[Webinar Recap] Eliminate Gaps and Risks with Proven Traceability Best Practices
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In this blog, we recap our recent webinar, “Eliminate Gaps and Risks with Proven Traceability Best Practices”
Eliminate Gaps and Risks with Proven Traceability Best Practices
Achieve Live Traceability™ Across Complex Development Lifecycles
Manufacturers across industrial, consumer electronics, and energy sectors are under constant pressure to build smarter, more complex systems all while meeting strict safety, regulatory, and performance requirements. As development processes span more tools, teams, and geographies, maintaining visibility across the entire product lifecycle becomes a real challenge.
Join Jama Software’s Yannick Selg to discover how Live Traceability and Digital Thread strategies can give your teams the visibility and confidence they need to deliver innovative, compliant products faster.
What You’ll Learn:
- Apply process best practices for end-to-end traceability in industrial manufacturing
- Use Digital Thread strategies to connect engineering, quality, and compliance teams
- Automatically detect gaps and risks in products and processes before they impact delivery
If your team is balancing complex requirements, specialized tools, and compliance demands, this webinar will show you how to stay ahead.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Yannick Selg: Thank you very much. My name is Yannick Selg. I’m a Senior Solutions Architect here at Jama Software. I bring broad experience in PLM and ALM implementation, and I’m supporting our customers in the machinery, consumer electronics, and energy sectors here with all your technical questions and demos. And I’m looking forward to guiding you through our webinar today, talking a little bit about traceability. Let’s start by taking a look at our agenda for the webinar today. We have a lot of exciting content to cover. So as a first step, we’ll begin with a brief introduction where I will provide an overview of the potential impact of gaps in traceability and how these affect your organization’s and basically day-to-day project work. Next, we’ll dive into the concept of the digital threat, and I will explain what a digital threat is as well as its significance in product development nowadays and how it can enhance collaboration and data visibility across the product development lifecycle in your organization. We’ll also take a look at some key benefits and the impact of those benefits on the daily work.
Following that, we’ll talk about the importance of traceability and explore some key points for end-to-end traceability. I will also discuss the importance of traceability in product development and the key components that are involved in this traceability. Right after that, we will jump into a live demonstration. We will focus on identifying gaps and risks in the product development process when using Jama Connect®. I’ve prepared some use cases which will give you an idea about the tools, the methods, and also the techniques that are available in Jama Connect for the detection of risks and gaps in traceability. And we will close out at the end with a Q&A session. This is your opportunity to also ask questions that you may have about a topic that we are covering today, but also any other topics regarding Jama Connect in general or regarding Jama Software, our organization.
Now let’s take a closer look at the impact of gaps in traceability. And oftentimes, we see the number one impact that we have is rework when we talk about gaps in traceability. Rework is a very significant factor in product development, and depending on which source we are looking at, it often consumes a substantial portion of the project budget and also the project time. So studies have shown that depending on which study you’re looking at, between 40 and 70% of a project’s budget is often allocated to rework and, for example, rogue development due to lack of, for example, traceability, but also numerous other factors. So this means basically half or, oftentimes, more than half of the budget is spent in correcting errors and making changes after the initial work is already completed. And we can also see that the amount of money that an error costs and rework costs increases exponentially throughout the entire life cycle of the product.
So, for example, if an error is initially detected during the development phase of your product, it’s far cheaper to fix, but looking forward, if this error goes into production, the costs can be astronomical to fix these errors. So, in order to avoid situations like this, traceability and the digital threat can be quite a good answer to this. Now, what does the digital threat provide? So the digital threat is, well, I would say basically a communication or orchestration framework that integrates data across the entire product life cycle. This means basically that the information from various stages of the development… Well, in the best case, all stages of development, like, for example, design, manufacturing, or testing, as well as maintenance, are connected together seamlessly. And by connecting this information from different stages of the development, the digital threat basically ensures that all the relevant data is accessible by the right people at the right time.
And this connectivity is crucial for maintaining consistency and accuracy also during your entire development process, and having all the information available, as I said, at the right time. And maybe the key benefits that I want to point out here of the digital thread are that it provides a broad visibility into the development process. So this basically means that you can see what is happening in your development process, and you can also see changes. So this visibility basically allows you to manage changes more effectively and ensure that modifications are tracked and the impact of these modifications is understood in the early stages of the product development process. So with this comprehensive view, your organization can make informed decisions and mitigate risks that are associated with these changes even before they occur. Now, what are the benefits of having these frameworks in place? I already talked about this on a high level, but I want to point out a couple of, well, specific things here, which we also see later on in Jama Connect.
So one of the key benefits of having the digital threat is, of course, the improved collaboration within the project, but also within the entire organization. With all the data integrated as shown before, team members from different departments and from different projects can access the same information, which is basically creating and supporting better teamwork and communication in the entire organization. And this enhanced collaboration obviously leads to more efficient problem-solving and decision-making processes across the project, but as I said, maybe also across the entire organization. Next, the digital threat also provides better data visibility and accessibility in the organization because the relevant data is all connected and it’s all visible in real time. So stakeholders can easily get this up-to-date use, and we will see this in Jama Connect later on as well. Having this digital threat enabled will basically allow you to get real-time updates on the status of your project. And this improved visibility ensures that everyone is basically always working on the latest data, which is reducing errors, especially about, for example, having delayed information flow throughout different silos.
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Selg: And this is the third point that I want to talk about, and probably also the most important one, as you will see on the next slide. So, traditional product development is often done in fragmented parts and isolated teams, but the digital threat breaks those barriers down and connects data and teams, and promotes a more integrated and cohesive approach to the development of your products. And this reduction of the silos is what all the organizations are striving for because it leads to smoother workflows and an overall very collaborative environment with very efficient communication streams. Now this is something that we see a lot with our customers, and I guess this model is quite familiar to you. You can see a, I would say, V model-inspired approach, but all the departments that are responsible for the different levels in here like, for example, the initial requirements identification of stakeholder requirements is done by a department, the system requirements are identified by a different department, implementation is, again, done by different departments and also in different tools. Same thing for the verification side of the V modeling here.
So maybe your work process will differ from the V-model, but still we observe a lot of silos that are working with their own tools like, for example, Word here or Excel as a requirement identification tool, which we see a lot with our customers. We also see, for example, Jira for software development, or Windchill or Teamcenter as a PLM software for hardware implementation. And we see Jenkins for automated testing. So, Jama Connect really connects with all those best-in-breed tools. And what we do here is we will set up what we call live traceability across the entire V-model, and we will eliminate the silos that we have seen before. So you can see on the entire V-model that we have here, all the levels are connected to each other, and Jama Connect is providing Live Traceability™ across the entire lifecycle of the V-model here by including information bidirectionally from all the tools that we can see around here to make sure that we have the full traceability available in Jama Connect.
Now, let us discuss the importance of traceability in product development and why it is critical to the success of any project. Basically, traceability ensures that all the requirements that we have are met and verified or validated throughout the entire product lifecycle. So this means on all the levels of the V-model, for example, that we have seen before. This also means that every requirement is tracked from its birth, from the inception of the requirement through the implementation all the way to the testing at the other end of the V-model. And by maintaining this level of oversight, we can basically ensure that nothing is overlooked and that the final product also meets the specified requirements that we have had from the beginning. Another key aspect of this traceability is also the role of traceability in terms of compliance. Many industries have very stringent standards and regulations that they must follow, and traceability allows your organization to demonstrate this compliance by providing, for example, a clear audit trail that might be required by auditors, and you can show how requirements were managed and fulfilled, and also traced.
This is very critical for passing regulatory inspections and potentially avoiding legal issues at the end and liabilities when delivering a product. And last but not least, traceability also plays, of course, a very important role in enhancing the quality of your products by tracking requirements and the implementation of requirements as well, so extending the traceability out from the requirement space also in the implementation space allows us to identify potential gaps and risks very early in the development process. And this early detection basically is what allows us to address these issues before they even become major problems, which ultimately ensures a higher quality of products and reduces the likelihood of this costly rework that we have been talking about in the very beginning. Now I would like to talk a little bit about the key components of Jama Connect for successful traceability and how we can support in setting up traceability before we just jump into the demo, because these will be the topics that we will now see in Jama Connect.
So I have divided it in three major parts. The first topic that we’re going to talk about is the requirements part, which is the Trace View that supports your engineers in identifying risks and gaps in the daily work, but we also have the option to use the Live Tracer Explorer, which will monitor the traceability of the entire project in real time in a bird’s eye view and gives decision-makers a lot of information to work with regarding the current health and traceability of the entire project. The next topic that I would like to talk about is validation and verification. With the relationship settings and the traceability of Jama Connect, we are able to create so-called Quality Gates, which will allow us to monitor various issues that might occur, like, for example, having approved system requirements without having test cases assigned to them. This gives you the opportunity to get a live overview of critical decompositions in your project and act on them accordingly. And the third topic here is change management because we don’t only have traceability for a static system, but Jama Connect also allows us to manage change.
The first thing that we are going to take a closer look at here is the impact analysis, which supports us understand the risks and the potential impact of change before we actually perform the change. And we will also take a look at the control mechanism called Suspect Links, which supports to manage change efficiently across different levels and allows us to make sure that we do not forget any important points when a change has been performed and the changes are propagated throughout all the required levels. All right. Now let us take a closer look at Jama Connect and go through the creation of traceability. So in here, in Jama Connect, in the middle in our dashboard, we can see our traceability information model, which is basically the backbone of our requirements decomposition and which guides our engineers through the entire process. My system is a smart temperature control system, which is basically a thermostat that can be managed with your mobile phone. And here, we have an example picture how this object will look like that I will use for the demonstration today.
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Selg: Now, when we look at the dashboard, we can see a traceability model that is, I would say, inspired by the V model. We have the stakeholder requirements on level one, we have the system requirements on level two, we have the subsystem requirements on level three, and we have an extended traceability in software with user stories, this will be used for our demonstration today, but we also have the possibility to have, for example, design descriptions which can be implemented in your hardware systems like, for example, PLM systems achieve the same effect. And we have the right-hand side of the V model with our subsystem verifications, system requirements, and ultimately our stakeholder validations in this case. So now from this user story, we have a link into Jira and the engineer would now work his daily practices. In Jira, would perform his daily task, the user story that we can see here is bidirectionally and continuously integrated with Jama Connect, so all the changes that we perform in Jira will be captured in Jama Connect and vice versa.
If the software engineer wants to understand the entire traceability and digital threat, he can jump with the click on the Jama Connect link, into Jama Connect, he will see the synchronized user story, and from here, he can open the Trace View and understand the decomposition of the user story all the way up through our decomposition process up to the highest level. So we can come from the user story one level up our subsystem requirement, which is decomposed from a system requirement, and ultimately, we are back at our remote control stakeholder requirement, which is the initial requirement that our user story is decomposed from. Now, this Trace View can be used on an individual level to perform daily activities as an engineer, but it provides far more than that. If we take a look at our second use case, we can now, for example, take a look at an entire set of system requirements and the Trace View is scalable and also supports taking a look at an entire set.
Now this comes in especially handy if you’re, for example, a Q&A engineer and you want to check the coverage of our system requirements with tests. So we can open the filter and filter for verifications against our system requirements, and Jama Connect will indicate a gap in coverage with a red exclamation mark. So, what we can do from here we can either create new verification cases or we can add coverage and link to already existing verification cases, either within our project or Jama Connect also supports cross-project referencing to create the coverage directly right here. Okay. As the next step, we want to understand what happens if change occurs after we already created and approved our requirements. To understand this, I have prepared a third use case where we going to take a closer look at our remote control stakeholder requirement. So I guess we all know the situation. We have been working on a product, and six months into the development process, stakeholders or customers are coming in and asking for changes of initial stakeholder requirements.
Jama Connect allows us to perform an impact analysis at every stage of the development, and due to the traceability that we have established through all the levels, Jama Connect will show me the impact that a potential change would have on this, for example, stakeholder requirement. And what we can see here on a direct relationship level, it would impact two validations as well as two system requirements. But on the second degree of separation, we would also impact system architectures, subsystem requirements, and further verifications, as well as already created defects. And Jama Connect supports us to understand to the end degrees of separation, the impact of a change of our initial stakeholder requirement and gives us the opportunity to create informed decisions based on data, which will give us good insights about the potential duration and the cost of a change because it shows us which elements in our product will be affected by this change.
Now if this change then needs to be performed, and this is what I’m going to do now in the next step as a demonstration, we need to have a control mechanism in place that allows us to understand that a change has been made and the downstream objects in our process need to be potentially reviewed. On the right-hand side here in our widget section, the color of the relationships switched from gray to red. This indicates in Jama Connect what we call a suspect link. A suspect link means that the upstream object, in this case, our stakeholder requirement, has been changed, and then the system will notify the engineers that they need to take a look at the downstream elements, in this case, the system requirements and the attached verifications and check if the change of our initial stakeholder requirement impacts the objects one level below. If yes, we can open the objects and perform the change and clear the suspect link.
If the change of the requirement does not have an impact on our downstream objects and the engineer is not required to perform any changes, it can clear the suspect links directly from the interface that we have right here to indicate again that no changes are required, and the widget that we can see here will switch colors directly again. Now we have been focusing quite a lot on the actual doing level right now, but Jama Connect also provides features that give us an insight from a bird’s eye view to really understand the full traceability and decomposition across our project. Now my demo project has 266 items in this project. So a fairly small project overall, but already quite complex to oversee with this amount of data in it. Production projects will have far more data, so the Live Trace Explorer comes in quite handy here especially.
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Selg: So what we can do to open this bird’s eye view on our project, we can open the Live Trace Explorer, and now within seconds, Jama Connect will create a real-time overview about the decomposition of our project and will provide a trace score here in the upper right-hand side corner to give me an overview or a health check of the decomposition in my project. Now, what can we see here in this view? First of all, the view shows us the degree of decomposition between the different levels in our process. For example, what we can see here. Out of all my stakeholder requirements that are indicated with this puzzle icon in here, 80% have system requirements derived from them. So this means if you continue with the project, if the current state, 20% of the initial stakeholder requirements are by default, not even considered in the product development, hence, you can never reach the requirements that are there because we don’t even consider them during the development process.
On the next level, we can see the further decomposition, we can see our system requirements that have been decomposed and the next level of decomposition, which, in this case, would be the subsystem requirements. And here, we can see the decomposition rate falls rapidly. Only 12.5% of my system requirements have subsystem requirements attached to them, but the traceability doesn’t stop here due to our bidirectional integration with all the best-in-breed tools and the example that I’ve shown you before with Jira, we can also see the decomposition process from subsystem requirements into user stories and extend the traceability with this view into Jira directly because we have synchronized the information between the two systems. And ultimately, to conclude the left side of the V model, we can also include defects in our breakdown that we can see here.
Now, on the right-hand side, we can see the coverage of tests. We have here, for example, the decomposition of verification. So how many subsystem requirements are covered with verifications, in this case, it’s 72.22%, but only 50% of those verifications are to be assigned to a test plan, which guarantees that they will be tested at a certain point in time. Now, between the different levels, we can see green or red lines, which is Jama Connect indicating to us the validity of the links. So what we can see here between the level is the amount of suspect links that we have between the levels, and this basically shows us how many percent of changes have been incorporated between the levels. And all of this information will go into an internal calculation, which will finally give us a trace score and an overall health check of the project.
Now this is not just a visual representation of your Jama Connect system, but it’s also interactive with a click on, for example, the system requirement decomposition right here, Jama Connect will now open again to trace you with pre-configured filters to show us exactly the decomposition of our initial stakeholder requirements into system requirements. And from here, again, we can start creating missing coverage with new items or we can create missing coverage with already existing items in the system. Again, also if required, cross-project referencing as well. Now with all this traceability information, and the bird’s eye view, and this traceability model as backbone that we have here, Jama Connect also allows us to create so-called dashboards, which we call quality gates that support us in understanding certain key aspects of your project.
Therefore, as a best practice, what we see a lot of our customers do is create a separate dashboard called quality gates where we can create different dashboards that give us certain set of information, for example, regarding rogue development, which means user stories that are created in Jira synchronized to Jama Connect automatically, but are not connected to any subsystem requirements, for example. Or we can also see, for example, in my case, all the approved stakeholder requirements without a test case here on the right-hand side, and all the approved system requirements without a test case here on the left-hand side. And this is quite a good example, what is used heavily with our customers, especially across the consumer electronics industry, because, of course, you don’t want to have approved system requirements that don’t have a test case available.
And especially for a quality engineer, having a real-time overview like this, showing you how many items are in an approved state, but also don’t have a test case available is quite handy to get a good overview about a specific part of your project that you want to have. And with a click on this dashboard, which is updated in real time, we will see all the system requirements in one list that don’t have a test case available and we can now start either now creating work or engineers or we can go start going to the objects themselves and start creating new verification cases or, again, related to existing verification cases, which are somewhere in the system. Now this concludes my live demonstration of Jama Connect regarding identifying gaps and risks in traceability. Thank you very much for attention.
WATCH THE ENTIRE WEBINAR HERE:
Eliminate Gaps and Risks with Proven Traceability Best Practices
Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software
Digital Continuity Consultant | Supporting clients and partners on their digital transformation journey.
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