Software Development

How Jama Software Supports Government Program Offices Part V: Test Planning

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How Jama Software Supports Government Program Offices Part V: Test Planning

Welcome to Part V of our government program offices series. If you haven’t already, go back and read the introduction to the government program offices series to learn more about how Jama Software supports government program offices and more about me and my qualifications. You can also read Part I, where I discuss the development of the RFI/RFP and we got approval to release the RFP, Part II on source selections, Part III where I cover contractor requirements decomposition, and Part IV, where we discuss financial management.

Welcome back to the program office blog series. You are now reading blog post six (6) on this, so congratulations on your endurance. At this point our program office and contractor have figured out the contract and the requirements. Today, we’ll dig into the test planning that happens both within the contractor and the program office (or the designated test organization).

Jama Connect has all of the requirements including the products functional and operational requirements. The contractor is responsible for building the product. As a part of that product development, the contractor will conduct a variety of unit and system level tests. Depending on the contract, the government may or may not have visibility or approval of any contractor internal testing. On the government side, there is typically both developmental (does this product meet the specifications?) and operational (can I actually use this product to do my mission?) testing.

In either case, Jama Connect can be used to build and approve the different test plans. This includes the contractor and government test plans. This allows traceability between the authoritative requirements and the testing, and allows for an easy analysis to determine if there is satisfactory test coverage of the requirements.

Jama Connect allows the creation of multiple test plans, where specific test cases can be assigned

Test Planning

Jama Connect allows you to document the results of the test runs within Jama Connect, allowing full visibility of whether or not the requirements were validated through testing.

One of the benefits of Jama Connect is that the contractor’s or government test teams can be independent of either the developers or the program office. Jama can be configured to limit access to or visibility of the test plans as required to ensure that independence is maintained. However, through the use of Jama Connect the testers are able to collaborate with the developers and the program office to ensure that the requirements are understood, and that the testing objective measures the products compliance to those requirements. It also allows the testings to start deriving additional requirements that are necessary to actually perform the test, and to start their own project management as required to be ready to test.

Test planning and generating test reports is a core function of Jama Connect and leveraging this capability within the program office environment is really a simple decision. The only uniqueness in this use-case is the possible need to reduce access to or visibility of the test plans, and that is easily accomplished through the built-in Jama Connect access controls.


John Allison
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