In this blog, we announce Jama Connect® for Robotics, which leverages functional safety and best practices for robotics product development.
Jama Connect® for Robotics
Reduce deployment time, ensure best practice adoption, and increase the success rate of innovation in robotics development
Leveraging functional safety and best practices for robotics product development based on the IEC 61508 industrial standard.
Jama Software®, the industry-leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, has announced the launch of Jama Connect for Robotics, which incorporates product development and functional safety best practices based on the IEC 61508 industrial standard for robotics product development.
Jama Connect for Robotics is a complete set of frameworks, example projects, and procedural, export, and configuration documentation that helps teams reduce deployment time, ensure best practice adoption, and increase the success rate of innovation. This solution comes with a fully equipped package that contains a robotics dataset, a procedural guide to functional safety based on IEC 61508, and other relevant guides. All these items help companies accelerate robotics product development with comprehensive reporting to document the process and improve compliance.
”Jama Software is proud to release a first-of-its-kind solution to the market that caters to all companies innovating and developing robotics applications,” said Tom Tseki, Chief Revenue Officer of Jama Software. “Jama Connect for Robotics enables companies to rapidly innovate, reduce risk, implement Live Traceability™, and optimize their systems development process.”
“Jama Connect for Robotics provides a consistent and comprehensible way to specify, analyze, and create critical products in compliance with IEC 61508,” stated Nicole Pappler, Senior Functional Safety Expert, AlektoMetis. “This solution allows for a structured approach to assigning functionality and safety functions to components. In addition, the solution provides a framework to accumulate the relevant and necessary documentation and evidence needed for getting the functional safety capabilities of the final product confirmed by the certification bodies.
About Jama Software
Jama Software is focused on maximizing innovation success. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, autonomous vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect® to minimize the risk of product failure, delays, cost overruns, compliance gaps, defects, and rework. Jama Connect uniquely creates Live Traceability™ through siloed development, test, and risk activities to provide end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement. Our rapidly growing customer base of more than 12.5 million users across 30 countries spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, financial services, and insurance industries. For more information about Jama Connect services, please visit www.jamasoftware.com
Read the entire press release here! Jama Software® Launches Jama Connect® for Robotics
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/12/2022-12-21-robitics-release-2-1.jpg5121024Steven Meadows/media/jama-logo-primary.svgSteven Meadows2022-12-21 06:30:392024-10-03 09:52:09Introducing Jama Connect for Robotics
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Collaboration
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, Carleda Wade, Senior Consultantat Jama Software, walks through how to collaborate with others users in Jama Connect.
In this session, viewers will learn how to:
Use the comment widget to @mention a user or group
Leverage action tags to designate high-priority comments
Use the Stream tab and the project dashboard stream view to see comments
Filter for comments that require action
Follow along with this short video below to learn more – and find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Carleda Wade: Hi, I’m Carleda Wade, Senior Consultant at Jama Software. By the end of this training, you’ll be familiar with how to collaborate in Jama Connect and have the confidence and basic skills to begin interacting with other users in the application. In this session, we will use the comment widget to @mention a user or group, leverage action tags to designate high-priority comments, use the stream tab and the project dashboard stream view to see comments, and we will filter for comments that require action.
Wade: So now let’s jump back into Jama Connect. As you can see, I’m back on the homepage. You can see bookmarks and recently viewed items on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand side, you’ll see active reviews and then stream activity in the bottom right-hand. If I click on the view all stream activity link here, it will bring me to this stream tab. From here, if I want to I can see all of the comments that are across the various projects within my Jama instance.
I also have the ability to apply a filter to, let’s say, look for any open questions, and when I do that, you’ll see any question that doesn’t have a resolution that’s being open. I can choose to reply to this or answer this question directly from here by clicking on answer question. And then when I answer this question, not only will you see it presented here in this stream, but if I go back to my project, this information, once I refresh this, will show up here in my activity stream. So here you can see both the comment as well as the response. From my dashboard, this activity stream will be a comprehensive viewing of not only changes made in the project but also comments that are made within the project. Here if ever I could choose to do a search for, let’s say, Joe, and anything that either was created by Joe or has Joe tagged will show up. Also, from this dashboard, I can click on the stream.
Wade: This stream view will show me only comments that are made within my project. And once again, just like in the stream view for the full instance in the top header, I can apply filters if I like. Back to my project explorer, if I choose to, let’s say, look at my system requirements and maybe I want to look at climate monitoring, in this single-item view, I also have the ability to review comments. So if you have it enabled, you can click on review comments and see any comments that are made as part of the review module, or clicking on the comments will allow you to be able to interact directly with this particular requirement. So I could choose to create this comment, and maybe I want to have the person who owns this. So I want to have Joe, so I can @mention Joe to say, “Hey, can we clarify this?”
And then I can actually mark this action as a question. And when I do this, Joe will get an email notification that says that he needs to come into Jama and be able to reply to this. Joe would also have the ability to reply to his email, and that information will be added to this thread. But not only can I @mention a single user, but I also have the ability to @mention, let’s say, my risk team. And when I send this notification, every person who’s a part of that user group will get a notification, and once again, they can come in and start making comments directly. But let’s say, for whatever reason, after I make a comment that I decide that I need to delete it, or I inadvertently delete it.
So even though I just added this comment for the risk team, let’s say I choose to delete this, you’ll see the confirmation message that says to confirm, and let’s say I choose to delete it. But fear not because anything that happens in Jama stays in Jama. So now if I navigate out of the single item view back to the dashboard, when I… Let’s clear that. When I refresh my page you can see for the activity stream that this item is showing that it has been deleted. But if I want to, now I can click on restore, and all is well. Now you’ll see this comment is showing as un-deleted. So just to summarize, there are a number of different ways to be able to collaborate and comment on content within Jama. So just pick what works best for you, depending on where you are within the system at the time.
Thank you for watching.
To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Jama Connect Features
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Features in Five topics, including Risk Management, Reviews, and more.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/12/FIF-Collaboration-5in5-intro-1.jpg10801920Carleda Wade/media/jama-logo-primary.svgCarleda Wade2022-12-16 03:00:112024-01-18 09:42:49Jama Connect® Features in Five: Collaboration
Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Migration & Data Mapping: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 6 of our Roundtable Chat series, Richard Watson – Practice Director at Jama Software® – and Alisa Eikanas – Senior Consultant at Jama Software® – discuss migration & data mapping, and how to migrate your DOORS® data to a new tool.
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Richard Watson: Hi everybody, I hope you’re all enjoying watching the vlog so far and that you take the time to watch some of the others. I’m Richard Watson, and I’m part of the solution management team at Jama Software. In this vlog, I’ll be giving the DOORS angle on things. I’ve been a systems engineer for about 35 years, 20 of which was as the product manager for DOORS and DOORS Next. I now spend much of my time advising clients on migration strategies to Jama Connect. Today I’m joined by Alisa, who’s going to give the Jama side of things.
Alisa Eikanas: Hello everyone, and good morning Richard. My name is Alisa Eikanas, and I’ve been a consultant here at Jama Software for just about five years. In that time, I’ve supported hundreds of successful implementations and have extensive experience supporting customers with complex migration needs, so I’m tickled to be here.
Richard Watson: Organizations are often black and white when it comes to migration. Either they believe migration is too risky to form, and so they’re stuck in their current tool, or they trivialize things, and they think it’s as simple as pressing a button and everything is done.
In my experience migration isn’t complex, but it does involve taking a lot of very small decisions and then repeatedly executing against those decisions when you’re migrating the data itself.
Alisa Eikanas: Mm-hmm, I couldn’t agree more. I often use the analogy of moving to help illustrate this very same point to customers. When you’re making the decision to move to a new house, the benefits are obvious. A bigger house, better schools, et cetera, and there’s things you can do to make that moving process more efficient. You can hire a mover and do all of that stuff, but there’s no shortcutting the fact that you still have to label the boxes, tell the movers where they have to go.
So again, we can take care of the heavy lifting, but that attention to detail is something that’s not ever going to be avoided. And it might seem tedious, but it’s so necessary in order to avoid unnecessary frustrations if not given the proper attention at the proper time. There are typically two blocking points regarding migrations.
So first, management would like to… The migration process itself to be predictable so that they can follow the progress and predict how long it will take. Ultimately, what they’re trying to avoid is disruption to work, additional costs, making sure that the proper resources are available during that process. And secondly, for end users themselves, they expect the migration to run smoothly and for us to be able to demonstrate that the migration task has been executed without error.
For example, I was recently working on a migration with a team and the data that we were migrating from DOORS Classic, they’ve been working on that data for 20 years and some of the original engineers are still involved in the project. And so, you can imagine for them how stressful it is to consider 20 years of their work being moved and just wanting to make sure and not have any fears or reservations.
That as the data was moved, that there would be no negative impacts to that data. So it’s completely understandable, but again, these are things that Jama Connect has found ways to address proactively to ensure that both of those concerns… Having the efficient be predictable so that it can be efficient and not overly expensive. As well as for end users, just ensuring again that data integrity is maintained from point A to point B.
Richard Watson: Generating a business case for migration is also often terribly difficult. In fact, it’s very difficult to justify moving from IBM DOORS to IBM DOORS Next because it’s more of an emotional decision. One reason to move away from DOORS is the aim to adopt more of a model-based systems engineering approach. If you have that, then it becomes consistent for your engineers, easier to create reports, and cheaper for integrations.
We all know that without DLX, it’s terribly difficult in DOORS to keep a consistent data model between your different modules. Thinking about consistent data types between modules, for example. DOORS Next, unfortunately, is very much the same as DOORS. While it has got shared information types within a component, those types are independent of other components and other projects. So you can very quickly have different data sets in DOORS Next that diverge apart exactly the same as you do inside DOORS.
Alisa Eikanas: Yeah, I would add that there’s typically always a great deal of desire to migrate, but defeating the perception that it’s an insurmountable obstacle can be tricky. This, as in many other cases, is where Jama Software really excels and exemplifies our customer-centric approach to solutions. We don’t treat or expect our customers or their data to be the same.
So, before we even begin a migration effort… Or for those of you that are considering looking into migration, Jama Software offers a free DOORS data model diagnostic service, providing a financial breakdown of the benefits, removing your DOORS data to an MBSE approach. And following that migration, your data, both old and new, we’ll consistently respect the data model defined by your organization within your Jama Connect instance.
Richard Watson: Another fallacy is that sticking to a single vendor for migration makes things simpler. Migration tools must be stronger between those tools from the same vendor. So DOORS, migration to DOORS Next is not the case, unfortunately. So DOORS Next is a wholly new requirement system, it’s just like moving to a different tool from a different vendor.
The data inside of DOORS Next is very different to DOORS, so it’s not a natural upgrade. You do have to do data migration. When adopting a new requirements tool, it’s really important to establish that data model so that you can exploit the benefits of the new tool with a consistent data model.
Migrating your data from DOORS to DOORS Next attempts to recreate your DOORS data in DOORS Next exactly as it used to look like in DOORS, and that leaves the reshaping of that data to the end user. We all know that the end user will typically not clean the data once he starts using DOORS Next, and so inefficient data in DOORS effectively becomes inefficient data inside of DOORS Next.
Alisa Eikanas: Absolutely, and what you’re talking about is a missed opportunity. That opportunity to recognize we can look at our data, see that perhaps we’re not treating it consistently or in a standardized way. And as we’re migrating that data, there is an opportunity to, again, apply a data model that’s going to be consistent and afford you so many benefits.
So, when approaching migrations here at Jama Software, firstly we identify. We work with organizations to identify and define the data model most appropriate for your development process, and then we migrate your DOORS data into that model. This doesn’t result in compromised data in any way, but it avoids the mass reshaping or cleaning of data after it’s been migrated.
Jama Software brings over 150 years of shared DOORS experience that we can bring to bear in helping clients migrate to Jama Connect. And in addition to that, we have extensive experience supporting customers going through that actual process of moving their data from DOORS or D&G into Jama Connect.
Richard Watson: Alisa, perhaps the best thing to do next is simply to take a look at the tool. Should we take a look at Jama Connect?
Alisa Eikanas: Absolutely, let’s take a look at a project in Jama. But before we actually start poking around the project itself, let’s start with that data model we’ve been talking about. So, what we’re looking at here on this project dashboard is a rendering of that data model. So if we take a look at this example, we see that we have user needs, we have system requirements, system architecture, subsystem requirements, et cetera.
And in addition to showing each of those artifact types or item types, we also show the traceability paths between them. So for example, here we see our system requirements, and we see that we have those traceability lines established between the appropriate artifact types. We’re not ever going to see a user need directly connected to a subsystem requirement because through our data model, we’re just ensuring that that proper decomposition path is respected.
So again, that process of… As we’re migrating our data, taking the opportunity to identify and to establish a data model is just incredibly powerful and beneficial to our teams. Once we establish that model, and again, we’re going to migrate your data into that defined data model, we want to ensure that that transition is still comfortable for DOORS users. So again, this data model might be new, but the data is still the same.
It’s the same data that they had in DOORS. So that transition from DOORS to Jama is, for the most part… Or, it is a very comfortable one. Navigating around the project itself feels very similar for DOORS users, and I’ll give you an example of that. So, for example, if you’re looking at a DOORS project, you might see a folder with a number of modules located underneath that folder. And then of course, within our modules we’re going to have our individual objects.
So here we’re looking at a Jama project, and what we’re looking at is the project explorer. This will probably visually look similar enough to DOORS users, and what I’ve done is I’ve built out just a quick little example here. So, Jama has a different container name for this, but it’s essentially a DOORS folder. And then underneath that DOORS folder we’re going to see our individual modules listed out, and then if we open up one of our modules we’re going to see our individual objects.
Heading objects as well as our regular requirement or text objects. And that same hierarchical document structure that was established in DOORS, we’re able to carry that over seamlessly in Jama so that for DOORS users, again, it’s… Everything looks and is organized the same way that they’re used to seeing it, and it just makes it very comfortable.
But going back to that added benefit of having an established data model, for example, if I open up this system requirement, if I’m looking at the traceability information, here I can see that the system requirement has a parent, it has a child. But in this downstream bubble right here, I see that it’s red. That’s telling me that there’s a problem, it’s obviously not that it doesn’t have any children because I can see that, again, this user need has…
Or, that this system requirement has a parent user need and a downstream subsystem requirement. So, taking this example of a system requirement where Jama is telling me, “Hey, we’re missing some required coverage.” If I go back to that data model and I take a look at my system requirement, I can see that yes, I’ve satisfied that need to have a parent user need, and I’ve satisfied that need to have a child subsystem requirement. But I’ve yet to satisfy that need for a downstream architecture and a downstream verification.
So again, this is a very brief glimpse of the many benefits of having that established data model. But most, I would say the key takeaway again is that we can kill two birds with one stone. We’re migrating you to a more efficient system and tool as well as just ensuring that we’re able to also bring in efficiencies to your process by establishing that data model.
Richard Watson: That’s cool Alisa, thank you very much. So, that brings us to the end of this vlog for today. Hopefully, you’ve had some high-level overview of migration. Alisa, thank you very much for your discussion and perspective, that was super useful to actually see the tool.
I hope those listening to the vlog do have a reasonable starting point for migration, and I look forward to hearing about your successes in the future. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying this vlog series so far, stay tuned for the next entry in our series, it’ll be coming in a few weeks’ time. Thanks very much, Alisa.
Alisa Eikanas: Yep, thank you.
Is your data working for you? A consistent and scalable data model is instrumental for achieving Live Traceability™ and making data readily available across the development lifecycle.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/12/Doors-VLOG-Episode-6-intro.jpg10801920Richard Watson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgRichard Watson2022-12-14 03:00:062024-01-18 09:54:24Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Migration & Data Mapping: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Document Generation: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 5 of our Roundtable Chat series, Mario Maldari – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software® – and Susan Manupelli – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – walk us through document generation and reporting in Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS.
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Mario Maldari: Hello, welcome to part five of our vlog series. I hope you guys are enjoying the series so far. My name is Mario Maldari, director of Solution Architecture here at Jama. I manage a team of solution architects. Spent about the last 20 years working with requirements software tools and watching them evolve over time. Happy to have landed here at Jama where we’re working with the Jama Connect product, which is great tool as well as a great company culture. Joined by my friend and colleague, Susan Manupelli. Susan, would you like to introduce yourself?
Susan Manupelli: Sure. Thank you, Mario. So my name is Susan Manupelli. I’m a solution architect here at Jama Software. Prior to joining Jama, I was over at IBM where I worked on their engineering lifecycle management suite, primarily on the requirements management products. So Doors and Doors Next Generation. And I’m also happy to be here at Jama.
Mario Maldari: Thank you, Susan. And this vlog episode will be discussing document generation from requirements tools. And so we often encourage our clients to stay within the requirements tool for the purpose of versioning and tracking change on requirements. But there are valid reasons why you’d want to get your documents out. And that could be something from sharing your requirements with suppliers or customers, long term archival, submitting documentation to a formal documentation system. So many reasons why you’d want to get them out. And I guess the difference would be between the tools is how easy is that to do and how seamless can that transition to a document generation be. So Sue, I know you’ve worked with requirements tools in the past and specifically Doors Classic. And how is that experience for you?
Susan Manupelli: So, sure. So first for Doors Classic, you can print Doors modules using a standard print window and there is some control over what the printed output is going to look like through something called page setups. However, the challenge there is that it doesn’t actually export it to a common format like Word or PDF. So in order to actually generate a word or PDF document, you have to use another tool from IBM called Pub, it was renamed from Rational Publishing Engine. So that’s another tool outside of Doors.
Mario Maldari: I see. And is it the same for Doors Next?
Susan Manupelli: Yeah, so with DNG, the situation’s a little bit better. Out of the box, DNG does allow you to export certain documents to Word or PDF, but the challenge there is that there are very few customizations that can be done. There’s a few trivial settings that you can make when you’re doing your exports. But in order to actually customize the output, you have to use again Rational Publishing Engine. And there’s a few challenges with that. So first of all, it’s a separately licensed tool, so you have to pay extra for that. Second of all, using RPE requires a knowledge of the rest APIs. So you basically end up meeting a programmer to customize the reports for you and create that template. And then the third thing is in order to take the template from RPE and upload it into DNG, you have to have administrative privileges to be able to do that. So the users are really limited in what they can do from DNG.
Mario Maldari: Yeah. And how is that received by the customer base?
Susan Manupelli: I think it’s fair to say they would prefer a lot more flexibility for the users to be able to make some simple adjustments to the reports.
Mario Maldari: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Well I’d like to show you how this is done in Jama. And let me share my screen and show you some options here. So in Jama, most views when you’re looking at your requirements, most of the views can be exported into either Word, Excel, PDF, or even a customized template. And so this is kind of interesting here and key. So customers often, if they’re exchanging requirements with stakeholders, they’ll want to put their requirements in a particular format with some branding or logos. And so you can do that easily in Jama by just modifying a Word document, uploading the template, and then once you have that template available, you can have your exports go into that format very easily.
So there’s a few different options here in terms of custom templates. You can create your own, which is great. And so when you’re looking at a view of requirements like this reading view, it’s easy to export it into Word. And let’s see if I have that up. And so you can take a look, and this is a customized template that I’ve created and you can see that the very basic one with just a logo, table of contents and then you see your requirements. The pictures in terms of the description as well as the name and some other information as well that comes in. So really easy to do that in Jama in terms of customizing your export template.
And if that’s not enough, we also have reports available out of the box canned reports with a number of different options that can be set down to Word or PDF. So a lot of different options in terms of pre-canned reports. But if the out of the box reports aren’t giving you what you need, then we also have a velocity engine where a lot of our customers create their own reports as well. And if they don’t have a skill set in that they can come to our services team and we can do that for you, which we do often all the time.
So a lot of different options in terms of getting your requirements out. And I think the key, you know, had mentioned flexibility, and I think that’s the key differentiator with Jama is to be able to have that flexibility, not only in terms of tools to get it out and export it into, but also to be able to customize.
Susan Manupelli: I agree, definitely for the end users to be able to do the kinds of changes that they need, straight Word is really a huge benefit.
Mario Maldari: Yeah, I agree. So just to summarize with Document Generation. We encourage you to work within your requirements tool, do everything you can, your reviews, your approvals changes your requirements. But of course there are cases where you want to get your requirements exported and I feel as though Jama does a really good job supporting that and providing the flexibility as well.
Susan Manupelli: I agree. Sounds great. Thanks Mario.
Mario Maldari: Yeah, Sue, I’d like to thank you so much for your time today and looking forward to having more of these vlog series. And yeah, take care and we’ll talk soon.
Susan Manupelli: Thanks. Bye guys.
Thank you for watching our Episode 5, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Review and Collaboration. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Migration & Data Mapping; Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/Doors-VLOG-Episode-5-intro.jpg10801920Mario Maldari/media/jama-logo-primary.svgMario Maldari2022-11-30 03:00:522024-01-18 10:51:51Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Document Generation: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
In this blog, we’ll break down key elements of our Jama Connect for Semiconductor Software.
Jama Connect® for Semiconductor Software
It can take months or even years to complete the development of a new chip. To avoid costly mistakes, semiconductor requirements need to be clearly communicated to the entire team across the development lifecycle. While most teams acknowledge their communication challenges, the risk of process change or adopting a new tool can be daunting. Jama Connect for Semiconductor provides an intuitive, leading-edge semiconductor requirements management solution for complex chip development with methods in use today by top manufacturers.
Supercharge Your Systems Development and Engineering Process
Jama Connect® is a solution for managing product requirements from idea through development, launch, and iteration. It brings people and data together in one place, providing visibility and actionable insights into the product development lifecycle. Jama Connect equips teams to analyze impacts, track decisions, and ensure quality of the product you set out to build.
Simplify Complex Product Development With Jama Connect
Jama Connect is a hub for understanding your complete product development lifecycle, enabling product managers and engineers to track requirements, decisions, and relationships on multiple levels to deliver compliant, market-driven products effectively. Jama Connect helps teams deliver high-quality products on time and on budget by aligning stakeholders, identifying risks early on and visualizing connections between regulations, requirements, and test cases throughout the development process.
Key Benefits
In the increasingly complex semiconductor industry, market forces are creating new challenges for semiconductor product developers. Jama Connect was designed to help teams:
Confidence – Trace requirements throughout the development process, illuminate risk, and proceed with confidence that you are building what you set out to build.
Visibility – Gain visibility into the product development process by monitoring relationships and dependencies between systems, teams, activities, and results.
Speed – Align teams, track decisions efficiently, and minimize rework to create high-quality products on time and on budget.
Adaptability – Easily adapt Jama Connect to your project and organizational workflows to create an intuitive experience so your teams can get up to speed quickly.
Performance – Benchmark and monitor team performance over time to understand the benefits of retooling your product development process. Store and reuse existing intellectual property and best practices from multiple product lines.
Infineon Transitions From a Document-Centric to Data-Centric Development Flow with Jama Connect
Founded in 1999 as a spin-off of Siemens AG, German semiconductor manufacturer, Infineon Technologies AG is a world leader in semiconductor solutions that make life easier, safer, and greener. Ranking among the 10% most sustainable companies in the world, Infineon is a leading player in automotive, digital security systems, power and sensor systems, and industrial power control.
In our Infineon customer story, we examine how Jama Software helps Infineon manage complex product development subject to regulatory compliance and increase efficiency. Read the full customer story to find out how Infineon’s shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution resulted in:
Better management of product complexities throughout the development cycle
Systematic handling of requirements from product definition to product development and verification
Improved collaboration with distributed teams both inside and outside of their organization
More effective exchange of requirements to ensure functional safety standards are met
Database-centric approach increases the efficiency of Infineon product development
Jama Connect helped Infineon shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution enabling newfound product development efficiencies around complexities, communication, reviews, and compliance.
CHALLENGES
• Keep the overview on ever-increasing product complexities and avoid requirements misunderstandings
• Provide compliance without compromising time-to-market goals
• Manual document versioning makes review cycles and alignment difficult
• Improve the review & sign-off process, making it an integral part of the requirement management system
• Need for enhanced reuse capabilities • Exchange requirements information with customers and suppliers
• Overcome the scaling limits of a document-centric approach
SOLUTIONS
• Jama Connect’s scalability supports complex projects
• Easier to show compliance to industry regulations
• Jama Connect Review Center supports an efficient process
• Provide requirements-accurate versioning to backtrace decisions
• Reuse requirements to shorten development cycles
• Digital exchange of requirements between customers and suppliers
RESULTS
• Better management of product complexities throughout the development cycle
• Systematic handling of requirements from product definition to product development and verification
• The traceability of requirements enables functional safety standards compliance
• Improved collaboration with distributed teams both inside and outside of their organization
• More effective exchange of requirements to ensure functional safety standards are met
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/2022-11-29-jama-connect-for-semiconductor-1.jpg5121024Decoteau Wilkerson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgDecoteau Wilkerson2022-11-29 03:00:502024-01-18 10:54:33Jama Connect® for Semiconductor Software: Modernize and Digitize the Requirements Management Process
Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Review and Collaboration: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: A User Experience Roundtable Chat we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 4 of our Roundtable Chat series, Mario Maldari – Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software® – and Vincent Balgos – Director of Medical Device Solutions at Jama Software® – walk us through reviews and collaboration in Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS.
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Vincent Balgos: Hi, welcome to part four of our vlog series. I hope you are enjoying the series so far. My name is Vincent Balgos, and I’ll be representing Jama Software today. In terms of experience, I’ve been working at Jama for over nine months now, but before joining Jama, I was a systems engineer in the medical device field working on requirements, reviews, risk and collaboration. I’m actually a former Jama customer and have been using the tool in practice for over six years developing complex medical products. I’m joined today by my colleague, Mario Maldari. Mario, would you like to introduce yourself and provide some background?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, thanks Vincent. My name is Mario Maldari. I’m Director of Solution Architecture at Jama. Spent about 20 years working in various requirement solutions, started with Requisite Pro back in the day and started working on the DOORS family. DOORS, DOORS Next Generation, so a lot of history with requirements management software in different industries.
Vincent Balgos: Great. How long have you been working at Jama?
Mario Maldari: Just about a year now.
Vincent Balgos: Oh great, so similar to myself. Welcome to the team and look forward to the discussion.
Mario Maldari: Thank you.
Vincent Balgos: As part of this series, we will be discussing actually the requirements, review and collaboration across different various tool sets. As many of you know, working and reviewing requirements are essential tasks that requires a significant effort sometimes from drafting the initial spirit of the requirement to the solidification of the final language. It’s an iterative and collaborative effort that usually requires lots of different teams across different function groups. There are many tools that can help with review and common ones that we’ve seen are generally emails, Word, Excel, PowerPoint to more complex tools, which is our focus today. Today we’d like to actually talk about the Review Center, a review and collaboration within the DOORS and how’s that compare to Jama, with Mario’s experience at DOORS, what’s been your experience with performing these tasks under the DOORS?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, it’s been interesting. I think some of the challenges that our customers faced at the time were difficulty with the tooling itself, the way that the collaboration and the review was done within the tool or facilitated within the tool. What would happen is they’d often go outside the tooling. They’d start using Word or documents and they’d email this back and forth. Besides going outside the tool, you’d end up losing a lot of history in terms of auditability, who made the decisions, and how the requirements evolved. It diminished the purpose and the value of a formal requirements tool. When it’s difficult, people just go outside the tool and that’s what we were seeing a lot with DOORS.
Then as DOORS Next started evolving, things didn’t get much better. It was very difficult to use the reviews within DOORS next. I was a test lead at the time trying to review requirements and test cases. I found that the UI itself was very difficult to use and facilitate. Again, it was just people going outside of the tooling to go with whatever was easier for them. It was quite a challenge from a usability point of view.
Vincent Balgos: That’s really interesting and that’s a little bit different workflow that we have actually natively within our Jama tool. Let me actually walk you through that. As you can see, Mario, here is actually the review center within natively within the Jama tool itself. This is actually a review that I just held with my team and we were reviewing actually five different requirements. We were able to collaborate, live and provide comment, feedback, approval, rejection or needs a revisit, and as a moderator, I can actually see and manage the whole review center within a single tool right through here.
For example, we highlighted this particular area and Carleda had some interesting comment here, but that’s a single point of comment. A more interesting one is one that we actually had here. We were talking about tolerances for a particular gain field requirement and I asked Jakob @Jakob, Hey, is this enough? What about X, Y, Z? Jakob responded as we had here. You can see this kind of maintains some of that audit trail traceability that you kind of mentioned that tend to get lost in different emails and different tools and stuff like that. But you can see that this is all collected in a single tool within the Jama space.
What’s also nice, as you know again, as you’re going through the review, you can see what the status of the review is in terms of the number of comments that we have here on the left, the number of approvals that we have, and then somewhere we may actually need a little bit more time. For example, this one here, I had a lot of conversation that I may want to have to go back with my team and kind of resolve that we have here. With that said, what do you think about Jam’s workflow?
Mario Maldari: Yeah, I think Jama’s workflow in terms of the review and approval, I think the usability is key here. When the tool itself facilitates a certain workflow and it makes it easy for the customers to use, I think that’s key. What I like about this is it stores everything within Jama. A year from now I can go back and look and say, who made the comment to get this approved and what was the discussion around that? I can easily see that. At the same time, I can easily get that information out of the tooling should I ever need to send it to an auditor or send it to management. The key is it’s all kept within the tool. I like that a lot.
Vincent Balgos: We just really just covered a very small snippet of the capabilities and power of the review center, but we can do exports, we can moderate this. There are additional capabilities here, but it’s great to hear that this is a more seamless flow. As you can see in the short demo, collaborating within Review Center is as easy as posting on social media where you can see comments, tag people, continue the discussion of the requirement or whatever you’re reviewing all within a single place. Jama allows live collaboration natively within the tool. Gone are the days, as you describe, Mario, about handling which email, which Word versions that we should be looking at. It seems a lot more efficient process than you described at DOORS.
Mario Maldari: Yeah, and it’s one thing too, you could formally manage your requirements in a tool and that’s great, but if you cannot have a workflow that facilitates a proper review and approval, then the tooling itself is very diminished. This kind of rounds off that whole workflow of requirements management. I like that a lot.
Vincent Balgos: Yeah, right. While I may have shown you a medical example, this tool is actually agnostic to any industry that you have within. This could be applied to aerospace, auto, semiconductor, other areas of the business. Again, just want to kind of share that tidbit.
Well, thank you for this discussion and your perspective, Mario. This kind of concludes our v-log on review and collaboration and the significance within the requirements management domain. We truly hope you’ve been enjoying the series so far. Stay tuned for the next entry in our series and we look forward to seeing you then.
Mario Maldari: Thank you, Vincent.
Thank you for watching our Episode 4, Jama Connect vs. IBM DOORS: Review and Collaboration. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/Doors-VLOG-Episode-4-intro-1.jpg10801920Mario Maldari/media/jama-logo-primary.svgMario Maldari2022-11-16 03:00:132024-01-18 13:17:27Jama Connect® vs. IBM® DOORS®: Review and Collaboration: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
In this blog, we’ll preview our customer story, “Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®.” To read the entire customer story, click HERE.
Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®
Graduates enter the workforce better prepared to tackle real-world engineering problems with modern technology
About Carnegie Mellon University
Master of Science in Software Engineering (M.S.-SE) is a unique program offered exclusively at CMU’s Silicon Valley campus by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Emphasizes a rigorous foundation in the core disciplines of software engineering
Offers students fundamental knowledge, skills, and first-hand experience in software engineering by balancing theory and practice, engaging students in active learning, and encouraging collaboration on projects drawn from real-world contexts
CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
As a co-founder of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Master’s Program, Dr. Cécile Péraire set out to prepare her students to enter the workforce by teaching modern software tools and processes with a hands-on approach. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon as a professor, Péraire worked for a decade at Rational Software and then at IBM.
As part of this modern approach to software engineering, Péraire teaches her students how to use Jama Connect® as the single source of truth for software product definition and uses the platform as a way to review her student’s work.
Principles of the Software Engineering Course
As a professor of Software Engineering for master’s students at Carnegie Mellon, Cécile Péraire teaches with a hands-on approach. Each semester, students are asked to select one real world challenge, and to come up with a software product that could help address the challenge. In the past, students have selected challenges like wildfires, food waste, and homelessness.
Instead of teaching a traditional lecture-based course, Péraire takes a mixed approach that combines flipped-classroom delivery and project-based learning, with students implementing dual-track Agile during their project. As the name suggests, it’s a process that has two tracks of work – one track aims at discovering what functionality to build next, focusing on requirements engineering and interaction design, and the other track focuses on delivering new functionality. The two tracks run continuously and in parallel with a strong focus on understanding the needs of the stakeholders and validating that the team is building the right product from the technical perspective, the user perspective, and the business perspective.
“In order to ensure that my students are building the right product, they must remain with the stakeholders during the entire semester and welcome changes at any time, principle,” said Péraire.
Selection Process
Prior to Péraire joining CMU, the requirements engineering course was taught in a more traditional and outdated fashion.
“When I joined CMU, I inherited a requirements engineering course that was taught using Word and Excel. I’ve always tried to teach fairly lightweight processes but having to create and structure documents introduced a lot of overhead for the students and made the process quite heavy and old fashioned,” said Péraire. “I could immediately see that it wasn’t working. When I had a chance to create my own course, I decided to do it differently.”
When Péraire set out to find a requirements management solution for her requirements engineering and interaction design course, she had a set of very specific criteria.
The new solution must have the following characteristics:
Cloud-based
Robust requirements management capabilities
Customizable to support all development practices
Reliable – free from bugs and crashes
User-friendly interface that is easy to learn
Resources and e-learning for students
Responsive and helpful support team and account management
After evaluating all available solutions, Péraire determined that Jama Connect stood out as the leader and fit her needs the best.
“After reading many reviews about the leading requirements management solutions, I ended up with a short list of about five tools that I evaluated very thoroughly. Overall, Jama Connect was the one that performed the best and met all of the criteria on my list,” said Péraire.
Using Jama Connect for Teaching Software Engineering
“…from interview notes to storyboards, prototypes, user stories, all the way down to working software. Every artifact that relates to the project is available in or accessible from Jama Connect. It’s the hub for all of the information we need.” CÉCILE PÉRAIRE, Professor of Software Engineering Carnegie Mellon
Now, with Jama Connect deeply ingrained in her software engineering course, students use the platform as their single source of truth for all software product definition activities.
Using Jama Connect for software product definition has been key to supporting her students in order to build the right product for their stakeholders. They use Jama Connect as a hub for all the artifacts that are created during the project, “…from interview notes to storyboards, prototypes, user stories, all the way down to working software. Every artifact that relates to the project is available in or accessible from Jama Connect. It’s the hub for all of the information we need,” said Péraire.
“My students use Jama Connect first to structure the information effectively, and then to share the information within their teams and with other stakeholders. They are required to stay in contact with their stakeholders throughout the semester and Jama Connect helps to facilitate that communication when they aren’t able to meet in person. Remote communication can happen synchronously or asynchronously as Jama Connect supports all those different ways of sharing information and getting feedback on the work done,” said Péraire.
Using Jama Connect to Review Work Provides Students with Real-World Project Management Experience
In addition to using Jama Connect to help students learn how to properly organize software development projects’ artifacts, Péraire also uses the platform to review, grade, and give feedback on her students’ work.
Improved Review Processes
“I use Jama Connect Review Center to grade and provide feedback on all deliverables. The process in itself is a learning experience for students because it actually mimics the real-world industry review. It provides me with the ability to very easily comment on any element of the project, ask questions, request changes, or have discussions related to a specific section of a deliverable,” said Péraire.
Enhanced Visibility into Revision History
“Jama Connect gives me visibility into the students’ work. At any point I can log into Jama Connect and see what is going on, who is doing what, and I can see the different discussion streams. I can see the revision history and who is contributing to what. Compared to Word and Excel, this gives me an improved ability to evaluate students individually while letting them work in teams,” said Péraire.
Effective Collaboration
“With Jama Connect, I not only have improved visibility into the students’ work, but I have the ability to effectively collaborate with students outside of the classroom for both mentoring and evaluation purposes. We can have a conversation around any project item,” said Péraire.
Because Péraire’s courses are hands-on and not lecture-based, her students learn by doing. By taking a project-based approach to learning, she’s able to mimic what happens in the industry, and her students get firsthand experience working through those challenges and interacting with stakeholders.
“Software product definition is a highly creative process supported by a combination of interactive design and requirements engineering practices. As students learn to apply those practices on their products during the course project, they document the outcome of their work in Jama Connect.” said Péraire.
“Jama Connect is really an effective way of teaching by example. The platform is fully customizable, so I created a structure for the students that nicely supports software product definition in the context of course projects. Students can use that as a good example of how to structure and share information in the future. That can be used as a starting point for a project and be customized to adapt to a different context,” said Péraire.
With Jama Connect, Péraire shares that her students can focus on content creation instead of building a complex document structure, which results in better learning outcomes and increased student productivity. Even if a student graduates and goes on to work at an organization that chooses not to use a requirements management platform like Jama Connect, Péraire believes her students are still more prepared to enter the workforce than those taught traditional, outdated software engineering tools and processes.
“Learning with Jama Connect gives my students a model of how to organize and structure artifacts related to software product definition. Even if they do not have a requirements management tool and have to go back to Word and Excel on their next project, they will have a good idea about how to organize and structure the information. While in that case they would lose the power of the tool, being exposed to an effective way of working should benefit my students greatly,” said Péraire
“Learning with Jama Connect gives my students a model of how to organize and structure artifacts related to software product definition. Even if they do not have a requirements management tool and have to go back to Word and Excel on their next project, they will have a good idea about how to organize and structure the information.”
How Jama Software® Supports CCMI
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University is the birthplace of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a framework used to evaluate the maturity of an organization’s software development process. The model describes a five-level evolutionary path of increasingly organized and systematically more mature processes.
Worldwide CMMI plays a key role in software development organizations that must showcase their development maturity. Teams are working hard to move their current CMM level to the next level and hence demonstrate their ability to deliver quality software.
Being CMMI certified is a common requirement for the Department of Defense (DoD) and U.S. Government software development contracts.
“While I am not a CMMI expert, my understanding is that during a CMMI appraisal, the organization must show evidence of implementation for each practice in the scope of the appraisal. For organizations that have a good process in place, Jama Connect can make this process visible. This can be beneficial during the CMMI appraisal in order to quickly identify evidence that the required practices are being implemented by the organization. Jama Connect can be leveraged to support demonstrating the alignment between CMMI and the practices adopted by the organizations needing certification,” said Péraire.
To read about the predicted future of Carnegie Mellon University and Jama Connect, download the full customer story HERE
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/11/2022-11-10-customer-story-carnegie-mellon-1-1.jpg5121024McKenzie Jonsson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgMcKenzie Jonsson2022-11-10 03:00:002024-01-18 13:32:20Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Program Teaches Modern Software Engineering Using Jama Connect®
Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Filters, Search, and Analysis: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 3 of our Roundtable Chat series, Richard Watson – Practice Director at Jama Software® – and Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture, Jama Software® – walk us through filtering, searching, and analyzing content in Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®
To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
Watch the full video and find the video transcript below to learn more!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Richard Watson: Welcome to part three of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the vlog so far. My name is Richard Watson and I’ll be representing DOORS today. In terms of experience, I’ve been using DOORS for just over 20 years and all of those was as the DOORS and DOORS Next product manager. I’m joined today by Cary.
Cary Bryczek: Hi everybody. I’m Cary. I haven’t had the pleasure of using DOORS for as many years as Richard. I’ve been blessed by not having to use it, but I have used Jama for a very long time and I’m the Director of Solutions Architecture here at Jama, and I’ve been in the requirements world for more than 25 years.
Richard Watson: Thank you. So in this vlog we’re going to be talking about requirements analysis, that’s filtering, searching, dashboards, etc.
Analysis is probably one of the most important reasons that we actually pick a requirements tool in the first place. The risk of life or the risk of lots of money gets organizations imposing compliance needs or their industry will give them regulations that they simply have to meet. And document-based systems just don’t give the relevant granularity to enable things like live traceability. So we need a tool.
Over time, the way we’ve engineered complex systems has changed and we find a much wider community of stakeholders are interested in direct access to the requirements. They want to actually go into the tool. And so usability of that tool becomes key. We also continue to get a wide dynamic set of users and new users, certainly younger users expect the tool to almost be like their social media apps that they’re using.
Cary Bryczek: Yeah, right but aren’t developing with the social media tools that the younger folks are used to. We’re doing real engineering.
Richard Watson: So how to persuade them to use an engineering tool?
Today’s tool engineers are being overwhelmed by data. Data can have, of course, huge value, but if you can’t find the data, it can sometimes even hinder your process, let alone give you any value.
Cary Bryczek: To do that analysis, we need to know how the information is stored, maybe even over multiple systems and how it’s all related to each other. We need to have different views of all of that trace data to ensure that really everything is being done as expected.
Richard Watson: So, okay, let’s start digging into the details. If we start with filters and search. Looking at DOORS, DOORS obviously has a world that’s wrapped around individual modules, and so trying to filter and search information across modules is next to impossible.
Initially, when we started out using DOORS years ago, that was okay. Today it’s not. Today we’re finding organizations have got thousands of DOORS modules and millions of requirements in those are total modules. It’s really difficult to find the data that you need. When you’re in a module, of course, DOORS has got quite sophisticated, complex filter definitions, but even they’re frustrating because if you want to modify them for some reason, perhaps you need to change them or maybe they’re even wrong, you have to start from scratch and normally, you need help to do that.
If we jump the fence DOORS Next, DOORS Next is DOORS next generation. It should be the next generation of DOORS, but it’s hampered by its history. DOORS Next actually was developed on top of an original tool requirements composer. And in order to introduce the DOORS, facilities, modules were added. And as a secondary fun function, modules actually confuse the situation. For example, when you add a requirement to a DOORS Next module, it also gets added to what’s called a base folder. And so when you’re searching for information, you need to know whether you’re looking for the requirement in a module or whether inadvertently you find that requirement in the folder. Sometimes you can even count these requirements twice because they’re in two separate places.
Cary Bryczek: Richard, that sounds complicated even listening to you describe it. Jama is a modern tool and we took a completely new approach with a web-based UI that’s designed for anybody to get up and running. And filters and searches is one of the prime areas that make it really super simple and easy to use for analysis.
Let me just show you what I mean. When we created Jama, we wanted it to be easy to use right away, and finding information should be just intuitive as possible. You don’t have to write any kind of DXL. I can see filters that I already have. I can see just things that I’ve bookmarked creating and searching. Again, I don’t have to write any DXL. It should just show me the particular type of requirements. I can even find things across. What are the ones that don’t have any downstream relationships.
Richard Watson: Yeah. This is so much different to DOORS, and also it’s an improvement over DOORS Next, Cary, because you can do filters on the information at the other side of the relationships and that’s quite difficult to do in DOORS Next and you just can’t do that in DOORS at all.
Cary Bryczek: Yeah. Filters are built into almost any view that you’re on. So if I’m right in a view that I’m looking at requirements, I’m able to filter it right there, filtered by keyword, filtered by the types of things that are in the view, even through traceability.
Richard Watson: Yeah. That’s really interesting, Cary. I particularly liked the way you were doing filters over relationships. I mean you consider it trying to do a filter in DOORS Next, which is impossible saying show me requirements related to defects that have been raised against failed test cases. You just can’t do that type of filtering inside of DOORS Next. So it’s pretty cool in Jama.
Richard Watson: Also, you’re showing the dashboard functionality. Dashboards in DOORS just don’t exist. So it’s got a welcome screen so you can sometimes see information on that welcome screen, but that was introduced so late in the process or the release schedule that not many organizations use it.
DOORS Next, of course, has dashboards, but again that’s hampered by history. DOORS Next dashboards are very much focused on requirements in folders. So for our DOORS user moving into DOORS Next, you’ll find that the maturity of dashboards around module information is pretty limited.
Cary Bryczek: With Jama, our dashboard technology is built right into the tool. You don’t need any extra add-on servers to make it work. And it’s something that is used as a launchpad for different stakeholders to get to the information. Let me show you what I mean.
We have dashboards that are built right in. The reporting engine is native inside of Jama itself, and then so you can take those filters that we were creating earlier and turn them into widgets, into pie charts, into bar charts, then you can download the information. You can download a picture of the things. You can see which requirements don’t have tests, what are the suspect ones, which are the recently viewed things, what’s the progress, which are the things that I’ve touched in the past few days. So if I need to pick up where I left off, launch that directly from a dashboard review.
Richard Watson: Yeah, that’s cool. I like the traceability map there as well. That’s really good. So let’s move on and talk about analysis of requirements. Analysis of requirements is where the fund is and we can start with DOORS.
DOORS has some analysis for capabilities, but mostly organizations are expected to develop DXL solutions. DXL it’s a cool thing to fill in gaps. I remember going around many of the software conferences and people will actually proudly come to me and say, “Hey, Richard. Our organization’s got hundreds of thousands of lines of DXL scripts,” sometimes over a million lines of DXL scripts.
Think about what we’re saying. A million lines of customization code where the organization’s core business is not developing requirements tools. That DXL hampers the performance of DOORS. Sometimes you lose sight of what’s making DOORS go slowly. Is it DOORS itself or is it a customization? And also, as time moved on, the number of people that have got skills in developing DXL is diminishing greatly. And so if you try to, you are exposing your organization to risk because you can’t maintain or extend your current environment.
Jumping the fence to DOORS Next, there’s a different problem entirely. DOORS Next, of course, doesn’t support front end customizations. It doesn’t support DXL. When you look at DOORS Next, actually you start to look at traceability. We want a system that can see an overall view of live traceability between data so that you can analyze that information. And the only way you can do that in DOORS Next is either with an additional tool, so Jazz reporting system, or you start looking at OSLC techniques. OSLC is okay if you’re looking at your Jazz-based products only. It’s got some very big constraints if you’re starting to get tools from different vendors. So you get tied into a single vendor solution simply because of the lack of maturity of OSLC implementations.
Cary Bryczek: Gosh, Richard. Again, that sounds really complicated. And one of the great things that Jama software did was build all of that workflow capability, all of the bits and pieces that you’d have to do with DXL into the software. So people just come in to Jama Connect and just start using it. And the live traceability aspect is probably my favorite aspect about the tool and it’s super powerful. Let me show you what I mean. One of the things that’s great is that live traceability enables pretty much anyone to find anything at the current moment across boundaries. And so, one of the ways that we start live traceability is through that relationship rule diagram. I can see the schema for what’s traced, and this information might be coming in live from other tools in the ecosystem.
We give you an easy way to organize. So if I’m starting to analyze a system just following this explore tree, and seeing how the information is organized by system and subsystem for this aircraft. Now once inside, just navigating to find that information is super simple. I even have live traceability here in the tools itself, so in the requirements, so I can see this particular function requirement, it traces to a system requirement.
Traceability is in almost every view that we look at. So if I’m in this one detail view of a requirement, I know it’s got upstream and downstream traces. If I’m in the live tracing view, my live tracing view, this is a multi-level view of requirements. So I can see if I’m following these requirements on down to the validation level or the system level. I can walk that traceability all the way down, multiple levels of requirements to look at test runs, to look at any defects along the way. It’s really powerful. And then I can start and filter right where I need to be. So if I want to have a filtered start from a filter view, which are the ones that are causing suspect?
Now, this shortens the amount of information that I have on the screen. It really makes the analysis much faster to do than having to work with DXL scripts or exporting stuff to spreadsheets and looking at the information.
Richard Watson: Thanks very much, Cary. That insight to Jama Connect is just reminding me of my last 18 months in Jama. I’ve really enjoyed picking up the Jama Connect product, really excited by it.
That brings us to the end of this particular vlog. I hope you all enjoyed it, and please feel free to take some time to look at some of the other vlogs in this series. Thanks very much, Cary.
Cary Bryczek: Thanks, Richard.
Thank you for watching our Episode 3, Jama Connect vs. DOORS: Filters, Search, and Analysis. To watch other episodes in this series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Review and Collaboration; Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/Doors-VLOG-Episode-3-intro-3-1.jpg10801920Richard Watson/media/jama-logo-primary.svgRichard Watson2022-11-02 03:00:142023-01-12 16:46:14Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Filters, Search, and Analysis: A User Experience Roundtable Chat
In this blog, we recap our press release covering the new performance and scale benchmarks set with the release of Jama Connect Advisor™ – The Industry’s First Native, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Advisor to Improve Requirement Quality.
Jama Software® Releases Jama Connect Advisor™ – The Industry’s First Native, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Advisor to Improve Requirement Quality
Jama Software®, the leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, has announced the launch of the Jama Connect Advisor™ — an intelligent, natural language advisor that improves the quality of requirements based on industry-recommended best practices by INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) rules and EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) notation for successful product development and market delivery.
Maintaining requirements quality is critical for product development as studies have shown that 70 to 85 percent of rework is due to faulty requirements. Efficient, precise, and accurately written requirements are the single source of truth that aligns development effort across engineering disciplines reducing rework, lengthy integration meetings, and costly late-stage surprises.
“Requirement quality is critical to our success, but it is hard to train and enforce. Jama Connect Advisor gives us the ability to train new engineers and ensure consistent requirement quality across projects – a real game changer for us,” said Sheila King, Senior Project Engineer, Rockwell Automation.
Companies not only benefit from reduced rework, but also the automation of training for new engineers to learn requirements authoring best practices. Jama Connect Advisor provides self-paced training as requirements are being authored and reviewed to help new engineers ramp up quickly without placing time demands on more experienced engineers.
“Needs, requirements, verification, and validation are common threads that tie all systems lifecycle activities and artifacts together. Because of this, the quality of the needs and requirements is critical to project success. Tools such as Jama Connect Advisor — that aid those defining well-formed needs and requirements and have the characteristics defined in the INCOSE Guide to Writing Requirements — are invaluable,“ said Lou Wheatcraft, Senior Consultant, Managing Member, Wheatland Consulting, LLC, and Co-Chair INCOSE Requirements Working Group.
Jama Connect Advisor helps engineers and product developers:
Leverage engineering-based natural language processing guidance while editing within Jama Connect®
Author intricate product requirements quickly, easily, and with precision
Develop and improve authoring skills through guidance based on industry-recommended practice by INCOSE Rules and EARS Notation
“Jama Software is committed to helping our clients improve the performance of the engineering process. Fundamental to this improvement is ensuring the quality of requirements through intelligent analysis and automated training for new engineers,” said Marc Osofsky, Chief Executive Officer, Jama Software.
Key Benefits of Jama Connect Advisor:
Reduce costly rework
Automate the training of engineers on requirements authoring best practices
Eliminate late-stage errors due to faulty requirements
Reduce tedious and morale-draining integration meetings
Increase engineering productivity through quality automation
With correct, precise, and efficient requirements, companies can accelerate product development to remain competitive in this new era of innovation.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/2022-10-26-jama-connect-advisor-press-release-1.jpg5121024Karrie Sundbom/media/jama-logo-primary.svgKarrie Sundbom2022-10-26 07:00:572023-07-26 12:41:47Jama Software® Releases Jama Connect Advisor™ – The Industry’s First Native, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Advisor to Improve Requirement Quality
A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Adoptability for All Stakeholders
Increasing industry challenges and complexities are pushing innovative organizations to consider modernizing the tool(s) they use for requirements management (RM). In this blog series, A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®, we’ll present several information-packed video blogs covering the challenges that teams face in their project management process.
In Episode 2 of our Roundtable Chat series, Cary Bryczek – Director of Solutions Architecture, Jama Software® and Susan Manupelli – Senior Solutions Architect, Jama Software® – walk us through the importance of adaptability, and ease of use, for all stakeholders in a requirements management tool.
Watch this short video below to learn more and find the full video transcript below!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Cary Bryczek: Hi everybody. Welcome to part two of our vlog series. I hope you’re enjoying the series so far. My name is Cary Bryczek, and I’ll be representing Jama software today. In terms of experience, I’ve been using Jama for nine years, but have used DOORS and numerous other requirements tools for the past 20 years. I’m joined today by Susan.
Susan Manupelli: Hi there. My name is Susan Manupelli. I’m a solutions architect here at Jama Software. Prior to joining Jama, I was a test architect working on the engineering lifecycle management suite of products, particularly on Rational DOORS Next Generation and the Global Configuration Manager. So I’m happy to be here with you today to talk requirements management adoptability
Cary Bryczek: Thank you Susan. In this vlog, we’re going to be talking about the adoptability for all stakeholders. Adoptability, it might be the most important aspect for a requirements tool and sometimes it’s the most overlooked. Adoptability isn’t just about being able to get users to actually use the software, but it’s about how well it fits into the IT ecosystem. How hard or easy it is to maintain, or even whether or not the organization recognizes its benefits.
UI, Ease of Use, and Adoptability
Susan Manupelli: Right. Let’s talk… One of the first challenges in the adoption of DOORS Classic is that many dev teams are distributed globally. DOORS is a legacy client server application, which doesn’t scale well over the WAM, so DWA, DOORS Web Access, was released as the answer to that problem, but it lacks significant functionality only available in the desktop client.
Another challenge with DOORS Classic is that the UI look and feel is very dated. Modern engineering teams are energized by utilizing the very latest technologies for developing state-of-the-art products for the future, and then they’re asked to use a requirements tool that was designed some 30 years ago. So that just doesn’t fly very well.
Let’s talk a little bit about DOORS Next Generation. It was marketed as a new modern alternative to DOORS Classic. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to use. There are too many different options for use and a lack of direction on best practices. So we’ll go through some of these challenges in the vlog.
The first place where users struggle to adopt DOORS Next Generation is a very basic question; whether to use modules or not. DNG originally only allowed you to organize requirements in a tree view hierarchy of folders. And later, to accommodate users that were more familiar with DOORS Classic, modules were added to DNG. Modules provide a document-like view for requirements, but these same artifacts outside of the module view show up in alpha numeric order in the true view, it makes organization of artifacts outside of the module very confusing.
Cary Bryczek: Wow. Yeah, that does sound complicated to comprehend. Jama was developed as a web-based solution from scratch. We wanted to fulfill the lowest common denominator stakeholder so anybody could come in and use our software. Our UI is modern and intuitive. Let me show you what I mean.
This is what I mean about our UI. It’s very streamlined. There’s hardly any button clicks or menus to learn how to use. There’s four main menus. And then the rest of them are kind of like right click kinds of options. We have the dashboard built right in. Our views are super simple. The explorer tree matches exactly what you see in our list view. And our views are very simple to navigate. So if this is the list view, and I wanted to see a document or a reading kind of view, I can just toggle the buttons to show those different types of views.
Teaching someone how to use this is really super simple, and it doesn’t take that much time at all. In fact, analysts have even recognized Jama Software as being the easiest user tool in the marketplace. You can go out there and see something like from G2, which queries users without us even knowing about it to get their direct feedback on the tools.
Link Relationship Rules and Traceability
Susan Manupelli: Well thanks, Cary. That was great. Another area that’s confusing in DNG has to do with linking. Linking behavior is different between module artifacts and non-module artifacts. A lack of understanding leads to incorrect or incomplete traceability analysis. In DNG, if you link to artifacts that are outside of a module, the link is placed on the core artifact. If you link to artifacts within a module, the link only appears in that particular module. If you then print a traceability report, you’ll only see links made in the module context. So links to core artifacts won’t be displayed. So as a user, that behavior is very confusing.
Another gate to adoptability has to do with enforcing link relationships. Enforcing relationship rules in DNG it’s just hard to do. Either all links are allowed, which means that users can kind of willy-nilly apply link rules that don’t make sense really for relationship, or allowed link rules are specified in a list form for a given component, and then they must be recreated across all components in the project. There’s also no visual representation of link rules in DNG, and there’s no notion of enforcement of required link rules, so compliance is hard to maintain.
Cary Bryczek: Gosh, just listening to that sounds really confusing to me, and I’ve even used DOORS. In Jama, linking is just straightforward. If an item is linked to another item, that link relationship will be visible wherever you are in the UI. We also have the capability to see what our relationship schema looks like and enforce a consistent way to apply traceability. Let me show you what I mean.
There’s a couple of different ways to look at the traceability. I can see that traceability right away. So I know that this standard aircraft platform requirement is traced to another object downstream. I can see the traceability numbers, so this one in this list view. I can see that this one requirement has five different traceability things. I can see it also in the trace view. We’ll tee up a live real-time version of what’s currently traceable out there. It’s very easy to see where there’s gaps in traceability because there’s just no information there.
We have our traceability rule set. Think of this picture as being the schema for what types of objects are allowed to be traced to one another. So I might have four levels of requirements traceability. I might have test cases in there. And so this set of rules would enforce the users to create consistent traces. And then I can follow those rules down in the live trace view as well. So if I’m following this aircraft level requirement, I can see the system requirements, and any kind of lower level objects, whether those are high level software requirements. Here I see some verification tests and agency test runs. Traceability is really made to be super intuitive, real-time, live, to allow anybody to understand and analyze the current situation.
Susan Manupelli: Another common issue is that DOORS Next is hard to administer and maintain. Upgrades are often a challenge. As major architectural changes have occurred in recent releases of the DNG, the time and effort and ultimately the cost to upgrade has been daunting.
Another area of maintenance in DNG has to do with the type system. The type system, that’s the part of DNG that keeps track of your artifact types, your attributes and your values and their relationships. And that needs to be consistent from project to project for cross component and cross project reporting. And there’s no global way to keep these items in sync from project to project or component to component.
Cary Bryczek: Cool. That’s really different than the experience here at Jama. Our host of solutions get updates just about every 60 days. Middleware and security updates are handled as necessary. And sometimes the middlewares might take six months to a year or so. Very stable releases and changes to the ecosystem. We have self-hosted solutions and even customers that have air gap, we can satisfy those sort of ecosystem environments. Very easy to set up and deploy.
Now, it was interesting that you talked about, Susan, though the type rules. In Jama, we’re a little bit different for item types and attributes. We define those globally. Here’s an example.
Our type rules are defined globally, like I said. Here’s an example of schema for the types that are relevant to this particular achiever one project. When we define them globally, it’s all point and click kinds of experience of dealing with that. These attributes are now consistent from project to project to project. And that way you can have really easy reuse scenarios. If you’re doing complex scenarios like product line engineering or if you have complex libraries of data that you use from one project to the next, having that consistent type definition really makes it easier for you to do analysis, leverage reuse, have shorter project startup times.
Susan Manupelli: Yeah, sure. I can definitely see that. One other area that I wanted to talk about has to do with reporting. For all the effort that’s put into DNG to maintain the projects, to build up the requirement specs, the reporting needed to meet certifications is hard or sometimes impossible to create. Mistakes or inconsistencies in the type system that we just talked about, those often manifest as issues once you try to do some traceability reporting. Keeping data consistent between DNG in the reporting data stores has proven to be a challenge, so we’re talking about the data warehouse and LQE. And basically robust reporting out of DNG requires the use of additional IBM tooling, either Jazz Reporting Service, or RPE, the Rational Publishing Engine, and those products are outside of DNG.
Cary Bryczek: That sounds complicated. Again, one of the great things that we have at Jama is our reporting engine is built right into Jama itself. And Jama is a single application, so there’s no deploying 11 different servers of applications that are sort of cobbled together through an integration under the covers. Jama is just a single application. And exporting is super easy. Let me show you what I mean.
We have lots of built in reports. Lots of different kinds of reports that you can add in. We have the capability to export directly to Excel, Word, right there. All a user has to do is configure the view that they’re looking at, whether that’s the reading view or the list view that’s customized to match what they need to have. And then they can have the built in export templates that are just creatable via Microsoft Word templates, so there’s no custom coding in most cases that a user has to do to run these kinds of reports. Doesn’t that sound much easier, Susan?
Susan Manupelli: It sure does.
Cary Bryczek: That brings us to the end of this particular vlog. I hope you all have enjoyed it. Please, I hope you also take some time out to look at some of the other vlogs in this series. Thank you so much, Susan, for your perspective on DOORS and DNG as well.
Susan Manupelli: Thank you Cary. Happy to be here.
Thank you for watching our Episode 2, Jama Connect vs. DOORS: Adoptability for All Stakeholders. To watch Episode 1 of this video series, click HERE.
We hope you’ll join us for future Jama Connect Jama Connect vs. DOORS topics, including: Adoptability for All Stakeholders; Filters, Search and Analysis; Review and Collaboration; Document Generation; Migration & Data Mapping; Industry Templates; Reuse and Variant Management; Requirements-Driven Testing; Total Cost of Ownership; and Why Did We Move to Jama Connect? A Customer’s Story.
https://www.jamasoftware.com/media/2022/10/Doors-VLOG-Episode-2-Blog-Image.jpg10801920Cary Bryczek/media/jama-logo-primary.svgCary Bryczek2022-10-19 03:00:362023-01-12 16:46:16A User Experience Roundtable Chat About Jama Connect® vs. DOORS®: Adoptability for All Stakeholders
