problem by enabling interoperability between compliant software.
Jama Connect features a best-in-class REST API for connecting to any other REST-compliant software or system. Our API is the basis of the many prebuilt integrations available from Jama Software & our partners.
What makes Jama Connect API the best- in-class
Accessible: Anyone with a Named Creator license can utilize the REST API – at no additional cost and no charges based on number of API calls.
Performant: Each Jama Connect Cloud instance allows up to 36,000 calls per hour/over 26 million calls per month, significantly more than other large SaaS providers.
Reliable: Industry standard best practices, such as API throttling, maintain system stability for consistent and reliable performance with minimal latency.
Comprehensive: We provide documentation accessible through Swagger UI, code snippet examples, and training from Jama Software’s services team who are experts in using the API.
Streamline Integration Processes: Combine Jama Connect API’s simple, flexible, and easy to use framework with the API cookbook, a step-by-step guide with practical, real-world recipes that address common integration needs, offer clear best practices, and answer frequently asked questions.
Boost Data Handling Efficiency: Manage data seamlessly with advanced features like strict pagination and the ‘include’ parameter. These optimizations
ensure your API calls retrieve only what you need, reducing system strain and enhancing performance during data-intensive operations.
Leverage Strict Security and Authentication: Prioritize security with OAuth authentication for Jama Connect Cloud users or Basic Authentication for self-hosted environments. Jama Connect API ensures the integrity and safety of your data during every integration.
Using the Jama Connect API
There are many ways to benefit from the Jama Connect API. Here are several examples:
Reporting: Automate the retrieval of project data for reporting purposes. By making GET requests to the API’s/projects endpoint, users can fetch detailed information about all projects within their Jama Connect instance. This data can then be integrated into business intelligence tools for real-time tracking of project progress, resource allocation, and key milestones.
Data & Trace Synchronization: Automate the synchronization of requirements and their trace relationships between Jama Connect and other REST-based tools for Live TraceabilityTM. This can be particularly useful for organizations that need to ensure alignment between their requirements management system and their development tracking tools. By leveraging the API, users can create scripts to push updated requirements and their traces from Jama Connect into their development platform or pull issue statuses back into Jama Connect.
Test Results Import: Automate the import of test results into Jama Connect. This ensures precise control, real-time updates, and integration with third-party test tools and related workflows for more efficient and reliable verification of new and changes to requirements.
Whether you’re retrieving actionable insights, integrating data across tools, or optimizing test workflows, Jama Connect API empowers your business with flexibility and performance.
Vertical Aerospace Achieves New Heights with Jama Connect®
Vertical Aerospace is revolutionizing the aviation industry with sustainable, cutting-edge aircraft like the VX4. To meet ambitious goals and regulatory demands, they turned to Jama Connect. By integrating this powerful platform, Vertical Aerospace achieved seamless certification compliance, improved collaboration, and accelerated their innovation process. With Jama Connect’s Live Traceability™ and intelligent project management capabilities, they’ve streamlined complex workflows and stayed ahead in an industry demanding nothing less than first-rate precision and speed.
Kirsty Boyd: Here at Vertical, we are pioneering electric aviation. We’re transforming how the world moves, and through that, we’ve created the VX4. The VX4 is a masterclass in eVTOL aircraft built specifically for sustainable travel and the use case in order to move people faster, better, leaner, more efficiently. For certification, we have to be very black and white. We have to really understand our limitations, our performance of our aircraft. The decisions in the design process that go into those solutions needs to be very well understood. And as you go through the process, things change. Configuration management is a massive part of what we try and do, and we have to be able to prove to the regulator that we’ve identified what those changes are, we’ve dealt with them in an appropriate way, and that we’ve got traceability from top to tail of that.
Karl Mulcahy: So Jama Software is the name of our company, and Jama Connect is the name of our platform. Our platform helps customers to embrace live traceability across the product development lifecycle and ensure that innovation succeeds. It’s a collaborative platform to bring everybody together to make sure that we combine data sources and intelligently make better decisions about our projects, to help you identify gaps in your traceability, to help remove bottlenecks, but ultimately to help bring your industry expertise to companies like Vertical Aerospace and help realize their innovation faster.
Kirsty Boyd: Vertical understood that we needed requirements management in order to certify the platform. And so we did a trade study to analyze different tools that were available in industry. We were looking at cost, efficiency, how flexible they were, how we could tailor them, and we down-selected Jama Connect.
Karl Mulcahy: So Jama Connect helps to bring our industry expertise to forefront. And what that means is we can help provide common ways of working that we’ve used with other clients and working with industry bodies to help streamline compliance or certification mandates.
Kirsty Boyd: We’re trying to do something completely and utterly new here. We don’t have an option for second-rate. We have to use incredibly intelligent partnering in order to meet our timescales, our deadlines, our technology advancement. We don’t have a choice but to go for first-rate partnering.
Karl Mulcahy: Personally, I’m very proud to work with Vertical Aerospace. It’s something that’s brand new in terms of the industry. I know Vertical are at the forefront of the industry. My little boy does ask me a lot what I do for a living. I tell him I work with rockets and planes and to show him this maybe at some point, I’m sure he’s going to be very excited to see it. And maybe one day, he’ll ride in one too.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Solution
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, Michelle Solis, Solutions Architect at Jama Software, explores how Jama Connect helps the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Industry manage complex requirements and streamline project communication.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Michelle Solis: Hello, I’m Michelle Solis, a Solutions Architect at Jama Software. In this video, we’ll explore how Jama Connect helps the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) industry manage complex requirements and streamline project communication.
AEC projects, whether it’s building a structure, designing a rail system, or developing an airport, come with complex requirements involving multiple teams. Communication is often fragmented and mid-project requirement changes can add confusion. Traditionally, the process unfolds in a linear workflow. The owner issues an RFP, teams respond, and the project is awarded. Once the project is underway, however, the owner may change requirements, making it hard for teams to see what parts of the project are affected.
Managing this process with documents alone, whether in Word, Excel, or PDF, is insufficient for managing these changes effectively, leading to missed updates, delays, and financial losses. Project management tools store documents but don’t provide visibility into relationships between requirements and tasks, making it hard to track changes across teams.
Solis: Jama Connect addresses these challenges by shifting from a document-centric to a requirements-driven approach. Instead of static Word documents, Jama Connect allows you to break down requirements into actionable items, improving clarity and manageability.
AEC projects often involve strict compliance requirements, such as LEED or ADA regulations, which can be difficult to track in traditional documents leading to missed updates or compliance gaps. With features like traceability, Jama Connect ensures these requirements are continuously monitored and managed throughout all project phases from the bidding process to construction, helping teams stay aligned with project goals.
By eliminating document silos, Jama Connect fosters collaboration across teams, providing real-time visibility into requirement changes, and ensuring that all requirements remain clear, traceable, and adaptable.
Let’s dive into Jama Connect and take a look at how this solution works. Here’s an example of a project with requirements entailing a new building. This project includes a traceability information model that begins with owner requirements. These requirements represent the written specifications and expectations set by the project owner. They are imported into Jama Connect, and then broken down into project requirements.
Those further break down to system requirements, design documents, and regulatory compliance, all of which we can validate and link to evidence provided by subcontractors ensuring full traceability across different aspects of the project lifecycle.
On the left panel is the explorer tree where the requirements live. If we click on a set of our requirements, we can see them in our List View, which is similar to Excel with rows and columns that we can adjust by dragging and dropping, or our document view, which is similar to working in Word and functions like a live document that we can edit by double-clicking and making our changes.
Jama Connect’s traceability features illustrate to us as end-users how change impacts our project. If I want to make changes to a project requirement, like this example of vertical circulation, I can first run an Impact Analysis to see if there are any potential upstream and downstream impacts. This shows me all of the requirements that may be impacted if I change this requirement. If this requirement changes because there’s a new weight capacity regulation to the elevator, then downstream, we should make the according changes to the elevator control system requirement and further downstream to the elevator validation and load monitoring subsystem requirement.
Solis: There are requirements here that will not be affected if I were to make these changes because it’s specific to the elevator functionality, so some of these escalator downstream requirements won’t be impacted. Impact Analysis shows us all of the potential impacts, but it’s up to us to decide if there’s indeed an impact and to make the necessary changes.
Jama Connect also has a full version history for all of our projects and other types of requirements. If I click on the version history, I can compare version two to version three and see all of the red and green line differences. So it looks like I removed some text and added that weight capacity regulation compliance.
With Jama Connect, AEC teams can move beyond static documents to a dynamic, requirements-driven approach, breaking down complex project requirements into actionable items, ensuring traceability, and maintaining compliance with industry regulations like LEED and ADA. By fostering real-time collaboration and eliminating silos, Jama Connect helps teams stay aligned, adapt to changes seamlessly, and keep projects on track from design to construction.
Thank you for watching this demonstration of Jama Connect for AEC Industries. If you would like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your AEC projects, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com. If you’re already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information, please contact your customer success manager or Jama Software consultant.
Best Practices: Unlocking the Power of the Digital Thread in Traceable MBSE™
In the world of product and systems development, integrating the digital thread throughout Model-Based Systems Engineering process isn’t just an advantage — it’s a game-changer.
In this engaging webinar, host Brian Kennedy, Principal Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, will show how the digital thread transforms MBSE, driving better traceability, stronger collaboration, and greater efficiency across the product lifecycle. You’ll also see how Live Trace Explorer™ helps connect your MBSE tools seamlessly, creating Traceable MBSE™.
What You’ll Learn:
The role of the digital thread in enhancing Traceable MBSE workflows
Best practices for building a connected thread across diverse systems
How Live Trace Explorer improves product quality, reduces risks, and accelerates delivery
Using coverage metrics to identify gaps and ensure process completeness
Proven strategies to reduce iteration loops and support regulatory compliance
Walk away with actionable insights to strengthen your Traceable MBSE processes — and see how Jama Connect® can elevate your engineering workflows.
Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.
Briand Kennedy: During today’s webinar, I’m going to be discussing the process of unlocking the power of the digital thread in Traceable MBSE. To begin with, let’s just take a step back and understand what exactly is the Traceable MBSE process and where did it originate from? Today, many products that companies produce are live for safety-critical and one of the requirements for life and safety-critical products is that the company must completely document how the product should perform. Additionally, they have to also prove that it performs as specified. As products have become much more complicated and sophisticated and systems have become much more integrated and difficult to model doing this process has become a greater challenge than it was maybe previously.
As a result of us interviewing various engineering leaders who are responsible for product release, we asked them what keeps you up at night? What are the top things that these engineering leaders say keeps them up at night? As we listened to them, we heard many common questions come up. These are the five top questions or issues that they indicated. The first one is, how do I know which product requirements have been missed in my design? How do I know which product requirements are not fully covered by my test cases that I’ve defined? How do I know which product requirements have failed to pass tests? How do I identify development activity that happens to be using incorrect requirements or maybe isn’t even directly connected to requirements? And finally, how do I know if changes that have been made in say, hardware impacts my software team or if a requirement change impacts either the hardware or software team? How do I understand this traceability? These are the things that we’ve heard a lot about. I bet one of these might resonate with you.
Kennedy: I’ll tell you what, why don’t we take a quick survey? There’s going to be a survey that pops up, and we’ll give you a couple of minutes to walk through these questions and tell us which one of these questions do you identify most with or is most pressing on your needs. Thank you very much for answering which one of these questions is the one you most identify with. At the end of this presentation, we’re going to come back to each one of these questions and show you how Traceable Model-Based System Engineering processes and the digital thread can help address each one of these items.
So, let’s talk a little bit about how we have developed Traceable MBSE to address these situations. To start with, let’s talk about where we came from. And we came from a paper-based system, and it doesn’t fully address these questions that we have here. And so, in order to solve these problems, we’ve performed a digital transformation, and that started with a very simple thing a long time ago of actually switching from physical paper over to electronic files. This provided significant improvements in efficiency and allowed each domain and discipline to be able to capture their data electronically versus on paper. It does improve communication, allows us to share data more easily, and allows us to reuse data in a much easier process. But fundamentally, this first step of converting from paper to electronic file, although it was a huge advantage, didn’t fundamentally change the process in which we did system engineering. We were still stuck with disconnected data.
So the next phase in this is what I call the decomposition phase. This occurred when we actually took those individual documents, for example, a complete requirement specification, and decomposed it to individual items. And this was very powerful. What we were able to do is instead of having a single document with all the specifications in it, we would decompose it to individual requirements, and each individual requirement could be referenced independently. And in fact, they allowed us to reuse this data and such. So you could have the same requirement being reused in multiple places, whereas before, you literally had two separate pieces of text that you were duplicating. Once again, another huge improvement in efficiency. This concept of decomposition doesn’t just isolate two requirements. It implemented various other things, such as the modeling systems for various other things. And it ended up creating a capability so that each discipline, each domain was able to create unique tools that address decomposition or analysis or simulation of their particular areas.
Kennedy: So what we saw was requirements identification and subsystem requirement identification, being executed in Word or Excel spreadsheets initially, and even going into some modeling techniques and different tools. So we ended up with a verification validation process that for each individual domain we were able to create some decent automation, but they weren’t connected. Each group was independently looking at their data and creating it, and there wasn’t consistent reuse across it and no consistent way of knowing what was the correct stuff. We depended on things like email and such like that. So it really created an impact on things like a lack of ongoing risk assessment, and change management became very difficult because even though we had decomposed some of the things and we had captured all the documents electronically, we still were not interconnected. We didn’t have a uniform interconnectivity, and this meant we had to take one more step in our digital transformation. And that final step was to create a true full model definition.
And when we talk about creating a full model, it involves quite a few things. First is governance. We have to create a structure and version control on top of the data. So we would classify the data in groups and control each one of those individual items, requirements simulations, functional definition, architectures as individual items and version control them in a controlled system in a database framework. So, we had a governance structure and control framework that needed to be defined. We then expanded from just having text-based or static images to having full diagrams where each item was interrelated and connected together. And we were able to create visual diagrams that illustrated how our systems were being designed, how functions and sub-functions and systems and subsystems were supposed to interact, and how data was supposed to flow from one part of our system to another. And we created these diagrams. Finally, we created a common data model, which allowed us to capture all these different pieces of data and define relationships from one item to the other and have consistent terminology and consistent use of that data. So we had one requirement defined in one place,e and it was used wherever it was needed by referencing that single item. And so that’s where we talk about a data model. We needed a complete data model to capture all this data that we were governing in the governance area and in the diagrams.
In this blog, we overview our new datasheet – Click HERE to read it in its entirety.
Jama Connect® Enables DevSecOps Through Robust API and Integrations That Connect All Activity to Requirements
DevSecOps involves integrating security into all phases of the software development lifecycle. Rather than waiting to start analysis of potential vulnerabilities until after the software product, system, or subsystem is completed, this strategy puts security at the center of software development from the start to identify issues when the cost of resolving them is lowest. It also enlists everyone to play a part in identifying, assessing, and mitigating security risks in their individual development-related activities.
Comprehensive Security Risk Management and Seamless Tool Integration
The biggest challenge in achieving DevSecOps success is the need to assess and manage security risks across all software development tools and teams in an efficient and comprehensive manner. DevSecOps leaders choose Jama Connect because it is the only requirements management solution that provides the automation and collaboration required. Its robust REST API provides alignment with an integrated CI/CD pipeline including Jira, Azure DevOps, Git, GitLab, Subversion, Jenkins, Splunk, Kubernetes, Visual Studio, and Coverity. The Jama Connect platform delivers Live Traceability™, connecting all DevSecOps activity to the singular common element that defines value across all steps in the process — the requirement. It provides intuitive, accessible collaboration and review capabilities for internal and external teams.
Enable Cybersecure-by-Design Compliance with DO-326A Standards
Jama Connect for Airborne Systems supports a DevSecOps strategy by applying a cybersecure-by-design approach to meeting DO-326A standards. With Live Traceability, Jama Connect overcomes the disconnectedness of processes in the tool ecosystem that causes certification delays, cost overruns, product failures, audit findings, late identification of defects, and lack of visibility. It makes change management between software and hardware easier and reduces the effort needed to demonstrate requirements and test traceability required for certification.
KEY BENEFITS:
Integrate security across all DevOps and testing software Jama Connect’s robust open REST API and market-proven integrations with best-of-breed DevOps and testing software tools make it possible to connect all DevSecOps activity to the common element that defines value across all steps in the process – requirements.
Start identifying security vulnerabilities early in the development process Jama Connect reduces the risk of releasing code with security vulnerabilities by focusing on security requirements and
testing from the early stages of development.
Empower the entire team to contribute to DevSecOps Jama Connect’s easy-to-use collaboration and review capabilities provide an inclusive, safe, and collaborative environment for internal and
external development, security, and operations teams to build software that is efficient and secure.
In this blog, we recap a section of our eBook, “The Clear Choice: Why Jama Connect Surpasses Codebeamer for Requirements Management and End-to-End Traceability” – Click HERE to read it in its entirety.
The Clear Choice: Why Jama Connect® Surpasses Codebeamer for Requirements Management and End-to-End Traceability
To adapt to increasing industry challenges and complexities, innovative organizations are now requiring best-in-class software to scale development, reduce risk, save time, and ensure compliance to quality, safety, and security regulations.
As organizations strive to deliver innovative products while navigating regulatory requirements, the tools they use for requirements management and traceability can make or break their success. This eBook is designed to help you understand the critical differences between Jama Connect® and Codebeamer, two leading requirements management solutions, so you can make an informed decision.
The Requirements Sector
The landscape of requirements management has undergone significant transformation. Traditional tools (like IBM® DOORS®) which once dominated the market, are now considered outdated. These legacy systems often lack the flexibility, ease of use, and integration capabilities required by modern teams. As a result, organizations are turning to modern solutions like Jama Connect that are built to meet the needs of today’s dynamic development environments.
Why Jama Connect?
Jama Connect stands out as a leading requirements management solution because it is designed with the user in mind. Its modern, user-friendly interface, combined with powerful features like comprehensive traceability and real-time collaboration, ensures that teams can manage requirements and risks effectively throughout the product, systems, and software lifecycle. Jama Connect also emphasizes customer success, offering expert support and training to help teams maximize their investment. Ease of use, rapid deployment, pre-configured well-documented industry frameworks, and in-house subject matter experts provide the fastest time-to-value/ROI without sacrificing quality or safety.
The Clear Advantages of Jama Connect Over Codebeamer
If you’re comparing Jama Connect to Codebeamer, one thing is clear — Jama Connect is the only purpose-built requirements management platform that delivers Live TraceabilityTM which allows engineering and other teams to
quickly and easily access the latest and most complete information for any requirement, no matter the stage of development or tools used. This real-time capability boosts productivity by ensuring teams work with the latest data and reduces risks like delays and defects by finding issues early. In addition, Jama Connect accelerates your product, systems, and software development by managing user needs and product information across the end-to-end development lifecycle.
Only Jama Connect Delivers Live Traceability™ Across Best-of-Breed Tools
Other vendors lock you into inferior platforms. Only Jama Connect seamlessly integrates with your tools of choice across engineering teams. Only Jama Connect can manage the state of development across all integrated teams and tools. Jama Connect’s unique and industry-specific Traceability Information Models define the relationships and expected behavior across teams and tools.
Our customers consistently tell us that they chose Jama Connect over Codebeamer for the following reasons:
1. Ease of Use and High Adoptability
Jama Connect’s intuitive design and user-friendly interface make it easy for teams to adopt and use. Unlike Codebeamer, which can be complex and challenging for new users, Jama Connect ensures that teams can start managing requirements effectively with minimal training. Users insist on a requirements management and traceability solution that is easy to use so that both internal and external stakeholders can efficiently access, share, and review information in a single source of truth, increasing and speeding up the adoption across teams for a better ROI.
The ease-of-use is not only imperative for users but also for administrators. Jama Connect offers an intuitive and user-friendly administration interface that enables admins to adapt the tool to their organization’s needs without having to learn overcomplicated configuration settings and concepts.
2. Modern Integration and Collaboration Capabilities
Jama Connect provides comprehensive traceability and impact analysis, enabling teams to manage change effectively and reduce the risk of errors. The platform seamlessly integrates with other best-of-breed tools (including Jira and Azure DevOps) in the development ecosystem, ensuring that teams can work efficiently without having to change their other development tools. In contrast, Codebeamer focuses on working solely with other PTC tools and its own limited application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities.
Modern product and software development requires optimal real-time collaboration between stakeholders. Jama Connect provides an enhanced collaboration experience with its communication streams and advanced Review Center, enabling both internal and external stakeholders with the capabilities to perform formal and iterative reviews.
3. Intelligent Engineering Management
Jama Connect empowers Intelligent Engineering Management by addressing a critical challenge faced by engineering and product development organizations: the lack of real-time KPIs and metrics during development. This gap often leads to delays, budget overruns, and product defects or recalls. Jama Connect uniquely transforms traceability into a measurable instrument, enabling teams to track real-time metrics and KPIs throughout the product development process. By providing a comprehensive overview of project progress and aligning it with required processes, teams can identify gaps early, mitigate risks, and avoid missed requirements. With its Live Traceability™ and integrations with other best-in-breed engineering tools, Jama Connect ensures that both internal and external data are seamlessly managed, driving informed decision-making and on-time project delivery.
4. Strong Customer Support
We know that our customers need a support team that makes them a priority. That’s why Jama Connect offers unparalleled customer support (including 24/7 support for any production outages), with dedicated customer success teams that work closely with you to ensure you achieve your goals. In contrast, Codebeamer’s support can be limited, making it difficult for your teams to get the help they need when they need it.
5. Scalable and Flexible
Jama Connect is highly adaptable, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and project sizes. Whether your organization is in automotive, aerospace, medical devices, or another industry, Jama Connect can be tailored to meet your specific needs, often getting you up-and-running quickly with custombuilt data frameworks to satisfy your industries regulations and best practices. Additionally, the platform offers flexible deployment options, including cloud and self-hosted, giving you the freedom to choose the best setup for your organization.
6. Fastest Time to Market/ROI
Deploy Jama Connect’s easy-to-use interface in weeks, not months, with easy updates and high performance. Preconfigured frameworks are built-in to satisfy industry regulations and help teams ease the path to compliance, along with in-house industry focused subject-matter experts and exceptional customer support.
7. Lowest Total Cost of Ownership
With simple and straightforward administration and no need for custom scripting or continuous updating, Jama Connect has the lowest total cost of ownership in comparison to Codebeamer. Jama Connect scales easily without big infrastructure investment, and with unlimited no-cost access for extended internal/external stakeholders, all team members can be involved with additional costs.
