Requirements Traceability Measured & Benchmarked for the First Time
The first large scale, empirical research to confirm higher levels of traceability correlate to cycle time and quality improvements
Jama Software, the leading requirements management solution provider, has released the Requirements Traceability Benchmark – the first-ever large-scale, empirical study to measure Traceability Scores™ and the impact different levels of requirement traceability have on quality and cycle times. The benchmark dataset includes over 40,000 projects spanning numerous industries. Requirements traceability across the entire systems development lifecycle is a core tenant of the systems engineering discipline and underpins industry standards to ensure higher quality, faster cycle times, and less costly rework.
“Process improvement requires measurement,” said Marc Osofsky, Jama Software’s CEO. “The engineering process needs to catch up to other business functions in terms of process measurement. Traceability Scores now provide a great way for companies to baseline current performance and measure improvement over time.”
Jama Software®, Tasktop, Intercax, LDRA, Vitech, and MID GmbH are founding members of the Requirements Traceability Alliance
Jama Software, the leading requirements management solution provider, today announced the formation of the Requirements Traceability Alliance with Tasktop, Intercax, LDRA, Vitech, and MID GmbH as founding members. The Requirements Traceability Alliance addresses the fundamental problem facing systems engineering organizations today – how to comply with Live Traceability across requirements that span siloed engineering disciplines and disparate tools. Live Traceability™ of system requirements is required by industry standards to ensure product safety and forms the foundation for digital engineering and model-based systems engineering. It delivers significant productivity improvements, and dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls resulting in faster time to market.
Requirements Traceability Alliance members have already achieved hundreds of Live Traceability deployments across preferred best-of-breed software tools in the product development process. These tools include Jama Connect®, Tasktop Hub, TestRail, Microsoft Excel, Sparx Enterprise Architect, Jira, Azure DevOps, Slack, Cameo/MagicDraw, MATLAB & Simulink, Git, LDRA tool suite®, Syndeia, Smartfacts, Windchill, GENESYS, and many more.
“Companies enable each engineering discipline to choose best-of-breed tools to optimize their team’s work. Alliance members provide the interoperability to achieve Live Traceability across these best-of-breed tools.” – Marc Osofsky, Jama Software’s CEO
Best-of-breed technology partners can learn more about — and apply to join — the Alliance here.
In this blog, we recap our press release covering the new performance and scale benchmarks set with the release of Jama Connect® 8.71
Jama Connect® 8.71 Exceeds Benchmarks
#1 in scale, concurrent users, response times, global usage, and interoperability
Jama Software, the leading requirements management solution provider, has announced performance benchmarks that set a new standard for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) used by engineering teams for complex product development. Specifically, Jama Connect® 8.71 exceeds benchmarksfor published performance and scale metrics for SaaS in the Requirements Management (RM) /Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) space. SaaS adoption among complex product engineering teams has historically lagged other areas of the enterprise due to the security and technical immaturity of hosted products from legacy vendors. Jama Connect is the first enterprise-grade SaaS product in the RM/PLM space and outperforms other SaaS solutions as well as legacy desktop and client-server offerings in use today.
“The poor performance of legacy attempts at ‘hosted’ solutions has led to SaaS hesitancy. The continued, market leading SaaS scale and performance of Jama Connect has broken through this hesitancy and led to rapid global adoption and usage.” – Josh Turpen, Chief Product Officer, Jama Software
Jama Connect 8.71 was released on March 4th, 2022, and all cloud customers and users were seamlessly upgraded as part of our regular SaaS deployment.
For more details on how your team can experience Jama Connect’s user-oriented performance and scale, request a trial here.
Systems Engineers Career Path
Most Systems Engineers we speak with have a common perspective on their role within their organization. Systems engineering as a concept is understood and supported by leadership. And, if systems engineering best practices are followed across all engineering disciplines, leadership also acknowledges the benefits the organization can realize. However, leadership will not force change on engineering disciplines (software, hardware, electrical, risk, verification, and validation) to remove barriers to systems engineering best practice adoption. This leaves most Systems Engineers in the challenging position of possessing responsibility for achieving systems engineering benefits without the authority to ensure engineers adopt best practices.
The good news is that there is a way out of this situation. The first step to elevating your career is to realize that managing the product engineering process through data is the key and that the Systems Engineering role is the natural role to lead this. For most organizations, the product engineering process is the only process in the company that is not managed through data. No one can go to a system and see the status of all product requirements and where development, integration, risk, and testing stand at any point in time. There is no way to manage by exception. There are no alerts that requirements are not covered, test cases are missed or that hardware made a change that now impacts software. Most organizations have come to accept this state of affairs and try to manage the process through endless meetings, emails, and Slack messages.
Until the product engineering process is manageable through data, Systems Engineers will be stuck in their current trap — endlessly trying to address issues after the fact, holding unwanted meetings, and the uphill battle of trying to persuade changes in behavior. Below is a 3-step approach that Systems Engineers we work with have used to solve this organizational challenge and have thereby elevated their careers. As with any process change, it is best to do it in stages. You can start with the following steps.
Baseline current process performance
Build the business case for change to gain support
Step One | Baseline Current Traceability Performance
The first step towards moving the organization to manage the product engineering process through data is to baseline current process performance. The best place to focus the baseline effort is on traceability since it spans the entire product development process, is a data management concept that is understood, enables systems engineering benefits, and is required by industry standards. To ease the baselining effort, we’ve developed a Traceability Diagnostic that you can use to assess your current situation. The Diagnostic inventories traceable data, the systems in which they reside, and your current Traceability Score™. This is a few-hour effort and forms the basis of the business case in step two.
In this no-cost, guided process, we’ll help you:
Understand the monetary risk of your current Traceability Debt™
Uncover the quantifiable ROI of moving to Live Traceability
Develop a clear plan of action, cost, and timing to achieve Live Traceability
To Get Started With Your Free Traceability Diagnostic, CLICK HERE
Step Two | Build Business Case for Live Traceability™
Once you have established a baseline, it is now possible to build a business case for change that will resonate with leadership. Based on your baseline, the Traceability Diagnostic determines the probability of negative product outcomes (defects, delays, rework, cost overruns, etc.) and the magnitude of these events. This quantifies the risk of maintaining the status quo and doing nothing. In addition to the risk reduction potential of Live Traceability, the Diagnostic also calculates the engineering productivity gains from eliminating the need for time-consuming, manual, after-the-fact traceability efforts.
Step Three | Start with Quick Wins
Once you have secured support to move forward, it is common to be able to deliver some quick wins to the organization shortly after project kick-off. The typical place to start is the painful and time-consuming after-the-fact traceability efforts. For example, continuous syncing between requirements and software development task management in Jira or Azure DevOps can be set up quickly to automate traceability from requirements to user stories, eliminating a large source of risk and manual, after-the-fact traceability effort. Once quick wins are shown, organizational momentum increases even further and puts you on the success path to begin managing the product engineering process through data.
Clients of ours that have taken this approach have received significant recognition, been promoted into roles with greater leadership, and have increased their external visibility through speaking engagements. Live Traceability is a unique opportunity to elevate one’s career. Don’t miss the chance.
![[Press Release Recap] Requirements Traceability Measured & Benchmarked for the First Time](https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/03/2022-03-30-benchmarking-press-release.jpg "[Press Release Recap] Requirements Traceability Measured & Benchmarked for the First Time")
![[Press Release Recap] Requirements Traceability Alliance Forms to Solve Live Traceability™](https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/03/2022-03-15-traceability-alliance-press-release.jpg "[Press Release Recap] Requirements Traceability Alliance Forms to Solve Live Traceability™")
![[Press Release Recap] Jama Connect® 8.71 Exceeds Benchmarks for Saas Performance and Scale](https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/03/Press-Release-Performance-and-Scale.jpeg "[Press Release Recap] Jama Connect® 8.71 Exceeds Benchmarks for Saas Performance and Scale")
