Tag Archive for: Ask Jama

Tag Archive for: Ask Jama

Leveraging Peer and Approval Workflows to Optimize your Peer and Approval Process

Reviews play a key role in successful product and systems development, helping to ensure the new project meets stakeholder, market, and compliance requirements. Peer and approval review processes enables organizations to both iterate and innovate quickly, while providing a dedicated process to apply appropriate rigor for final reviews. In addition, integrating item workflow with approval reviews can eliminate manual processes and reduce human error.  

In our most recent Ask Jama webinar, “Leveraging Peer and Approval Workflows to Optimize Your Review and Approval Process,” we talked about how to:  

  • Enable item transitions to be automatically triggered by a finalized review – reducing errors, clicks, and time needed to manually transition review items  
  • Improve Part 11 compliance by allowing organizations to set a locked status to review items that have been finalized  
  • Configure your own smart defaults for reviews by moving all settings to the central organization administration 

Below is a recoding of a webinar and an abbreviated transcript.

 

 

Thank you all for joining us today. My name is Julie Goodner, I’m one of the Senior Product Managers here at Jama Software. I’ve been with Jama for roughly two and a half years, and working in many areas of the application, most recently into the Review Center. My drive, really, is to make our product easy and functional for our customers. I am always available to hear your thoughts and ideas, so if you want to reach out to me at any time, please feel free to do so. And today I will be highlighting the work the team has completed in Review Center by adding these new Peer and Approval templates. 

In today’s webinar, we will be discussing how leveraging these new Peer and Approval review templates help connect with your Items Workflow to create efficiency and reduce errors in your project, and how including Workflow with your Approval review will eliminate manual steps and reduce errors. And lastly, we’ll be going through all these settings and features in Jama Connect. I’ll give a full rundown, how to do this, and where to do it. This is the overview of today’s demonstration. 

First, I will be the org admin going into the Review Center settings and showing you the new Peer and Approval templates along with some features that we have added into the Default template, which was the way you’re used to doing it in the past. And then from there, I will take you into Workflow and show you how Workflow and Approval templates merge together to create a cohesive experience for you when you’re finalizing the Approval review. Next, I’ll become a moderator and look at the new settings in Review Center and see the Approval and Peer. And then I’m going to walk you through what it looks like to transition a Peer review into an Approval review, and then see your items finalized at the end. 

RELATED: Check out our upcoming webinars by visiting our events page! 

So in Review Workflow, in Settings, the Approval review with Workflow reduces errors, clicks, and time needed to manually transition reviewed and approved items in your project. How this works is to enable the new Approval review, like I just stated, and we’ll walk through that again, review template and configure the Approval workflow for your items. In addition, this improves Part 11 compliance by allowing organizations to set a lock status to a reviewed item that has been finalized, no longer having to go back manually and locking those items after your review has been approved. And for efficiency, we have moved all the review setups into the admin section. And by doing this, your org admin can now set up smart defaults to eliminate confusion for your moderator when they create that review. 

Once the moderator now sees these new templates, they want to know what the difference is between probably the Peer and Approval review. Well, how we look at it as a Peer review is used to collaborate with your team, refine your requirements, and get them into the spot that they’re really ready for that final approval. Once they’re ready, the moderator then can transition the Peer review to an Approval review. They can invite all the stakeholders and, when completed and signed off, they can finalize that Approval review, which will then automatically trigger the Workflow items. So they don’t again, have to do a batch update or go into each item, transition, put locks on them, et cetera. All this is done automatically for you, now, with this new Approval review with Workflow. When the review is transitioned, it maintains all the previous comments and signatures, again for audit, or if you need to look back in historical facts. Peer review and Approval review transitions are all captured in the activity stream and version history. 

This greatly improves the moderator’s visibility to participants’ progress, and workflow transitions apply to review items when finalizing that review. And I just want to call this out, that the settings no longer change if a review, settings in the admin have been updated when a review is in flight. So if you’re working on a review and your org admin changes something, for whatever reason, your review will maintain its exact settings as they were when you started that review or edit that review. If you do need to take on these new settings, you will have to create a new review. 

RELATED: Introducing Jama Software’s New Hands-On Workshops (H.O.W. with Jama Connect®)

Alright, so let’s get into the demo. I’ve opened my project, I’m now the org admin. I’m going to go into my admin section, and we just got the 862 release, which will give you these new settings. First, I’m going to go into the Review Center. As you’ll notice, we have added the electronic signature settings and the optional settings into this main area. So again, your admin can now create, like I said before, those smart defaults. And these will carry over into your Workflow or your Review wizard when they create that review. But let’s really talk about the Peer and Approval. First, let’s get into Peer. You’ll notice all the settings are the exact same as they are in the Default or Non-template review. We suggest that you let the moderators override, but if you don’t want to, you can simply turn this off. What that means is a moderator can override any of the settings that your org admin has set up. 

You can have electronic signature, but we don’t think you need it for a Peer. But if your company does, you can just simply keep those on. And we always suggest to have the comments show up in the single item view, but again, you can turn those off as well. We have them private, or you can make them public, and so on and so forth. Once I’m done with that one, I’m going to go into my Approval review. Again, the settings are the same. These settings can not be overridden by your moderator. So once they’re set up by your org admin, they will be the settings in your wizard. If you do need to adjust them, you will have to contact your org admin and have them update whatever settings you need, and then you can carry forward with your reviews. 

To learn more about optimizing leveraging peer and approval workflows to optimize your reviews, watch the full webinar here. 


[Webinar Recap] Ask Jama AnythingAs part of our ongoing series of Ask Jama webinars, covering customer questions and best practices, our most recent webinar was all about answering your most pressing questions about Jama Connect.

In this webinar, our customer support and professional services team started the session with an overview of Jama Software’s Support and Community resources and then spent the rest of the webinar answering questions from our current and future customers. 

This webinar was well received by our customers, and we wanted to make sure nobody missed out on this great content. Below, you’ll find a recording of the webinar and an abbreviated transcript.

Ask Jama:  Ask us anything – that’s right – anything about Jama Connect! 

 

Question: How do I improve my team’s quality of requirements authoring? And how do I distinguish system level and sub system level requirements?

Answer: For those that aren’t familiar with Jama Connect, on the right-hand side you’ll see a little relationship diagram, and these boxes are item types. They’re different than documents. They’re really more like data driven, granular specific requirements. So you could have multiple levels of requirements that trace to each other. So that’s essentially how I would differentiate if you had a system requirement, you need to decompose that into multiple sub system requirements. You could utilize this traceability capability.

So, for example, if I’m looking at this manual scheduling system requirement, there’s probably a lot of manual scheduling I could do, I could change the temperature, I could change the schedule of when I’m home or when I’m not home, so I could make that be the sub system requirements that are part of the software, and it’s really just when you have your relationship role set up, you can add sub system requirements that would then be traced to the system requirement. So I think using the multiple item types and the relationship role is a great way to differentiate.

Question: How do I know that a requirement is well written?

Answer: But kind of getting back to the quality, how do I know a requirement is written of a high quality, there’s a lot of different ways that you can tackle that. I have this little text item here called guidance and I find that a lot of our customers do a really good job of putting directly in Jama Connect a link to their work instructions, which has maybe it’s like a process guide, or maybe it’s an actual tactical screen shot by screenshot set of instructions that you, in terms of how you want people to use Jama Connect, and it’s also a great place to put in some requirements offering suggestions.

RELATED:  Five Best Practices for Writing Requirements 
Systems Engineering Requirements Templates

So, for example, I have here a couple different requirement templates. I have one that’s based on system engineering, so you want to have a trigger, pre-condition, actor, action, object. That’s a very good template to start from and then I’ve got a little example here, like an airbag, when a collision is detected, precondition is and the passenger airbag switches on, the actor is the system, action is it shall detonate and the object is the passenger airbag. Now you don’t necessarily have to write it in a table format but having this little template here in the example can be really nice when you’re authoring, and you can actually work with your Jama Connect admins to add these templates directly in Jama Connect.

Question: What’s the difference between requirements and design?

Answer: The way I like to differentiate it is requirements are really meant to describe the need for something, whereas design is like the response of the how, how we’re actually going to implement that requirement.

So, this is a very simple distinguish differentiation between the two, but obviously if you have a complex system, you might have something more complicated where, like in my example I have stakeholder needs that decompose down to system requirements that decompose into subsystem hardware or software requirements. But it is important that you’re differentiating requirements versus design, because you don’t want to over constrain your development team by putting too much design decisions into the requirements themselves. Of course, that’s always a real challenge and I’m guilty of doing that myself too.

Question: How do baselines relate to document versions?

Answer:  For folks that are new to Jama Connect, or haven’t used Jama Connect before, when you have a document, let’s say a word document, I might version it, or I might have it in a SharePoint or a OneDrive system that’s kind of automatically versioning it. When you’re doing that though, especially with requirements specifications, it’s single document version is going to have a lot of unstructured data or unstructured text inside of it, so you might have requirement one, requirement two, requirement three. They’re all contained within document version 3.0, or three different versions of that document. The concept of versioning in Jama Connect is we have different tiers. So when we use the term version we’re actually referring to an individual requirement level.

So I might have requirement one which is on version three, it’s liked to a test A which is on version two, and then I might also have a requirement 2 which is on version five. Each of these items you can actually see if I click on an individual item here. On the right hand side is what we call widgets, and you can see this particular manual scheduling requirement, it’s on version eight. I can click on this version eight and I can see how things have changed. So I made a short little change right before the webinar started here and I want to compare from version seven to version eight, and I can hit the compare button, but that’s going to show me the tracked side by side change, so I can see in red the word monthly was taken away and I replaced it in green with the word weekly. So each of these, that’s the big difference between a document and more of a data driven tool like Jama Connect is that it’s going to be tracking the version at a much more granular level.

RELATED: Defining and Implementing Requirements Baselines

Question: Where do baselines come into play?

Answer:  Baselines is a term and a concept that we use in Jama Connect, it’s kind of more equivalent to what you might previously thought of as the document version. So baseline will take a group of items and you all as the users can scope what items you want to include in the baseline, and it will take a point in time snapshot of all of those items. So the real differences of document versions is really like the version is relevant to the whole document and there’s a lot of unstructured text. A baseline in Jama Connect is meant to have structured requirements, test cases, whatever it is you’re tracking.

Question: How do I create custom exports?

Answer: it took me a while to learn the difference at least with how we use our terms within Jama Connect between templates and reports. So templates in general are structured formats limited to data stored in the UI, just to give a little bit of a definition and understanding to it. So when we are saving information as a template, we are creating another view for the data. A template can be exported either as is, or used in a report. Our reports are used to avoid the UI to structure and export information, whereas templates are more reflective of the information shown in the UI. Our advanced reports are an export with information either being pulled from the database or API culled. Both of which aren’t capable through the UI.

So, you can create an export or office templates if you don’t mind the limitations of how your information is reorganized and presented outside of Jama Connect. I also do want to note that there is a difference between our office templates and our editor templates. Our office templates are going to be what you use to export. Our reports though are a little bit different. If you are a self-hosted customer, or if you have a self-hosted instance, you can create your own reports.

You can also contact your account manager as well and they can help you in creating a custom report built by one of our report specialists.

Watch the full webinar to see the answers to many of the most commonly asked Jama Connect questions. You can also take a moment to go back and watch a few other our other webinars, like this one on release management options in Jama Connect, or this one on moving from a document-based design control and risk management in medical device development.

Watch the full webinar to learn more about the most commonly asked questions about Jama Connect.

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As part of our ongoing Ask Jama webinar series, covering customer questions and best practices, our most recent webinar was all about the details of the latest product roadmap enhancements related to baselines and how these changes benefit our customers, especially when it comes to compliance.

In this webinar, a panel of Jama Connect experts discuss the top updates that have been released, and the future of baselines in Jama Connect.

This webinar was well received by our customers, and we wanted to make sure nobody missed out on this great content. Below, you’ll find a recording of the webinar and an abbreviated transcript.

Ask Jama: Defining and Implementing Baselines to Simplify Compliance

Julie Goodner: I’m really excited to show you the enhancements that we have made to the Baseline area along with giving you a sneak peek of where we’re headed. Over the last few releases, we have dramatically changed the look and feel of the Baseline area of Jama Connect. We’ve worked extensively on permissions, auditability, and usability to make Baseline workflow more efficient.  

I’ll be walking you through the way we have dramatically enhanced our Baseline preview, the list and reading views, the header activity stream and our new slide over panel preview. Everything that I’ll be showing you today has come from direct customer feedback and I’m excited to show you where we’re at and where we’re going. Over the years, we’ve received feedback from our customers regarding enhancements to the Baseline tree.  

This was a large body of work that we hope creates a more useful and consistent experience for you. You can now add all version core and custom fields to your baseline list view including the workflow status. When looking at your baseline list view, we now provide a count of all the items that are included. So, at a glance, you can easily see the scale of your baseline items.  

Watch the below recording to see the top five improvements to Baselines in Jama Connect in these key areas:

  • Baseline tree view
  • List and reading views
  • Baseline header
  • Activity streams
  • Slide-over panel previews

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Adrian Rolufs: Now we’re going to talk a little bit about how to utilize these baselines and the new capabilities that Julie just described in Jama Connect while you’re doing your requirements engineering work. Most of the work around baselines is focused on the management of work products.  

We’re going to talk today, about how that work aligns with your compliance needs and we’ll talk about how different standards for different industries drive those requirements. We’re going to talk about how that aids in understanding the traceability during your document life cycle and we’ll also focus on some best practices around what we find works best for our customers when managing baselines in Jama Connect.  

First of all, let’s take a look at the automotive industry. If you’re developing automotive products that have a functional safety concern, then you’re typically following ISO 26262 as part of your development and if you’re developing software, you may well be following Automotive SPICE. Both of those standards or regulations have requirements that are met by the Baseline features of Jama Connect and that falls under the categories of configuration management as well as document management.  

Those standards require that you are able to keep track of the versions of the documentation that when you have a completed product, you can point back to the specific versions of the requirements that it met and the Baseline feature of Jama Connect is the way to do that. If we switch over and take a look at the medical device industry, in the medical device industry, there’s a design history file or DHF that is required to be generated for every product that is submitted to the market. 

RELATED: An In-depth Look at Defining and Implementing Requirements Baselines

That DHF, an integral part of that if you’re using Jama Connect is the baselines, the baseline captures exactly the version of the content of each of the different work products that’s going to go into the DHF and typically, there’s a baseline for every work product and an exported document to a QMS system that goes along with that. So, similar to the needs of automotive but a little bit different terminology.  

Now, if we take a look at airborne systems. Each of the requirements or the standards that’s typically followed there has requirements for configuration management. Configuration management is typically the activity that is most closely associated with the Baseline function of Jama Connect and you’ll see there’s sections there that drive that as well. The nice thing is even though there’s different standards for different industries, they’re largely requiring teams to achieve the same goals.  

So, the common functionality provided by Jama Connect through the baselines and version history meets those requirements and that’s what we’ll be looking at today. First of all, what is that common workflow through Jama Connect that meets all those requirements? For any work product or document that you’re generating from Jama Connect, it generally needs to go through the same process.  

You’re going to create the material either by importing or creating the content in Jama Connect, you’re going to build traceability using the relationship features of Jama Connect to associate the individual requirements with other requirements or test cases. That material then needs to go through a comprehensive review process to make sure that the right people have reviewed the content for accuracy, completeness, verifiability, ability to implement a solution and capture that feedback and then eventual approval in Jama Connect.  

Once you have that, you then will have baselines that came about as part of the review process and the final baseline that was actually signed off in Jama Connect, you’ll want to capture as an official record saying that this is the signed off version that we are building our product to meet. And then finally, in many cases, it makes sense to export a document version of that to check into a PLM system or a QMS system or to distribute to other people who may not have access to your Jama Connect environment.  

You can view the full webinar by clicking on the button below, or take a moment to go back and watch a few of our other Ask Jama webinars, like this one on release management options in Jama Connect, or this one on moving from a document-based design control and risk management in medical device development.

Watch the full webinar to learn more about the latest product roadmap enhancements related to Baselines, and how to get the most out of Jama Connect.

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Optimize with Jama Connect

Leveraging Jama Connect To Optimize Your Product And Systems Development Process

With over 12.5 million active users, organizations around the globe rely on Jama Connect to help bring complex products to life. Innovative companies choose Jama Connect to improve quality, reduce rework, prove compliance, and get to market faster.

That’s why we’re excited to announce a three-part webinar series designed to help our customers get the most out of Jama Connect. In this webinar series, Optimize with Jama Connect, we’ll dive deeper into Jama Connect and our experts will give you an in-depth overview how to use Jama Connect to optimize your product and systems development process.

Below is a snapshot of when each webinar will happen, what will be covered, and how you can save your spot.

Optimize with Jama Connect: Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization 

Wednesday, December 9 – 8:00 a.m. PT | 5:00 p.m. CET 

According to an Engineering.com survey, 83% of companies experienced at least one negative product outcome including: significant delays, cost overruns, product defects, compliance gaps, recalls, omitted requirements, and lengthy rework. Often these negative outcomes were directly related to poor requirements management.

On the flip side, standardization fosters excellence in requirements management, resulting in consistency, repeatability, predictability, and a competitive edge.

In the first episode of our Optimize with Jama Connect webinar series, we’ll explore the benefits of defining, deploying, and enforcing requirements management standards within your organization.

We’ll also share best practices for requirements management standards and illustrate Jama Connect can help facilitate a successful and sustainable approach.

In this webinar, we’ll cover:

  • The benefits of standardizing requirements management across the organization
  • Common challenges in requirements management standardization
  • Using Jama Connect to facilitate implementation of requirements management best practices and standards

REGISTER NOW

Optimize with Jama Connect: Managing Product Development Complexities Across Hardware and Software Teams

Thursday, January 14 – 8:00 a.m. PT | 17:00 CEST 

With the growing complexity of products and software, the more complicated the process required to build it becomes — and the accompanying increased risk of flaws which can lead to expensive, and potentially reputation-harming recalls. Managing complexities across software and hardware development requires the entire development process to consider (and include) a variety of teams and interdependencies.

In the second episode of our Optimize with Jama Connect webinar series, we will discuss some of the key challenges that teams face when integrating hardware and software requirements, risks, and tests, with a document based or legacy tool approach.

We’ll also discuss how Jama Connect and its integration capabilities helps teams developing complex systems and products to:

  • Reduce product development risk
  • Provide end-to-end traceability for all involved teams
  • Improve product quality

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Optimize with Jama Connect: Building a More Effective and Efficient Product Development Process 

Wednesday, February 10 – 8:00 a.m. PT | 5:00 p.m. CET 

An ideal product development process requires close collaboration between teams, up-to-date knowledge of applicable regulations, and an efficient requirements management platform for defining, verifying, and validating requirements. However, not every manager is convinced that his or her team needs to do a better job on requirements development and management, or that such an investment will pay off —despite numerous industry studies which indicate that requirements issues are a pervasive cause of project distress.

In the third episode of our Optimize with Jama Connect webinar series, we’ll cover some of the ways our customers have used Jama Connect to improve not only their requirements, risk, and test management processes, but also their end-to-end product development process and outcomes.

Register for this webinar to learn more about how Jama Connect helps teams to:

  • Speed development with fine-grained, structured data
  • Spot bugs and problems sooner by improving visibility
  • Rethink linear development processes to work in parallel

REGISTER NOW

To view the full series, watch recordings of the webinars after they happen, or register for individual webinars, visit our Optimize with Jama Connect page.

SEE FULL SERIES

Getting Data In and Out of Jama ConnectAs part of our ongoing series of Ask Jama webinars, covering customer questions and best practices, our most recent webinar was all about on getting data in and out of Jama Connect, enabling effective collaboration resulting in reduced rework and minimized risk.

Steve Rush, a Jama Connect expert and a consultant from our Professional Services team, covered options for getting data in and out of Jama Connect to create an ongoing exchange of requirements throughout the product development process.

This webinar was well received by our customers, and we wanted to make sure nobody missed out on this great content. Below, you’ll find a recording of the webinar and an abbreviated transcript.

Ask Jama: Getting Data In and Out of Jama Connect

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The primary options you have are authoring items and requirements directly into Jama Connect and import options. Today we’re going to focus on importing Excel and Word documents into Jama Connect. Many customers are managing requirements, risks, or other information in documents, so it is very common that customers need to import this data into Jama’s item-based approach for managing requirements.  

RELATED: Defining and Implementing Requirements Baselines

Authoring content directly into the tool is definitely the best method for adding new items, either requirements, risks, or any other items that you need in Jama Connect. By authoring requirements directly in the tool, you can take advantage of some of the collaboration functionality in Jama and bring team members into discussions earlier and often in a requirements gathering and creation process. Jama will maintain version history on a discrete item, so you can track all the different changes that may happen on a given item. If you are leveraging review center, feedback from reviews can be incorporated on the item and, again, you can track those changes here. Lastly, something to consider when you’re importing documents into Jama is that a document import may often times is simply a snapshot of an item at its current state. So, it’s missing an important context that may give you more information about the item and decisions that are made on that item.  

But, of course, there are many good reasons why you may need to import items. Watch the full webinar to see a detailed demonstration of different import methods with Microsoft Word and Excel. You can also take a moment to go back and watch a few other our other webinars, like this one on release management options in Jama Connect, or this one on moving from a document-based design control and risk management in medical device development.

Watch the full webinar to learn more about your options for getting data in and out of Jama Connect, and how Jama Software’s Services team can help.

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Release Management Options

As part of our ongoing series of Ask Jama webinars, covering customer questions and best practices, we recently held a webinar addressing release management options in Jama Connect.

In the webinar, Ryan Moore, a Jama Connect expert and a consultant from our Professional Services team, discusses options for managing releases within Jama Connect. The following concepts were covered:

  • Leveraging Jama Connect’s release field
  • Re-use and synchronization
  • Branching vs. mainline approaches

We heard from our customers afterward that this webinar was informative and insightful, and we wanted to make sure that you didn’t miss out on this great content. Below you can see a transcript of the webinar, and view the full webinar recording.

The Full Demonstration of Release Management Options in Jama Connect

 

Transcript: Release Management Options in Jama Connect

Thank you all for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join us for the session about change management options in Jama Connect. Before we get started, I’d like to start off by clarifying a few key concepts as they pertain to requirements management, and really how they fit in within the scope of Jama Connect. I’ll also be including some use cases for each of the concepts we walk through today to help provide a bit of a bigger picture. And then we’ll go into a live demonstration within the tool. Through my experience with different organizations and various industries, I find that people tend to use a lot of different terminology and nomenclature that may pertain to any one subject, whether you’re discussing what you consider a specific version, or what’s the difference between a product versus a project, or how you define your user roles. This is no different when you’re approaching the concept of how you define releases. So, it’s important for us to clarify it.

A release to one person may be considered the final distribution of a product, where it’s officially available to the public or active in the field. Software teams, on the other hand, may think of release in terms of code or hardware. Other teams may consider manufacturing distribution in their framing releases. For our considerations today, let’s consider a release a grouping of requirements and corresponding tests that represent a product at a specific point in time. This could be a requirement set that’s specific to a product version, such as version 2.0 or version 3.0, where it could be included as part of a blanket, summer or fall release. So, regardless of what your organization is going to be using for requirements and tests, you could be using stakeholder requirements, market, user requirements, system versus subsystem, functional versus non-functional, design requirements or input requirements, verifications, validations, or calling new test cases. These are the types of artifacts that we’re going to be considering as a part of a release.

RELATED: Streamlining Requirements Reviews: Best Practices for Moderators, Reviewers, and Approvers

Baselines

Now let’s define baselines. Baselines are a very important aspect of Release Management and within Jama Connect as well. They provide clear cut lines in the sand. Baselining within Jama Connect can really be considered the ability to capture a snapshot of any grouping of items that you choose within a project at any given point in time. Let’s elaborate on some of the more common use cases for baselines. Baselines provide the ability to take full snapshots of artifacts. By taking baselines at release milestones, we’re able to make comparisons down the road using Jama Connect’s baseline comparison reports, which are exportable. They also provide detailed information and nuanced changes quickly and easily. Just a couple of clicks of a button, we can pull up these reports. The baseline reports will provide you a full list of any modified, deleted, or added items between baselines. So, it gives you the information that you need to be able to make quick comparisons. You can also use them to compare to the current state of the project. We can use baseline to compare between two baselines, or we can select a baseline that we captured prior and compare it to the current state of the project as well.

Additionally, you can also use Jama Connect’s baselines to actually roll back items, so you can roll back to prior baselines. Since baselines can be captured at the time of release, that also means you’ll have the ability to revert back to prior releases. So, lots of different power and what you can do in leveraging the baselines. As I mentioned, they are also easily exportable if you need it to export out and place into a quality management system (QMS) or another type of document control. And as a final caveat, we want to keep in mind that baselines, they’re static bits of information. They’re not going to be able to be leveraged to fork projects on a different path or branch them, if you will. Today we’ll through the concept of branching via reuse and synchronization during the presentation today.

RELATED: Defining and Implementing Requirements Baselines

Reusing and Synchronization

What is reuse and synchronization? Reuse and synchronization within Jama Connect can be considered as two advanced concepts. They both have very beneficial use cases and unique purposes. For that reason, I’ve included separate definitions. But you can also use them together and the outcome is going to be a lot of time saving and powerful use cases for you. Consider the concepts of reuse. In practice and in defining reuse is really to simply copy items in Jama Connect from one location to another, or it can be within the same project or across separate Jama Connect projects. Synchronization can be considered an additional step on top of reuse that allows you to maintain connections between those copied or reused items. Synchronization really adds an additional layer of monitoring between your artifacts to track differences or changes between them, and also provides you the ability to push and pull information between those synchronized items. Synchronization really leverages the concept of global IDs within Jama Connect. And those are the shared IDs between reused and synchronized artifacts that are going to help you bridge those items and maintain the connection between them.

Let’s walk through a few use cases for reuse and synchronization to help you better frame the use cases here and how it’s applicable and practical in use. Major releases to a large product. These could be small or large modifications to variants or existing product lines that you have. Staged releases of an evolving product is a second use case. And that may be used to leverage over time on a rolling schedule. For example, if you release a beta product, where you’ll be refining towards a final version and working as you go. Recent synchronization allows for version comparisons. As I mentioned before, Jama Connect’s synchronization allows you to generate a comparison view to easily identify differences between synchronized items. Also allows for “maintenance” updates to release projects. And synchronization allows you to separate Jama Connect projects into different maintenance workspaces, if you will, and easily push changes back into one main major release project. It also allows for changes to be “pushed” between releases.

In the same vein, and we’re talking about these projects that we’re leveraging for releases, you can use the synchronization to push changes back and forth between those projects. It allows for change control to the product. So, synchronization pushes, and this is very important, are never automatic. It’s always going to be a manual process, so you have to have ownership of that. What that means is that users always dictate when the changes are being made. Once again, this is a very important aspect to remember when considering using synchronization. You need to develop a regular cadence to determine who and when the changes are going to be pushed and pulled between synchronized artifacts or items. Then lastly, you’re able to use reuse and synchronization to create branches or forks from the original project. If needed, this concept of branching allows you to really work on multiple releases in parallel.

Release Management Options

Let’s talk about releases and in terms of the different types of releases that organizations may be working on as they go through the product development cycle. When we talk in terms of releases, we have two different methodologies that we’ll outline today and their differences. Linear versus parallel releases. We have linear on the left-hand side here and parallels on the right-hand side here. As you can see, linear releases are sequential or one after the other. They’re never going to be worked on simultaneously. Alternatively, parallel releases on the right-hand side, as you might expect by the name, parallel, they’re going to be worked on in tandem or side by side. So, you can be working on multiple releases in tandem.

“How are requirements impacted by these two approaches?” you might be thinking. In linear release management requirement, typically, we’ll have one singular definition at any given time. If I’m working in parallel, however, I may have the same requirement that spanned across two or three different releases. And that definition could easily change depending on the need of that release, or if I’m working in Release V2.0 versus Release 3.0. We might have a different need to alter the definition of that requirement. Since it’s summertime, let’s take a sunscreen for example. If I’m working on sunscreen products, it has different options SPF 15, SPF 30, and SPF 50. And we’re working on these simultaneously because we’re needing to roll them out on a similar timeline, where we have a similar roadmap for them. There may be same requirement in SPF 15 as there is in SPF 50 to include a very specific ingredient that helps block out the sun. But in SPF 15, we may need less of that depending on the strength versus needing more in SPF 50.

Let’s talk about the suggested approaches in Jama Connect for linear versus parallel. For the specific Jama Connect features and how they pertain to each release, Jama Connect’s release field is going to be the suggested method for the linear approach. The reason being is that the release field is going to allow you to make items a part of only one release at a time. So, the release field in Jama Connect doesn’t allow you to tag items in more than one release at a time. From a configuration standpoint, that means that the release field does need to be added to each item type that we’ll be using to label items as part of releases. That can be easily done by accessing your Jama Connect Admin section, navigating to the item types and then going to the fields. And if you don’t already have a release field as part of the item, you can easily add that there. In linear releases, you’re going to be leveraging baselines within one project to capture the state of the artifacts at the time of release.

Parallel releases on the right-hand side, reuse and synchronization really enable you to work simultaneously across multiple projects. And these projects will be release specific projects. Each project will maintain the scope of a unique release. Parallel release approaches. There are a few different variations that you may choose from when using parallel approaches. If you need to work in parallel, you have to roll out multiple releases simultaneously. You have two suggested approaches here, two key concepts that we’ll cover. A branching approach and a mainline approach. The branching approach, which is really aptly named for a visual image of branches stretching out from the base of a tree, requires you to leverage Jama Connect’s project duplication with synchronization. So, we’ll be copying projects. We’ll also be synchronizing the items within the project in the process of creating that project copy. Your various release projects will be branched off of your original release project. So, if we’re looking at our graphic here, our one would be the original release project, the first release, and then we could branch off into other various releases. So, we’ve branched off to R2, and then we have two branches that come off of R2, R2.1 and R3. And you can see that these are copies of R2 labeled here.

The mainline approach, however, dictates that you use one centralized project for the current state of affairs or the most recent release. Projects are created for unique releases and specific elements may be picked and chosen off of the mainline project to be selected for reuse and synchronization into your specific release projects. This method allows you to pick and choose, as I said, which specific elements are impacted by a release and strategically copy them into the appropriate release project. The resulting project off of your main project may be thought of as a unique release-specific workspace. You’ll manage all your release- specific work in the outlier projects and then push changes back into the mainline via synchronization once you’ve finalized your release.

RELATED: How to Avoid Ambiguity and Save Your Requirements

Once again, Jama Connect’s baselines are going to be leveraged once releases are pushed back into the main project to capture release milestones. So, we have our release-specific projects R1, R2, and R3. And we have our mainline project that houses all of the aggregate information. So, we are able to push and pull back and forth between these. Key capabilities in Jama Connect for each release management approach. If we’re looking at linear releases using that release field and also leveraging baselines. So, two main concepts there for the linear, and that’s the one after the other. We’re not working in tandem or in parallel. For parallel, we talked about the branching in the mainline approaches. Branching will really be leveraging the project duplication, reuse and synchronization. Whereas mainline, we’re looking at reuse, synchronization, and baselines.

Now that we’ve walked through all that, let’s hop into the tool itself and give you a quick demonstration of how to use the release field, how to branch projects, and what the mainline approach looks like as well.

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