Tag Archive for: Jama Connect Platform

Jama Connect vs DOORS

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.

To watch Episode 1 of this series, click HERE.

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.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Solution for IBM® DOORS®

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.

RELATED: G2 Recognizes Jama Connect as the Only Leader in Requirements Management

Administration and Maintenance

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.

RELATED: Why Investing in Requirements Management During an Economic Downturn Makes Good Business Sense

Running and Exporting Reports

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.

To learn more about available features in Jama Connect, visit: Empower Your Team and Improve Your Requirements Management Process

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.


Jama Connect® Features in Five: Jama Connect Interchange™

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, Debbie Mitchell, Product Manager at Jama Software, will introduce viewers to Jama Connect®’s dedicated integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange™.

In this session, we will explore:

  • Benefits of integrating Jama Connect
  • Features of Jama Connect Interchange
  • Common Jira and Excel Functions integration workflows

Follow along with this short video below to learn more, and you can find the full video transcript below!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Debbie Mitchell: Welcome. I’m Debbie, a Product Manager here at Jama Software. In this video, I’m going to introduce you to Jama Connect’s dedicated integration platform, Jama Connect Interchange. In this video, we will explore the benefits of integrating Jama Connect to other best-of-breed tools, the features offered by Jama Connect Interchange, and some common workflows using our Jira and Excel Functions integrations.

When developing new products, organizations typically employ an entire suite of best-of-breed tools. Requirements management tools like Jama Connect, task management tools like Jira and Microsoft Azure DevOps, and charting and spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel.

Working across disconnected tools can present a problem, though. Information quickly becomes out of date, and teams get out of sync with one another, leading to product delays, defects, cost overruns, rework and recalls. This is why we built Jama Connect Interchange, a new integration platform that delivers seamless integration between Jama Connect and other best-of-breed tools.

Unlike other integration tools in the marketplace, Interchange is built, supported, and continually enhanced by dedicated teams at Jama Software. This means Interchange is deeply integrated with Jama Connect configurations and workflows, providing you with a smart and seamless sync while you continue to work in your tool of choice.

Let’s take a common example. Suppose my company is building a new product that includes a software component. Using Jama Connect, I finalize a list of software requirements which will now be decomposed into individual user stories. Those stories will be sent to Jira, the software development team’s tool of choice, for the software engineers to complete.

RELATED: Jama Connect Interchange™ Datasheet

Debbie Mitchell: Let’s see what this looks like in Jama Connect. Using Interchange, I have set up an integration that allows the user stories that I’ve created in this set to automatically flow to a specific project in Jira. In Jira, the software development team can then refine the stories and create additional tasks and subtasks as needed to complete the development work.

In the Interchange admin hub, I’ve specified exactly how information should flow between Jama Connect and Jira for this particular project. I can specify whether each field flows one way or bi-directionally, and the frequency with which changes are synced. Updates can flow as fast as every 15 seconds, so both systems always have the latest information.

For this particular scenario, I’ve configured Interchange so that when development work is complete in Jira, the user story status is automatically synced back to Jama Connect to a field called Development Status. Now I can use the trace view in Jama Connect to easily identify when all user stories associated with a particular requirement have been completed.

To further automate this workflow, I can use the Interchange Excel Functions module to apply additional logical transformations to my data in Jama Connect. You can think of Excel Functions as a calculator that runs in the background while you continue to work in Jama Connect. A Jama Connect administrator maintains the formulas and calculations in an Excel template, and those formulas are then applied to fields in Jama Connect based on the settings and rules the administrator sets up in Interchange.

In this simple example, I’ve set up a rule in my Excel template stating that when all downstream user stories have a status of Development Done, I want the upstream software requirement in Jama Connect to also be marked as Done. Now, this is just one example of how Interchange Excel Functions can be used.

RELATED: Jama Connect®: Accelerating Systems Development with Requirements Management and Live Traceability™

Debbie Mitchell: Jama Connect clients today derive much deeper value from Interchange for scenarios like complex risk calculations, automated field inheritance or data population between related items, customized test case status rollups, and more. You can find out more about Excel functions, use cases, and capabilities by joining the Jama Connect interchange sub-community on the Jama Software community website.

Jama Connect customers can now leverage the power of Interchange to continuously sync information between Jama Connect and other best-of-breed tools. This means teams can continue using their tool of choice to maximize productivity while ensuring that critical project requirements stay in sync. Unlike other solutions in the market, Interchange has been specifically designed and developed to work seamlessly with Jama Connect. It’s easy to deploy, configure, use, and expand, driving efficiency and further lowering your total cost of ownership.

For more information about Interchange, contact your Customer Success Manager today, and thanks.

FREE DEMO: Click Here to Request a Demo of Jama Connect Interchange™

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, Requirements Advisor, and more.


OSLC

What Is OSLC?

OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) is an “open” standard designed to facilitate communication between tooling primarily used in engineering disciplines. The initial work was done by IBM in 2009 and in 2013 governance moved to OASIS. The idea behind OSLC is to provide a common layer for tool vendors so that connection between tools can be created without having to write and maintain individual connectors between each set of tools. In theory, this reduces the burden on tool vendors and gives users confidence that tools that support OSLC will interoperate without issue.

What tools support OSLC?

Many tool vendors do not directly support OSLC. Jama Software® integrates with a wide variety of best-of-breed tools and most of them do not come with native OSLC connectors. Of the 25 most prevalent tools that we see in the market, 20% have some OSLC capability, and only 16% have a company- supported connector. Contrast that with the fact that 100% of these tools have a company-supported REST API and you can clearly see the direction of the market.

OSLC services a relatively small niche that often requires consulting and some technical assistance to setup. Given that many of the tools that utilize OSLC are desktop based, the IT environment becomes a challenge for integration. This has led many to rely on third-party vendors to broker the OSLC integration layer and provide the support necessary. At Jama Software we have partnered with MiD and their product Smartfacts to enable this connection. Jama Connect® has a robust REST API and through our partnership with MiD we can support those customers who need an OSLC integration, while extending our integration capabilities to the much wider systems engineering ecosystem.

RELATED: Jama Software® and Sparx Systems Enhance Best-of-breed Tools Integration to Strengthen Live Traceability™ Across Systems Development

Using the integration hierarchy to achieve Live Traceability™

Most companies who are considering an OSLC integration are doing so to improve requirements traceability across their product development process. Requirements traceability approaches range from rudimentary, manual approaches, to automated synchronization across tools. At Jama Software we’re focused on helping our customers achieve Live Traceability™  via automated synchronizations of best-of-breed tools to a common traceability model. For those desktop tools that do not fully support automated synchronization, a lower level of traceability is the best that can be achieved.

Traceability Level

OSLC sits squarely in Level 3.

RELATED: DOORS Next Generation or Jama Connect: A Side-by-Side Look at Requirements Management Platforms

Organizations that are heavily invested in a specific toolchain suite can leverage OSLC to reduce the interop challenge inherent in suites that have been created through acquisition. Embedding user interfaces into other applications and maintaining links allows a user to navigate through the “suite” without having to open each application. When dealing with desktop applications, this can reduce the need to load up each tool individually. It is certainly better than trying to sync information through manual efforts.

In desktop tool scenarios and with tools that do not have a web API, OSLC might be as far as you can go. In which case, Jama Software has you covered. For those who want to move beyond the single user context and achieve Live Traceability, we recommend Level 4 integrations. Utilizing easy-to-implement, universal web standards we’ve helped hundreds of organizations achieve the user-level benefits of contextual data while also elevating the systems engineer’s visibility to the process and organization level.

Contact Jama Software today to find out how we can help you with OSLC and further you on your journey towards Live Traceability.

What is DOORS


Customer Success Programs

In this blog, we recap the “Driving Business Outcomes with Jama Software’s Success Programs” webinar.

When you buy Jama Connect, you’re not just buying the #1 requirements management solution on the market. Our Customer Success team stands behind you, delivering the expertise, guidance, and resources you need to see a quick return on your investment and achieve your business goals.

Our adoption-oriented approach balances industry best practices with the practicalities of how you plan, build, and test your products.

In this webinar, we discuss how Jama Software has created specific diagnostic tools and customer success offerings to achieve higher value with Jama Connect. We also explore how Jama Connect can enable transformational value to positively impact your business, and how our specific customer success offerings can help your team increase traceability compliance and requirement quality.

Learn more about our new customer success programs, and how they lead to better outcomes such as:

  • Higher percentage of passing tests
  • Lower product defect rates
  • Faster time to market

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

Driving Business Outcomes with Jama Software’s Success Programs

John D’Addario: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I’m John D’Addario, senior director of customer success here at Jama Software. I’m responsible for our global customer success team here, and we are so excited to share with you some of insights around how our new success program can help you and your company drive business outcomes with Jama Connect. I’ve asked my colleague Preston to join me today. Preston, can you give a brief introduction of yourself?

Preston Mitchell: Yeah. Thanks John. Hey everybody. It’s great to be here. As John mentioned, I’m really excited to share with you some of the things we’ve been working on here to make the success programs even better. For those of you that don’t know me, I am the director of the global solutions team. I’ve been with Jama for about 10 years. My background is kind of in requirements management. I’ve been a business analyst, I’ve been an Agile program manager. So I’m really excited about all of the best practices when it comes to system development and requirements authoring. So yeah, I’ll pass it back to John and we’ll dive in.

Related: G2 Again Names Jama Connect® the Leader in Requirements Management Software

John D’Addario: Thanks Preston. So as the number one in requirements management software, our purpose is to ensure that innovators succeed with customer success at the forefront of everything we do. Through years of industry specific experience and thousands of customer engagements, we bring the best practices to bear, to maximize the success rate of the product development process. There are six core business outcomes we focus on helping you drive with Jama Connect. They are reduced cycle time, increased process efficiency, streamline and accelerate reviews, speed time to market, gain visibility and control, ensure compliance and manage risk. We do this across our five key verticals, medical device, automotives and semiconductor, space, airborne and defense systems, software development, and industrial manufacturing.

We have a really exciting agenda for you today. We’re going to go through four topics. We’re going to give an overview of our success program. Preston’s going to go on and talk about measurements and outcomes. We’re going to do a double click on the success programs and then leave some time at the end for some Q and A. So let’s get into it. We are the experts when it comes to requirements management and traceability. We have years of experience between our customer success managers, solution consultants, and technical support engineers. Through our success program, we help our customers achieve faster time to value with Jama Connect.

Preston Mitchell: Hey John, maybe for some of the folks we could give a breakdown of the different team roles here. I’m not sure if everyone has actually interacted with their entire success team at Jama Software. So maybe we could give a background of each of the roles and what their goals are at Jama.

John D’Addario: Sure, sure. So starting with our customer success manager, really think of your customer success manager as you’re trusted advisor, focusing on understanding your business outcomes. We work together to build what we call a success plan. We use that success plan to help marshal resources across the genre enterprise. We also help you with all your commercial needs, like renewals, buying more licenses, adding a success program subscription, adding services, things like that. Our technical support engineers are there to help you with any technical questions that come up during your time with Jama Connect. They are well versed in the ins and outs of all things technical. Preston, why don’t you give a little bit more detail around the solution consultants?

Related: Jama Software® and Sparx Systems Enhance Best-of-breed Tools Integration to Strengthen Live Traceability™ Across Systems Development 

Preston Mitchell: Yeah, definitely. The solution consultants are part of my team. They really bring a lot of industry experience to bear. So a lot of them have been product managers, system engineers, quality managers in their prior roles. So they bring industry experience like requirements authoring experience, quality management, specific industry experience. Then they also of course have a lot of deep practical experience using Jama Connect the product. So they combine those to really recommend best practice uses of the tool. They very much understand the pain points and the outcomes that you all are trying to drive with your products every day. So any kind of deep product questions, or asks of how to use Jama Connect in order to achieve their goals, that’s really what their purpose is.

John D’Addario: Great. Great. When I look at this team and the resources we have here at Jama, I’m a little partial to think that, not only do we have the best team and the requirements management industry, I think we have the best team of any team that I’ve worked in over the last 10, 15 years. It’s really exciting to have this level of engagement between these three teams with this one mission of driving customer success. Let’s do a little bit of a deep dive into our success program. So through this continual engagement with your teams, we really focus on measurable improvements to your process. We do that by forming focus areas, helping you drive adoption and usage of Jama Connect, helping eliminate trace debt, and increasing your Traceability Score™, improving requirements quality score, increasing verification compliance. When you think about the success program, one of the main benefits of the success program is what we call the success catalog.

John D’Addario: This success catalog brings together four great resources for our customers to use. The first one being training resources. The second one being benchmark assessments. The third one being solution consulting. And lastly, fourth, our technical services. When you think about your journey with Jama Connect, think about it in three stages, implement, measure, and optimize. The success program is at the foundation of helping you achieve those business outcomes. We do that by mixing different services in our success catalog together, and what we call a success path. In these three examples, you can see here, we have three different success path that brings this prescriptive use of these services in the catalog to help you achieve business outcomes during the different phases of your journey with Jama Connect.

To watch the full webinar, visit: Driving Business Outcomes with Jama Software’s Success Programs

RELATED


Systems Engineering

Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published through IEEE Innovation at Work, “Managing Complexity in Systems Engineering for Product Development with Live Traceability,” by author Nikhil Rai, IEEE Senior Member, Senior Director of Product and Solutions Marketing at Jama Software.

Systems Engineering for Product Development with Live Traceability

Complexity of Product Development is Exploding

In today’s world, technological innovations across embedded systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) are aggressively pushing the envelope on product complexity and accelerating digital transformation. The next generation of autonomous cars, electric vehicles, robots, and space shuttles are all complex systems that need to seamlessly interact with multiple layers of software, hardware, and humans across different environments.

Because complex technology products require intricate interfaces with various systems or sub systems, there is an inherent challenge of coordinating the multiple development teams, who are often geographically spread across the world. Furthermore, large teams typically work on different stages of product development within their own silos. The different development tools, architecture, and IT environments used across various teams and organizations can significantly add to the challenges of developing new technologies.

Manufacturing sectors will reap the AI technology benefits of enhanced monitoring and supply chain optimization. In financial institutions, AI techniques can be used to identify which transactions are likely to be fraudulent. Through AI, the industry could also adopt fast and accurate credit scoring while automating manually intense data management tasks. Disruptions in the transport and logistics realm could include autonomous trucking and delivery on the roads and automated picking in warehouses.

RELATED: Systems Engineers Career Path – How to Elevate

Reality of Today’s Complex Systems Development

Most complex system development starts with defining user needs and requirements, which involves design, software, and hardware teams developing deliverables that ultimately get tested and integrated for delivering the product. Given the disparate nature of these teams, there is an inherent need to optimize and continuously keep track of systems information from concept to development and delivery. However, there is often a gap in terms of how information is consumed across engineering departments, as well as its availability and traceability. The digital thread in engineering today is still a collection of different tools, which means traceability is usually accomplished in a cumbersome and manual fashion via time-consuming meetings and disconnected documents.

Challenges in Traceability

Traceability is a key both to product development and software engineering for tracking the systems development lifecycle. Helpful in achieving regulatory compliance, traceability can also be used within software engineering for running test cases and gaining valuable insights.

While some organizations make it a point to map product development stages and improve traceability to gain these benefits, traceability is often considered after-the-fact by others. This means that once an issue is identified, there is effort required to trace back where the error originally occurred to prevent that same failure from occurring in the future. This approach can cause multiple cost overruns, product delays, and inefficient management of change impacts. Think of addressing a car recall or fixing a complex medical device or industrial equipment— the costs can be enormous. By emphasizing the importance of traceability from the start, organizations can avoid the extra effort and cost associated with implementing it after an error has been made.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability – How to Go Live

Live Traceability™

The solution lies in bringing a practical approach of Live Traceability™ to the systems engineering world. Optimizing and measuring the systems development process with Live Traceability is a crucial competitive advantage that companies can leverage. For any complex product, systems, or software development, the requirements and user needs form the first level of abstraction. Live Traceability can be measured and monitored by using systems requirements as an anchor to manage information used in different stages of the systems development lifecycle.

At Jama Software, we define live requirements traceability as the ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement— no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans. Live Traceability of system requirements is required by industry standards to ensure product safety and forms the foundation for digital engineering and model-based systems engineering. This enables the engineering process to be managed through data and its performance improved in real time.

Through better requirements management and a focus on traceability, companies can improve their systems development performance with higher quality products and improved cycle times. The industry is now embracing the idea that to improve engineering efficiency within the systems development process, we need to continuously monitor and measure traceability.


requirements management software

 

Eight Ways Requirements Management Software Will Save You Significant Money

Requirements management software helps development teams eliminate manual compliance efforts and significantly reduce product delays, rework, and cost overruns. Some platforms, like Jama Connect®, also include frameworks and templates aligned to industry standards — and enable live requirements traceability through siloed development, test, and risk activities, providing end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and process improvement.

In this post, we’ll share the eight ways that a requirements management platform can save your company significant money, making it a wise investment at any time — especially during challenging economic times.

Requirements Management Software can help your organization save money by:

1. Reclaiming Productive Work Time

A modern requirements management solution (like Jama Connect®) can help your teams reclaim hours of unproductive work time, resulting in money saved across the organization. Without a modern requirements management solution, highly skilled – and often highly paid – employees can waste up to 40% of their time on tedious, unproductive activities such as:

  • Searching for siloed information in static documents and/or disconnected tools
  • Manual/or duplicative data entry to update status in multiple systems
  • Working off old data and outdated versions of documents
  • Reformatting and migrating data back and forth between tools
  • Reconciling differences between data sources
  • Trying to understand ‘what changed?’ and assess the impact

After implementing Jama Connect, our customers on average, quantify that they are reclaiming one to two hours of productive work time per day, some even more. The engineers at Monolithic Power Systems can now quickly and easily produce required documentation and no longer need to spend time in multiple time-consuming meetings and scrums to get a clear picture of what’s happening with their products. And with Jama Connect, they can automatically generate — at times — 70-80 pages of documentation (entered correctly one time, in one place) and efficiently generate any additional documentation they need, saving their engineers countless hours of documentation time.

Another customer, RBC Medical Innovations (now known as Vantage Medtech) shared that on one of their state-of-the-art capital equipment development projects, Jama Connect saved them 123 team-member days with an average cost savings per project of $150,000. And medical industry innovators and pioneers in the field of plasma science, Grifols, reports saving 80 hours or more per project after implementing Jama Connect.

Interested in the numbers?

Let’s take, for example, this simple calculation.

If you have 10 team members engaged in core requirements management activities, and each spends roughly four hours on the above-listed unproductive tasks per weeks, the annual budget reclaimed with Jama Connect would be $94,118.

Note: The calculation assumes 237 actual working days per year (at an average salary of $100K) with each author in Jama Connect reclaiming a conservative one hour per day.

Test this out with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!

2. Reducing Rework

How much money are you leaving on the table due to rework? See how much you can save by decreasing discovered and unplanned work due to:

  • Improperly defined requirements
  • Incomplete decomposition and missing coverage
  • Insufficient review and stakeholder alignment
  • Lack of rigor and impact analysis when managing change
  • Late-stage requirements churn

Again, let’s assume an organization has an average product development investment cost of $10,000,000. (Typical rework costs average about 30% of development costs, so in this case, it would be $3,000,000. And rework costs due to poor requirements management averages about 60% of rework costs, which, in this case, would be $1,800,000).

Our customer data shows that Jama Connect typically reduces requirements management rework by 40-60%. So, with these calculations, the organization can expect to reclaim, a not insignificant, $900,000 of annual budget with Jama Connect.

In one example, our customer, Arteris IP has seen not only seen reuse go up by 100%, and review times down by 30%, but also a significant 50% reduction in rework since using Jama Connect.

Test this out with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!

3. Streamlining the Review Process

For product developers and engineers, reviews are a cornerstone of the development process. How much are inefficient requirement review meetings costing your organization? Is your review process cumbersome, manual, in disparate documents, and challenging for distributed stakeholders to collaborate? If so, it might be time to (forgive the redundancy) review your review process. Healthcare leader, Grifols shared that with Jama Connect, they have reduced their review cycles from three months to fewer than 30 days.

Legacy solutions that are difficult to use can make the review process incredibly cumbersome, diverting frustrated team members out of the tool and onto ineffective (often quickly outdated) versions of disparate documents. This is a story we’ve heard repetitively from customers who’ve moved away from legacy tools and processes.

RELATED: Why Migrate from IBM® DOORS® to Jama Connect?

If that’s one of your frustrations as well, it might be time to see how much budget you can reclaim through review optimization, including:

  • Virtualizing reviews for asynchronous collaboration
  • Focusing key stakeholders on the most relevant information
  • Adopting a more iterative approach
  • Increasing upfront rigor and version control
  • Tracking participation and progress

For this calculation, we’ll assume three variables:

  1. Total number of requirements review meetings per month
  2. Approximate duration of each review meeting
  3. Average participants in each meeting

Let’s assume six review meetings per month, each meeting lasting three hours, and an average of 10 people involved in each review meeting. Calculating with an average salary of $150K/per attendee, and with the above-defined variables, the annual cost of review meetings would be $162,000. The total number of people hours in review meetings would be 180 hours.

The calculated savings alone, by just reducing the time spent in meetings, would be $81,000.

Jama Connect typically reduces time spent in meetings by 40-60%. Notably, the Finnish Red Cross estimates that implementing Jama Connect has shortened their review cycles by an impressive 80%. What could you get done with all that time back?

With Jama Connect, you can simplify the review and approval process by capturing collaborative feedback from stakeholders, including voting for priority and electronic signatures for approver roles. In addition, Review Center in Jama Connect helps teams reduce risk, and save time and money by allowing teams to:

  • Increase participation in the review process
  • Retain a historical record of all decisions made and by whom
  • Provide visibility sooner in the review process
  • Generate approval-ready content for e-signature faster
  • Collaborate more often and capture tacit knowledge

Check out the potential savings you could realize with your own numbers using the interactive calculator below!

4. Identifying Defects Earlier in the Development Process

Does your organization build complex software and systems? How much can you decrease the cost of development by addressing software defects earlier? Using a modern requirements management software solution can help you identify and address software defects due to:

  • Lack of rigor early in the development lifecycle
  • Low stakeholder participation in requirements definition/validation
  • Poor visibility into requirements changes and impact analysis
  • V&V/QA teams remaining disconnected throughout the process

For this sample equation, we’ll take an average total number of requirements managed annually (we’ll use 4,500) and the average number of hours it takes to fix a defect (we’ll use six hours for this example). The average number of requirements with defects typically equals around 60% of the total number of requirements. With these test numbers, the annual cost of defects would be $850,000. Jama Connect can reduce the number of requirements-related defects by 25-40%. Identifying and addressing these issues earlier in the development process can significantly help to reduce risk and reclaim significant budget.

For this calculation, we’ve used 30%. The calculation assumes 237 actual working days per year (at an average salary of $100K) with each author in Jama Connect reclaiming one hour per day.

With Jama Connect, the annual budget that could be reclaimed is $255,150.

Test the numbers for yourself using this ROI calculator to see how much you can save by reducing requirements-related defects by up to 40%!

RELATED: Requirements Debt: A Medical Product Program Risk

5. Providing a Better User Experience

Let’s face it, if software is difficult to use and the user interface is challenging, engineers just won’t use it, or only a select few will. We all want life to get the job done, run smoothly and easily — and the software we choose needs to reflect those desires. So, the right requirements management software not only needs to be powerful and have robust capabilities, but it needs to be easy to use.

“Jama Connect lowers the complexity and burden of having to manually keep requirements, architecture, and specifications all in sync and traced to each other.  It’s a formidable problem that is virtually eliminated courtesy of Jama without the hassle of having to learn a clunky UI (IBM Doors).”​

Alan M., Chief Product Officer – G2 Verified Review

“Jama is being used as a test management tool in my company. I [have been] using Jama [for] 3+ years, and I can tell you that this was one of the best Test management tools I’ve ever used. Everything is so easy to understand, and the interface is user friendly — easy to use and can learn this tool quickly.”

Team Lead in Engineering, Software Company – Verified Trust Radius Review

A smooth user experience that provides a pleasant and recognizable interface (one that teams will actually use) is critical to the success and effectiveness of any product development process. Jama Connect is award-winning for its ease of use, and that’s something we’re proud of. Customers love using Jama Connect to optimize their complex product, systems, and software development spanning industries such as aerospace and defense, automotive, medical device/life sciences, financial, semiconductor, insurance, industrial, software technologies, and more.

“Our team cannot stop saying great things about Jama Connect! Its efficiency and intuitiveness have turned requirement workshops from a multi-day event to a 6-hour meeting. Teams adopted the platform so fast, we needed to go back to Jama to get additional licenses (twice)!”
Jim Bolton, Director of Methodology and Tools – Workforce Software

“I told the team it was a very easy-to-use solution. But people were shocked at how fast it came together. Within hours, we were going and setting up the structure for our requirements. There were many other people in the company who had used Jama Connect before and supported our selection. It was a clear choice for medical device innovators like us.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio

6. Optimizing Communication and Collaboration

Modern, easy-to-use software can improve collaboration and communication across an organization, both for internal and external stakeholders. The right requirements management software will optimize communication and save money, frustration, resources, and time- across the board. One of our customers, the Finnish Red Cross, estimates that their testing team has improved their collaboration and communication by 50% with Jama Connect.

Legacy systems like IBM® DOORS® are notoriously difficult to use and often require individuals with specialized training to implement. This regularly forces engineers and other stakeholders to manage projects outside the software in disparate documents.

“Jama suited our need for collaboration and communication. Jama provides a very easy-to-use interface and communication system that brought in the buy-in from all stakeholders. Visure, Doors, TTA didn’t perform as well in the communication/ collaboration department where we really needed a boost.”​
Stephen Czerniej P. Eng, Systems Engineer – Allied Vision

With Jama Connect, broader teams and stakeholders can collaborate on reviews, test cases, verification and validation in real-time. This kind of in-situ collaboration dramatically reduces risk across the entire development lifecycle to reduce the chance of delays, cost overruns, and expensive recalls, and in turn increases the opportunity for successful outcomes.

[Jama Connect] has allowed us to get more people from our other offices involved in the collaboration process because we’re not all having to sit on a conference call at awkward times. People can come into the system at a time that suits them and review things. And we know their comments will be seen by everybody else.”
Alistair McBain, Sr. Business Consultant – SITA

The fact that it is easy to share information and execute processes even when the team is not co-located (geographically dispersed). Changes are properly tracked, and people notified. It is also easy to organize, review, and monitor the review progress. My organization involves several scientists from 31 countries and more than 200 institutes. Jama Connect gets remote and distributed people informed and involved on processes related to requirements.
Francesco D., Senior Systems Engineer – Verified G2 Review

7. Centralizing Your Requirements Management with Best-of-Breed Tooling

Managing requirements in a single platform speeds up the product development process by saving time (time=money), strengthening alignment, and ensuring quality and compliance. Teams can create, review, validate, and verify requirements in one solution. With Jama Connect, teams can:

  • Have an authoritative source of truth for clear visibility throughout the product development lifecycle
  • Iterate in real time for informed decision-making and consensus
  • Support multiple product development methodologies and engineering disciplines
  • Configure the requirements management software to align with industry best practices
  • Visualize how tests track back to requirements to prove quality and compliance
  • Reuse validated requirements to quickly replicate features across products
  • Not investigating how you can leverage software within your organization is costing you money

“We are using [Jama Connect] from the design specifications/requirements till the test case reviews… Since Jama can be used as a complete project management tool, complete details of a product /project can be tracked in one place easily.”
Suhas Kashyap, Senior Test Engineer, L&T Technology Services – TrustRadius Verified Review

“Jama Connect has brought some new life to our requirements management (and how we see the inter-connectivity of functional requirements with System Requirement Specifications), better dashboards and reporting for everything it supports from printing test plans, requirements, specifications, and test runs.”
Fred Sookiasian, Senior Quality Assurance Software Lead – Advanced Bionics

The #1 problem product engineering organizations face is complying with traceability requirements spanning siloed teams and tools. And one dirty little secret in product engineering is the plethora of traceable data stored in Microsoft Excel. Jama Connect Interchange™ is purpose-built to deliver end-to-end Live Traceability™ (see section below) across best-of-breed tools, including Microsoft Excel — and it’s the first requirements management platform to make Excel data live traceable through a point and click integration interface.

Now teams can leverage the power of Jama Connect’s traceability model to continuously sync traceable information from other best-of-breed tools with no change required for engineering disciplines to continue using their chosen tools to maximize productivity.

“Jama Connect is one of the vital and advanced tools of the modern era. It has a methodology that can ensure complete project tracking from the first step to the execution, test cases, rectification, quality assurance, project timelining, and much more in a streamlined way which has been increasing the overall ROI and efficiency of the project. The important factor of Jama Connect is that all board members can analyze and collaborate on the performance on the same stage, and this has been increasing trust between the clients and organizations while doing large-scale management.”
Engineering Strategist, IT Services – Verified TrustRadius Review

8. Measuring and Improving Development Success with Live Traceability™

Live requirements traceability is the ability for any engineer at any time to see the most up-to-date and complete upstream and downstream information for any requirement — no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans. This enables the engineering process to be managed through data, and its performance improved in real-time.

“Right off the initial stage of just importing the data in Jama Connect and trying to create the relationships, we actually saw that we had traceability gaps, just based on what we had done before in the old system. Catching these gaps would’ve probably taken hours or days in our old system, while with Jama, it became obvious in a matter of minutes.”

Julien Guillaume, Program Manager – Össur

But you can’t improve what you can’t measure!

Jama Software® is the first to measure traceability thanks to our clients’ participation in a benchmarking dataset of over 40,000 complex product development projects spanning aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, industrial, medical device, semiconductor, space systems, and more.

“We have achieved: better requirement communication across departments; a better home for verification and validation test cases with traceability to the sources; and a detailed overview of traceability of requirements from regulatory requirements all the way down to risk items.”
Stephen Cxerniej P. Eng PMP®, Global Platform Systems Engineer – Allied Vision

If you’d like to learn more on how to measure your traceability to improve product quality and accelerate time to market — and get your Traceability Score™, check out our Requirements Traceability Benchmark (the first large-scale, empirical research to confirm that higher levels of traceability correlate to cycle time and quality improvements.) In it, we show how higher scores equal improved product quality and faster time to market. examine how traceability is measured, and the business practices that separate top-quartile performers from the rest.

“Jama Connect establishes traceability proactively from user needs, risk controls, all the way through verification.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio

WATCH THE WEBINAR: Requirements Traceability Benchmark

When asked, “What do you like best about Jama Connect?” One G2 reviewer shared this:

” …Traceability and the traceability matrix. The ability to establish relationship rules, relate items and item types, and then see where you have gaps is really powerful. After your relationships are established, if you make a change to an item, you can see which related items might be impacted. It makes management of requirements extremely easy.”
Marshall K, Senior Vice President, IT Solutions – G2 Verfied Review

To speed time to market, with reduced risk of negative budget impact, now is the time invest in a modern requirements management platform

Jama Connect enables the delivery of high-quality products, faster, by improving the systems development process through unified requirements management and traceability across the V-model (or any product development process you utilize such as Waterfall, Agile, etc.).

“Jama Connect enables a requirements-driven, systems engineering approach for deploying the V-model in product development. It helps us manage the complexities of vehicle hierarchy; interdependencies between vehicle, system & component; and establish traceability between requirements to validations.”
Anirban Niyogi, Systems Engineering Lead, Vehicle Integration – Nikola

The platform’s robust features coupled with an easy-to-adopt interface aligns people, processes, and tooling in one place to provide visibility and actionable insights into the end-to-end product, systems, and software development process. The result — improved product quality and accelerated time to market with reduced risk of costly delays, recalls, rework.

“We save a lot of time and effort in development and product management by using the well-made collaboration functionalities, especially in these current COVID times, when actors cannot always meet in person. We also save time by making use of the item reuse capabilities of Jama. With Jama we always know who made changes to an item, when the changes were made and sometimes even why. That helps us tracking down and understanding those changes. The ability to link pieces of information together in a relatively easy way, help us to achieve full test coverage, checking for impacts of changes upfront and oftentimes understand a requirement’s rationale. Jama [Connect] also provides good filter and search functions and especially the weaved in collaboration functions constantly prove to be useful. It is also worth mentioning that Jama [Connect] provides powerful customization options, so we were able to customize Jama to our needs and way of working.”
Olaf P., Requirements Management Enterprise – Verified G2 Review

RELATED: See More G2 Reviews HERE

Is Now the Right Time to Invest in Requirements Management Software?

Understandably, being on the edge of a possible recession can motivate extreme fiscal prudence, but now is not the time to duck and cover. It’s the precise time to make proactive decisions that will save your organization measurably in the long run. If you’re dealing with any of the budget-swallowing inefficiencies mentioned above — and can see the potential gains a modern requirements management solution like Jama Connect will offer — it might be exactly the right time to strategically think about making a change to optimize your development processes, saving money for your organization in the long run.

“We have achieved a significant ROI with Jama Connect in risk reduction and productivity gains: reuse is up 100%, rework is down 50%, requirements review cycle time is cut by 30% and audit preparation time is down 75%. Jama Connect is our single source of truth. If it’s not in Jama Connect, it’s not happening.”
Kurt Shuler, VP Marketing – Arteris IP

Are you ready to reclaim some significant budget? Give us a call to see how we can be of help or get started today with a free trial of our award-winning requirements management software platform.

RELATED


IBM® DOORS®

In this blog, we recap our “The Inside Story: Data-Model Diagnostic for IBM® DOORS®” webinar.

Organizations make investments in software tools to improve their product development process, but they often forget to invest in their data. A consistent data model is the best way to maximize the benefits of software tooling, but this can only be achieved by spending time on analysis.

Jama Software is well documented on the benefits of a common engineering data-model and the use of diagnostics to understand the true nature of your engineering data.

In this session, we will discuss the production of a return on investment (ROI) for cleaning your IBM® DOORS® data.

You’ll learn more about:

  • Why a common engineering data-model is important
  • The aims of a diagnostic tool
  • The breakdown of the IBM DOORS data-model diagnostic in terms of the measures that can be taken
  • Calculating the financial impact of cleaning your engineering data

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

The Inside Story: Data-Model Diagnostic for IBM® DOORS®

Richard Watson: Thanks very much. Yeah, I’m excited to be here today. As was said, previously, before Jama Software, I’ve been working with DOORS for a huge amount of time as the product manager for a long time, and I’ve moved to Jama Software. One of the main activities I’ve been working with in Jama is “How do we transform DOOR’s data into a new requirements tool of Jama Connect?” And this presentation is all about trying to understand the diagnostics or understand some diagnostics from your data to be able to understand data shape and size so that we can help see the business case and also help understand how we would transform it to improve the situation.

Let’s start at a very high level. I’ve presented a slide like this repeatedly for all of those 30 whatever years. We know that the earlier in the life cycle that we find a defect or a problem, the cheaper it is to resolve, but in Jama Software, we firmly believe that this is related to traceability. If we have traceability between the artifacts in our engineering process, then we have the ability of finding the information that has an error. For example, if you’ve been working on your needs analysis, and then you start to decompose your requirements, at that stage, if there is a traceability between the requirements definition and the needs analysis, you’ll start to see the errors in the needs at that stage, rather than having to wait all the way around to validation, and then finding out that mistake. And if you wait until the end, we all know that it’s been proven that it’s much more expensive, and there are many sources of this information, but you’ll see a link on the slides to INCOSE.

If we look at the reality of this V model, though, even with tools in place and some integrations in place, we find that there are many different types of silos of information in organizations, and this integration of framework between those different silos is just not established. As you’re documenting the requirements or the system design or the implementation, because you don’t have a viable connection back to the previous assets, you’re not encouraged to find the errors in those previous assets. And so if you work in different silos in this way, you don’t fix those errors. And by the time then you go through to verification, validation, and up that side of the V, then you’ll perhaps start uncovering those problems and it’ll be expensive. Even worse, you won’t find those problems; you’ll go into deployment, and you’ll find it in production, and that’s terribly expensive.

Related: Requirements Traceability – Does My Data Model Matter?

Richard Watson: Here in Jama Software, we believe that our live traceability model has resolved this. Jama Software provides an environment that keeps all of those different assets connected. Requirements actually are the common denominator. Everybody works against some form of specification. Maybe the name changes, maybe it’s a work instruction or a requirement or a project need, or a user expectation, but everybody’s working to something, everybody’s conforming to something. And here in Jama Software, we provide an environment to create your engineering data in something called a model-based framework. You have a model-based systems engineering framework for all of your engineering data, and we keep that data connected directly from the beginning. So rather than waiting to comply or give some sort of statement to say everything’s been covered and creating traceability, later on, we encourage this traceability to be established right from the very beginning.

And we do that in a way that does not force people out of their preferred environments. And so they work in their existing environments establishing traceability, but then we can see the end to traceability in a commonplace. And we can make sure that all the engineering assets are consistent. Jama Connect offers this environment. It offers a way of defining a model-based systems engineering data model over your engineering data and then facilitating which applications should be contributing to those bits of information. Be it Jama Connect for requirements or test and risk, or some other system for defect tracking and other assets in that way.

Great, we’ve got this understanding that information needs to be connected together from the get-go and not at some later stage. And so that would give you a perfect environment, right? But there’s a big but. This data model that we’ve been describing, we can describe it in something like a language. Your engineering data model is the language of your engineers. It’s the way that they create your systems, though the way they specify it, et cetera. But you want to be able to facilitate a common language. If you’ve got separate teams using a different way to engineer your systems, then they can’t communicate between each other effectively. They can’t move between teams effectively. And the cost of integration across that life cycle becomes more and more expensive.

Related: Considering DOORS® for requirements management? There is a more modern solution. 

Richard Watson: And so this language needs to become common, but it’s quite difficult because in traditional environments, so if we move the conversation to talk about some of the IBM tooling, so IBM DOORS or IBM DOORS Next, for example, we find that there aren’t many of these silos. IBM DOORS, for example, specifies requirements in what it calls DOORS modules. Each DOORS module stands on its own. Unless your organization have taken steps to try and rigorously make modules consistent with each other, each of those modules would end up being a silo of information. Multiple different sets of user requirements, for example, could be easily inconsistent with each other.

DOORS Next is the same. DOORS Next uses a component model, and each component stands on its own as a silo, and keeping the components consistent with each other is also difficult. Although we’ve got this wish to have a common language across our organization, it’s very easy and quite convenient to end up with lots of silos of organizations, each doing their own particular thing and not being able to communicate. Then that big question. The big question is if you have these silos, how do you move from having a silo-based organization to having a common language or a common engineering data model? And that’s when we should start talking about data-model diagnostics…

To watch the full webinar, visit: The Inside Story: Data-Model Diagnostics for IBM® DOORS®

RELATED


requirements management software

Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn

Regardless of the state of the economy, organizations building complex products, systems, and software can always benefit from improved efficiency across the end-to-end development process. Making strategic changes that optimize processes and team productivity will undoubtedly save your organization significant time and money.

And, while it may seem counter-intuitive to invest in new technology during an economic downturn (dare we say the word recession), a modern requirements management tool like Jama Connect®, can provide a dramatic ROI in short order — making it a smart-sense move to invest in new product development software right now.

During economic uncertainty, spending capital on the right tools can improve product quality and increase productivity, well-positioning your organization to save time and money over the long term. But regardless of what happens with the economy, it is never going to be wasted effort to optimize your product development processes or begin to think about how to weather the impact of an impending economic storm.

RELATED: The Jama Software Guide to Requirements Traceability®

Invest in Requirements Management Software Now to Save In Both the Short & Long Term

Many of our clients come to Jama Software to help optimize their product development process after experiencing some of the following core frustrations:

  • Using cumbersome legacy requirements management solutions that have non-intuitive challenging UI/UX
  • Engineers spending valuable hours of tedious manual documentation across disparate documents and tools
  • Engineers wasting time on in-efficient workflows that can be streamlined to save upwards of 80%
  • Insufficient, ineffective cross-team collaboration across various stages of the systems development process starting from requirements, design, development to testing and validation
  • Inefficient and cumbersome review cycles
  • Difficulty in easily producing the necessary documentation to prove compliance
  • Siloed tools and processes that misalign teams and workflows, and leave visibility gaps
  • Lack of Live Traceability™ which results in finding errors late in the development process which can cost upwards of 100x or more to resolve than if they had been found earlier in the development process
  • And the list goes on and on…

Think about the corresponding monetary burden these outdated solutions and misaligned processes place on the organization’s shoulders.

Making an investment in a modern requirements management platform isn’t simply about the time and money that will be saved or improving productivity and efficiency for just a few months — it’s about the savings and reduced re-work that will be realized from the moment the application launches and for years beyond. Depending on the organization’s goals, they either save costs with the gained efficiencies or they use it to be competitive, win new contracts, and bring products to market faster and more cost effectively. You may be thinking that now is the time to pause on spending, not invest. To the contrary, we’d like to share how investing in a modern requirements management solution now is the right decision to help your organization protect itself from an economic downturn and increase your ROI.

RELATED: Accelerate, Measure, and Improve the Systems Development Process with Live Traceability in Jama Connect

For Startups: Build Your House on Bricks, Not Sticks

For startups, investing in a modern requirements management solution, like Jama Connect, is a smart idea irrespective of the state of the economy.

While long established large organizations may be able to withstand a period of lowered sales and slow development, startups may not have that option. A startup’s ability to get to market fast – and first – often is a great indicator of success, and on the flip side, failure.

Doing things right the first time is crucial.

While startups might be hesitant to invest in software initially, a great number are investing in Jama Connect in order to reduce rework, speed development, meeting regulatory compliance, and get to the market before their competitors.

And it’s paying off.

For medical device startup, Proprio, VP of Software Engineering, Rama Pailoor knew it was imperative to establish a requirements-driven development process from the very beginning. Pailoor recognized that their existing approach of using only a Quality Management System (QMS) was not capable of supporting the level of complexity needed to develop their product. Like many document and spreadsheet-based processes, the Quality Management System (QMS) Proprio had in place technically supported requirements management at face value, but when it came to complex engineering efforts, the system came up short.

“Establishing a requirements-driven development process helps to formalize the user needs, getting all the stakeholders to come to a common forum, to express the requirements from their perspective, and avoid confusion. The right requirements management solution can facilitate all of that.”
Rama Pailoor, Vice President of Software Engineering – Proprio

For medium to large organizations: Strengthen your foundation by investing in modern tools and digital transformation

While big enterprises have large teams spread across various geographies and different divisions working on multiple projects, there is a strong need to optimize processes and reduce inefficiencies to reduce costs — especially during challenging economic times. Putting resources towards digital transformation and modern software tools (which result in more ROI) will also reduce overall product development costs over the long term. Through these investments, companies can strengthen their foundation to remain competitive and be better able to weather external market forces.

It is also worth re-visiting how enterprises can improve the engineering efficiency of product development by investing in requirements management and traceability tools. Optimizing the systems engineering process by bringing in traceability across your development stages can immediately create a positive impact on cycle times, and faster execution of testing and validation.

Requirements management software, like Jama Connect, can help development teams improve product quality and accelerate time to market. The platform’s robust features coupled with an easy-to-adopt interface aligns people, processes and tooling in one place to provide visibility and actionable insights into the end-to-end product, systems, and software development process.

 

RELATED


This image portrays our webinar series on Optimizing Product and Systems Development Processes

Optimizing Product and Systems Development Process with Jama Connect

Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization 

Is your organization struggling with costly production failures?

A survey by Engineering.com revealed that a staggering 83% of companies faced production outcome failures — such as significant delays, cost overruns, product defects, compliance gaps, recalls, omitted requirements, and extensive rework — often stemming from inadequate requirements management.

In contrast, implementing standardized requirements management can lead to enhanced consistency, repeatability, predictability, and a distinct competitive advantage.

In this webinar, Matt Mickle – Director, Solutions & Consulting at Jama Software, explores the advantages of establishing, implementing, and enforcing requirements management standards within your organization.

In this session, you will learn:

  • The key benefits of standardizing requirements management across your organization
  • Common challenges encountered during the standardization process
  • How to leverage Jama Connect to implement best practices and streamline your requirements management standards

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Medical Device & Life Sciences

Managing Development Complexities across Hardware and Software Teams

With the growing complexity of products and software, the more complicated the process required to build it becomes — and the accompanying increased risk of flaws which can lead to expensive, and potentially reputation-harming recalls. Managing complexities across software and hardware development requires the entire development process to consider (and include) a variety of teams and interdependencies.

In the second episode of our Optimize with Jama Connect webinar series, we will discuss some of the key challenges that teams face when integrating hardware and software requirements, risks, and tests, with a document-based or legacy tool approach. We’ll also discuss how Jama Connect and its integration capabilities helps teams developing complex systems and products to:

  • Reduce product development risk
  • Provide end-to-end traceability for all involved teams
  • Improve product quality

WATCH NOW

RELATED: Jama Connect for Medical Device & Life Sciences Development Datasheet

A More Effective and Efficient Product Development Process

An ideal product development process requires close collaboration between teams, up-to-date knowledge of applicable regulations, and an efficient requirements management platform for defining, verifying, and validating requirements. However, not every manager is convinced that his or her team needs to do a better job on requirements development and management, or that such an investment will pay off —despite numerous industry studies which indicate that requirements issues are a pervasive cause of project distress.

In this webinar, we’ll cover some of the ways our customers have used Jama Connect to improve not only their requirements, risk, and test management processes, but also their end-to-end product development process and outcomes.

Watch this webinar to learn more about how Jama Connect helps teams to:

  • Speed development with fine-grained, structured data
  • Spot bugs and problems sooner by improving visibility
  • Rethink linear development processes to work in parallel

WATCH NOW

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