Tag Archive for: jama analyze

There are many reasons why a project might stray from its original plan, but a leading factor is often underestimating complexity at the project’s outset. And that mistake is costing companies.

McKinsey recently analyzed 1,800 completed software projects and 1,600 integrated-circuit design projects for a deeper understanding of the state of product development.

The study found that only 30% of software projects met their original delivery deadline, while the average overrun was around 25%.

With hardware projects, the problem was worse: More than 80% of projects were late and the average overrun was nearly 30%.

Overruns such as these cost companies greatly, with both a direct impact on budget and an indirect effect on market position and perspective. This is a tough problem to tackle, especially when teams are building increasingly complex products at a faster rate than ever before.

At Jama, we believe the way to overcome this challenge is to make your development process more standardized. Here are three ways to take your development process to the next level and decrease costly overruns for good.

Focus on the Definition Stage

Multiple handoffs, interactions and iterations take place throughout the development process. Yet, because of antiquated and disparate tooling, teams are often disconnected and lack visibility into what other groups are doing or how those actions affect scope.

The result is often tradeoffs without market context. This can lead to scope creep and quality issues entering the process downstream, all due to poor communication in earlier development stages.

To smooth handoffs and create a refined process, you need to focus upstream at the definition phase of development. If you get that right, you can mitigate issues downstream so they don’t become much larger and more significant problems.

Use the Right Tools for the Job

Products are more complex than ever, so it follows that development of those products has grown more complicated. Still, many companies continue to use the same, unstructured tools they’ve always used in their development process.

Today’s highly structured, highly governed work requires technology that can not only withstand the changing landscape but also ease the transition and manage complexity at scale.

Modern product development platforms like Jama Connect empower your teams and support the workflow you need to compete in today’s market.

Managing complexity at scale means defining relationships among requirements and items through to defects, as well as validating and verifying that what you’re building is what the market needs.

This is exactly what Jama Connect™ provides. Seamless integrations with best-in-breed tools like Jira Software increase the visibility of activities across a unified environment.

You can operate with the confidence that your teams are working collaboratively; your review process supports your structure, and you can deliver on time – all with live traceability along the way.

Avoid Past Mistakes

Teams often underestimate complexity because they believe that issues they’ve encountered in the past won’t come up again. Avoiding past mistakes requires leveraging what you’ve already done and benchmarking for the future. A structured approach backed by consistent data lets you see how projects are progressing in real time.

To dive deeper into the relationship between rising product complexity and effective requirements management, download our report: “Design Teams: Requirements Management & Product Complexity.”

Your company’s competitive advantage is contingent on the quality of its software product and the speed with which you can deliver it. And the quality and speed of your next release hinges on the skill, efficiency and motivation of your development team.

So, when you think about it, few roles are more central to your bottom line than developers.

That’s one of the reasons why it’s important to measure and optimize their contributions for continuous improvement. For instance, is the team already overachieving? Do you need more resources? Different processes?

The first step is knowing what to measure and our new, extensively-researched paper will help.

In “The Essential Guide to Software Development Team Metrics,” you’ll learn how to track the speed, accuracy, quality and even joy of your software development team.

At 56 pages, there’s honestly too much actionable information in the paper to discuss in just one blog post. So for now, we’ll focus on the nine metrics that relate to team speed and productivity.

How do Your Software Developers Rate in These Nine Key Areas?

Our new paper describes nine key productivity metrics for your developers. They are:

Cycle time
How much time are you spending working on each issue? Depending on your development goals, you may find it helpful to break down cycle time data by type, so you can see how long your developers are spending on each type of project (such as bugs or feature requests).

Another approach is to analyze how long issues are spending in various states of status, from open to closed and every stage in between.

Release cycle time
Closely related to cycle time, release cycle time specifically calculates how long your team is spending on each product or feature release. You’ll measure from when development begins to when you ship.

Velocity
Velocity is one of the best ways to track the real contributions of your development team. It’s a measurement of the number of ship-ready (or at least test-ready) features your team delivered within a particular time period. 

Throughput
Your team’s throughput is similar to its velocity, only more granular. While velocity determines the end result, throughput counts tasks, chores and bugs in addition to features.

So while velocity tells you what your team did that can actually be sold, throughput gives you a better idea of what their overall workload was for given time periods.

Open pull requests
When your developers complete a change, they’ll add it to the code repository and then issue a pull request that asks the rest of the team to review the work.

Each pull request will remain open until colleagues have provided feedback and a manager (or other developer) marks it as closed.

Having a lot of open pull requests indicates that a lot of work is getting done — but it could also be a sign that your reviewers are slow in responding.

Work in progress
Closely related to throughput, work in progress (WIP) tracks your team’s number of current tickets or issues. Whereas throughput looks at what your team did during a specific week or month, WIP looks at what they’ve got on their plates right now.

Iteration flow
With iteration flow, you can visualize how the status of your tickets changed over a certain period of time. This view can help you gauge whether or not the repeatability and health of your development processes is affecting your time to delivery.

Difficulty of feature implementation
This metric is a great way to gauge how challenging your development team finds their work.

When your developers consistently report that feature additions were tough, you can rest assured that they’re not bored at work — but you’ll also have to be careful not to burn them out or sink morale.

Should we release faster?
Here’s another metric that can keep your finger on the pulse of team morale. If your developers consistently report that they think you can release faster, you’ll know you’re not getting all you can out of them.

Get the Full Story on Software Development Team Productivity

In our new paper, we go into more depth on what these team productivity metrics really mean. We also talk about how to measure them — and why.

And we don’t stop at metrics related to productivity and speed. We also share:

  • 10 metrics that can help you ensure on-time delivery.
  • 13 metrics to help you boost product quality.
  • 5 metrics to help you measure team health.
Grab “The Essential Guide to Software Development Team Metrics” now.

 

Product development teams face incredible pressures to deliver more innovative products, faster and with sustained high quality.

At Jama Software, we’ve been working with innovative companies at the forefront of this endeavor. One of the common challenges we’ve seen is product and engineering leaders lacking visibility and critical insights into their product development process.

In the constant struggle stay on task and on track, they’re looking for insights and analysis to understand how their teams are performing, identify opportunities to reduce risk and communicate that information quickly across the organization.

We’ve set out to address this challenge with the launch of Jama Analyze.

As part of the Jama Product Development Platform, this new solution builds upon the product development data that teams generate with solutions like Jama Connect™, Atlassian Jira Software, GitHub and more, to give product leaders a far-reaching view into performance and the insights needed to mitigate risk and impact product success.

With simple accessibility and easy-to-understand charts, graphs and other visual indicators, Jama Analyze allows business leaders and product developers to connect the dots between teams, decisions and data sets that existed only in isolation before. This ability allows teams to drive strategic insight and sustain competitive advantage.

The benefits of this new addition to the Jama Product Development Platform spans entire organizations, from product to engineering, quality analysts to executives. Here are some of the key features of Jama Analyze.

 

Standardizing process and performance is easier when you can remove data silos and compare KPIs across all teams in a single chart or dashboard. Create as many dashboards as needed, give context to product development data, compare performance across teams and products or use private dashboards to keep sensitive information within groups.

 

Establish New Operational Benchmarks
By gathering and analyzing information across your product development process, teams can reveal roadblocks and inform actions. Jama Analyze also enables your teams to own the analysis they need and reuse critical information for higher-level product and program views. It also uncovers important quality trends that until now have been buried in spreadsheets, low-level reports or simply missed.

Highlight Early Warning Signs of Risk and Opportunity
As development teams move at faster speeds to meet market demand, it’s easy to get lost in the process. With teams so focused on hitting deadlines, they can overlook the areas of their process that could be refined to minimize errors and maximize innovation. Shared insights from Jama Analyze help teams surface these data points and take quicker action for better business outcomes.

Improve Organizational Performance
Align your product development organization around common company-defined goals and KPIs to establish baselines for performance and measure progress. Organizations can leverage our best practices in the form of suggested recipes and templated metrics, as well as build out their own dashboards, to create common standards across groups.

Jama Analyze unlocks new universes of strategic insights for product development companies to make better products. And, when used in conjunction with Jama Connect, organizations begin to unleash Predictive Product Development.

With recent updates, Jama Connect has never been more powerful for understanding your full product development lifecycle and proving you built the product you set out to build. Here are some highlights of its features and updates to help you hit your product launch target.

Validation, Verification and Test Management

Product quality matters, and Jama Connect lets you maintain traceability and confirm that each requirement, system and component spec has been tested. Now, Jama Connect has been radically improved to enhance how verification and validation data is handled within the application. By simplifying the visibility of how test results are connected to your requirements, you get better context and capability.

Review Center

Cancel lengthy approval meetings, as Review Center allows your teams to make better, faster decisions on approvals. New upgrades allow test plans to be sent to Review Center, making it easier to collaborate and negotiate approvals. Afterward, the results are sent to Test Center to review for feedback and sign-off. Review Center also now enables you to quickly identify what’s changed since you last viewed the content, and highlight and respond to targeted comments immediately.

 

With Jama Connect as your single source of truth for definition, verification and validation, you can benchmark and monitor team performance over time. You can also get insight into current progress to goal to drive execution. Plus, Jama Connect illuminates risk, and eases the path towards product compliance.​

Requirements Management

Jama Connect still lets you write requirements and create cross-team review groups for a more streamlined approval process. Teams also have the ability to prioritize requirements validation, problem statements, engineering responses, negotiation and more. With updates to how requirements are presented within Jama Connect, we’ve made it easier than ever to view and share content more easily.

Risk Management

Analyzing risk is an integral part of developing safety-critical products. With Jama Connect, risk and hazard analysis are directly integrated within your development process to give better clarity to associated requirements and mitigations.

Real-Time Collaboration

One of the key features of Jama Connect has been its ability to simplify communication around complex systems and processes, and we’ll continue to build on that. By allowing teams to get the answers and data they need to be more productive, milestone phases are tightened, risks are identified and opportunities to innovate are uncovered faster than ever.

End-to-End Traceability

Eliminate blind spots within your development process. Follow the connections between requirements, specifications and tests, including decision tracking, ensuring all teams understand the impact of product changes.

Built for Ecosystems

Not every development team uses the exact same solutions to build great products. Jama Connect allows teams the flexibility to use a variety of tools through our expanding group of reliable partners.

See if Jama Connect would be the right choice for your organization by checking out our eBook, “Selecting the Right Product Development Platform.”