Traceability

[Webinar Recap] Leveraging Jira & Jama Connect® for Enhanced Requirements Management

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In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Leveraging Jira & Jama Connect® for Enhanced Requirements Management” – Click HERE for the full version.

Leveraging Jira & Jama Connect® for Enhanced Requirements Management

Is it time to scale up your requirements management?

Many companies developing software try to manage requirements using a combination of Word and Jira. However, for all the effort that goes into documenting requirements, teams who rely on Word and Jira alone often struggle with a lack of traceability, inefficient requirement reviews, little insight into development, and an inability to quickly and easily understand the full impact of change.

While tools like Jira play a crucial role in the development lifecycle, leveraging its strengths with Jama Connect® offers a more traceable and seamless product development process.

In this insightful webinar, host Susan Manupelli, Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software®, will walk through the pitfalls of inefficient requirements management and how Jama Connect can help. In this session, gain an understanding of key features of Jama Connect, including:

  • Live Traceability™ – help ensure requirement coverage and allows you to easily identify exceptions (missing upstream or downstream requirements) to close any gaps.
  • Review Center – come to a consensus faster on what needs to be built.
  • Jama Connect® Integration with Jira – gain insight into development and avoid scope creep by ensuring that development tasks tie back to requirements.
  • Impact Analysis – be nimble react quickly to change while reducing risk.

Discover how Jama Connect can help you understand the current state of your system and how to optimize your development process by leveraging Jama Connect and Jira together

Below is a preview of our webinar. Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

The following is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Leveraging Jira & Jama Connect® for Enhanced Requirements Management

Susan Manupelli: Many companies developing software try to manage requirements using a combination of Word and Jira alone. And for all the effort that goes into documenting requirements, the results often fall short. And this can be in the form of frequent rework, missed deadlines, slower rollouts, and overall poor quality. In today’s webinar, we’ll address these challenges and I’ll show you how Jama Connect can be used to improve development outcomes. As we get started, I’d like to review the agenda for today. So first, we’ll start off with a brief introduction of myself, as well as my company Jama Software. Next, we will review the challenges of using Word and Jira alone for managing requirements. For each of the challenges raised, I’ll show you how Jama Connect can solve the challenge and improve the outcome of your software development projects.

I’ll show you how to achieve Live Traceability™ with Jama Connect. Live Traceability ensures requirement coverage and allows you to easily identify exceptions. And what I mean by that is missing upstream or downstream requirements, so that you can close any gaps. We’ll discuss the review process. Trying to manage reviews in Word is time-consuming and prone to error. I’ll show you how Jama Connects’s Review Center significantly improves the efficiency of reviews for both your internal and external stakeholders. Jira is used by many companies to manage their development tasks. Using Jama Connect’s integration with Jira, you’ll get insight into development and avoid scope creep, by making sure dev tasks tie back to requirements. I’ll also cover how to use Jama Connect to understand the current state of your system, see why Jira alone cannot be used for this purpose. And finally, change happens in software development. And in fact, agile principles support embracing change. With Jama Connect’s impact analysis, you’ll have the critical information to allow you to quickly react to change while reducing risk.

So just a little bit about myself. I’ve spent more than 20 years in product development, primarily in the testing capacity as a principal test architect for various requirements and test management tools. I have experience in several phases of the software development lifecycle, including traceability of artifacts from requirements definition, to implementation, verification, and validation. As a Solutions Architect here at Jama Software, my role is to demonstrate the power of Jama Connect in Live Traceability. And I work with our clients through their Jama Connect trials to help them realize the value of requirements management as well as test management when done properly.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

Manupelli: With that as a backdrop, let’s jump into the main focus of today’s webinar, the challenges of using Word and Jira alone to try and manage your quantitatives.

So the first issue with trying to use Word and Jira alone is lack of traceability. Word is a flat file with no relationships between requirements. Any attempt to traceability is going to be manual, time-consuming, and prone to error. The next challenge is inefficient requirement reviews. Reviews with Word are also manual. Even though you may use the track changes feature in Word, reconciliation of changes from multiple stakeholders takes significant time. Managing participation and tracking feedback is also very difficult. The next challenge is little or no insight into development. Once you approve a BRD, a business requirements document, development will go off and will start to code, often with no feedback loop back to the requirements.

There’s often this throw-it-over-the-wall approach. So we’ll address that issue in today’s call. No clear definition of system. The development work to be done is defined in Jira. Once a development task is marked on it’s closed out. Changes that come along as part of new requirements or maybe because of a defect fix, might actually invalidate previous completed tasks, leaving you with an incomplete view of the functionality of your current system. Inability to understand the impact of change. So change happens in software development. It comes from a variety of sources. If you don’t have your requirements traced and connected to your development items, it’s going to be extremely hard and likely impossible to accurately analyze the impact of change. So let’s take each one of these one by one and dig in a bit further.

RELATED: The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

Manupelli: So first, the first challenge, lack of traceability. Trying to manage requirements in a flat file like Word or Excel is just not enough. Manual traceability, it’s resource intensive, it’s prone to error, and missing coverage, and you end up with a complete lack of visibility into development. So really, you never really know how far along you are in the project. Lack of traceability is the number one cause of negative project outcomes. So let’s take a moment to show the desired level of traceability. This is the common V model in systems engineering. You define your customer needs in the upper left, decompose those needs into requirements until you get to the bottom of the V, where implementation and integration takes place. While the right side shows verification and validation.

Notice the cost to fix defects increases substantially the later in the life cycle the defect is discovered. This is 110 times more expensive, assuming you find it at the validation time. For defects that escape even this and are not found until customer deployment, the cost is exponentially higher. So this V model is the goal. Capture the needs, trace them to well-defined requirements, make sure you’ve got no gaps in coverage or gaps in testing, and make sure the development tasks to fulfill the requirements are connected as well. But for teams using Word in Jira, their V often looks like this. Noticed all the red X’s identifying broken coverage. So the customer needs may be captured in Word or some other document-based tool. Maybe there’s an effort to break these down into requirements in Word or Excel, but then there’s no connection between these.

So there’s really no way to make sure that every need is covered with a requirement. Perhaps at some point the requirements are transferred from Word or Excel into Jira in the form of user stories or some other development item. But again, there’s no connection back to the requirements that the customer needs. So if your teams are siloed and lack good collaborative capabilities, you could wind up with implementations that end up failing your verification and worse, even your validation. So basically, your team spent time building something that does not satisfy those customer needs. So Jama Connect solves this with something we call Live Traceability. Live Traceability is really a digital thread through every level of development. So let’s jump in and I’ll show you a demo of this.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Leveraging Jira & Jama Connect® for Enhanced Requirements Management

Susan Manupelli
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