[Webinar Recap] Best Practices for Test Management
|
This blog recaps our webinar, “Best Practices for Test Management” – Watch it in its entirety HERE.
Transform Your Development Lifecycle with Modern Test Management
Building complex systems demands more than just functionality—it requires precision, compliance, and reliability. Verification and validation are the cornerstones of ensuring your product meets industry standards and exceeds expectations.
Traditional testing methods can’t keep up with the growing demand for faster delivery and uncompromised safety in complex system development. In this session, we’ll look at how adopting a modern test management approach can transform the way you develop and deliver complex systems.
Join Romer De Los Santos, Principal Solutions Manager at Jama Software, for a deep dive into optimizing your testing lifecycle. We will discuss the critical shift toward requirements-based testing and how connecting test status directly to requirements ensures complete traceability and streamlines development.
What you’ll learn:
- Achieve end-to-end traceability by linking test results directly to requirements
- Ensure compliance and eliminate gaps in your development process
- Empower QA teams to validate requirements early, accelerating approvals
- Foster seamless collaboration between engineering and quality assurance teams
- Gain real-time visibility into test progress to proactively address roadblocks
Leverage data-driven insights to mitigate risks and enhance product quality
Don’t miss this opportunity to improve how you manage verification and validation.
THE VIDEO BELOW IS A PREVIEW – WATCH THE ENTIRE PRESENTATION HERE
TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW
Romer De Los Santos: Hello, everyone. I’m Romer De Los Santos, a principal solutions consultant here at Jama Software, specializing in software development and process improvement for the medical advice and life sciences vertical. Before joining Jama Software, I spent over 20 years developing a myriad of medical devices, including insulin pumps, continuous glucose sensors, diabetes management software, solid-state cardiac spec cameras, genomic sequencers, and IVD genomic assays. Having served in the roles of software developer, test lead, systems engineer, technical product manager, core team lead, and even a short stint as an internal auditor, I have gained firsthand experience in the full development lifecycle and have an understanding of the perspectives of the different stakeholders involved in development. I’m pleased to be here today to present on test management using Jama Connect®.
Jama Connect is a highly configurable requirements management tool that includes robust test management capabilities. I’m happy to share some best practices on how to use those capabilities. This is not intended to be a step-by-step tutorial on how to perform testing using Jama Connect. Instead, I’ll be going over some testing concepts and best practices to help improve your experience with the tool. Then I’ll provide some information on what is possible and how you can extend Jama Connect’s capabilities. First, let’s start with a discussion about the structures around testing in Jama Connect, and how understanding those structures will help you manage your testing effort.
The scope of testing is defined by a test plan, and test execution must be in the context of a test plan. Many users use one test plan per release. However, for more complex projects, it may make more sense to break up testing into one test plan per major component or one test plan per test team. Having a test plan per component allows you to leverage the testing of that component whenever the component is used. Having a test plan per test team allows individual test teams to manage their own testing effort independently, and is often used by very large organizations. Your testing strategy depends on your situation, and if you need advice, please contact your designated Jama Solutions consultant or your customer success manager.
Test plans contain groups of test cases. Jama Connect adds test cases to a cycle of testing by test group and status. The criteria you use for grouping test cases is up to you; however, it is best practice to organize test groups by functional group, which is defined as a feature or functionality that can be independently tested. This type of organization facilitates reuse. For example, say you swap out an imaging module for a genomic sequencer with an equivalent component. Instead of cherry-picking individual test cases, you can rerun the imaging module test group. Now, let’s talk about the structures around test execution.
RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Medical Device & Life Sciences
De Los Santos: A group of test runs is known as a test cycle. Jama Connect will allow you to add to the test cycle by test group, test status, pass or fail, and will even give you the option of cherry-picking from the selected test groups. Test cycles can be run in series or in parallel. If you have a small team, you may choose to run one cycle at a time. If you have multiple test teams, it may be more efficient to have each test team have their own test cycles so that testing can be run in parallel. When running multiple test cycles in parallel, it is best practice to agree on a naming convention to minimize ambiguity when looking at a growing list of test cases. Something like Alpha Team Cycle 1 identifies the team and the current cycle they’re on.
Each test case added to the test cycle will spawn a test run, which captures the execution of the test case. The test run is synchronized with the version of the test case at the time the test cycle was created. If there are any changes after that point, the test run will not automatically update until you choose to resynchronize them. However, doing so will wipe out any progress you’ve currently made on your test run. If you want to keep your progress and continue your work on your previous test case, then don’t sync. Jama Connect allows you to run different versions of the same test case, as long as they live in different test cycles.
Now, this is a good time to talk about the concept of parameterization. Parameterization is when a single test case is run multiple times to verify a specific set of parameters. It’s best practice to duplicate the test case for each parameter so that you have a separate test run per parameter. While this method does increase the total number of test cases in your test plan, it also ensures that each parameter is tested and captured in its own test run, thus eliminating ambiguity in your testing results.
Since Jama Connect is an item-based software solution, you can use item locks to manage your testing effort. If you lock a test plan, you prevent modifications to the test plan, the adding and removing of test cases and the organization of those test cases into test groups. However, testers are still able to create test cycles and execute test runs. They can also choose to synchronize runs to the latest versions of your test cases. In other words, when locking a test plan, you have control over what test cases are run and how they are organized. If you choose to lock a test cycle, you will ensure that testers execute the version of the test case at the time the cycle was created or last synchronized. Thus, locking the test cycle gives you control over the version of the test case to be executed. Finally, if you want to prevent a test case from being run, you should lock the associated test run. This effectively prevents any test execution.
RELATED: Expert Perspectives: A Method to Assess Benefit-Risk More Objectively for Healthcare Applications
De Los Santos: While Jama Connect is not designed as a dedicated test management tool, it can be configured to be compatible with most testing processes. Let’s go over some of the most useful configuration options available to you. What I’m showing you here is Test Center in Jama Connect. One of the most common requests I receive from my clients is, ” Where can I put a prerequisite or preconditions field in Jama Connect?” Ideally, you want to place it where the description field is located on the test execution tab here. However, you don’t have control over the order of the items that are going to be displayed on the test execution tab.
The best way to accomplish this is to reuse or rather commandeer the description field of your test case to be your new preconditions field. So the way you would do that very simply is you would go to your admin panel, go to item types, select your particular test case item, and then look for a unique field name called description and rename that to be your preconditions field. Any value you enter into your new preconditions field will appear in the description field of the associated test run. All right? So let’s try it out. Let’s go into our project, go under verifications. We’ll pick the first test case and enter a precondition for a prerequisite. This is a precondition. Save that off. When we go back to the test plan and look at the test runs, you’ll notice it’s now out of sync because we updated the test case. We’ll go ahead and resync, and now, when you execute your particular test case, or rather, execute the test run, you’ll see here that the precondition now appears above the test steps.
THIS HAS BEEN A PREVIEW – TO WATCH THE ENTIRE WEBINAR, VISIT:
Best Practices for Test Management
Senior Professional Services Consultant at Jama Software
I'm a professional with over 20 years of experience developing software in the medical device industry. I have a proven track record for driving process improvements, introducing design controls to teams entering the medical device space, and for bringing focus to highly complex projects.
Regulatory Experience: HIPPA, IEC62304, ISO13485, ISO14971, ISO8601, 21 CFR Part 11, 21 CFR 820, IVDR, cGMP, GDP, QSR
Languages and Skills: CSPO, CSM, Jama, JIRA, Confluence, Agile PLM, SAP PLM, Scrum, Requisite Pro, Visual Studio, MS Office, MS Project, Visio, Balsamiq, Oscilloscope, DICOM, C#, WPF, XMAL
Regulatory Experience: HIPPA, IEC62304, ISO13485, ISO14971, ISO8601, 21 CFR Part 11, 21 CFR 820, IVDR, cGMP, GDP, QSR
Languages and Skills: CSPO, CSM, Jama, JIRA, Confluence, Agile PLM, SAP PLM, Scrum, Requisite Pro, Visual Studio, MS Office, MS Project, Visio, Balsamiq, Oscilloscope, DICOM, C#, WPF, XMAL
Latest posts by Romer De Los Santos (see all)
- [Webinar Recap] Best Practices for Test Management - April 9, 2026
- [Webinar Recap] Effective Strategies and Solutions for Successful SaMD Project Execution - December 5, 2023
- Jama Connect® Features in Five: SaMD Framework - October 13, 2023