Tag Archive for: Jama Connect Platform

The Clear Choice: Why Jama Connect® Surpasses Codebeamer for Requirements Management and End-to-End Traceability

To adapt to increasing industry challenges and complexities, innovative organizations are now requiring best-in-class software to scale development, reduce risk, save time, and ensure compliance to quality, safety, and security regulations.

As organizations strive to deliver innovative products while navigating regulatory requirements, the tools they use for requirements management and traceability can make or break their success. This eBook is designed to help you understand the critical differences between Jama Connect and Codebeamer, two leading requirements management solutions, so you can make an informed decision.

The Requirements Sector

The landscape of requirements management has undergone significant transformation. Traditional tools (like IBM® DOORS®) which once dominated the market, are now considered outdated. These legacy systems often lack the flexibility, ease of use, and integration capabilities required by modern teams. As a result, organizations are turning to modern solutions like Jama Connect that are built to meet the needs of today’s dynamic development environments.

Why Jama Connect?

Jama Connect stands out as a leading requirements management solution because it is designed with the user in mind. Its modern, user-friendly interface, combined with powerful features like comprehensive traceability and real-time collaboration, ensures that teams can manage requirements and risks effectively throughout the product, systems, and software lifecycle. Jama Connect also emphasizes customer success, offering expert support and training to help teams maximize their investment. Ease of use, rapid deployment, pre-configured, well-documented industry frameworks, and in-house subject matter experts provide the fastest time-to-value/ROI without sacrificing quality or safety.

RELATED: See why users rank Jama Connect as the #1 requirements management tool on the market in the most recent G2 Report

The Clear Advantages of Jama Connect Over Codebeamer

If you’re comparing Jama Connect to Codebeamer, one thing is clear — Jama Connect is the only purpose-built requirements management platform that delivers Live Traceability™ which allows engineering and other teams toquickly and easily access the latest and most complete information for any requirement, no matter the stage of development or tools used. This real-time capability boosts productivity by ensuring teams work with the latest data and reduces risks like delays and defects by finding issues early. In addition, Jama Connect accelerates your product, systems, and software development by managing user needs and product information across the end-to-end development lifecycle.

Only Jama Connect Delivers Live Traceability™ Across Best-of-Breed Tools

Other vendors lock you into inferior platforms. Only Jama Connect seamlessly integrates with your tools-of-choice across engineering teams. And, only Jama Connect can manage the state of development across all integrated teams and tools. Jama Connect’s unique and industry-specific Traceability Information Models define the relationships and expected behavior across teams and tools.

Learn More »

Our customers consistently tell us that they chose Jama Connect over Codebeamer for the following reasons:

1. Ease of Use and High Adoptability

Jama Connect’s intuitive design and user-friendly interface make it easy for teams to adopt and use. Unlike Codebeamer, which can be complex and challenging for new users, Jama Connect ensures that teams can start managing requirements effectively with minimal training. Users insist on a requirements management and traceability solution that is easy to use so that both internal and external stakeholders can efficiently access, share, and review information in a single source of truth, increasing and speeding up the adoption across teams for a better ROI.

The ease of use is not only imperative for users but also for administrators. Jama Connect offers an intuitive and user-friendly administration interface that enables admins to adapt the tool to their organization’s needs without having to learn overcomplicated configuration settings and concepts.

2. Modern Integration and Collaboration Capabilities

Jama Connect provides comprehensive traceability and impact analysis, enabling teams to manage change effectively and reduce the risk of errors. The platform seamlessly integrates with other best-of-breed tools (including Jira and Azure DevOps) in the development ecosystem, ensuring that teams can work efficiently without having to change their other development tools. In contrast, Codebeamer focuses on working solely with other PTC tools and its own limited application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities.

Modern product and software development requires optimal real-time collaboration between stakeholders. Jama Connect provides an enhanced collaboration experience with its communication streams and advanced Review Center, enabling both internal and external stakeholders with the capabilities to perform formal and iterative reviews.

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

3. Intelligent Engineering Management

Jama Connect empowers Intelligent Engineering Management by addressing a critical challenge faced by engineering and product development organizations: the lack of real-time KPIs and metrics during development. This gap often leads to delays, budget overruns, and product defects or recalls. Jama Connect uniquely transforms traceability into a measurable instrument, enabling teams to track real-time metrics and KPIs throughout the product development process. By providing a comprehensive overview of project progress and aligning it with required processes, teams can identify gaps early, mitigate risks, and avoid missed requirements. With its Live Traceability™ and integrations with other best-in-breed engineering tools, Jama Connect ensures that both internal and external data are seamlessly managed, driving informed decision-making and on-time project delivery.

4. Strong Customer Support

We know that our customers need a support team that makes them a priority. That’s why Jama Connect offers unparalleled customer support (including 24/7 support for any production outages), with dedicated customer success teams that work closely with you to ensure you achieve your goals. In contrast, Codebeamer’s support can be limited, making it difficult for your teams to get the help they need when they need it.

5. Scalable and Flexible

Jama Connect is highly adaptable, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and project sizes. Whether your organization is in automotive, aerospace, medical devices, or another industry, Jama Connect can be tailored to meet your specific needs, often getting you up and running quickly with custom-built data frameworks to satisfy your industries regulations and best practices. Additionally, the platform offers flexible deployment options, including cloud and self-hosted, giving you the freedom to choose the best setup for your organization.

6. Fastest Time to Market/ROI

Deploy Jama Connect’s easy-to-use interface in weeks, not months, with easy updates and high performance. Preconfigured frameworks are built-in to satisfy industry regulations and help teams ease the path to compliance, along with in-house industry-focused subject-matter experts and exceptional customer support.

7. Lowest Total Cost of Ownership

With simple and straightforward administration and no need for custom scripting or continuous updating, Jama Connect has the lowest total cost of ownership in comparison to Codebeamer. Jama Connect scales easily without big infrastructure investment, and with unlimited no-cost access for extended internal/external stakeholders, all team members can be involved with additional costs.

THIS HAS BEEN A PREVIEW – TO READ THIS EBOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, VISIT:
The Clear Choice: Why Jama Connect Surpasses Codebeamer for Requirements Management and End-to-End Traceability

Understanding ISO 26550: Managing Variability in Systems and Software Engineering

Understanding ISO 26550: Managing Variability in Systems and Software Engineering

As products become more complex, companies need better ways to manage different versions and configurations. ISO 26550 helps organizations handle variability in systems and software engineering, making it easier to develop, maintain, and update product lines while ensuring quality and compliance.

What is ISO 26550?

ISO 26550, Software and Systems Engineering — Reference Model for Product Line Engineering and Management, provides a framework for managing product variations. It helps organizations develop multiple product versions efficiently by identifying shared components and differences, reducing duplication, and improving consistency.

FOR A MORE IN-DEPTH LOOK AT ISO 26550, WATCH:
Use Cases and Strategies for Simplifying Variant Management

Key Aspects:

  • Product Line Engineering (PLE): A structured approach to managing families of related products.
  • Variant Management: Guidelines for handling product differences while keeping a common foundation.
  • Traceability & Compliance: Ensures all product versions meet quality and regulatory standards.
  • Lifecycle Integration: Supports managing variability from initial planning through development and maintenance.

Where is ISO 26550 Used?

ISO 26550 is useful for industries that build complex, configurable products, such as:

  • Automotive: Managing different car models and features while meeting safety regulations.
  • Aerospace & Defense: Ensuring variations of mission-critical systems meet strict requirements.
  • Medical Devices: Maintaining compliance across different product versions for various markets.
  • Industrial Equipment: Handling multiple configurations of machinery and control systems.
  • Software Development: Supporting modular software design to serve different customer needs.

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

How Jama Connect® Helps:

Jama Connect makes it easier to follow ISO 26550 by providing:

  • Live Traceability™: Tracks changes across product versions to maintain compliance.
  • Variant Management: Helps teams manage multiple configurations efficiently.
  • Requirements Management: Organizes and links requirements across product lines.
  • Collaboration & Reviews: Improves teamwork and decision-making.
  • Compliance & Audit Support: Provides workflows and reports to simplify audits.

Conclusion

ISO 26550 helps organizations manage product variability effectively, improving efficiency and compliance. Jama Connect supports this by providing tools for traceability, variant management, and collaboration. If your organization needs a better way to handle product variations, Jama Connect can help simplify the process.

Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Matt Mickle, McKenzie Ingram, and Decoteau Wilkerson.

Utilize Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to Produce High-Quality Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™

Utilize Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to Produce High-Quality Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™

When discussing the requirements management process with my clients, I’ll often say, “the first step in maturing your requirements management process is to use an enterprise tool such as “Jama Connect.” This allows for scalability of their process and more importantly, the ability to manage change across their product lifecycle. Features such as the Review Center, Baseline Capture and Compare, Collaboration, Suspect Triggers and Variant Management are all necessary parts of the process that allow for tight control and the ability to meet the most rigorous of standards. Once that message becomes clear to my clients and the benefit realized, the next aspect of the conversation is, “Can you write GOOD, high-quality requirements?” It’s one thing to get your requirements into a formal tool, but what if the requirements aren’t any good to begin with? As the old adage says, “garbage in, garbage out”. This problem becomes magnified to a dangerous extent when your requirements define life-saving devices or mission-critical hardware and software.

RELATED: Jama Connect Advisor™ Datasheet

How Jama Connect® Uses Natural Language Processing to Improve Quality

Enter Jama Connect Advisor to the conversation. Jama Connect Advisor is a state-of-the-art requirements authoring guide and optimizer powered by natural language processing that helps a system engineer or a product developer write effective, well-organized requirement specifications based on industry-accepted INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) rules and the EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation.

Jama Connect Advisor allows you to analyze requirements text to provide a quality score based on the INCOSE and/or EARS rules the user chooses to validate against. This analysis can be done on a single item or “in bulk” against multiple requirements. Reports provide a detailed overview of the quality and score of the requirements. This allows for requirements authors to iterate on their requirements and improve the scores, ultimately resulting in better quality requirements across the entire lifecycle.

When all of your downstream requirements and tests are dependent on how a requirement is defined, it is extremely important that the quality of the requirements are there from day one. With the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, it is a natural extension to apply these techniques to requirements management creation and elaboration.

A Continued Investment in AI and How it Relates to Better Requirements Management

Jama Software continues to make strides in this area and we have recently relaunched our Jama Labs Website. Some of the exciting functionality we are exploring includes:

  • Automatically detecting high-risk areas in requirements by analyzing review comments
  • AI-generated test cases derived from requirements
  • Auto-scanning existing IP, to discover reuse candidates, which improves efficiency and saves time.

RELATED: Artificial Intelligence in Requirements Management

Conclusion:

The maturity and scale of your requirements process doesn’t end with managing them in a formal tool. There must be a focus on defining good, quality requirements and the ability to detect and report on the quality in real time easily. This visibility allows for authors to quickly update their requirements for better quality from the beginning. When everything downstream depends on it, the quality of your requirements truly does matter.

Visit our labs website to learn more. labs.jamasoftware.com

Jama Software and :em AG Announce Strategic Partnership to Drive Efficiency in Requirements Management

Jama Software and :em AG Announce Strategic Partnership to Drive Efficiency in Requirements Management

Jama Software a leading provider of requirements management and traceability solutions, is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with :em AG. This collaboration brings together Jama Software’s industry-leading platform, Jama Connect®, with :em AG’s expertise in process and method consulting to help organizations streamline product development, enhance compliance, and mitigate risk.

Jama Connect empowers teams with real-time collaboration, Live Traceability™, and comprehensive requirements, risk, and test management, enabling them to navigate complex regulatory environments with confidence. Through this partnership, :em AG will support customers in seamlessly integrating Jama Connect into their development workflows — including variant management, risk management, and test management —while providing expert guidance on configuration and adoption.

“We are excited to partner with :em AG to expand the reach of Jama Connect and help more organizations overcome the challenges of increasingly complex product and software development,” said Tom Tseki, Chief Revenue Officer at Jama Software. “Together, we are enabling teams to accelerate innovation while decreasing risk by ensuring end-to-end traceability and regulatory compliance.”

Dr. Marcus Krastel, Member of the Board of :em AG, added, “We are delighted to have Jama Software, another leading provider of requirements management software, as a partner and to be able to address new customers with our services. Together, we are driving forward the digital transformation and offering solutions for the increasingly complex work with requirements and regulations.”

About Jama Software

Jama Software is focused on maximizing innovation success in multidisciplinary engineering organizations. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, software-defined vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect requirements management software to minimize the risk of defects, rework, cost overruns, and recalls. Using Jama Connect, engineering organizations can now intelligently manage the development process by leveraging Live Traceability™ across best-of-breed tools to measurably improve outcomes. Our rapidly growing customer base spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, financial services, and insurance industries.

For more information about Jama Connect services, please visit jamasoftware.com/

Headshot of a subject matter expert leading a webinar on Unlocking the Power of the Digital Thread in MBSE

In this blog, we recap our recent webinar, “Unlocking the Power of the Digital Thread in MBSE”

Best Practices: Unlocking the Power of the Digital Thread in Traceable MBSE™

In the world of product and systems development, integrating the digital thread throughout Model-Based Systems Engineering process isn’t just an advantage — it’s a game-changer.

In this engaging webinar, host Brian Kennedy, Principal Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, will show how the digital thread transforms MBSE, driving better traceability, stronger collaboration, and greater efficiency across the product lifecycle. You’ll also see how Live Trace Explorer™ helps connect your MBSE tools seamlessly, creating Traceable MBSE™.

What You’ll Learn:

  • The role of the digital thread in enhancing Traceable MBSE workflows
  • Best practices for building a connected thread across diverse systems
  • How Live Trace Explorer improves product quality, reduces risks, and accelerates delivery
  • Using coverage metrics to identify gaps and ensure process completeness
  • Proven strategies to reduce iteration loops and support regulatory compliance

Walk away with actionable insights to strengthen your Traceable MBSE processes — and see how Jama Connect® can elevate your engineering workflows.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Briand Kennedy: During today’s webinar, I’m going to be discussing the process of unlocking the power of the digital thread in Traceable MBSE. To begin with, let’s just take a step back and understand what exactly is the Traceable MBSE process and where did it originate from? Today, many products that companies produce are live for safety-critical and one of the requirements for life and safety-critical products is that the company must completely document how the product should perform. Additionally, they have to also prove that it performs as specified. As products have become much more complicated and sophisticated and systems have become much more integrated and difficult to model doing this process has become a greater challenge than it was maybe previously.

As a result of us interviewing various engineering leaders who are responsible for product release, we asked them what keeps you up at night? What are the top things that these engineering leaders say keeps them up at night? As we listened to them, we heard many common questions come up. These are the five top questions or issues that they indicated. The first one is, how do I know which product requirements have been missed in my design? How do I know which product requirements are not fully covered by my test cases that I’ve defined? How do I know which product requirements have failed to pass tests? How do I identify development activity that happens to be using incorrect requirements or maybe isn’t even directly connected to requirements? And finally, how do I know if changes that have been made in say, hardware impacts my software team or if a requirement change impacts either the hardware or software team? How do I understand this traceability? These are the things that we’ve heard a lot about. I bet one of these might resonate with you.

RELATED: Bridging ALM and MBSE: Strategies for Seamless Integration

Kennedy: I’ll tell you what, why don’t we take a quick survey? There’s going to be a survey that pops up, and we’ll give you a couple of minutes to walk through these questions and tell us which one of these questions do you identify most with or is most pressing on your needs. Thank you very much for answering which one of these questions is the one you most identify with. At the end of this presentation, we’re going to come back to each one of these questions and show you how Traceable Model-Based System Engineering processes and the digital thread can help address each one of these items.

So, let’s talk a little bit about how we have developed Traceable MBSE to address these situations. To start with, let’s talk about where we came from. And we came from a paper-based system, and it doesn’t fully address these questions that we have here. And so, in order to solve these problems, we’ve performed a digital transformation, and that started with a very simple thing a long time ago of actually switching from physical paper over to electronic files. This provided significant improvements in efficiency and allowed each domain and discipline to be able to capture their data electronically versus on paper. It does improve communication, allows us to share data more easily, and allows us to reuse data in a much easier process. But fundamentally, this first step of converting from paper to electronic file, although it was a huge advantage, didn’t fundamentally change the process in which we did system engineering. We were still stuck with disconnected data.

So the next phase in this is what I call the decomposition phase. This occurred when we actually took those individual documents, for example, a complete requirement specification, and decomposed it to individual items. And this was very powerful. What we were able to do is instead of having a single document with all the specifications in it, we would decompose it to individual requirements, and each individual requirement could be referenced independently. And in fact, they allowed us to reuse this data and such. So you could have the same requirement being reused in multiple places, whereas before, you literally had two separate pieces of text that you were duplicating. Once again, another huge improvement in efficiency. This concept of decomposition doesn’t just isolate two requirements. It implemented various other things, such as the modeling systems for various other things. And it ended up creating a capability so that each discipline, each domain was able to create unique tools that address decomposition or analysis or simulation of their particular areas.

RELATED: Jama Connect for Traceable MBSE™

Kennedy: So what we saw was requirements identification and subsystem requirement identification, being executed in Word or Excel spreadsheets initially, and even going into some modeling techniques and different tools. So we ended up with a verification validation process that for each individual domain we were able to create some decent automation, but they weren’t connected. Each group was independently looking at their data and creating it, and there wasn’t consistent reuse across it and no consistent way of knowing what was the correct stuff. We depended on things like email and such like that. So it really created an impact on things like a lack of ongoing risk assessment, and change management became very difficult because even though we had decomposed some of the things and we had captured all the documents electronically, we still were not interconnected. We didn’t have a uniform interconnectivity, and this meant we had to take one more step in our digital transformation. And that final step was to create a true full model definition.

And when we talk about creating a full model, it involves quite a few things. First is governance. We have to create a structure and version control on top of the data. So we would classify the data in groups and control each one of those individual items, requirements simulations, functional definition, architectures as individual items and version control them in a controlled system in a database framework. So, we had a governance structure and control framework that needed to be defined. We then expanded from just having text-based or static images to having full diagrams where each item was interrelated and connected together. And we were able to create visual diagrams that illustrated how our systems were being designed, how functions and sub-functions and systems and subsystems were supposed to interact, and how data was supposed to flow from one part of our system to another. And we created these diagrams. Finally, we created a common data model, which allowed us to capture all these different pieces of data and define relationships from one item to the other and have consistent terminology and consistent use of that data. So we had one requirement defined in one place,e and it was used wherever it was needed by referencing that single item. And so that’s where we talk about a data model. We needed a complete data model to capture all this data that we were governing in the governance area and in the diagrams.

To watch the entire webinar, visit:

Best Practices: Unlocking the Power of the Digital Thread in Traceable MBSE™

A clock wearing a graduation hat alongside a lightbulb with gears and text about requirements management for seamless product delivery.

Jama Connect Features in Five: Requirements Management for Seamless Product Delivery

Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect’s powerful features… in under five minutes.

In this Features in Five video, Michelle Solis, Solutions Architect at Jama Software, explores how Jama Connect offers an effective solution for delivering software, products, and services. We will examine how key features, such as importing, the traceability information model, and the review center, can help streamline processes, reduce rework, and minimize scope creep.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Michelle Solis: Hello. I’m Michelle Solis, a Solutions Architect at Jama Software. In this video, we’ll explore how Jama Connect provides an effective solution for delivering software, products, and services. We’ll dive into how key features like importing, the traceability information model, and the review center can help streamline processes, reduce rework, and minimize scope creep.

Many teams gather requirements in Word or Excel while tracking development in separate tools, creating a lack of traceability between stakeholder needs and engineering work. This disconnect can lead to missed input, rework, and defects when requirements change. Without an integrated system, engineering may build outdated requirements, and QA may test against incomplete information, leading to costly delays.

Jama Connect bridges this gap by providing structured traceability and an efficient review process. Customers start by importing requirements from Word, Excel, or other tools. Once in Jama Connect, users can conduct structured reviews with stakeholders, enforce signatures, and track version changes. This ensures seamless traceability as requirements evolve, keeping teams aligned and reducing errors.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Features in Five: Reuse & Sync

Solis: Let’s jump into the tool and see how Jama Connect provides a solution for the delivery use case. We’ll start by looking at the traceability information model for an example project. Here, our requirements, like the previous slide detailed, start as an intake questionnaire filled out in Word. Those questions and responses are brought into Jama and then decomposed into customer requirements. From there, they further break down into functional and nonfunctional requirements with potential development tasks or software configurations.

Those tasks are tested and defects are logged against those tests. This traceability model allows users to see the downstream impacts of changes and trace defects up to their customer requirement. To the left, we have our exploratory that holds and organizes the requirements. Our customer component opens up to those customer intake questions and customer requirements. The customer intake questions are brought in using our Word import tool.

On the right hand of our screen, we see an example of what that intake questionnaire might look like. Now, we can see those questions and responses once they’ve been imported. Let’s click on one of these items and see one method of collaboration. In the comment stream section, we can pose questions for discussions, ask for a decision, or raise an issue. Our stakeholders, in response, can answer those decisions, answer questions, or provide resolutions.

In this example, I asked for clarification on this specific question. Now, instead of having to look through emails and other channels of communication, Jama Connect can be my source of truth. Once we finalize these questions and answers, we can break these down into customer requirements, and then we can send off our customer requirements for a review. I’ll right-click on my customer requirements and send them out for review. Our review wizard will be initiated, and I’ll define the name. I have different options for settings. One setting I’ll leave on is requiring an electronic signature from my approvers. I’ll designate my participants. In this case, it’s Michael Scott, my stakeholder, and myself. And then, in the final screen, it’ll show me what that invitation looks like when it gets sent out to my stakeholders.

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

Solis: While this review is initiating, I’m going to switch and sign in to Michael Scott so we can see what it looks like from the stakeholders perspective. Now let’s jump into a review we just initiated as a stakeholder. When a reviewer logs in, they are brought into a review screen with all of the reviews they are actively participating in. This makes the review process easy to jump into, and your non Jama users will be able to ramp up into the reviews quickly.

In the review, participants can reject and approve items line by line. They can leave comments and highlight specific text when they want to specify spelling errors or specific details. Once the review is complete, we’ll approve and sign off. From here, we can export our review into Word or PDF with our signatures attached.

Jama Connect streamlines product delivery by enhancing traceability, collaboration, and review processes, ensuring that teams remain aligned and projects stay on task. From capturing stakeholder requirements to managing approvals and exporting finalized documentation, Jama Connect provides a structured yet flexible approach to a successful product development.

Thank you for watching this demonstration of how Jama Connect features solve for the delivery use case. If you would like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your product development processes, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com. If you’re already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information, please contact your customer success manager or Jama software consultant. Thank you.

To view more Jama Connect Features in Five topics, visit:
Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series

Overcoming Top Challenges in the Energy Storage Industry with Jama Software

From aging infrastructure, to changing regulations, Jama Software® helps engineering teams meet demand with innovative, scalable solutions.

This blog explores the top challenges in the industry and how Jama Software’s cutting-edge requirements management solutions can help overcome them, including:

  • Aging infrastructure requiring urgent modernization
  • Adhering to evolving safety, emissions, and sustainability regulations
  • Energy efficiency and optimization

To read the full Whitepaper, visit “Overcoming Top Challenges in the Energy Storage Industry with Jama Software.” 

RELATED: The Top Challenges in Industrial Manufacturing and Consumer Electronic Development

1. Aging Infrastructure

The energy storage industry is undergoing rapid transformation. Faced with aging infrastructure, evolving regulations, the push for energy efficiency, rising global demand, and cost pressures, engineering teams are tasked with delivering innovative, scalable solutions. This whitepaper explores the top challenges in the industry and how Jama Software’s cutting-edge requirements management solutions can help overcome them.

The Challenge

Decades-old energy infrastructure — from power plants to grids and pipelines — requires urgent modernization to prevent failures and increase resilience. Engineering teams must design cost-effective solutions to upgrade aging systems while maintaining operational reliability.

The Impact

Failing infrastructure can lead to costly outages, environmental hazards, and public safety risks. Engineering teams need robust tools to manage complex modernization projects with precision.

How Jama Software Helps

Jama Software – and our innovative solution, Jama Connect – empowers teams with real-time requirements management and traceability to:

  1. Define clear modernization goals and align stakeholders.
  2. Track progress across multi-phase projects, ensuring nothing is overlooked.
  3. Mitigate risks through live traceability and impact analysis. 4. Document decisions for future audits and maintenance efforts.

2: Regulatory Compliance

The Challenge

Adhering to evolving safety, emissions, and sustainability regulations is a constant hurdle for energy storage developers. Regional and global standards demand rigorous documentation, traceability, and audit readiness.

The Impact

Failure to comply with regulatory standards can result in hefty fines, project delays, or operational shutdowns. Development teams need systems to ensure every design and process meets regulatory requirements.

How Jama Software Helps

Jama Connect provides comprehensive traceability and compliance management to:

  1. Simplify regulatory adherence with pre-configured templates for industry standards.
  2. Ensure complete traceability of requirements, tests, and results.
  3. Streamline audits with real-time reporting and centralized documentation.
  4. Foster cross-team collaboration to address regulatory challenges efficiently.

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

4. Energy Efficiency and Optimization

The Challenge

Improving efficiency across production, transmission, and consumption is critical to reducing waste and operational costs. Engineers are increasingly leveraging AI, IoT, and advanced analytics to optimize energy systems.

The Impact

Inefficient systems contribute to unnecessary costs and environmental degradation. Teams must integrate advanced technologies into their designs while managing complex requirements.

How Jama Software Helps

Jama Connect enables innovation through structured requirements management, allowing teams to:

  1. Collaborate on defining requirements for AI, IoT, and analytics integration.
  2. Validate designs against efficiency goals with built-in verification tools.
  3. Identify risks early through impact analysis and proactive testing.
  4. Drive continuous improvement with real-time insights and data integration.

5. Cost and Investment Pressures

The Challenge

Energy storage projects often face high upfront costs and long development timelines. Engineering teams are under pressure to deliver innovative solutions that offer faster returns on investment.

The Impact

Cost overruns and delayed timelines can jeopardize project success and stakeholder confidence. Efficient project management is crucial to meeting deadlines and budgets.

How Jama Software Helps

Jama Connect streamlines project delivery and cost management by:

  1. Enabling real-time collaboration to reduce delays and inefficiencies.
  2. Providing live traceability to track changes and manage scope creep.
  3. Supporting iterative design and development for faster prototyping.
  4. Enhancing decision-making with data-driven insights and reporting tools.

THIS HAS BEEN A PREVIEW – TO READ THIS DATASHEET IN ITS ENTIRETY, VISIT:
Overcoming Top Challenges in the Energy Storage Industry with Jama Software

The New ARP4754B and Techniques in Jama Connect® for Airborne Systems

ARP4754B, released on December 20, 2023, is a standard from SAE International that provides recommendations for the development of civil aircraft and systems, focusing on ensuring safety and compliance with regulations. It covers the entire aircraft development cycle, from system requirements through verification and validation. The latest revision includes new methods for safety analysis, such as Model-Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) and Cascading Effects Analysis (CEA). It is mandatory for all aircraft and systems worldwide, including emerging eVTOLs and UAVs, to demonstrate compliance with aviation regulations. This guideline aligns with ARP4761A, which was released on the same date, for safety assessment processes and offers increased flexibility in selecting validation and verification methods.

ARP4754B Applied in Jama Connect for Airborne Systems

ARP4754B and ARP4761A are both crucial guidelines, and the alignment between the two new versions has been enhanced to streamline development and safety assessments. In addition to the inclusion of the two new safety analysis methods, ARP4754B now places a stronger emphasis on identifying and mitigating unintended behaviors. It now includes consensus methods for demonstrating compliance within the development planning process and has also enhanced its flexibility in validation and verification.

Jama Connect can be used throughout the system development process as the primary system to manage the requirements and full product traceability. Figure 1 from ARP4754B outlines the relationships between the lifecycle and integral processes, which provide guidelines for safety assessment, electronic hardware and software lifecycle processes, and the system development process described herein.

An aircraft / systems development process model adapted from SEA ARP4754B

There are always numerous ways to tailor the use of Jama Connect. Here’s how the updates to ARP4754B influence requirements management and how our Airborne solution is pre-configured to support them.

1: Adoption of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)

  • MBSE Integration: Updates encourage the use of MBSE to handle the increasing complexity of aircraft systems.
  • Modeling Languages: Use of modeling languages like SysML to create detailed system models that include requirements, behavior, and structure.

Jama Connect for Airborne Systems Model-Based Techniques

  • Model-Driven Requirements: Requirements are captured and managed within the Jama Connect data model, providing requirements management techniques that support model-based representations. The Solution comes pre-configured with element types that correspond to the levels of requirements called out in ARP4754B, function elements, WBS, verifications and validations, and safety-related elements. Jama Connect constrains the data to follow the traceability rules which enable rapid analysis, automated trace matrix generation, and querying and reporting.

List of model-driven requirements such as function, aircraft requirement, system requirement, and more.

  • Synchronization of Models and Textual Requirements: Ensuring consistency between textual requirements and model-based representations requires synchronization mechanisms. Jama Connect is often used in conjunction with SysML tools and all leading vendors offer native integrations.

Figure 2: Model-based elements replace documents and the Jama Connect for Airborne Systems’ traceability schema maintains consistency.

RELATED: A Path to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) with Jama Connect

2. Enhanced Integration of Safety and Requirements Management

  • Safety-Driven Requirements: The updates emphasize integrating safety assessments directly into the requirements management process. This means that safety considerations become a foundational aspect of requirement definition and management.
  • Iterative Feedback Loop: There is a stronger focus on creating an iterative process where safety analysis results inform requirement updates, and changes in requirements trigger reassessment of safety analyses.

Jama Connect for Airborne Systems Safety & Requirements Management Techniques:

  • Traceable Within the Model: The outputs from safety analyses are captured and managed directly in Jama Connect. Our Airborne Systems solution provides the data model for a consistent trace and data strategy between safety, requirements, and tests.
  • Requirements Annotation: Requirements have built-in attributes for safety-related information, such as hazard classifications and safety integrity levels.
  • Tool Integration: Jama Connect integrates seamlessly with safety analysis tools such as ANSYS Medini, the LDRA tool suite and others to ensure seamless data flow and traceability between safety assessments and requirements.
Jama Connect Airborne Systems framework showing in an explorer tree with a side-by-side comparison of how it follows SAE ARP4754B requirements structure.

Figure 3: Jama Connect for Airborne Systems solution on the left and SAE ARP4754B (page 102) on the right.

RELATED: Cybersecurity in the Air: Addressing Modern Threats with DO-326A

3. Improved Traceability Requirements

  • Bidirectional Traceability: Enhanced emphasis on maintaining bidirectional traceability between requirements, design artifacts, implementation, and verification activities.
  • Traceability to Safety Objectives: Requirements must be directly linked to safety objectives and hazard analyses derived from updated safety assessment processes.

Jama Connect for Airborne Systems Solution Techniques:

  • Robust Traceability Matrices: The solution comes preconfigured with views and filters required by ARP4754B. These sophisticated traceability matrices that map requirements to design elements, test cases, and safety analyses are also exportable. The Airborne Systems solution has out-of-the-box export templates that can also be tailored.
  • Automated Traceability: Instead of authoring content and then creating a trace to its related content after the fact, use the “Add Related” functionality built into Jama Connect. This use of automated trace creation to manage traceability reduces the risk of human error and improves efficiency.
Jama Connect Airborne Framework item types.

Figure 4: Constrained set of data choices ensures users create consistent traces.

We’ve shared 3 of the 6 ways Jama Connect’s Airborne Solution supports ARP4754B influence requirements management.
Want the full picture? Download the whitepaper to explore them all!

The New ARP4754B and Techniques in Jama Connect for Airborne Systems Whitepaper

Graduation hat on a ticking clock showing this videos five minute topic of release management in jama connect using reuse and synchronization.

Jama Connect Features in Five: Release Management via Reuse & Synchronization

Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect’s powerful features… in under five minutes.

In this Features in Five video, Máté Hársing, Solutions Manager at Jama Software, demonstrates how Jama Connect helps teams streamline release management with its reuse and synchronization capabilities.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Máté Hársing: Hello and welcome. My name is Máté Hársing, and I’m a Solutions Architect at Jama Software. In this video, we’re going to explore how Jama Connect helps teams streamline release management with its reuse and synchronization capabilities. Managing multiple product releases often introduces challenges such as tracking changes across different product versions, ensuring teams work on release branches without disrupting the main project, merging updates without losing critical information or creating inconsistencies, maintaining traceability and compliance in industries with strict regulatory requirements.

Without the right tools, these challenges can lead to delays, increased costs, and risks of errors. Jama Connect addresses these challenges with its reuse and synchronization capabilities.

By allowing you to duplicate projects or components, Jama Connect creates a release branch where teams can work independently. The platform provides powerful comparison tools at the item, set, and project levels, enabling you to see changes clearly.

When it’s time to merge updates, Jama Connect gives you full control, allowing you to select specific changes while maintaining traceability and alignment. Now let’s see this in action. I’ll start by showing the main branch of the project and how it’s in sync with a specific release branch, release 2.0. This release branch is a separate project that will include updates and modifications specific to this version once we start working on it. As you can see, so far, the synchronization is fully intact between these two projects.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Features in Five: Reuse & Sync

Hársing: Now let’s take a look at the synced items widget starting at the item level. This widget shows the relationship between this specific operational time requirement in the main project and the release branch. You can see they are currently in sync, meaning there is no difference between them. If I change the operational time for release two zero to a higher number, as we want to ensure higher user satisfaction, you’ll see they are now out of sync.

By clicking on the button, we can see the red line differentiation between the main branch requirement and the release-specific requirement for release 2.0. Moving up to the set level, we can view how entire groups of requirements are synced. This provides a broader perspective, allowing teams to manage changes across multiple related items efficiently. Let’s add a new requirement to release 2.0 and delete an existing one so that you can see how the information will show up when comparing the two sets between the main branch and release 2.0.

Finally, at the project level, you can see an overview of synchronization across the entire project. This is particularly useful for tracking overall progress and ensuring alignment between the main branch and the release.

Now I’ll demonstrate how to merge changes back into the main project. Jama Connect allows you to make different kinds of merges. For instance, you can accept specific changes, reject others, or use the consolidation option to manage conflicting requirement descriptions side by side. This ensures the two versions of a requirement can be refined into a common denominator, maintaining clarity and consistency.

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

Hársing: I’d like to emphasize that both reusing and synchronizing are permission-controlled so that only appointed team members can execute these tasks. Each dedicated project can also be baselined creating a snapshot in time. This is invaluable for generating submission-ready documentation, especially in regulated industries such as medical device design and development. Additionally, any change made in either project, the main branch or the release branch, propagates reactive change management capabilities via the Suspect Link tool. This feature automatically flags impacted items, ensuring teams can quickly assess and address the downstream effects of any modification.

These features reduce risks, improve collaboration, and ensure compliance by keeping everything organized and transparent. Jama Connect simplifies release management so you can focus on delivering high-quality products.

Thank you for watching this demonstration of release management via reuse and synchronization in Jama Connect. If you would like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your product development process, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com. If you are already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information about release management via reuse and synchronization, please contact your Customer Success Manager or Jama Software Consultant.

To view more Jama Connect Features in Five topics, visit:
Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series

 

[Webinar Recap] Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively

In this blog, we recap our recent webinar, “Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

 

Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively

Engineering organizations face challenges delivering complex products on time, within budget, and with high quality. Teams often work with different tools, creating data silos that slow the digital engineering process. These gaps lead to missed requirements, delays, and defects.

In this webinar, our Jama Software experts Preston Mitchell, Vice President of Solutions & Support; Mario Maldari, Director of Product & Solution Marketing; and Vincent Balgos, Director of Solutions & Consulting, discuss how Jama Connect®, and our Jama Connect Interchange™ add-on, address these challenges through key use cases.

What you’ll learn:

  • Traceable Agile: Integrate systems engineering and software teams using Jama Connect + Jira to drive quality and speed.
  • Scalable FMEA Process: Empower reliability and risk management teams with Jama Connect + Excel for efficient FMEA analysis.
  • Universal ReqIF Exchange: Seamlessly import, export, and round-trip ReqIF exchanges across requirements tools with Universal ReqIF, enabling teams to co-develop requirements with stakeholders and partners.

The video above is a preview of this webinar – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Preston Mitchell: We are here to talk about how to save precious engineering time, and each of us is going to cover a specific use case that we think will help your teams save a lot of time, utilizing both Jama Connect, as well as Jama Connect Interchange. And when you think about where is most of the time wasted in engineering teams, we typically find it’s something that visually looks like this. It’s siloed teams and tools across the system engineering V model, and we really find that these things are the number one cause of negative product outcomes.

You know them, you’re probably intimately familiar with them. It’s a lack of identification of defects, missed requirements, or lack of coordination. A lot of manual steps to connect things, maybe requirements that live in one tool, and your system testing that lives in a different tool. And a lot of this can be highly manual, which is really a tough thing when you have to satisfy some of the industry regulations that a lot of our customers work with.

As we all know, kind of late detection of issues really leads to a huge cost in order to correct that with a project. You can kind of see in this bar graph here, that I’ve got on the left the different phases, going to the right of a typical product development. So you’re starting in the requirements definition and design, and moving all the way to acceptance testing. Typically, the number of faults or problems are introduced very early in the requirements definition and design phase. But the problem is they aren’t found until later in the project, like during integration or system testing. And even if you get to the acceptance testing level, you can see the exponential increase in cost to fix these expensive errors. These is not Jama Connect’s numbers, these numbers are from sources at The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). So you can really take away from this is the fewer errors that we introduce early, or the faster or sooner that we identify those issues, the better off we’re going to be and the more engineering time we are going to save.

How do we do this? Well, Jama Software, we are the number one requirements management and Live Traceability™ product in the market. We really bring a lot of resources and technology to bear to help you manage your product development, whether that’s complex and highly scaled types of products. We help you bring all the collaboration and reviews online. And we help you, number one, integrate the different state of the product across the many disparate tools that you might have in your engineering departments, and, specifically, that’s going to allow you to then measure and improve your traceability.

RELATED: Jama Connect Interchange™ for Software and Product Development Teams: Live Traceability Realized

Mitchell: We work with a lot of the key industries that you see here at the bottom, and in particular, like Vincent, you work with the medical devices. I think your use case that you’re going to cover is going to be very built off of that medical device industry. But really, a lot of the use cases we’re going to cover today are applicable to all of these industries.

We are the leader, and we’d like to be bold about it. We are number one according to G2 in terms of requirements management and traceability tools. So we encourage you to check out the different ratings and how we stack up against our competitors.

The ultimate goal that we want to get you to is saving that time. So moving from disparate, siloed teams and tools to an actual integrated system of Live Traceability. We actually have benchmark data from all of our cloud customers, where we can actually show a correlation between the customers that have a greater traceability score, meaning all the expected relationships have been built out. We find that they have 1.8x faster time to defect detection, nearly 2.5x times lower test case failure rates, and then typically a 3.5x higher verification coverage. So it behooves you and your engineering teams to think about how can we actually integrate, and save ourselves time, and that’s just going to create a higher-quality product down the line.

I’d be curious to pause right here. We have a poll. I’d be interested in asking, if you take a step back and think about your R&D teams, all the different tools and teams that you have, what percentage would you say today in your organization is actually fully covered by Live Traceability? 100%, 50%, 0%? I’d be kind of interested in the scale on that. So we should see a poll pop up here, and I’ll give you a couple of seconds to answer that.

Now, we see some answers coming in. Thank you. Yeah, as to be expected, it’s not anywhere near 100%. Most of the companies that we work with are struggling with this, and so this is where we really want to help them out. And how do we do that? Well, our Jama Connect Interchange add-on to Jama Connect is a really powerful tool that we’re going to walk you through today, and it’s going to allow you to automate the connection between your data and process.

So we’re going to cover three use cases. I’m going to talk briefly first about Traceable Agile™, and this is how we integrate systems and software teams, using Jama Connect and a very popular tool that a lot of our software organizations use, which is Atlassian Jira. So we’ll talk about that Traceable Agile use case. Then Vincent is going to cover the Scalable FMEA Process, so how to utilize the power of the functions that are in Excel, and bringing those functions to bear inside of Jama Connect, so that you can do risk management and reliability management, but tied in with your requirements and testing. And then, finally, we’ll end on Mario covering Universal ReqIF Exchange, and this really enables you to co-develop with partners and suppliers across Jama Connect, but also maybe even different requirements management tools. So let’s dive in.

 

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

Mitchell: So when you think about Traceable Agile, Agile software, it’s a methodology, as well as a philosophy. It’s been around software teams for a long time, and it works well. It’s been widely adopted, and widely successful. At the same time, a lot of complex products are not made up of solely software. They have to actually be integrated in with the hardware and perhaps other mechanical aspects of these products that you’re building. So there’s a balance, right? There’s a balance of being completely Agile, but also making sure that you follow some process.

And kind of where we find that Agile sometimes can break down when we talk with software engineering leaders. They have these very common questions that they bring up, and it’s what keeps them up at night. How do I know which requirements have been missed? Am I actually covering everything? How do I know that I’m actually testing all of my requirements, and which ones of those have failed? The fourth bullet there, how do I identify rogue developments? It’s like, how do I make sure my teams are not gold-plating the product, and we’re actually meeting the stakeholder or the user needs that we’re trying to deliver to? And then, finally, change. Change is a given in this fast-paced environment, so how do I know when impacts are made? When changes are made in the software or in the hardware, how do I know what those impacts are across?

So the solution to this is Traceable Agile. It’s really no change to how your software teams may work today using Atlassian Jira. Really, what we are adding on is the ability to auto-detect gaps and measure and take action on those. And so I’m going to step into Jama Connect to give you a little bit of a demonstration here.

THIS IS A PREVIEW OF OUR WEBINAR, WATCH IT IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively