What’s New in Jama’s Spring 2014 Release
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I’m thrilled to introduce a new version of Jama. Over the weekend, we upgraded Jama to our SaaS customers. This release marks our continued focus on providing organizations and teams a central place to manage and communicate their product definition, development and deployment. At the core of the new features for this release, we’ve linked two concepts together: collaboration and traceability. Over the years, these have been considered separate and disconnected. Traceability ensured coverage and referred to the relationship between test cases and requirements. We see traceability as much more, as the connecting (“steel”) thread between the core business value of the product and the work, down to the item level, performed by every member of the extended product team.
By merging the concepts of traceability with collaboration, we’ve introduced in Jama a set of visualization features that clearly show who across the organization is connected to the work. When someone needs a decision or a question to move forward, they can instantly reach out to the right people for real-time action. Product development is all about negotiations and trade-offs. You start with this beautiful idea of what you want to build, and then the reality of what ultimately comes out at the end requires decisions and compromises. If everyone on your team has a clear understanding of the steel thread, they’ll make the right decisions, navigate through the technical complexities and contribute elegantly to the business outcomes.
For example, the Jama product team captures around 72 product-related decisions per day. This is a one-product, agile team working in one location. The biggest majority of organizations we work with are much larger – consider how many decisions are escaping view from the organization. Conversations that would otherwise be lost in meetings, in email or buried in documents somewhere are captured in the Jama Stream, connected to the work. Now, with the new Connected Users features, users can trace not only the decisions and conversations back to the work, but also the people directly, and indirectly, vested in the outcome of each decision. This insight can dramatically speed the development process and result in better product outcomes.
The Spring release also introduces Relationship Rules, a visual diagram to define and standardize data so users can see how their data fits into the entire product delivery process. This feature prevents users from connecting incorrect data and ensures full traceability.
To learn more about these new features check out the video below, see the press release and read the release notes.
Derwyn Harris writes about ISO 26262 compliance, rethinking the Agile manifesto, and lessons learned in complex product development.
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