Traceability

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

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

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

 

Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively

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

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

What you’ll learn:

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

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

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Preston Mitchell
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