Tag Archive for: TÜV SÜD

TÜV SÜD Certification


The Top Six Things You Should Know About TÜV SÜD

In the quest for innovation, product testing, compliance, and safety certifications remain key to accessing markets and gaining customers. No one wants to buy a product, service, or process that hasn’t been thoroughly vetted by an independent body. In the context of global markets, few certifications carry the importance or significance of those from TÜV SÜD, but in the United States, the various companies that are part of the TÜV Association are not widely known. So, what is TÜV SÜD, and why is it so important to product development? 

Here are the top six questions and answers about TÜV SÜD: 

1: What does TÜV SÜD stand for?

“TÜV” stands for “Technischer Überwachungsverein,” which translates to “Technical Inspection Association” in English. There are several independent companies that are part of the TÜV Association; TÜV SÜD is headquartered in Munich and employs approximately 25,000 people around the globe. 

2: What type of company is TÜV SÜD?

TÜV SÜD is focused on protecting people and the environment through rigorous testing, certification, auditing, and advisory services. The company helps ensure regulatory compliance of new and updated technologies, especially in automotive innovation and development, and it functions as a notified body in Europe for medical devices. The TÜV companies trace their origins back to the 1860s when they were first formed to oversee the safety of steam engines. 

3: What is the difference between TÜV SÜD and TÜV Rheinland?

TÜV SÜD and TÜV Rheinland are different companies that both provide similar services. All TÜV companies are at least 25.1% owned by the TÜV Association. There are currently six main members of the TÜV Association, all of whom are denoted by the brand “TÜV” plus the regional suffix, such as SÜD or Rheinland. The other TÜV companies include TÜV Nord, TÜV Thüringen, TÜV Saarland, and TÜV Austria. 


RELATED READING: Monolithic Power Systems Uses Jama Connect to Manage Complexities and Compliance


4: What is a TÜV SÜD Certification?

A TÜV SÜD Certification assures governing bodies and consumers that a product, service, or process has passed relevant safety testing and meets relevant compliance requirements. The certification process is rigorous and comprehensive and involves multiple steps, including steps to review requirements and establish processes followed during development. 

5: Why is achieving TÜV SÜD Certification so important?

TÜV Certification is recognized internationally as a sign of quality and thorough review—similar to an ISO or UL certification. Although it originated in Germany, it is regarded globally as evidence that your product, service, or process has attained high standards of safety, quality, and sustainability. With a TÜV SÜD Certification, you can achieve access to additional markets and give your customers peace of mind. 

6: Is Jama Connect® certified by TÜV SÜD?

Jama Connect received its first TÜV SÜD certification in 2016. Jama Connect is TÜV SÜD certified for developing safety-related products according to ISO 26262 (up to ASIL D) and IEC 61508 (up to SIL 3). Jama Software is the first vendor that is both SaaS and Agile to receive the certification. In 2019, Jama Software completed additional certification for Jama Connect as a software tool for the development of medical devices according to IEC 62304 and railway applications according to EN 50128. 


RELATED READING: How Jama Software’s TÜV SÜD Certification Helps Customers Build Safer Products


Don’t neglect important certifications. Even if you are already pursuing other certifications, the TÜV SÜD Certification could be an important addition to your automotive, medical, or railway products and services. Jama Connect can help you meet the requirements tracing and process needs that will set you up to achieve the TÜV SÜD Certification and expand to new markets and customers. To learn more, contact us. 



TÜV SÜD

In 2016, the Jama Software team proudly announced that we had received a certification from internationally-recognized testing body TÜV SÜD. Jama Connect™ was certified as a software tool for development of safety-related products according to ISO 26262 (up to ASIL D) and IEC 61508 (up to SIL 3). It was especially noteworthy, as Jama Software was one of the first vendors to be both SaaS and agile to have received this certification. 

Three years later, we are excited to announce we have extended the scope of our certification from TÜV SÜD. Jama Connect is now also certified as a software tool for development of medical devices according to IEC 62304 and railway applications according to EN 50128.

This new certification gives medical device developers and railway application developers confidence that Jama Connect has been evaluated and qualified for defining, building and testing products that have to meet critical functional safety requirements. 

We recently talked with Christian Nowak, Functional Safety Expert at TÜV SÜD, to discuss what is required to receive such certifications and what they mean for our customers. 

Jama Software: Can you explain, generally, how the certification process is completed 

Christian NowakFor a software tool certification, we are focusing our assessment on the development processes and the validation approach and evidences provided by our customers. An important activity is the on-site audit at the customer’s premises. The first audit was conducted in 2016 as part of the original certification and we performed a three-day re-audit in June 2018 at Jama Software’s headquarters in Portland, OR. 

During the initial audit we looked at the organization’s processes in the light of the functional safety standards’ requirements for developing and maintaining safety-relevant software. The recent re-audit included sample checks to see if these processes are being followed based on the evidences created.  

We also discussed and assessed modifications and improvements of processes, which play an important role for verification and validation especially in the context of the Agile development approach at Jama Software. 


RELATED: 3 Ways Products Became More Complex in the Last Five Years


JS: What is required in addition to the on-site audit?  

CN: The on-site activities are usually supported by off-site reviews of the documentation evidences generated by the customer. Due to the agile development approach at Jama Software leading to frequent releases, our assessment approach had to be adapted and is following this pace.  

In other words, we are regularly assessing the modifications Jama Software is applying remotely and updating our certification report accordingly. In a way, our assessment approach has, in this case, also become “agile.”  

JS: What does this certification mean for our customers? How can they benefit from these certifications?  

CNEvery Jama customer who is attempting to adhere to the mentioned standards for developing safety-related systems, hardware or software must provide documentation evidences addressing the requirements defined in the standards.  

Those requirements also consider the software tools that are used for the development of safety-related systems, hardware or software. The idea is that systematic faults should be avoided not only in the actual developed systems, hardware or software, but also in the software tools used for the development.  

By undergoing a successful third-party certification by an accredited testing body like TÜV SÜD, Jama Software demonstrates that they are following adequate development processes and performing adequate validation activities for preventing systematic faults. 

Thus, Jama customers can use the TÜV SÜD certificate as an argument for software tool qualification in projects where increased confidence in the software tool is required. They do not have to spend all the efforts for qualifying the tool themselves; they only have to make sure that they are following the safety manual that Jama Software is providing for each release. 


RELATED: Watch a demonstration of the Jama Connect for Automotive Solution


JS: What is the value for organizations developing products in accordance with these standards?   

CN: In some industry fields, functional safety standards are mandatory to be complied with – in others, product liability is a main driver. In general, the quality, reliability and of course the safety of those products are being improved, which helps avoiding recalls, sanctions, and worse – consumer injury. 

JS: How long is the certificate valid for? 

CSGenerally, a TÜV SÜD functional safety product certificate is valid for five years. During this timeframe, TÜV SÜD is however regularly monitoring the adherence to the requirements by accompanying the agile development remotely as mentioned before and by returning every two years for an on-site audit.    

JS: Is TÜV SÜD involved in the development of the functional safety standards?  

CN: Yes, TÜV SÜD is actively participating in the standardization committees. Please note that just recently the second edition of the automotive functional safety standard was released (ISO 26262:2018). 


RELATED: Learn more about ISO 26262 and automotive electronics development


JS: How long does the tool certification process take, on average?  

CNWell, this depends on the maturity of the existing development processes, the complexity of the tool and the experience of the company with functional safety when we start with the assessment. I would say the initial certification can be achieved within six months, but it can also take much longer if many iteration loops are required. 


To learn more about how Jama Connect can help your team simplify compliance, streamline development, and speed time to market, download our solution overview.

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Jama Connect for Automotive

For automotive manufacturers, compliance to safety standards is important, but it is not the only factor when delivering safe and reliable products to market. To achieve compliance, organizations need defined processes for automotive development and production and detailed traceability, from the high-level user needs through to test management.

In the automotive industry, the cost of being late to market is not just about your bottom line or market share. Today’s consumers have high expectations and won’t have the patience to wait for your solution. Leaders seek to spend less time on paperwork and more on innovation as part of an effort to streamline their product development and simplify compliance.

Over the coming months, we’ll be publishing a series on best practices for automotive development and how Jama Connect for Automotive can help teams align to industry standards, simplify functional safety compliance processes, and accelerate time to market. Below you’ll find a description of what you can expect from this series, and what topics will be covered.

Note: Now that our automotive development blog series has concluded, you can go back and read the Part I and Part II.


Related: Five Challenges in Modern Automotive Product Development


Part I: Thursday, September 10th: Automotive Spice (ASPICE)

Modern automobiles are complex systems of systems that must be reliable and safe. One of the ways to increase reliability and safety is for automotive OEMs and suppliers to follow established development processes. In this post, we’ll discuss how Jama Connect for Automotive aligns with Automotive Spice (ASPICE) and other regulatory standards.

Part II: Thursday, September 17th: Functional Safety (ISO 26262)

Functional safety is a key part of the overall safety of a system or piece of equipment in automotive development. Functional safety is crucial for automotive developers who aim to eliminate risk. In this post, we’ll detail how automotive development teams can build safety-critical products, while accelerating time to market with frameworks and templates aligned to functional safety industry standards.

Part III: Thursday, September 24th: Collaboration Across the Ecosystem

Effective collaboration with your customers and suppliers is crucial for automotive developers. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how with Jama Connect for Automotive, developers are able to collaborate across the ecosystem with requirements exchange, including standard Req-IF based data exchange.We’ll demonstrate how automotive developers can use Jama Connect for Automotive while effectively interfacing with other requirements management tools, avoid manual rework, and verify that all requirements are met, regardless of their original source.

Part IV: Thursday, October 1st: IATF 16949

IATF 16949:2016 (replaces ISO/TS 16949:2009) is a standard that establishes the requirements for a Quality Management System (QMS) in automotive development. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how Jama Connect for Automotive aligns with IATF 16949 and how developers can speed development with a platform designed specifically for automotive development.

Part V: Thursday, October 8th: TÜV SÜD

Jama Connect is certified by internationally recognized testing body, TÜV SÜD, as suitable for use in the development of safety-related software according to EN 50128, IEC 61508, and/or ISO 26262 up to SIL 3 or ASIL D. Jama Software provides a certification by TÜV SÜD for each cloud and self-hosted release. In this post, we’ll discuss what this certification means, and how it can help your team.

Part VI: Thursday, October 15th: Requirements Engineering for Remote Automotive Teams

In the final post of our 6-part series, we’ll discuss how to increase early stakeholder visibility and participation in the review process. We’ll demonstrate how teams can leverage Jama Connect for Automotive to exchange requirements data to collaborate with remote engineering teams, customers, and suppliers.


To learn more about how Jama Connect for Automotive can help your team simplify compliance, streamline development, and speed time to market, download our solution overview.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Product development

Close gaps in product development with Jama Connect™ and LDRA

Interested in closing gaps in your product development lifecycle? It’s no secret that developers of mission-critical software are facing increasingly complex system requirements and stringent standards for safety and efficacy. That’s why Jama Software has partnered with LDRA to deliver a test validation and verification solution for safety- and security-critical embedded software. LDRA has been a market leader in verification and software quality tools for over 40 years. They serve customers across the aerospace and defense, industrial energy, automotive, rail, and medical device industries.

Integrating TÜV SÜD-certified Jama Connect with the LDRA tool suite gives teams bidirectional traceability across the development lifecycle. This transparency helps development teams build higher-quality products and get to market faster while mitigating risk. Whether teams are working from a standards-based V model or applying an Agile, Spiral, or Waterfall methodology, employing Jama Connect in concert with the TÜV SÜD- and TÜV SAAR-certified LDRA tool suite closes the verification gaps in the development lifecycle, helping to ensure the delivery of safe and secure software.

Let’s dive into some details to understand the value of using Jama Connect and the LDRA tool suite.

Requirements and test cases form the bond between Jama Connect™ and LDRA

Product managers and engineers use Jama Connect to manage requirements and testing from idea through development, integration, and launch. Managing requirements in the Jama Connect platform allows users to align teams, track decisions, and move forward with confidence that they are building the product or system they set out to build.

LDRA imports Jama requirements and test cases, mirroring the structure and levels of traceability established from the decomposition of stakeholder requirements down to software requirements and test cases. With the Jama artifacts in the LDRA tool suite, traceability down to the code can be realized and verification and validation of requirements can begin.

During the Jama test case import, the user can choose the type of test case it corresponds to (e.g. unit test, system test, code review test) and let LDRA create a test artifact that will invoke the proper part of the LDRA tool suite and realize that test case type.

Part of realizing Jama test cases in the LDRA tool suite includes the ability to follow the steps defined in the Jama test case description (e.g. inputs, outputs, expected results). Test cases executed by the LDRA tool suite can be executed either on a host machine, in a virtual environment, or on the actual target hardware. Verification results are captured, and Pass/Fail status results are produced. The verification results can then be exported from the LDRA tool suite into the Jama test case verification status field.

By way of the Jama Test Run feature, the change in verification status and included user notes can be logged and committed. Additionally, if the user desires, the LDRA tool suite verification results can also be exported into the Jama requirement verification status field, giving the Jama user additional touch points to analyze.

Another benefit of the integration is Jama’s ability to create, link, assign, track, and manage defects discovered during testing with the LDRA tool suite.

Partnering with standards and safety experts on product development

Many industries and their applications have safety-critical requirements drawn from process standards like ISO 14971 and ISO 26262. These requirements demand a higher level of visibility and traceability that can be achieved with the Jama-LDRA integration.

LDRA is heavily involved in the international standards body. They help lead the DO-178 standard in the aerospace market for safety in avionics. LDRA is also a significant contributor to the MISRA software coding standard and other standards like CERT. Their tool suite is ISO 9001:2008-certified as a quality management system and TÜV SÜD- and TÜV SAAR-certified.

The Jama-LDRA partnership benefits not only LDRA customers in the military and aerospace needing to comply with standards like DO-178B/C, but also one of the fastest-growing industries, and the one that keeps LDRA the busiest: the automotive industry and their need to comply with ISO 26262. The Jama-LDRA partnership also addresses applications for safety and security in the medical device industry (IEC 62304), rail (EN 50128), and industrial controls and energy (IEC 61508).


RELATED: Increasing Efficiency in Testing and Confidence in Safety Standard Compliance

Certification and code analysis

LDRA helps users achieve certification in standards like DO-178B/C, DO-331, ISO 26262, Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE), IEC 61508, and others. The LDRA tool suite lays out a set of objectives for the relevant process standard, along with corresponding artifact placeholders and sample template documents. This guiding project structure with built-in progress metrics gives the user an intuitive understanding of what is required to achieve certification and the day-to-day gains toward that goal.

A major key benefit to customers is LDRA’s ability to perform on target hardware testing or Run-For-Score (RFS). These customers have a very strict process for achieving certification wherein step-by-step testing is followed and results are logged and eye-witnessed.

LDRA also has its own proprietary code analysis engine. Starting with static code analysis, a debugging method that examines the source code before the program is run, LDRA generally finds potential coding flaws and security vulnerabilities prior to code compilation. Once the code has been compiled, testing can be further complemented by LDRA’s dynamic testing, structural coverage, and unit testing.

Build with certainty

The complementary capabilities and automation offered by Jama and LDRA deliver a powerful solution for the development and test verification of software systems in the product development lifecycle. Whatever software development approach your team chooses to employ, requirements- combined with Jama’s product lifecycle management capacities can help you deliver safe, compliant products on time and on budget.

To learn more about test management with Jama, take a deeper look at our solution and download the datasheet.


To learn more on the topic of test management, we’ve compiled a handy list of valuable resources for you!

When I joined Jama as CEO earlier this year, I was excited to become part of a team that was passionate about our customers and solving their problems. The companies we get to work with are a major reason I wanted to join Jama to begin with — it’s an honor and a thrill to partner with them as they build products that will change their industries and the economy. I know I’m not alone in that enthusiasm: As I met individually with every employee during my first three months on the job, over and over again “our customers” was a top reason people cited for coming to work here.

Market Forces

Our customers span an array of critical industries — aerospace, financial and consulting services, medical devices, government, semiconductor, consumer electronics and automotive, to name a few. I’ve now had the privilege of meeting with dozens of them, and I’ve consistently heard them describe the following market forces in play:

The new generation of smart, connected products is increasing competition.

For the first time ever, when consumers buy something new, whether a phone, a thermostat or a car, they expect its capabilities to improve over time. They expect new features over the lifetime of the product, automatic fixes where there were previously recalls, and unprecedented options for customization. With each release of Jama, we’re rolling out new features and improvements that focus on enabling innovation for our customers. We invested in building our REST API to add more even customization and extend the functionality of our solution.

Increasing complexity and new regulation add new challenges.

Development cycles are more complicated than before, requiring close coordination of hardware and software teams, often using different tools and methodologies. Connected products introduce new security risks, often into industries that were previously immune to regulatory compliance. As software becomes an increasingly critical component of new cars, the automotive industry has responded with new compliance regulations such as ISO26262, and so have we. This year we achieved ISO 26262 fit-for-purpose certification by TÜV SÜD to give our customers confidence as they navigate the path to compliance in their product development process.

Systems development teams require a purpose-built product development platform and must take a continuous engineering approach to create products for the modern world.

ALM was built for software, PLM was built for hardware, but today’s product teams require a unified set of capabilities. Teams need contextual, ongoing collaboration and a single source of truth for their data and requirements. In June, we released Jama 8, kicking off a series of releases that will build on our core traceability and collaboration features. We’re also investing in our product ecosystem with the launch of our Partner Alliance Program, working with best-of-breed solution providers to better serve our customers.

At face value, these challenges are daunting. But we get to see our customers overcome them each day through disciplined, modern management of their development processes, which lets them better capitalize on industry trends. As they work to deliver the life- and economy-critical products that are going to change the way we live, we’re glad to be their partners and are eager to foster their success every step of the way.