Tag Archive for: Jama Connect Platform

 

This image portrays a title page for an instructional video with a title stating the demo topic is Azure DevOps Integration with Jama Connect.

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Azure DevOps Integration

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 the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in about five minutes.

In this Features in Five Integration Series video, Susan Manupelli, Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – will demonstrate the Azure DevOps integration with Jama Connect®.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Susan Manupelli: Hello, and welcome to the Features in Five Integration series. My name is Susan Manupelli, and I’m a Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software. Today, we will be walking through Azure DevOps integration. We make it possible for you to integrate Jama Connect with your preferred best-of-breed software to achieve Live Traceability™ across the end-to-end development cycle.

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 significant productivity and quality improvements, dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls, and ultimately results in faster time to market.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Integrations for Live Traceability™

Manupelli: Before I demonstrate the integration, I’d like to share a slide that depicts the flow of information. The top represents our process as defined in Java Connect through relationship rules. At the bottom, we’re depicting Azure DevOps. This slide illustrates an implementation task in the form of a user story that syncs up into Jama Connect, as well as a defect created in Jama Connect that syncs down to Azure DevOps. The beauty of this integration is that developers can stay in their tool of choice, in this case, ADO. Product owners can stay in Jama Connect, yet both sides have access to the details of the task. More importantly, the task and related status become part of what’s Live Traceable in Jama Connect. Let’s demo this.

Here we are in Jama Connect. The integration can be configured as a bidirectional sync, so it doesn’t matter whether I create the task in Jama Connect or ADO. First, we’ll decompose a software requirement into a development task that’s in the form of a user story. Here we have a login requirement software requirement. I’m gonna go ahead and add a related downstream user story, which will bring up the form to create a new user story. Notice the editor template feature in Jama Connect prepopulates these with standard user story verbiage. So as a user, I need to log in so that I can view my account. We’re gonna go ahead and set the status to new, and then we’re gonna save and close.

Jama Connect is prompting me to where I wanna save this, so I am going to go ahead and save this where the user stories live in my hierarchy. Notice that upon saving, automatically, the relationship widget indicates the fact that I have traceability, and I could see that traceability back to the software requirement. Within seconds, this user story will flow into ADO.

And you can see that it’s completed already. The integration URL has been populated, and I can navigate this URL, which will open up the item ADO. Let’s take a look.  Here we are in ADO. You can imagine the developer has been assigned to implement the user story. They may add some context to the description. They may go ahead and add a comment, And they may go ahead and indicate that they’re starting to work on this user story by changing the status to active.

Notice that the developer can traverse a URL back to Jama Connect to see the requirements that are driving the user story. These links are handy, but the real advantage is the fact that the changes the developer made within seconds will be visible to anyone working in Jama Connect. Let’s flip back to Jama Connect and take a look. Notice the changes the developer made are now visible here in Jama Connect. The product owner can view and respond to the developer’s comment, and notice that the status has also been updated.

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

Manupelli: The updated status is reflected in a trace view that we can see here automatically, as well as any dashboard reports we have for user stories. So that’s Live Traceability in action. As a reminder, this thing can be configured by directional. So if your process varies and you create user stories in ADO, we support that use case as well.

Here we are in ADO. Let’s create a new user story. Let’s give it a title and give it a description, and let’s go ahead and save this. Within fifteen seconds, this user story will flow into Jama Connect. Here we are back in Jama Connect’s dashboard. Notice the widget showing these stories that are missing upstream relationships? That new user story has shown up here. Let’s open it.

Now let’s relate to existing and find the requirement that the user story fulfills, and we’re gonna go ahead and relate. Notice the traceability is updated automatically. This completes the traceability between the requirement and the user story.

Thank you for watching this Feature in Five session on the Azure DevOps integration for Jama Connect. If you are an existing customer and wanna learn more, please reach out to your customer success manager or consultant. If you’re not yet a client, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com to learn more about the platform and how we can help optimize your development process.

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

[Webinar Recap] Bridging ALM and MBSE: Strategies for Seamless Integration

In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Bridging ALM and MBSE: Strategies for Seamless Integration” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

Integrate Jama Connect® and Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect (EA) using LemonTree.Connect to align business and engineering objectives.

Join our experts Philipp Kalenda, Head of Consulting & Training at LieberLieber and Cary Bryczek, Director of Solution Architecture at Jama Software ® to discover how this powerful collaboration eliminates the gap between requirements engineering, system architecture, design, and product management.

You will gain a thorough understanding of these topics and more:

  • How Jama Connect®’s Live Traceability™ capabilities allow for seamless integration across best-of-breed tools.
  • How leveraging Jama Connect Traceable MBSE™ can act as a starting point for your MBSE efforts.
  • How to create a workflow for deriving systems architecture based on requirements from Jama Connect.
  • How LemonTree.Connect enables standard engineering domain practices for configuration management.
  • How to facilitate streamlined evidence that proves your architecture is satisfying requirements.

Below is a preview of our webinar. Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

The following is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Bridging ALM and MBSE: Strategies for Seamless Integration

Cary Bryczek: My name is Cary Bryczek. I’m the Director of Aerospace & Defense Solutions here at Jama Software. I’m really looking forward to speaking with you today on this particular topic and looking forward to Philipp’s presentation as well. So to kick things off, we are going to set … I just want to set the stage with some trends across the A&D industry that we’re seeing. I’ll talk about how those trends are creating challenges for chief engineers and describe what’s keeping them up at night. Then I’ll set the stage for Philipp’s presentation by showing you what Jama Connect’s Traceable MBSE™ looks like and how that’s designed to solve some of those challenges, and Philipp’s going to definitely take you on a deeper dive to show you how system models in Jama Connect interoperate.

In the aerospace and defense industry, developing a new system has a complexity that far exceeds commercial product development. For example, the FAA’s program to develop the unmanned aircraft traffic management system involves not just the pilot and his drone but is designed to enable autonomous and semi-autonomous operation of multiple aerial systems, including passenger and cargo delivery in a tightly integrated civil aerospace. The elements in blue that you see are all distinct systems of their own, and the new traffic management system needs to be able to integrate communications and data across all of those systems to provide this new capability.

In the highly constrained environment of outer space, NASA’s Cislunar and the Artemis program, for example, are focusing on the operation and survivability of autonomous systems. To develop a space system, NASA does not do this alone but has many contracts with companies to deliver parts of the system. For example, Blue Origin, they have two programs like the Friction Stir Additive Manufacturing Program and the Metallic Thermal Protection System are two examples of just parts of the system.

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

Bryczek: Canopy Aerospace, they’re developing a low-cost reusable thermal protection system. Roccor AKA Redwire in Erie, Colorado, they’re developing a characterization of high aspect ratio booms for these large apertures and so many more. This ecosystem of partners and contributing to a whole brings its own challenges to the pool when trying to collaborate, share data, and execute common systems engineering processes. Like the NASA’s Cislunar and Artemis initiatives for space exploration, they’re focusing on operation and survivability.

In the defense domain, we’re seeing all sorts of cases in unmanned aerial systems as well to aid tactical situations and help with strategic planning. The underlying theme of these large systems is the integration and the collaborative approaches to developing these different weapon systems and aerospace systems in very constrained environments.

So from a strategy perspective, what are these agencies trying to really do? Government agencies and aerospace and defense companies are always evolving their strategies to be able to deal with this complexity and to help streamline their engineering processes. For example, the Department of Defense (DOD) has published a new adaptive acquisition framework. This pathway is intended for large-scale traditional hardware acquisitions to facilitate rapid and iterative development and delivery of software capability to the user.

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

Bryczek: In 2018, the Digital Engineering strategy outlines a vision to modernize how the department designs, develops, delivers, and operates, as well as sustains systems securely and safely. Their vision is to connect people, processes, data, and capabilities across an end-to-end digital enterprise. The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) published its recent Vision 2035 document, and it is intended to inspire and guide the strategic direction of systems engineering, the practice of systems engineering for the global systems community.

MOSA, the Modular Open Systems Approach, it uses a system architecture that allows major subsystem components at the appropriate level to be incrementally added, removed, and replaced throughout the lifecycle of the major system. The DOD’s systems engineering and architecture group is focusing on modernizing the systems engineering practice. They’re leveraging capabilities from CERC. They’re using MOSA to build systems that can be upgraded and to incorporate new technology faster to respond to emerging threats.

When we look at this in a little bit larger view with this new modernization of the systems engineering approach, the DOD has moved away from visualizing its process using a V model in favor of what truly takes place from a process standpoint, which is that modern systems engineering is highly cyclic. You can see the outermost ring is as close to that old V model, where a concept definition is in the upper right, it moves the system definition through architecture and design and over to V & V and back-to-start around on the next cycle.

What’s important is that there’s a strong emphasis on measuring not just the system being built, but the process that’s building the system, your system’s engineering process and that data and models are at the heart of it all. To the fullest extent, models should be used in favor of documents and data should inform decision-making.

What is the industry saying? There’s a challenge to using data-driven approaches and models. The DOD has highlighted there’s a lack of an integrated approach to the implementation of these systems engineering focus areas, and it’s creating a delay in the full implementation of the digital transformation, which is necessary to ensure relevant guidance and skills.

RELATED: Leading Ground-to-Air Communications Systems Developer Indra Park Air Takes Off with Jama Connect®

Bryczek: Continuing to use legacy tools and approaches is what is making integrated approaches not possible. What is necessary is to take a federated approach to data across the tool ecosystem and to use tools with more robust APIs, and modern architectures that are standards-based. An MBSE approach requires an integrated approach to connect the system models, architecture, and requirements to the program teams the software teams, and the hardware teams. It doesn’t mean to use a siloed system modeling tool and expect those teams to be able to consume and understand that model.

What we hear quite often is, “How do I achieve the benefits of MBSE when no other engineers can access model parameters that they need for downstream decision-making?” Those with technical oversight, chief engineers who have technical oversight and responsibility for program success, executing MBSE, or even just traditional systems engineering commonly raise the following questions, “How do I know if the architecture and system requirements are satisfying all the needs? How do I know if a change in the architecture will impact testing? How do I know if a change in the architecture will impact downstream hardware or software teams? How do I detect unallocated systems architecture and requirements?”

So the question of, “How do I achieve the benefits of MBSE when no other engineers can access model parameters?” can be answered by using traceable MBSE. Now, the reality at most companies is that the end-to-end systems development process is fragmented into domain-specific tools and spreadsheets that have no built-in collaboration. Now, this leads to fragmented requirements traceability and requires significant manual effort through emails and meetings and sometimes luck to try and prevent delays rework, or cost overruns.

Most companies have come to accept the situation as an unchangeable reality given the lack of a single platform to enable this entire process, nor a method to integrate spreadsheets and desktop tools. Using Traceable MBSE, the system model in the modeling tool is joined with the Jama Connect model. Jama Connect is continually calculating traceability and coverage and provides scores that can be used to identify high-risk areas that can be drilled into to determine corrective actions. The system model can detect those changes and the modeling engineers can take the corrective actions.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Bridging ALM and MBSE: Strategies for Seamless Integration

How to Manage Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries

In this blog post, we summarize our Whitepaper titled “How to Manage Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries” – Written by Kevin Dibble and Jama Software. Click HERE to read the full thing.

How to Manage Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries

Learn how automotive and semiconductor teams use requirements management tools to support meeting ISO/SAE 21434 while increasing visibility, collaboration, and review-cycle efficiency.

Security threats such as malware, ransomware, and data breaches impact many industries, but with expanded connectivity in the automotive and semiconductor sectors, increased urgency exists to safeguard against fast evolving risks.

Research shows that 91% of vehicles are connected, and that number is expected to rise to 96% by 2030. With more automobiles and semiconductor devices being connected, attack surfaces (cybersecurity vulnerabilities) are expanding quickly, and the ISO/SAE 21434 standard aims to understand and safeguard against potential threats.

However, managing a cybersecurity case within the standard requires many steps, and cross-team visibility and collaboration are often challenging. As a result, some teams are turning to requirements management tools to help improve visibility and increase transparency in review cycles.

If you haven’t used a formal requirements management tool before, understanding the benefits, advantages, and how it works helps determine if it’s right for your team.

RELATED: A Guide to Road Vehicle Cybersecurity According to ISO 21434

Why manage a cybersecurity case in a requirements management tool?

A cybersecurity case is a structured argument supported by the evidence of work products to detail why risks found within the Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment (TARA) are reasonable.

Creating a cybersecurity case for ISO/SAE 21434 is a complex process with many moving parts. Using a requirements management tool has many benefits, including improved traceability, easier collaboration, and improved functionality for reviews.

Here are several ways a tool can help.

1. Improved collaboration between OEMs and tier 1 and 2 suppliers. A requirements management tool, such as Jama Connect®, supports requirements interchange format (ReqIF), which can be used for bidirectional communication of requirements, item definitions, and more. Using the tool, you can support improved collaboration workflows.

2. Provides “trace as you go” visibility. You don’t want traceability to be an afterthought handled by your requirements engineer at the end of the project, especially when that project is complex. A purpose-built requirements management tool, like Jama Connect, allows you to create requirements tracing to parent requirements, design blocks for requirements allocation, and more. It supports a trace-as-you-go methodology.

3. Access impact analysis to handle midstream project changes more effectively. Jama Connect provides access to an impact analysis, a powerful capability supporting the trace-as-you-go approach. Running an impact analysis as project changes happen midstream allows for greater understanding and visibility.

4. Automatically generate test coverage reports. With Jama Connect, you can allocate requirements to design blocks or interconnect the requirements management system to design tools. Using tools like Design Architect provides powerful analytics and test coverage reports that are automatically generated.

5. Connect tools and avoid disjointed tooling challenges. Disconnected tools are often a source of visibility issues. Jama Connect links disparate tools and offers a “toolchain view” for more seamless tool functioning and visibility, like with the Design Architect example above.

6. View exactly where you’re at in a project in real-time. As you move through the management of a case, it’s important to see where you are in the process so you can stay on track. Jama Connect can provide analytics that clearly indicate where you’re at in a project, including allocated requirements, tests that have been covered, and more.

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

How does a requirements management tool fit with the ISO/SAE 21434 standard?

Traceability, collaboration, and improved review processes are all benefits of a purpose-built requirements management tool, but to understand how it works, it helps to have an example. In the details below, we’ve used the Jama Connect platform as an example to see how it works – from product-dependent cybersecurity management to threat analysis and risk assessment methods.

ISO/SAE 21434 is organized by clauses and subclauses, broken out below.

The right requirements management tool will enable your teams to optimize the development process in many of the above areas. Specifically, here’s a breakdown of how the Jama Connect platform supports each of them, as indicated by the box’s color.

Green. These areas are fully supported and recommended to be implemented in Jama Connect. For example, when viewing section 9 in the chart above under the “Concept” heading, Jama Connect supports the item definition, cybersecurity goals, and cybersecurity concept.

Yellow. These are optional and can be implemented in Jama Connect. For example, you’ll see subclauses 5.4.3 “Information sharing” and 5.4.4. “Management systems” fall into this category.

Yellow-green. These are partially supported in the tool. In other words, Jama Connect can support some of the requirements but not all of them. As an example, 10.4.1 “Design” and 10.4.2 “Integration and verification” are included in this category.

Red boxes. These are not recommended for support in Jama Connect and are usually handled with an in-house tool instead—in that some are processes that expand throughout the organization, and some are activities or work products suited for alternative best-of-breed tools. The progression of these work products can, however, be brought back to Jama Connect to reflect status through the Cybersecurity case. An example is the areas under the “post-development phases, including 12 “Production” and 13 “Operations and maintenance.”

One of Jama Connect’s most powerful capabilities is supporting the green and yellow categories through document building and generation. The tool supports the process of building and reviewing documentation with real-time collaboration as well as creating documentation with a single click and no post-processing.

TO DOWNLOAD THIS WHITEPAPER IN ITS ENTIRETY, VISIT:
How to Manage Cybersecurity in Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Industries

How to Overcome Development Challenges: Optimizing Review Cycles for Regulated Industries

The nature of regulated industries poses specific hurdles that demand strict procedures and careful consideration. Teams must navigate various difficulties, such as adhering to strict regulations and managing complicated relationships with stakeholders, to deliver top-notch products, software, and systems. Improving the review process is a critical approach for overcoming these challenges, promoting teamwork, enhancing decision-making, and expediting time to market. In this blog post, we delve into how streamlined review processes can help teams conquer development obstacles in regulated sectors.

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

The Critical Role of Enhanced Review Cycle Processes

  • Ensuring Compliance with Regulations: In industries such as medical device & life sciences, aerospace & defense, and automotive, adherence to regulatory standards is of utmost importance. Through improved review procedures, all requirements and deliverables are thoroughly evaluated, reducing the possibility of non-compliance and associated penalties. Regular and thorough reviews also aid in the early detection and resolution of any issues during the development process
  • Fostering Efficient Collaboration: Development projects often involve the collaboration of diverse teams and external partners. Enhanced review processes establish a structured framework for effective collaboration, ensuring that all stakeholders can contribute and provide feedback efficiently. This cooperative approach leads to the creation of comprehensive and well-rounded solutions.
  • Expediting Development Timelines: Timeliness is crucial in regulated industries. Streamlined review processes can significantly reduce development timelines by swiftly identifying and addressing any issues that may arise. This minimizes the need for rework and helps teams stay on track, ultimately accelerating the time-to-market.
  • Enhancing Decision-Making: Enhanced review processes offer a holistic view of project progress and potential challenges, facilitating well-informed decision-making. By providing all relevant information to stakeholders, teams can make timely and well-founded decisions, aligning everyone towards a common goal.

“The review process is a lot quicker than it was before, it’s very efficient in Jama Connect. If we compare it to reviewing the spreadsheets and Word documents versus doing a review in Jama Connect Review Center, it’s about an 80% reduction in time, for sure.”
– Kurt Shuler, Vice President, Marketing – Arteris IP, “See How Arteris IP is Leveraging Jama Connect for Autonomous Vehicle Development”

Strategies for Enhancing Review Processes

  • Simplifying Review Processes: It is crucial to have well-defined and streamlined protocols in place for reviews to optimize the process. This includes setting specific review deadlines, using standardized templates, and clearly outlining the roles and responsibilities of all parties involved.
  • Utilizing Modern Technology: Innovative review tools like Jama Connect’s Review Center offer the ability for real-time collaboration and feedback. These tools allow for reviews to take place at different times, preventing delays and keeping the process moving forward.
  • Centralizing Documentation and Feedback: Having a centralized location for all review documents and feedback ensures that team members have access to the most up-to-date information. This promotes transparency and ensures that feedback and approvals are properly recorded and easily traceable, which is crucial for compliance audits.
  • Identifying and Removing Obstacles: Regularly evaluating review cycles to pinpoint any issues and implementing solutions such as automated notifications and reminders can help keep the review process on track. This proactive approach helps maintain progress and ensures timely completion of reviews.

“If working in Aerospace / Avionics engineering, Jama Connect is a solid option to handle requirements, elements of detailed design and Test artifacts. It also enhances cross-team collaboration through the Review Center, the Stream feature.”

– Process Engineer, Aerospace & Defense  

The Benefits of Jama Connect®’s Review Center

Jama Connect®‘s Review Center provides an iterative, collaborative approach to reviewing requirements and tests in real-time. With Jama Connect’s Review Center, teams can:

  • Enable efficient and scalable reviews and shorten review cycles by up to 50%
  • Prioritize critical decisions and align stakeholders to improve response times, minimize meetings, and eliminate communication bottlenecks
  • Facilitate compliant reviews and approvals by creating a standardized review process, gaining formal approvals, and exporting to an auditable system of record
  • Engage unlimited stakeholders: Drive participation from buyers, suppliers, and partners across organizational boundaries for centralized definitions, input, and decisions
“Jama Connect allows us to centrally collect project documentation (requirements, product risks, test cases, etc) and efficiently review, release, and reuse the contents of these documents.”
– Vice President of Engineering, Medical Device & Life Sciences

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

Conclusion

Improving review procedures is a vital approach to overcoming challenges in regulated industries. When reviews are optimized, they not only ensure adherence to regulations, but also promote efficient teamwork, accelerate development timelines, and enhance decision-making. Jama Connect’s Review Center provides a robust solution for enhancing review processes, allowing for efficient and scalable reviews, aligning stakeholders, promoting compliant reviews, and engaging an unlimited number of participants. With Jama Connect’s Review Center capabilities, teams can streamline their review processes, resulting in the timely delivery of high-quality, compliant products that meet the stringent requirements of regulated sectors.

“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%.”
– Kurt Shuler, Vice President, Marketing – Arteris IP, “See How Arteris IP is Leveraging Jama Connect for Autonomous Vehicle Development”

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

Jama Connect® Features in Five: TestRail Integration

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 the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in about five minutes.

In this Features in Five Integration Series video, Steven Pink – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – demonstrates integrating test results from TestRail with Jama Connect®.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Steven Pink: Hello and welcome to the Features in Five Integration Series. My name is Steven Pink and I’m a senior solutions architect at Jama Software. Today we’re going to be walking through a live demonstration of integrating test results from TestRail with Jama Connect.

We make it possible for you to integrate Jama Connect with preferred best-of-breed software to achieve live traceability across the end-to-end development cycle. 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 significant productivity and quality improvements and dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls, and ultimately results in faster time to market.

The goal of integrating with a testing tool like TestRail is to better visualize test coverage for our requirements. Jama Connect can help in identifying and calling out gaps in test coverage, while also visualizing and reporting on the test results, utilizing the filters, dashboards, and exportable reports.

Integration with TestRail starts by mirroring TestRail’s hierarchy of test suites, test sections, test cases, and test results in Jama Connect. We use sets of test cases to mirror the test suites and folders to mirror the test sections within those suites.

As we transition into Jama Connect, I want to point out how we’re relating our test results and test cases from TestRail to the requirements being authored and captured in Jama Connect. As we look at this relationship diagram, we see our software requirements and our user stories relate to the custom test cases being managed over in TestRail. This is a very common scenario for many of our customers where certain teams might be utilizing a different tool for testing, and we need to integrate those results back with the requirements managed in Jama Connect. We can author a test case directly within Jama Connect or within TestRail.

RELATED: Jama Connect® Integrations for Live Traceability™

Pink: So we’re going to start out by authoring a test case in Jama Connect. This demo suite would mirror a suite in TestRail, and this folder would mirror a section in TestRail. I’m going to author a new test case within this folder. We’ll call this example test case. Once I’ve saved this test case, we’ll trace it to the requirement that it covers within this project. I’m going to choose one of my example software requirements.

So now I’ve created a test case with a relationship to the software requirement that it covers. We’ll notice this integration URL is populated automatically and allows us to jump to the mirror of that test case that’s been created in TestRail. Once I’ve signed into TestRail, we’ll be able to see that that test case is mirrored into TestRail.

It is in that demo suite and in section A. If we want to run this test case, I’m going to go to my test runs and results and create a new test run. It’s going to be based on that demo suite, and we’re going to include all test cases, which is just one in this example. This example test case is now showing untested. And if I were to look back in Jama Connect, we’ll see for my example test case under the relationships tying back to that software requirement. As soon as we come in here and run our test execution, let’s say we update this to past or failed, this result is going to get sent back to Jama Connect automatically.

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

Pink: We can also see on the test case itself, there’s an easy link back into Jama Connect. So if our test runners working in TestRail would like to see requirement coverage and traceability, they’re able to easily click the link from TestRail and go back into Jama Connect and explore that traceability and coverage. I’ll use that link right now to go back to our test case in Jama Connect. And now we’ll see because we’ve executed that test case, there’s an associated test run, and that test run is showing the result of past. We can visualize all of this through our trace views, our dashboards, and our custom export templates within Jama Connect. So this is a great reason to be syncing and integrating these results so that we can visualize through the trace view which of these requirements have test cases in place, which requirements might have gaps in testing, as well as being able to drill down and see those test results, even being able to show status of those test results and the status of the defects associated.

Thank you for watching this Features in Five session on integrating test results between Jama Connect and TestRail. If you’re an existing customer and want to learn more, please reach out to your customer success manager or consultant. If you’re not yet a client, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com to learn more about the platform and how we can help optimize your development process.

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

Jama Connect® Recognized as a Top Rated Requirements Management Solution on TrustRadius!

Jama Connect® Recognized as a Top Rated Requirements Management Solution on TrustRadius!

Jama Connect® has achieved notable recognition on TrustRadius, solidifying its position as a leading platform for requirements, risk, and test management. With an intuitive user interface, robust features, and exceptional customer support, Jama Connect has been honored with a “Top Rated” distinction by TrustRadius in 2024.

Visit the full report to discover why customers love using Jama Connect for product, systems, and software development. This recognition highlights Jama Software’s unwavering commitment to providing a reliable and efficient requirements management solution that empowers teams to drive innovation and attain exceptional outcomes.

RELATED: The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

Jama Software values the feedback from our clients who have used Jama Connect and are committed to providing them with the best support, resources, and expertise to help them succeed. As the leading provider of requirements management software, Jama Software is proud to receive recognition for our commitment to enabling multidisciplinary engineering organizations to develop products, systems, and software to maximize their success.

“I’m VERY likely to recommend Jama Connect to a colleague because they’d struggle to get anything done without using it! That’s the tool we’re using for Requirements Management now, so I recommend to my colleagues that they get amongst it!”

-From a review collected and hosted on TrustRadius – Ian Webb, Systems Engineering Technical Writer – Enphase EnergyElectrical & Electronic Manufacturing

“For our company, it was imperative that we streamline all our processes and have a solution that is well controlled for audit purposes. Jama Connect has been able to satisfy these needs easily with its intuitive design which shortened the user learning curve. Furthermore, the configuration management of artifacts is built in from the start which is incredibly powerful for auditors of our products.”

-From a review collected and hosted on TrustRadius – Eric Zaremski, Lead Program Manager – FORT Robotics

From all of us at Jama Software® to all of you, thank you!

 

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Git Repository Integration

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 the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in about five minutes.

In this Features in Five Integration Series video, Atef Ghribi, Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – demonstrates a Git repository integration with Jama Connect® using a repository in GitLab.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Atef Ghribi: Hello and welcome to the Features in Five Integration series. My name is Atef Ghribi and I am a senior solution architect at Jama Software. Today, we’ll be looking at the Git repositories integration using an example of a repository in GitLab. We make it possible for you to integrate Jama Connect with the preferred best-of-breed software to achieve Live Traceability™ across the end-to-end development cycle. 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 significant productivity and quality improvements, dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls, and ultimately results in faster time to market. Jama Connect being the central space repository for holistic overview across the traceability chain will be able to store the source code change track published by the integration hub from the source code repository management tools such as GitHub or GitLab. This allows software developers to work in their environments without adding additional steps to ensure traceability.

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

Ghribi: The integration hub will take care of publishing the source code, and commit information to Jama Connect as soon as they are available in the Git repository. Additionally, software developers can provide traceability information in their source code commits, which will allow Jama Connect to create the trace links to other items, making sure that source code change sets are embedded into the traceability chain. By providing this seamless integration, Jama Connect will ensure better accessibility beyond tool boundaries to source code traceability for stakeholders who are not necessarily familiar with Git repositories.

This holistic traceability enables better efficiency in conducting impact analysis and controlling the change management process as well as facilitating reporting and tracking of metrics across tools to assess and achieve compliance with less effort. Here is a simple flow between GitLab and Jama Connect. I will start by adding a simple implementation task to my Jama Connect project. This is the input for the software developer to start working on the implementation. Now this is just an example. We can here use any other item type based on the process defined and configured within Jama Connect.

Going to my implementation issues set and here I will start by creating a new task and then I will just save and close and this will create a new implementation task inside of my Jama Connect project. I will take the ID provided by Jama Connect as information that I will use later for the traceability. Now in GitLab I will make some changes to my source code and will make sure to mention the implementation task ID and my source code commit. I’m of course just using the UI of GitLab here to edit the file, but this would be the same process if I’m working on a different environment development machine and submitting the changes sets from my own local repository.

We are just keeping things simple for the time being. So going into my file and then I’m going to edit the file as a single file just here adding some changes and I will make sure to mention in the commit message the message for the change. And then I will just put the ID as I got it from Jama Connect and now I will just commit the changes and we will see what will happen inside of Jama Connect. The integration will take care of the rest and we will go back to Jama and see how the source code change commit was published and how the traceability will be defined inside of Jama Connect.

RELATED: The Benefits of Jama Connect®: Supercharge Your Systems Development and Engineering Process

Ghribi: Within a few seconds based on the integration configured, we can refresh our project inside of Jama Connect and see how the source code change set will be published to the spot in the project tree that we defined in the integration hub. We will just refresh and now we will see that we now have one item representing our change commit with the name that was provided. So if we look closer here, we’ll be able to see that we have that same message. If we look at the traceability on the right-hand side of the screen and our relationship switch it, we will be able to see that there is one upstream link to the task implementation task that we used in the comment.

So as software developers we don’t need to redundantly create any items inside of Jama Connect or create any links after we submit our traceability. If I go also to the task that is inside of Jama Connect and look at the traceability chain, and refresh, we’ll be able to see here that source code traceability that is managed. So we have bidirectional traceability already inside of Jama Connect, which will now allow us to have and embed our code or change sets traceability source code to the traceability chain of our project.

Thank you for watching this Feature in Five session on the Git repositories integration for Jama Connect. If you are an existing customer and want to learn more, please reach out to your customer success manager or consultant. If you are not yet a client, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com to learn more about the platform and how we can help optimize your development processes.

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

G2® Once Again Names Jama Connect® the Overall Leader for Requirements Management Software for Spring 2024

G2® Once Again Names Jama Connect® the Overall Leader for Requirements Management Software for Spring 2024

In the competitive landscape of requirements management solutions, Jama Connect® has once again emerged as the overall leader in the Spring 2024 G2 Grid® Report for Requirements Management Software.

G2 rates products and sellers based on reviews gathered from our user community, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. They apply a unique algorithm (v3.0) to this data to calculate the Satisfaction and Market Presence scores in real-time. The Grid® Report for Requirements Management | Spring 2024 is based on scores calculated using the G2 algorithm v3.0 from reviews collected through March 05, 2024

In addition to the honor of being named the leader in requirements management software, we are proud to showcase that we were awarded several additional medals for Spring 2024 in requirements management, including:

  • Enterprise Leader
  • EMEA Leader
  • Europe Leader
  • Small-Business Leader
  • Mid-Market Leader

Download the full report to see why customers love using Jama Connect for product, systems, and software development. 

Learn More About the Spring 2024 G2 Grid for the top Requirements Management Software products HERE!

DOWNLOAD

Jama Software® is honored to be recognized as the leading requirements management solution. We are grateful to our customers for providing valuable feedback on their experiences with our product, services, and customer support. This recognition is a testament to the value our industry-leading software brings to our customers, particularly those who have transitioned from a document-based approach to complex product, systems, or software development.

“Jama Connect effectively resolved our requirements management issues” -From review collected and hosted on G2.com, Stephan T. — Mid-Market

Our goal is to provide our customers with the best possible experience when using our platform. Being named the overall Leader demonstrates how much our users enjoy working with Jama Connect.

“Product Design teams need a requirements management tool like Jama [Connect.] Using Jama Connect allows our software development team to have a well-organized and well-written set of requirements. It allows us to more easily maintain a baseline of features in our continuously evolving software.” -From review collected and hosted on G2.com, Verified User — Mid-Market

Read Jama Connect for Requirements Management reviews on G2

From all of us at Jama Software to all of you, thank you!

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Automated Testing

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 the powerful features in Jama Connect®… in about five minutes.

In this Features in Five Integration Series video, Steven Pink – Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software® – demonstrates an integration of automated test results with Jama Connect® through a Python Script and our open REST API.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Steven Pink: Hello and welcome to the Features in Five Integration series. My name is Steven Pink, and I’m a Senior Solutions Architect here at Jama Software. Today we’ll be walking through a live demo of integrating some existing automated test results with Jama Connect through a Python script using our open REST API.

We make it possible for you to integrate Jama Connect with your preferred best-of-breed software to achieve Live Traceability™ across the end-to-end development cycle. 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 or any requirement, no matter the stage of systems development or how many siloed tools and teams it spans.

This enables significant productivity and quality improvements and dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls, and ultimately results in faster time to market.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability Benchmark

Pink: The goal of integrating automated test results is typically to better visualize test coverage for requirements. Jama Connect can identify and call out gaps in test coverage, as we see here, while also visualizing and reporting on the test results using filters, dashboards, and exportable reports.

Automated testing can be performed in a variety of ways, including the usage of automation servers and different frameworks. But regardless of the approach, all we need to integrate is to add requirement identifiers to our automated test results, so that they can be traced back to the requirements they cover and then make a call to the Jama Connect REST API to submit the latest results and traceability.

All right, now I want to talk about automated testing in Jama Connect. In this example project that we’re looking at, it’s a simple software development project where we’re gathering requirements, breaking those down into epics and stories, and then performing manual and automated tests.

In this example, our manual tests are being performed in Jama’s testing environment, but we have automated tests, that are actually automated test scripts, that we’re populating results into Jama with traceability, as a part of the automated test script, so that we have end-to-end traceability through our automated test results.

If I look at my manual test cases in the project hierarchy, we can see these manual tests have been created, some of them have been run, and results have been recorded. But if I switch over and look at my automated test cases, we’ll see there aren’t any yet. That’s because I haven’t run any automated test scripts.

RELATED: The Benefits of Jama Connect®: Supercharge Your Systems Development and Engineering Process

Pink: Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to execute an automated test script that will record some results for a few different tests. I’m going to run this module, and it’s going to start executing. And if we give it just another minute now.

If I go to my automated test cases, I’ll refresh this and you’ll see it’ll populate. We now have four automated test results that have been populated into Jama. We can populate these items with any kind of information from those automated test results, whether that be issues that arose during the execution or execution data. We can also keep track of whether they passed or failed, if we have a specific pass or fail parameter we can track through them.

The benefit of integrating automated testing with Jama Connect is that we can keep track of our traceability proactively as we run our automated tests. If I look at any one of these automated tests, you’ll see under the relationships, because in our test script we associated the test with a user story, that traceability has been built into this proactively. So when we execute our automated test, the results populate into Jama Connect with traceability.

Thank you for watching this Features in Five session on integrating automated test results to show requirement test coverage in Jama Connect. If you are an existing customer and want to learn more, please reach out to your customer success manager or consultant. If you’re not yet a client, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com to learn more about the platform and how we can help optimize your development process. Thanks for watching.

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

[Webinar Recap] Best Practices for Writing Requirements

In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Best Practices for Writing Requirements” – Click HERE for the full version.

Best Practices for Writing Requirements

“Needs.” “Features.” “Requirements.”

Regardless of what terminology your teams use to identify and define requirements, the purpose of good requirements is to create a shared understanding of the promise, functionality, appearance, and value for the products you develop across all stakeholders.

In this insightful session, our industry experts will guide participants through the different ways teams can write better requirements to remove ambiguity and improve development outcomes. In this webinar you will learn how to:

  • Create a simple, systematic, and standardized process that your teams can follow
  • Separate requirements from design and establish hierarchy
  • Ensure traceability of requirements during development

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Best Practices for Writing Requirements

Patrick Garman: Hello everyone, let me introduce myself and my co-host. I am Patrick Garman, I’m a Principal Solutions Consultant here at Jama Software, and I work with customers across multiple industries to optimize requirements management practices to help innovators succeed. Before coming to Jama Software, I had 10 years of product development experience and I’ve led teams to successful product launches in soft tech, consumer electronics, logistics, healthcare, government and public sector, and the financial services industries. And now I serve as the services lead for improving requirements quality at Jama Software. Joining me today as well is Danny.

Danny Beerens: Hi. Thank you, Patrick, for introducing me. I’m Danny Beerens, Senior Solution Consultant here at Jama Software, and I will be assisting Patrick today. I have nearly two decades of experience in system engineering, and I have successfully implemented, trained, maintained, and supported application lifecycle management application, specifically requirements management application. Throughout my career, I have worked on projects and collaborated with customers in the medical device, aerospace and defense, automotive, and semiconductor industries.

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

Beerens: So let’s start off today. Jama Software’s purpose is to help innovators succeed, as Patrick already mentioned. And the key to successful innovation is writing high-quality requirements for your products. We want you to walk away from this session with an understanding of why requirements are important and give you a useful framework from which to build your requirements-authoring skills. Basically, we are setting the groundwork here. We’ll expose you to the challenges in product development as they relate to requirements, and we will talk about how requirements help to bridge communication challenges. We’ll also provide you with important information and tools for authoring better requirements. So helping you write better requirements is why we are here, but what does that matter, why are we really here?

What we want and what I suspect you want too is to build safe and high-quality products, and requirements are an essential element in defining, designing, and developing great products. So yes, we want you to write better requirements, but writing better requirements is a means to a better end, a high-quality safe product, and good requirements also mean getting that great product with hopefully less communication friction, reduced rework, and building a work environment that encourages collaboration, transparency, and focuses on quality.

RELATED: The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

Beerens: So, let’s start with talking about why requirements are important. Requirements are the building blocks of product development and strong requirements lead to better products. Conversely, vague and unclear requirements cannot only lead to product issues but also to safety concerns. These quotes you see here from the US Food and Drug Administration Design Control Guidelines for Medical Device Manufacturers, and highlight the importance of quality requirement management in delivering safe products to the market. But these justifications for requirements can be applied to any industry or product. Keep in mind, that design control activities are intended to drive quality and safety into the product development process. And here, they are stating that requirements are the foundation to those safety activities.

Of course not all benefits of proper requirements management are related to safety, these also call out the impact to later product development lifecycle activities, finding that missing requirements or even ill-defined requirements can cause expensive redesign and rework, which makes sense considering the later issues are found in the product lifecycle, the more expensive the issue is to resolve, as you’ll need to circle back to previous phases to identify and address the issue at the root, and their impacts along the way. Requirements management activities are a way to avoid these issues from the start, thus reducing rework and redesign, and improving your quality. It also ensures you make the time to market. While the specific regulations and standards may vary, the same requirement management practices and principles are applicable to any industry.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Best Practices for Writing Requirements