In this blog, we recap our press release on Jama Software® partnering with Sterling PLM.
Jama Software® Partners with Sterling PLM
Expands Lifecycle Management and Live Traceability™ Expertise Offerings
Jama Software®, the industry-leading requirements management and traceability solution provider and Sterling PLM, an industry leader in engineering management problem-solving, have partnered together to expand expertise and offerings across requirements management and Live Traceability™ solutions.
“Jama Software’s world-class consulting organization — that spans across multiple verticals including medical device development — will be greatly complemented by this partnership with Sterling PLM. Sterling PLM expands on our already comprehensive services that drive measured improvements across product development processes that result in faster time to market and higher product quality.”
Tom Tseki, Chief Revenue Officer at Jama Software®
Jama Connect® is the only platform that delivers Live Traceability™ across engineering disciplines through the entire product development process to reduce defects, delays, rework, and cost overruns. Sterling PLM‘s team has decades of combined experience consulting in highly regulated industries for a variety of medical device manufacturers. By partnering with Jama Software, Sterling PLM will collaborate and support lifecycle management services around configuration, training, and process development.
“At Sterling PLM, we have years of experience cultivating superior technical and lifecycle management know-how. We pride ourselves on our ability to anticipate problems before they become apparent to our clients. We are excited to add Jama Connect to our arsenal of technology solutions, adding to our capability to apply our specialized expertise and customized approach to solving problems for our clients.”
Dan Sterling, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Founder at Sterling PLM
Jama Software has consistently been listed as the leader in Requirements Management software tools by G2® for the fourth consecutive reporting period. By combining Sterling PLM’s customized solutions and seasoned expertise in lifecycle management technologies and Jama Software’s industry-leading requirements management and traceability offerings, Jama Software and Sterling PLM will continue to accelerate transformation to serve the needs of medical device developers.
“We’re especially excited to leverage the expertise and experience of the Sterling PLM team with our Medical Device customers. They’ll be a great addition to our out-of-the-box solutions for medical device developers and provide specialty services such as computer systems validation and legacy tool data migration.”
Vincent Balgos, Director, Medical Solution at Jama Software
About Sterling PLM
Sterling PLM helps engineering companies across the globe implement proven processes that govern the design and development of their engineered products while leveraging software that tracks processes with greater visibility across the enterprise. Our team has decades of combined experience consulting in highly regulated industries for a variety of manufacturers—from small start-ups to large global organizations—and we’ve spent years cultivating unique skills and concentrated expertise in the business of engineering. We specialize in regulatory-compliant software programs that help customers track the project artifacts that they care about—across the entire project lifecycle.
About Jama Software
Jama Software is focused on maximizing innovation success. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, autonomous vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect® to minimize the risk of product failure, delays, cost overruns, compliance gaps, defects, and rework. Jama Connect uniquely creates Live Traceability™ through siloed development, test, and risk activities to provide end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement. Our rapidly growing customer base of more than 12.5 million users across 30 countries spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, financial services, and insurance industries. For more information about Jama Connect services, please visit www.jamasoftware.com
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/12/2022-11-30-sterling-release-1.jpg5121024Karrie Sundbom/media/jama-logo-primary.svgKarrie Sundbom2022-12-07 06:30:512023-01-12 16:46:06Jama Software® Partners with Sterling PLM: Expands Lifecycle Management and Live Traceability™ Expertise Offerings
In this blog, we’ll break down key elements of our Jama Connect for Semiconductor Software.
Jama Connect® for Semiconductor Software
It can take months or even years to complete the development of a new chip. To avoid costly mistakes, semiconductor requirements need to be clearly communicated to the entire team across the development lifecycle. While most teams acknowledge their communication challenges, the risk of process change or adopting a new tool can be daunting. Jama Connect for Semiconductor provides an intuitive, leading-edge semiconductor requirements management solution for complex chip development with methods in use today by top manufacturers.
Supercharge Your Systems Development and Engineering Process
Jama Connect® is a solution for managing product requirements from idea through development, launch, and iteration. It brings people and data together in one place, providing visibility and actionable insights into the product development lifecycle. Jama Connect equips teams to analyze impacts, track decisions, and ensure quality of the product you set out to build.
Simplify Complex Product Development With Jama Connect
Jama Connect is a hub for understanding your complete product development lifecycle, enabling product managers and engineers to track requirements, decisions, and relationships on multiple levels to deliver compliant, market-driven products effectively. Jama Connect helps teams deliver high-quality products on time and on budget by aligning stakeholders, identifying risks early on and visualizing connections between regulations, requirements, and test cases throughout the development process.
Key Benefits
In the increasingly complex semiconductor industry, market forces are creating new challenges for semiconductor product developers. Jama Connect was designed to help teams:
Confidence – Trace requirements throughout the development process, illuminate risk, and proceed with confidence that you are building what you set out to build.
Visibility – Gain visibility into the product development process by monitoring relationships and dependencies between systems, teams, activities, and results.
Speed – Align teams, track decisions efficiently, and minimize rework to create high-quality products on time and on budget.
Adaptability – Easily adapt Jama Connect to your project and organizational workflows to create an intuitive experience so your teams can get up to speed quickly.
Performance – Benchmark and monitor team performance over time to understand the benefits of retooling your product development process. Store and reuse existing intellectual property and best practices from multiple product lines.
Infineon Transitions From a Document-Centric to Data-Centric Development Flow with Jama Connect
Founded in 1999 as a spin-off of Siemens AG, German semiconductor manufacturer, Infineon Technologies AG is a world leader in semiconductor solutions that make life easier, safer, and greener. Ranking among the 10% most sustainable companies in the world, Infineon is a leading player in automotive, digital security systems, power and sensor systems, and industrial power control.
In our Infineon customer story, we examine how Jama Software helps Infineon manage complex product development subject to regulatory compliance and increase efficiency. Read the full customer story to find out how Infineon’s shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution resulted in:
Better management of product complexities throughout the development cycle
Systematic handling of requirements from product definition to product development and verification
Improved collaboration with distributed teams both inside and outside of their organization
More effective exchange of requirements to ensure functional safety standards are met
Database-centric approach increases the efficiency of Infineon product development
Jama Connect helped Infineon shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution enabling newfound product development efficiencies around complexities, communication, reviews, and compliance.
CHALLENGES
• Keep the overview on ever-increasing product complexities and avoid requirements misunderstandings
• Provide compliance without compromising time-to-market goals
• Manual document versioning makes review cycles and alignment difficult
• Improve the review & sign-off process, making it an integral part of the requirement management system
• Need for enhanced reuse capabilities • Exchange requirements information with customers and suppliers
• Overcome the scaling limits of a document-centric approach
SOLUTIONS
• Jama Connect’s scalability supports complex projects
• Easier to show compliance to industry regulations
• Jama Connect Review Center supports an efficient process
• Provide requirements-accurate versioning to backtrace decisions
• Reuse requirements to shorten development cycles
• Digital exchange of requirements between customers and suppliers
RESULTS
• Better management of product complexities throughout the development cycle
• Systematic handling of requirements from product definition to product development and verification
• The traceability of requirements enables functional safety standards compliance
• Improved collaboration with distributed teams both inside and outside of their organization
• More effective exchange of requirements to ensure functional safety standards are met
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/2022-11-29-jama-connect-for-semiconductor-1.jpg5121024Decoteau Wilkerson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDecoteau Wilkerson2022-11-29 03:00:502023-01-12 16:46:08Jama Connect® for Semiconductor Software: Modernize and Digitize the Requirements Management Process
In this blog, we overview Part 1 of our eBook, “A Guide to Good Systems Engineering Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond” in which we discuss the fundamentals of systems engineering best practices, the “V” model, the characteristics of good systems engineering, and lessons learned. To read the entire eBook, download it HERE.
A Guide to Good Systems Engineering Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond.
In the first part of this eBook, we discuss:
The fundamentals of systems engineering
The role of a systems engineer
Systems engineering process
The “V” Model of systems engineering
Part I: The Basics of Systems Engineering
What is systems engineering?
Systems engineering is an engineering field that takes an interdisciplinary approach to product development. Systems engineers analyze the collection of pieces to make sure when working together, they achieve the intended objectives or purpose of the product. For example, in automotive development, a propulsion system or braking system will involve mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and a host of other specialized engineering disciplines. A systems engineer will focus on making each of the individual systems work together into an integrated whole that performs as expected across the lifecycle of the product.
What are the fundamentals of systems engineering?
In product development, systems engineering is the interdisciplinary field that focuses on designing, integrating, and managing the systems that work together to form a more complex system. Systems engineering is based around systems-thinking principles, and the goal of a systems engineer is to help a product team produce an engineered system that performs a useful function as defined by the requirements written at the beginning of the project. The final product should be one where the individual systems work together in a cohesive whole that meets the requirements of the product.
What is a system?
A system is a collection of different elements that produce results that individual elements cannot produce. Elements or parts can be wide-ranging and include people, hardware, software, facilities, policies, and documents. These elements interact with each other according to a set of rules that produce a unified whole with a purpose expressed by its functioning. An example of a system is the human auditory system; the system includes individual parts in the form of bones and tissue that interact in a way to produce sound waves, which are transferred to nerves that lead to the brain, which interprets the sounds and formulates a response. If any single part in the auditory system fails or experiences disruption, the entire system can fail to perform its function.
What is systems thinking?
Systems thinking is a way of thinking that looks at the overall function of a complex system rather than breaking it down into smaller parts. For example, systems thinking would consider an automobile a complex system that consists of smaller, specialized elements. While an electrical engineer might only be concerned with the electrical system of the automobile, someone looking at the entire complex system would consider how the electrical system would impact other systems in the automobile — and how those other systems might impact the electrical system. If one piece of the electrical system fails, for instance, how would that failure cascade to other systems to impact the operability of the automobile? Systems thinking will take a “big picture” approach to the overall product.
What is the role of a systems engineer?
A systems engineer is tasked with looking at the entire integrated system and evaluating it against its desired outcomes. In that role, the systems engineer must know a little bit about everything and have an ability to see the “big picture.” While specialists can focus on their specific disciplines, the systems engineer must evaluate the complex system — as a whole — against the initial requirements and desired outcomes. Systems engineers have multi-faceted roles to play, but primarily assist with:
Design compatibility
Definition of requirements
Management of projects
Cost analysis
Scheduling
Possible maintenance needs
Ease of operations
Future systems upgrades
Communication among engineers, managers, suppliers, and customers in regard to the system’s operations
How can systems engineers help improve traceability?
For many systems engineers, balancing the needs of the individual systems and their engineers against the system as a whole results in addressing problems after the fact, holding unwanted meetings, and trying to persuade others to change behavior. Many organizations may not adequately focus on requirements and traceability, resulting in a lack of data that would allow a systems engineer to better evaluate the product. To avoid constantly chasing problems and start streamlining processes, systems engineers can use three best practices:
Baseline the current traceability performance:
Traceability spans the product development process, and product team members understand the value of data management, especially as concerns meeting industry requirements. By establishing a baseline of traceability performance, the entire team will be able to see existing risks and potential savings and improvements. In addition, a baseline can give a foundation for a plan of action to move toward Live Traceability™.
Build the business case for Live Traceability:
With a baseline in hand, systems engineers can offer a case for moving to Live Traceability based on data. The data can establish the ROI, productivity improvements, and risk reduction of moving from static traceability to Live Traceability.
Create quick wins:
Once the advantages of Live Traceability are established, the systems engineer can set up continuous syncing between requirements and task management programs, thus automating traceability from requirements to user stories. This simple shift can help demonstrate the value of shifting from after-the-fact traceability to Live Traceability.
The systems engineering process can take a top-down approach, bottoms up, or middle out depending on the system being developed. The process encompasses all creative, manual, and technical activities necessary to define the ultimate outcomes and see that the development process results in a product that meets objectives. The process typically has four basic steps:
1. Task definition/analysis/conceptual: In this step, the systems engineer works with stakeholders to understand their needs and constraints. This stage could be considered a creative or idea stage where brainstorming takes place and market analysis and end user desires are included.
2. Design/requirements: In this phase, individual engineers and team members analyze the needs in step one and translate them into requirements that describe how the system needs to work. The systems engineer evaluates the systems as a whole and offers feedback to improve integration and overall design.
3. Create traceability: Although we’re listing traceability here as the third step, traceability is actually created throughout the lifecycle of development and is not an isolated activity taking place during one phase. Throughout the lifecycle of development, the team works together to design individual systems that will integrate into one cohesive whole. The systems engineer helps manage traceability and integration of the individual systems.
4. Implementation/market launch: When everyone has executed their roles properly, the final product is manufactured or launched with the assurance that it will operate as expected in a complex system throughout its anticipated lifecycle.
Developed in the 1980s, the “V” Diagram of Systems Engineering is a way of specifying the specific series of steps that make up a systems engineering approach. While it was originally employed in a pre-Agile environment, it still has relevance to product development today and can enable faster, less risky product development. The “V” diagram allows system engineers multiple viewpoints and opportunities to evaluate systems as they integrate with each other. This approach starts with the desired outcomes and objectives and then deconstructs them into individual systems and system components for the purpose of design. Once the requirements and design details are established, individual systems can be tested and evaluated, then integrated into the overall piece for testing and verification. As the systems are integrated and become closer to the final complex system, teams have multiple opportunities to validate and verify concepts, requirements, and design.
For the systems engineer, the “V” Model can give a clear roadmap that allows the breakdown of the complex system into smaller parts and then the reintegration and reassembly of the pieces into a cohesive whole. With systems broken down to individual components, traceability, requirements management, and testing and validation become more manageable. In addition, as the pieces are reintegrated into the whole system, the “V” Model allows for an iterative process that gives a clearer view into potential risks and helps troubleshoot problems. Systems engineering is a discipline that’s vital to the success of a complex system. By including systems engineers in all stages of product development and requirements management, teams can reduce risks, improve time to market, and produce better products that more adequately meet end user requirements.
Why is Live Traceability Essential? Given the complexity of products today, it takes multiple team members to weigh in on key decisions. And the number of decision points are only growing as products get more complex, making it even harder to adequately weigh all the options and trace their impacts. Learn more.
To read Part 2 of “A Guide to Good Systems Engineering Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond”, download the entire eBook HERE.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/2022-11-03-sytems-engineering-1.jpg5121024Decoteau Wilkerson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDecoteau Wilkerson2022-11-03 03:00:272023-01-12 16:46:13A Guide to Good Systems Engineering Practices: The Basics and Beyond
As the developer of a coastal transportation vehicle, REGENT must adhere to rigorous safety standards for both aviation and maritime travel, and they take that process very seriously. And in order to create the safest, highest quality vehicle, they know that they must implement a world-class development process. With that in mind, REGENT implemented Jama Connect.
After implementing Jama Connect®, the REGENT team has realized the following outcomes:
Ability to complete an entire design review in three weeks
Reuse library of compliance with more than 25 sets of external regulations and standards
Documenting verification and collecting artifacts for compliance is a simple, automated process
Electric Transportation Startup, REGENT, Speeds Time to Market by Choosing Jama Connect to Simplify and Prove Compliance for Complex Safety-Critical Product Development with Strict Regulatory Oversight
ABOUT | REGENT
Founded in 2020 by MIT-trained, ex-Boeing engineers
Building their flagship product, the seaglider, a wing-in-ground-effect craft
Sub-scale prototype built and a goal of having paying passengers on their 12-passenger seaglider Viceroy by 2025
Headquartered in the Boston area
With a mission to drastically reduce the cost and headache of regional transportation between coastal cities, REGENT is building a revolutionary new category of electric vehicle called a seaglider that will service routes up to 180 miles with existing battery technology, and routes up to 500 miles with next-gen batteries. The vehicles will be as safe as aircraft and have better wave and wind tolerance than existing seaplanes and WIGs.
By coupling the high speed of an airplane and the lower operating cost of a boat, REGENT is revolutionizing regional coastal travel.
Founded in late 2020, REGENT has already built a sub-scale prototype of the seaglider and will have a full-scale prototype by 2023.
Backed by many big-name investors, including Mark Cuban Companies, Hawaiian Airlines, and Founders Fund, REGENT aims to safely transport commercial passengers by 2025.
REGENT CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
As the developer of a coastal transportation vehicle, REGENT must adhere to rigorous safety standards for both aviation and maritime travel, and they take that process very seriously. And in order to create the safest, highest quality vehicle, they know that they must implement a world-class development process. With that in mind, REGENT implemented Jama Connect®.
OBJECTIVES
Demonstrating compliance with stringent aviation and maritime safety standards
Meeting aggressive development timelines in order to safely transport commercial passengers by 2025
Building an inclusive, efficient review process
EVALUATION
Cloud-based solution
Easy-to-use platform with a modern, intuitive interface
Ability to scale multiple projects
Industry experience and aviation market presence
OUTCOME
Ability to complete an entire design review in three weeks
Reuse library of compliance with more than 25 sets of external regulations and standards
Collecting artifacts for compliance is a simple, automated process
As a new company, REGENT knew that they needed to get things right the first time around. With little wiggle room for error, the team set out to find a requirements solution that could help the team turn their ideas into reality.
The main objectives that REGENT needed their requirements management platform to support were:
Demonstrating compliance with stringent aviation and maritime safety standards
Meeting aggressive development timelines in order to safely transport commercial passengers by 2025
Building an inclusive, efficient review process
“As a developer of seagliders which are essentially flying boats, REGENT connects the aviation and maritime domains. In the future we will also need to comply with international maritime regulations as well. Because of this, we knew we needed to take a rigorous approach to safety and vehicle development. It was important for us to find a solution that could track requirements and be used to generate the artifacts necessary to certify a flying boat,” said Ted Lester, Vice President, Certification at REGENT. “We wanted to lay the groundwork for the kind of safety-critical development that’s used in the aviation industry. Ultimately, we knew that if you’re developing a new aerospace vehicle from scratch, a good requirements management tool is key.”
From the start, REGENT knew they needed the best available requirements management platform available.
As part of their evaluation process, they began searching for a solution that met the following criteria:
Cloud-based solution
Easy-to-use platform with a modern, intuitive interface
Ability to scale multiple projects
Industry experience and aviation market presence
REGENT evaluated a number of solutions, including IBM® DOORS® and Intland codebeamer, but Jama Connect was the only platform that met all of their needs.
“As a startup, we were working with a very small, agile team. We knew that we couldn’t stand up a hosted solution, so it was important to us that we find a solution that could be Software as a Service (SaaS). And with Jama Connect, we were able to stand the platform up very quickly with very little IT work” said Ted Lester, VP, Certification.
“It was also very important to us that our team could easily use the platform. We knew we needed a solution that allowed us to easily trace requirements from design all the way through verification and validation,” said Lester. “Between the more than 25 sets of external regulations and standards we need to follow, our requirements, and our sub-system requirements, we knew were going to have an extensive number. The ability to scale and do traceability easily was key to our selection process, and nobody did that better than Jama Connect.”
Another factor that played into REGENT’s decision was Jama Software®’s deep knowledge of the aviation industry, extensive resources, and industry templates that help teams build the infrastructure for regulatory
compliance with aviation standards.
“Although IBM DOORS and IBM Telelogic probably have the largest market penetration in aviation, we had many people on our team who had worked in the tool in the past and did not have good experiences. With
Jama Software, we had templates available for DO178 and ARP4754 available to help us get up to speed faster.” said Lester.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/2022-09-22-regent-customer-story-1-1.jpg5121024Decoteau Wilkerson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDecoteau Wilkerson2022-10-13 03:00:462023-01-12 16:46:16Electric Transportation Startup, REGENT, Speeds Time to Market with Jama Connect®
In the medical device industry, proving that there are no unvalidated or unverified requirements is critical for compliance. While Convergent prepared to demonstrate compliance with De Novo Classification Request standards, they began to seriously consider the challenges of their documents-based requirements management process.
In this customer story, we examine how Jama Connect helps Convergent Dental increase efficiency and manage complex product development subject to regulatory compliance. Read the full customer story to find out how Convergent Dental has shifted from cumbersome document-based processes to a more modern requirements management solution, resulting in:
Audit preparation decreased from three weeks to one day
Streamlined review cycles
Plans for leveraging Jama Connect for test management
Convergent Dental chooses Jama Connect to manage compliance through in-depth reviews and to save valuable engineering time.
ABOUT | Convergent Dental
Headquartered in Needham, MA
Expertise: Creating breakthrough laser technology that completely changes how people think of dentistry.
Awards: The Company’s flagship product, Solea®, was voted a Gold Winner for innovation at Edison Awards 2016.
Headquartered in Needham, MA, Convergent Dental, Inc., is the creator of Solea, the world’s first computer-aided hard, soft, and osseous tissue dental laser.
With an isotopic CO2 beam of 9.3 µm, Solea cuts significantly finer and faster than any other dental laser, with virtually no noise or need for anesthesia. Their unique system, with patented technologies and controls, nearly eliminates the need for the drill – the thing that many dread about going to the dentist.
CONVERGENT DENTAL CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
CHALLENGES
Manual, cumbersome processes were slowing teams down significantly
Difficulty compiling necessary documentation for compliance
Proving all requirements are tested
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Easy-to-use platform with a low barrier to entry
Out-of-the-box configurations
Automated traceability
THE OUTCOME AND THE FUTURE
Audit preparation decreased from three weeks to one day
Streamlined review cycles
Plans for leveraging Jama Connect for test management
Manual, cumbersome processes were slowing teams down significantly
As a small team, the development team’s motto is that no one has the option to be “dead weight.” So, when their engineers were forced to spend hours manually editing requirements and tracking traceability using Word and Excel documents, it wasn’t great for team morale, or for their pace of development.
While using Word and Excel, they found themselves tracking across multiple documents, all with their own trace matrix tables relating to different requirements. The fallout from this process is that even a single word or letter change in a low-level subsystem requirement led to updating the corresponding requirements documents and their trace matrix tables. So, a single letter turns into not one change but potentially six changes across five different documents.
This manual method of digging through Word documents led to cumbersome requirements management and traceability tracking from engineers whose time should be devoted to systems engineering for product development.
We have a small team with a large amount of features and updates to perform on an ongoing basis. We all work really hard here, and there’s no option to be dead weight. Getting rid of that wasted time in Word and Excel, and getting our test engineers back to work, is the ultimate goal.” – Craig Woodmansee, Electrical Systems Engineer, Convergent
Difficulty compiling necessary documentation for compliance
In the medical device industry, proving that there are no unvalidated or unverified requirements is critical for compliance. While Convergent prepared to demonstrate compliance with De Novo Classification Request standards, they began to seriously consider the challenges of their documents-based requirements management process.
They knew their requirements were tested, but in order to show proof, they had to go through hundreds and hundreds of pages. They tediously combed through all their records, which took weeks, significantly impacted productivity, and slowed time to market.
“So instead of just being able to reference the reports and say, ‘Look, they’re here,’ I had to put together the list and then ask a team member to go dig down those. And that took him a couple of days to dig up all that testing. So that was the loss, time from our test engineers.” – Craig Woodmansee, Electrical Systems Engineer, Convergent
Preparing for the De Novo Submission was a catalyst for this in-depth review of their requirements. If they continued down the path of Word and Excel, an auditor — if they decided to pull on any small little string — would have resulted in more time trying to track down the requirements. This experience was the deciding factor that led them to understand that the Convergent team needed a better tool.
To solve the above challenges, and in order to save valuable time in the development process, the Convergent team knew they needed to move to a modern and proactive requirements management tool.
Many team members had shared their past experience with Perforce Helix, however, when they began evaluating new solutions, they realized they needed more robust configurations and a more intuitive interface than what those could offer.
“When comparing Jama Connect and Helix, ease of use and the interface played a large role in that decision. While Perforce has many strong applications, this specific area is one where Helix fell short.” – Craig Woodmansee, Electrical Systems Engineer, Convergent
The evaluation process for selecting a modern requirements and test management solution ultimately came down to Intland codebeamer and Jama Connect®.
The following capabilities and features were ultimately why Convergent selected Jama Connect:
Easy-to-use platform with a low barrier to entry
Throughout the evaluation process, it was important to the Convergent team that they found a platform that was easy to use, allowing all team members to easily get started without spending significant time learning a complex platform.
As a small team, Convergent needed a platform that would allow them to move quickly and be agile. They didn’t have time to waste when looking for the requirement management tool that would solve their challenges. After completing trials of both Jama Connect and codebeamer, they knew they needed to make a timely decision. They gathered as a team for an internal review where they asked each other questions such as, “How easy was it to learn?”, “How good and intuitive did it feel to use?”, and “How fast can we be onboarded?”
During their evaluation, Jama Connect’s online training videos demonstrated just how easy the platform was to use. After watching tutorials, critical team members felt they already knew how to use the platform and that Jama Connect would provide a good level of support. After their trial, they discovered that the low barrier to entry and quick adoption helped Jama Connect stand out from other platforms and made their team excited when they received approval to start using Jama Connect.
Out-of-the-box configurations
Implementing a new system is a big deal for any company, and while the team knew onboarding a modern requirements management solution would greatly improve the team’s efficiency, they knew that they were facing a relatively significant change. To save time for their quality team, they prioritized finding a solution with out-of-the-box configurations aimed at the design control process.
While evaluating Jama Connect, they found preconfigured design rules that closely matched what they currently used.
“You can’t beat it. It’s too easy. Using the out-of-box configurations, I can just click and view the trace matrix. That was phenomenal.” – Craig Woodmansee, Electrical Systems Engineer, Convergent
Automated traceability
When evaluating solutions, Convergent knew that a key component of their search revolved around a platform’s ability to automatically — and proactively rather than reactively — create traceability from design, all the way through to verification and validation.
What they found was that Jama Connect was the only platform that could create Live Traceability™, the ability to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement, no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans.
The Convergent team knew that this level of traceability would allow the team to work faster, simplify their process, and improve the quality of their project management.
After importing user needs and requirements, creating relationships, and running tests in Jama Connect, the Convergent team realized that traceability became semiautomatic.
“We don’t have to manually maintain traceability because Jama Connect does it for us. Once requirements are in place, Jama Connect just says ‘if you make a change, then here are all the things it affects.’” – Craig Woodmansee, Electrical Systems Engineer, Convergent
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/2022-09-customer-story-convergent-1-1.jpg5121024Decoteau Wilkerson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDecoteau Wilkerson2022-10-04 03:00:042023-01-12 16:46:18Innovative Dental Equipment and Technology Company, Convergent Dental, Selects Jama Connect® For Its Quick Adoption and Live Requirements Traceability
Incorporating Risk Traceability into Manufacturing Production Software and Preparing for the Transition from CSV to CSA
Intro
Over the years, the burden of Computer Systems Validation (CSV) has resulted in medical device manufacturers avoiding implementation of automated manufacturing production systems or upgrading long-outdated versions of software. As part of the FDA’s ‘Case for Quality’ initiative in 2011 to study quality best practice in medical device manufacturing, the FDA found that the burden of compliance, such what is expected for Computer Systems Validation (CSV), deterred technology investments and as a result, inhibited quality best-practice.
As an outcome, the FDA is expected to release a draft guidance in 2022 that outlines their new approach of Computer Software Assurance (CSA) for Production and Quality System Software. The goal is to improve software quality by focusing on the software’s impact to patient safety, impact to product quality, and impact to quality system integrity. Using a risk-based approach, manufacturers can spend more time testing to ensure software meets its intended use, instead of ensuring test protocols and reports are fully scripted are error free.
As the key to right-sizing CSA activities is based on risk, managing risk, and risk traceability and incorporating is a key activity. And there’s no need to wait for the publication of the FDA CSA draft guidance, medical device manufacturers can incorporate these risk management and traceability practices now in their CSV activities.
Keep reading below for best practices on how to extend risk management and risk traceability from the medical device development to your manufacturing production software used to manufacture your devices.
Main Points for How
Consider the product risks and hazards
Even though we are discussing manufacturing production software and the software used on manufacturing equipment, the first step is to consider the product risks and hazards. Start with your master list of hazards, hazardous situations, and associated harms developed during medical device development and determine where and how failures in the manufacturing production software and production equipment can result in those risks and hazards. These are the areas to consider as the highest risks to control, mitigate, and validate.
Next, perform additional risk analysis from the lens of the environment and manufacturing personnel that will operate said equipment and software. It is important to also protect the environment and prevent injury and harm to those interacting with the equipment. You don’t want the unintended release of hazardous chemical reagents or equipment fires that could have been prevented with built-in high temperature shut-down feature.
Create manufacturing production software intended uses and requirements
Just as one determines the intended use and design input requirements of a medical device, the same is to be done for the manufacturing production software and equipment. Incorporate the necessary features as manufacturing requirements (analogous to the design inputs of your medical device) that address the risks identified in the previous step.
One example is based on risk of the product and demonstrates how risk traces from the development of the medical device. Consider the design of a semi-automated assembly machine for a drug-delivery device. The machine aligns and press-fits together two plastic injection-molded halves of the delivery sub-assembly. One of the main product associated risks is ensuring proper flow efficiency to ensure the proper amount of drug is delivered correctly and to the proper anatomical location.
In this case the risk traceability and translation to the assembly machine design inputs is:
Perform software testing and equipment validation based on risk
Once ready to test the production equipment software and perform equipment validation, incorporate, you guessed it, risk. All manufacturing requirements then need to be verified, however, scale the amount and type of testing for each manufacturing requirement based on the risk. Aspects of the software and equipment that are of high risk, such as preventing severe harm to operators, or the end users and patients of the medical device will have more testing and documentation than those of lower risk.
Document risk traceability of testing and equipment validation
Just as documenting risk traceability for medical device is important, it’s also important for manufacturing production software and equipment. Using a tool like Jama Connect® makes it easy to link your master list of hazards, hazardous situations, and harms to your manufacturing requirements for manufacturing production software and equipment. This increases consistency and efficiency in the risk analysis and prioritizing efforts on where it matters for patient and operator safety. The interface of Jama Connect® also makes the traceability and documentation of the associated testing and validation easy to visualize, alerting teams to gaps and incomplete testing.
Closing
Extending risk traceability from your medical device development to your manufacturing production software and equipment brings focus to what can impact patient safety and scales the testing and validation work appropriately. Incorporate risk and you’ll also be well on your way for the upcoming FDA transition from CSV to CSA.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/09/2022-09-27-preparing-for-csv-to-csa-1.jpg5121024Michelle Wu/media/jama-logo-primary.svgMichelle Wu2022-09-27 03:00:062023-01-12 16:46:20Incorporating Risk Traceability into Manufacturing Production Software and Preparing for the Transition from CSV to CSA
What Is OSLC?
OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) is an “open” standard designed to facilitate communication between tooling primarily used in engineering disciplines. The initial work was done by IBM in 2009 and in 2013 governance moved to OASIS. The idea behind OSLC is to provide a common layer for tool vendors so that connection between tools can be created without having to write and maintain individual connectors between each set of tools. In theory, this reduces the burden on tool vendors and gives users confidence that tools that support OSLC will interoperate without issue.
What tools support OSLC?
Many tool vendors do not directly support OSLC. Jama Software® integrates with a wide variety of best-of-breed tools and most of them do not come with native OSLC connectors. Of the 25 most prevalent tools that we see in the market, 20% have some OSLC capability, and only 16% have a company- supported connector. Contrast that with the fact that 100% of these tools have a company-supported REST API and you can clearly see the direction of the market.
OSLC services a relatively small niche that often requires consulting and some technical assistance to setup. Given that many of the tools that utilize OSLC are desktop based, the IT environment becomes a challenge for integration. This has led many to rely on third-party vendors to broker the OSLC integration layer and provide the support necessary. At Jama Software we have partnered with MiD and their product Smartfacts to enable this connection. Jama Connect® has a robust REST API and through our partnership with MiD we can support those customers who need an OSLC integration, while extending our integration capabilities to the much wider systems engineering ecosystem.
Using the integration hierarchy to achieve Live Traceability™
Most companies who are considering an OSLC integration are doing so to improve requirements traceability across their product development process. Requirements traceability approaches range from rudimentary, manual approaches, to automated synchronization across tools. At Jama Software we’re focused on helping our customers achieve Live Traceability™ via automated synchronizations of best-of-breed tools to a common traceability model. For those desktop tools that do not fully support automated synchronization, a lower level of traceability is the best that can be achieved.
Organizations that are heavily invested in a specific toolchain suite can leverage OSLC to reduce the interop challenge inherent in suites that have been created through acquisition. Embedding user interfaces into other applications and maintaining links allows a user to navigate through the “suite” without having to open each application. When dealing with desktop applications, this can reduce the need to load up each tool individually. It is certainly better than trying to sync information through manual efforts.
In desktop tool scenarios and with tools that do not have a web API, OSLC might be as far as you can go. In which case, Jama Software has you covered. For those who want to move beyond the single user context and achieve Live Traceability, we recommend Level 4 integrations. Utilizing easy-to-implement, universal web standards we’ve helped hundreds of organizations achieve the user-level benefits of contextual data while also elevating the systems engineer’s visibility to the process and organization level.
Contact Jama Software today to find out how we can help you with OSLC and further you on your journey towards Live Traceability.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/09/2022-09-13-oslc-what-is-it-1.jpg5121024Josh Turpen/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJosh Turpen2022-09-13 03:00:032023-01-12 16:46:21OSLC – What Is It and What Are Its Challenges?
Supply chain collaboration: Interactive or ReqIF. Which is right for you?
There are two main types of requirement collaboration in the supply chain: Interactive and ReqIF. While interactive collaboration is on the rise and offers the most benefits, there are cases where it is not feasible. Jama Software supports both methods and, in this post, we will discuss each method’s use-case and pros/cons.
Interactive Collaboration: The High-fidelity Option
We all know that collaboration in product development helps improve quality, reduces risk and speeds up development. For this reason, Jama Connect® has context-based, interactive collaboration built into the platform. Reviews are a formal, effective collaboration method that guides teams in fulfilling regulatory requirements.
In addition to using these industry leading capabilities in-house, our customers frequently use these capabilities to collaborate with external stakeholders. For instance, Jama Connect allows you to invite reviewers simply by email (Jama Connect licenses include more than enough reviewer licenses for this purpose). This works extremely well in practice. In fact, one medical device developer, RBC Medical Innovations, was able to shed hundreds of team-member days during development to save $150,000 in cost savings per project.
As a fully web-based software as a service (SaaS) product, Jama Connect offers customers a standard and secure web interface for cross-department or cross-company collaboration. Inviting customers or suppliers into your Jama Connect system is as easy as sending an email. User security can limit what is seen and allows for granular control of permissions. Our full version tracking enables everyone to see what has changed, who changed it and all impacts on upstream/downstream traceability.
The Alternative: Controlled Data Exchange via ReqIF
Data exchange between organizations is nothing new, and many organizations have collaborated for decades, typically by exchanging documents. While this approach technically works, it results in unstructured data that provides no traceability, no understanding of changes between versions and no easy way to provide structured feedback.
The automotive industry is a great example of complexity across the supply chain with OEM’s traditionally working with hundreds of suppliers. It’s not unusual to find tens of thousands of requirements in an automotive specification, so managing these requirements is a challenge. In response, the industry developed an international standard for the lossless exchange of requirements called Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) and the standard was finalized in 2011.
A requirements exchange with ReqIF has some similarities to the old (and dreaded) document exchange process: One party exports a ReqIF file and hands it to the other party. The transfer can happen via a portal upload, automated exchange or even as an email attachment.
But here’s where the similarities end: A ReqIF file contains structured requirements data consisting of individual requirements with visibility into structure, attributes, related elements, and traces. ReqIF also supports incremental updates. If one party creates another version and exports a month later, you could import that version into your environment and the tool would show you clearly which elements, attributes, and traces have changed. For instance, you could use suspect links to re-validate only those items that have changed. Compared to trading .pdf files, which yes believe it or not many organizations still do, this is an extremely significant time saver and error avoiding capability.
While the standard is certainly more advanced than simple document sharing, it does have drawbacks. Not every tool adheres to the standards in the correct way. Data exported can be missing embedded images, required fields in one system are not required in another and user information (meta-data) is not universally available.
ReqIF is commonly used to solicit feedback from a supplier. A producer could export the requirements for a supplier, including attributes for providing status feedback and comments. The supplier would then import the ReqIF file into the tool of their choice, where they could fill out the supplier attributes and send the resulting export back.
In addition, they could start integrating the imported requirements into their own development system. For example, they could establish traceability from the customer requirements through to design while keeping the process invisible to their customer.
There are other use cases that ReqIF supports as well, but for all of them, the foundation is a controlled asynchronous exchange of structured requirements that keeps individual items, attributes and traces intact. Jama Connect supports this workflow and we have many customers that are using it today.
Bottom Line: How to Collaborate?
If you are using Jama Connect, the built-in collaboration capabilities are the most effective way to work together. Having 100% Live Traceability™ has been proven to increase product quality while reducing time to market.
However, if you are working with people outside your organization, that may not be able to collaborate using your Jama Connect instance a ReqIF-based collaboration could be an acceptable alternative.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/08/2022-08-10-supply-chain-reqif-1.jpg5121024Josh Turpen/media/jama-logo-primary.svgJosh Turpen2022-08-09 03:00:052023-01-12 16:46:28Supply chain collaboration: Interactive or ReqIF. Which is right for you?
Eight Ways Requirements Management Software Will Save You Significant Money
Requirements management software helps development teams eliminate manual compliance efforts and significantly reduce product delays, rework, and cost overruns. Some platforms, like Jama Connect®, also include frameworks and templates aligned to industry standards — and enable live requirements traceability through siloed development, test, and risk activities, providing end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement.
In this post, we’ll share the eight ways that a requirements management platform can save your company significant money, making it a wise investment at any time — especially during challenging economic times.
Requirements Management Software can help your organization save money by:
1. Reclaiming Productive Work Time
A modern requirements management solution (like Jama Connect®) can help your teams reclaim hours of unproductive work time, resulting in money saved across the organization. Without a modern requirements management solution, highly skilled – and often highly paid – employees can waste up to 40% of their time on tedious, unproductive activities such as:
Searching for siloed information in static documents and/or disconnected tools
Manual/or duplicative data entry to update status in multiple systems
Working off old data and outdated versions of documents
Reformatting and migrating data back and forth between tools
Reconciling differences between data sources
Trying to understand ‘what changed?’ and assess the impact
After implementing Jama Connect, our customers on average, quantify that they are reclaiming one to two hours of productive work time per day, some even more. The engineers at Monolithic Power Systems can now quickly and easily produce required documentation and no longer need to spend time in multiple time-consuming meetings and scrums to get a clear picture of what’s happening with their products. And with Jama Connect, they can automatically generate — at times — 70-80 pages of documentation (entered correctly one time, in one place) and efficiently generate any additional documentation they need, saving their engineers countless hours of documentation time.
Another customer, RBC Medical Innovations shared that on one of their state-of-the-art capital equipment development projects, Jama Connect saved them 123 team-member days with an average cost savings per project of $150,000. And medical industry innovators and pioneers in the field of plasma science, Grifols, reports saving 80 hours or more per project after implementing Jama Connect.
Interested in the numbers?
Let’s take, for example, this simple calculation.
If you have 10 team members engaged in core requirements management activities, and each spends roughly four hours on the above-listed unproductive tasks per weeks, the annual budget reclaimed with Jama Connect would be $94,118.
Note: The calculation assumes 237 actual working days per year (at an average salary of $100K) with each author in Jama Connect reclaiming a conservative one hour per day.
Test this out with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!
2. Reducing Rework
How much money are you leaving on the table due to rework? See how much you can save by decreasing discovered and unplanned work due to:
Improperly defined requirements
Incomplete decomposition and missing coverage
Insufficient review and stakeholder alignment
Lack of rigor and impact analysis when managing change
Late-stage requirements churn
Again, let’s assume an organization has an average product development investment cost of $10,000,000. (Typical rework costs average about 30% of development costs, so in this case, it would be $3,000,000. And rework costs due to poor requirements management averages about 60% of rework costs, which, in this case, would be $1,800,000).
Our customer data shows that Jama Connect typically reduces requirements management rework by 40-60%. So, with these calculations, the organization can expect to reclaim, a not insignificant, $900,000 of annual budget with Jama Connect.
In one example, our customer, Arteris IP has seen not only seen reuse go up by 100%, and review times down by 30%, but also a significant 50% reduction in rework since using Jama Connect.
Test this out with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!
3. Streamlining the Review Process
For product developers and engineers, reviews are a cornerstone of the development process. How much are inefficient requirement review meetings costing your organization? Is your review process cumbersome, manual, in disparate documents, and challenging for distributed stakeholders to collaborate? If so, it might be time to (forgive the redundancy) review your review process. Healthcare leader, Grifols shared that with Jama Connect, they have reduced their review cycles from three months to fewer than 30 days.
Legacy solutions that are difficult to use can make the review process incredibly cumbersome, diverting frustrated team members out of the tool and onto ineffective (often quickly outdated) versions of disparate documents. This is a story we’ve heard repetitively from customers who’ve moved away from legacy tools and processes.
If that’s one of your frustrations as well, it might be time to see how much budget you can reclaim through review optimization, including:
Virtualizing reviews for asynchronous collaboration
Focusing key stakeholders on the most relevant information
Adopting a more iterative approach
Increasing upfront rigor and version control
Tracking participation and progress
For this calculation, we’ll assume three variables:
Total number of requirements review meetings per month
Approximate duration of each review meeting
Average participants in each meeting
Let’s assume six review meetings per month, each meeting lasting three hours, and an average of 10 people involved in each review meeting. Calculating with an average salary of $150K/per attendee, and with the above-defined variables, the annual cost of review meetings would be $162,000. The total number of people hours in review meetings would be 180 hours.
The calculated savings alone, by just reducing the time spent in meetings, would be $81,000.
Jama Connect typically reduces time spent in meetings by 40-60%. Notably, the Finnish Red Cross estimates that implementing Jama Connect has shortened their review cycles by an impressive 80%. What could you get done with all that time back?
With Jama Connect, you can simplify the review and approval process by capturing collaborative feedback from stakeholders, including voting for priority and electronic signatures for approver roles. In addition, Review Center in Jama Connect helps teams reduce risk, and save time and money by allowing teams to:
Increase participation in the review process
Retain a historical record of all decisions made and by whom
Provide visibility sooner in the review process
Generate approval-ready content for e-signature faster
Collaborate more often and capture tacit knowledge
Check out the potential savings you could realize with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!
4. Identifying Defects Earlier in the Development Process
Does your organization build complex software and systems? How much can you decrease the cost of development by addressing software defects earlier? Using a modern requirements management software solution can help you identify and address software defects due to:
Lack of rigor early in the development lifecycle
Low stakeholder participation in requirements definition/validation
Poor visibility into requirements changes and impact analysis
V&V/QA teams remaining disconnected throughout the process
For this sample equation, we’ll take an average total number of requirements managed annually (we’ll use 4,500) and the average number of hours it takes to fix a defect (we’ll use six hours for this example). The average number of requirements with defects typically equals around 60% of the total number of requirements. With these test numbers, the annual cost of defects would be $850,000. Jama Connect can reduce the number of requirements-related defects by 25-40%. Identifying and addressing these issues earlier in the development process can significantly help to reduce risk and reclaim significant budget.
For this calculation, we’ve used 30%. The calculation assumes 237 actual working days per year (at an average salary of $100K) with each author in Jama Connect reclaiming one hour per day.
With Jama Connect, the annual budget that could be reclaimed is $255,150.
Test the numbers for yourself using this ROI calculator to see how much you can save by reducing requirements-related defects by up to 40%!
Let’s face it, if software is difficult to use and the user interface is challenging, engineers just won’t use it, or only a select few will. We all want life to get the job done, run smoothly and easily — and the software we choose needs to reflect those desires. So, the right requirements management software not only needs to be powerful and have robust capabilities, but it needs to be easy to use.
“Jama Connect lowers the complexity and burden of having to manually keep requirements, architecture, and specifications all in sync and traced to each other. It’s a formidable problem that is virtually eliminated courtesy of Jama without the hassle of having to learn a clunky UI (IBM Doors).”
Alan M., Chief Product Officer – G2 Verified Review
“Jama is being used as a test management tool in my company. I [have been] using Jama [for] 3+ years, and I can tell you that this was one of the best Test management tools I’ve ever used. Everything is so easy to understand, and the interface is user friendly — easy to use and can learn this tool quickly.”
Team Lead in Engineering, Software Company – Verified Trust Radius Review
A smooth user experience that provides a pleasant and recognizable interface (one that teams will actually use) is critical to the success and effectiveness of any product development process. Jama Connect is award-winning for its ease of use, and that’s something we’re proud of. Customers love using Jama Connect to optimize their complex product, systems, and software development spanning industries such as aerospace and defense, automotive, medical device/life sciences, financial, semiconductor, insurance, industrial, software technologies, and more.
“Our team cannot stop saying great things about Jama Connect! Its efficiency and intuitiveness have turned requirement workshops from a multi-day event to a 6-hour meeting. Teams adopted the platform so fast, we needed to go back to Jama to get additional licenses (twice)!”
Jim Bolton, Director of Methodology and Tools – Workforce Software
“I told the team it was a very easy-to-use solution. But people were shocked at how fast it came together. Within hours, we were going and setting up the structure for our requirements. There were many other people in the company who had used Jama Connect before and supported our selection. It was a clear choice for medical device innovators like us.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio
6. Optimizing Communication and Collaboration
Modern, easy-to-use software can improve collaboration and communication across an organization, both for internal and external stakeholders. The right requirements management software will optimize communication and save money, frustration, resources, and time- across the board. One of our customers, the Finnish Red Cross, estimates that their testing team has improved their collaboration and communication by 50% with Jama Connect.
Legacy systems like IBM® DOORS® are notoriously difficult to use and often require individuals with specialized training to implement. This regularly forces engineers and other stakeholders to manage projects outside the software in disparate documents.
“Jama suited our need for collaboration and communication. Jama provides a very easy-to-use interface and communication system that brought in the buy-in from all stakeholders. Visure, Doors, TTA didn’t perform as well in the communication/ collaboration department where we really needed a boost.”
Stephen Czerniej P. Eng, Systems Engineer – Allied Vision
With Jama Connect, broader teams and stakeholders can collaborate on reviews, test cases, verification and validation in real-time. This kind of in-situ collaboration dramatically reduces risk across the entire development lifecycle to reduce the chance of delays, cost overruns, and expensive recalls, and in turn increases the opportunity for successful outcomes.
[Jama Connect] has allowed us to get more people from our other offices involved in the collaboration process because we’re not all having to sit on a conference call at awkward times. People can come into the system at a time that suits them and review things. And we know their comments will be seen by everybody else.”
Alistair McBain, Sr. Business Consultant – SITA
The fact that it is easy to share information and execute processes even when the team is not co-located (geographically dispersed). Changes are properly tracked, and people notified. It is also easy to organize, review, and monitor the review progress. My organization involves several scientists from 31 countries and more than 200 institutes. Jama Connect gets remote and distributed people informed and involved on processes related to requirements.
Francesco D., Senior Systems Engineer – Verified G2 Review
7. Centralizing Your Requirements Management with Best-of-Breed Tooling
Managing requirements in a single platform speeds up the product development process by saving time (time=money), strengthening alignment, and ensuring quality and compliance. Teams can create, review, validate, and verify requirements in one solution. With Jama Connect, teams can:
Have an authoritative source of truth for clear visibility throughout the product development lifecycle
Iterate in real time for informed decision-making and consensus
Support multiple product development methodologies and engineering disciplines
Configure the requirements management software to align with industry best practices
Visualize how tests track back to requirements to prove quality and compliance
Reuse validated requirements to quickly replicate features across products
Not investigating how you can leverage software within your organization is costing you money
“We are using [Jama Connect] from the design specifications/requirements till the test case reviews… Since Jama can be used as a complete project management tool, complete details of a product /project can be tracked in one place easily.”
Suhas Kashyap, Senior Test Engineer, L&T Technology Services – TrustRadius Verified Review
“Jama Connect has brought some new life to our requirements management (and how we see the inter-connectivity of functional requirements with System Requirement Specifications), better dashboards and reporting for everything it supports from printing test plans, requirements, specifications, and test runs.”
Fred Sookiasian, Senior Quality Assurance Software Lead – Advanced Bionics
The #1 problem product engineering organizations face is complying with traceability requirements spanning siloed teams and tools. And one dirty little secret in product engineering is the plethora of traceable data stored in Microsoft Excel. Jama Connect Interchange™ is purpose-built to deliver end-to-end Live Traceability™ (see section below) across best-of-breed tools, including Microsoft Excel — and it’s the first requirements management platform to make Excel data live traceable through a point and click integration interface.
Now teams can leverage the power of Jama Connect’s traceability model to continuously sync traceable information from other best-of-breed tools with no change required for engineering disciplines to continue using their chosen tools to maximize productivity.
“Jama Connect is one of the vital and advanced tools of the modern era. It has a methodology that can ensure complete project tracking from the first step to the execution, test cases, rectification, quality assurance, project timelining, and much more in a streamlined way which has been increasing the overall ROI and efficiency of the project. The important factor of Jama Connect is that all board members can analyze and collaborate on the performance on the same stage, and this has been increasing trust between the clients and organizations while doing large-scale management.”
Engineering Strategist, IT Services – Verified TrustRadius Review
8. Measuring and Improving Development Success with Live Traceability™
Live requirements traceability is the ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement — no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans. This enables the engineering process to be managed through data, and its performance improved in real-time.
“Right off the initial stage of just importing the data in Jama Connect and trying to create the relationships, we actually saw that we had traceability gaps, just based on what we had done before in the old system. Catching these gaps would’ve probably taken hours or days in our old system, while with Jama, it became obvious in a matter of minutes.”
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.
“We have achieved: better requirement communication across departments; a better home for verification and validation test cases with traceability to the sources; and a detailed overview of traceability of requirements from regulatory requirements all the way down to risk items.”
Stephen Cxerniej P. Eng PMP®, Global Platform Systems Engineer – Allied Vision
If you’d like to learn more on how to measure your traceability to improve product quality and accelerate time to market — and get your Traceability Score™, check out our Requirements Traceability Benchmark (the first large-scale, empirical research to confirm that higher levels of traceability correlate to cycle time and quality improvements.) In it, we show how higher scores equal improved product quality and faster time to market. examine how traceability is measured, and the business practices that separate top-quartile performers from the rest.
“Jama Connect establishes traceability proactively from user needs, risk controls, all the way through verification.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio
When asked, “What do you like best about Jama Connect?” One G2 reviewer shared this:
” …Traceability and the traceability matrix. The ability to establish relationship rules, relate items and item types, and then see where you have gaps is really powerful. After your relationships are established, if you make a change to an item, you can see which related items might be impacted. It makes management of requirements extremely easy.”
Marshall K, Senior Vice President, IT Solutions – G2 Verfied Review
To speed time to market, with reduced risk of negative budget impact, now is the time invest in a modern requirements management platform
Jama Connect enables the delivery of high-quality products, faster, by improving the systems development process through unified requirements management and traceability across the V-model (or any product development process you utilize such as Waterfall, Agile, etc.).
“Jama Connect enables a requirements-driven, systems engineering approach for deploying the V-model in product development. It helps us manage the complexities of vehicle hierarchy; interdependencies between vehicle, system & component; and establish traceability between requirements to validations.”
Anirban Niyogi, Systems Engineering Lead, Vehicle Integration – Nikola
The platform’s robust features coupled with an easy-to-adopt interface aligns people, processes, and tooling in one place to provide visibility and actionable insights into the end-to-end product, systems, and software development process. The result — improved product quality and accelerated time to market with reduced risk of costly delays, recalls, rework.
“We save a lot of time and effort in development and product management by using the well-made collaboration functionalities, especially in these current COVID times, when actors cannot always meet in person. We also save time by making use of the item reuse capabilities of Jama. With Jama we always know who made changes to an item, when the changes were made and sometimes even why. That helps us tracking down and understanding those changes. The ability to link pieces of information together in a relatively easy way, help us to achieve full test coverage, checking for impacts of changes upfront and oftentimes understand a requirement’s rationale. Jama [Connect] also provides good filter and search functions and especially the weaved in collaboration functions constantly prove to be useful. It is also worth mentioning that Jama [Connect] provides powerful customization options, so we were able to customize Jama to our needs and way of working.”
Olaf P., Requirements Management Enterprise – Verified G2 Review
Is Now the Right Time to Invest in Requirements Management Software?
Understandably, being on the edge of a possible recession can motivate extreme fiscal prudence, but now is not the time to duck and cover. It’s the precise time to make proactive decisions that will save your organization measurably in the long run. If you’re dealing with any of the budget-swallowing inefficiencies mentioned above — and can see the potential gains a modern requirements management solution like Jama Connect will offer — it might be exactly the right time to strategically think about making a change to optimize your development processes, saving money for your organization in the long run.
“We have achieved a significant ROI with Jama Connect in risk reduction and productivity gains: reuse is up 100%, rework is down 50%, requirements review cycle time is cut by 30% and audit preparation time is down 75%. Jama Connect is our single source of truth. If it’s not in Jama Connect, it’s not happening.”
Kurt Shuler, VP Marketing – Arteris IP
Are you ready to reclaim some significant budget? Give us a call to see how we can be of help or get started today with a free trial of our award-winning requirements management software platform.
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Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn
Regardless of the state of the economy, organizations building complex products, systems, and software can always benefit from improved efficiency across the end-to-end development process. Making strategic changes that optimize processes and team productivity will undoubtedly save your organization significant time and money.
And, while it may seem counter-intuitive to invest in new technology during an economic downturn (dare we say the word recession), a modern requirements management tool like Jama Connect®, can provide a dramatic ROI in short order — making it a smart-sense move to invest in new product development software right now.
During economic uncertainty, spending capital on the right tools can improve product quality and increase productivity, well-positioning your organization to save time and money over the long term. But regardless of what happens with the economy, it is never going to be wasted effort to optimize your product development processes or begin to think about how to weather the impact of an impending economic storm.
Invest in Requirements Management Software Now to Save In Both the Short & Long Term
Many of our clients come to Jama Software to help optimize their product development process after experiencing some of the following core frustrations:
Using cumbersome legacy requirements management solutions that have non-intuitive challenging UI/UX
Engineers spending valuable hours of tedious manual documentation across disparate documents and tools
Engineers wasting time on in-efficient workflows that can be streamlined to save upwards of 80%
Insufficient, ineffective cross-team collaboration across various stages of the systems development process starting from requirements, design, development to testing and validation
Inefficient and cumbersome review cycles
Difficulty in easily producing the necessary documentation to prove compliance
Siloed tools and processes that misalign teams and workflows, and leave visibility gaps
Lack of Live Traceability™ which results in finding errors late in the development process which can cost upwards of 100x or more to resolve than if they had been found earlier in the development process
And the list goes on and on…
Think about the corresponding monetary burden these outdated solutions and misaligned processes place on the organization’s shoulders.
Making an investment in a modern requirements management platform isn’t simply about the time and money that will be saved or improving productivity and efficiency for just a few months — it’s about the savings and reduced re-work that will be realized from the moment the application launches and for years beyond. Depending on the organization’s goals, they either save costs with the gained efficiencies or they use it to be competitive, win new contracts, and bring products to market faster and more cost effectively. You may be thinking that now is the time to pause on spending, not invest. To the contrary, we’d like to share how investing in a modern requirements management solution now is the right decision to help your organization protect itself from an economic downturn and increase your ROI.
For Startups: Build Your House on Bricks, Not Sticks
For startups, investing in a modern requirements management solution, like Jama Connect, is a smart idea irrespective of the state of the economy.
While long established large organizations may be able to withstand a period of lowered sales and slow development, startups may not have that option. A startup’s ability to get to market fast – and first – often is a great indicator of success, and on the flip side, failure.
Doing things right the first time is crucial.
While startups might be hesitant to invest in software initially, a great number are investing in Jama Connect in order to reduce rework, speed development, meeting regulatory compliance, and get to the market before their competitors.
And it’s paying off.
For medical device startup, Proprio, VP of Software Engineering, Rama Pailoor knew it was imperative to establish a requirements-driven development process from the very beginning. Pailoor recognized that their existing approach of using only a Quality Management System (QMS) was not capable of supporting the level of complexity needed to develop their product. Like many document and spreadsheet-based processes, the Quality Management System (QMS) Proprio had in place technically supported requirements management at face value, but when it came to complex engineering efforts, the system came up short.
“Establishing a requirements-driven development process helps to formalize the user needs, getting all the stakeholders to come to a common forum, to express the requirements from their perspective, and avoid confusion. The right requirements management solution can facilitate all of that.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio
For medium to large organizations: Strengthen your foundation by investing in modern tools and digital transformation
While big enterprises have large teams spread across various geographies and different divisions working on multiple projects, there is a strong need to optimize processes and reduce inefficiencies to reduce costs — especially during challenging economic times. Putting resources towards digital transformation and modern software tools (which result in more ROI) will also reduce overall product development costs over the long term. Through these investments, companies can strengthen their foundation to remain competitive and be better able to weather external market forces.
It is also worth re-visiting how enterprises can improve the engineering efficiency of product development by investing in requirements management and traceability tools. Optimizing the systems engineering process by bringing in traceability across your development stages can immediately create a positive impact on cycle times, and faster execution of testing and validation.
Requirements management software, like Jama Connect, can help development teams improve product quality and accelerate time to market. The platform’s robust features coupled with an easy-to-adopt interface aligns people, processes and tooling in one place to provide visibility and actionable insights into the end-to-end product, systems, and software development process.
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In this blog, we recap our press release on Jama Software® partnering with Sterling PLM.
