Requirements & Requirements Management

[Webinar Recap] Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™

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In this blog, we recap the “Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™” webinar.
Click HERE to watch it in its entirety! 

Achieve Project Success with Clear, Effective Requirements

In this webinar, the speakers provide insights on how to leverage Jama Connect Advisor™, an easy-to-use, cutting-edge requirements authoring, editing, and analysis tool. Jama Connect Advisor uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and evaluates and scores requirements against INCOSE EARS guidelines, enabling teams to create industry-compliant requirements, reduce risk, and improve efficiency throughout development.

You will learn how to:

  • Boost requirements clarity and writing speed as well as develop team skills with guided authoring
  • Track progress and improve requirements quality over time with downloadable reports
  • Improve the quality and usability of large volumes of requirement statements effortlessly with Batch Analysis
  • Save time on authoring, reviewing, and updating requirements
  • Confidently assess project readiness through requirements maturity analysis
  • Minimize rework risk due to ambiguity and contradictions

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

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

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor

Jeremy Johnson: Thank you so much to everybody that’s joining us today. This is a pretty special time for us to be able to take a new capability to market. From a product management and product development standpoint, it’s an extremely exciting time for us. So again, I appreciate everybody’s time in joining us here today.

Before we transition into the main portion of the session here, I want to provide a short introduction and an overview of our agenda. We’ll talk a little bit, for those who aren’t familiar with us, a little bit about Jama Software. We’ll talk a little bit about the trends in product development, and some of the challenges that we see in requirements authoring. We’ll also of course introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor, who it’s for, and how it works. We’ll get into a demonstration. We’ll also talk a little bit about our customer success program, specifically our customer success authoring workshop, and how we are now including and embedding the technology and the capabilities around Jama Connect Advisor into that consulting offering.

And then, as Juliette mentioned, our special guest, Sheila King will go into the requirements quality focus that she’s helping implement at Rockwell Automation, and we’re super excited and happy to have her. And then, we should have some time at the end of the session for some questions as well.

But again, starting with and moving into Jama Software’s role in the product development ecosystem, our vision and our purpose as an organization is to ensure that innovators succeed. And as you’ll see from today’s discussion and demonstration, that’s really at the core of what drove our introduction of Jama Connect Advisor.

From a broader solution standpoint, Jama Connect is the number one requirements management provider in the marketplace. We help teams with requirement management and product development through live traceability that also spans not only requirements, but the verification and validation components on the test side, risk management, and other key data that drives those processes forward.

The value that we hope these innovative organizations, our customers, derive is really focused around things like cycle time reduction, helping speed time to market, enabling through live traceability the ability to gain visibility and control over the organization’s product development processes, and really drive streamlining, really drive a tremendous amount of value, and ultimately ensure compliance and managing risk.

As far as organizations that we work with, we span medical device, automotive, industrial, machinery,and software, and this is just a sampling of the customers that we have the pleasure of partnering with. We have over 800 customers globally. These organizations span from smaller startup organizations to large global enterprises.

So with that very short intro to Jama Software, I now would like to review some of the complexity and challenges that we see today in product development, and of course to introduce you to Jama Connect Advisor.

Related: Jama Connect Advisor™ Datasheet

Katie Huckett: Thanks, Jeremy. I’m really excited to talk about Jama Connect Advisor today and some of the things that are happening in the environment that led us to develop this solution. Today’s systems have become much more complex, and the emergence of the system of systems architecture has become the dominant approach for devices in all sectors, whether it’s aerospace, automotive, medical, and even consumer products. The system of systems is actually a collection of independent subsystems that are integrated into larger systems and deliver the unique capabilities required by users. The challenge is that it is difficult to predict accurate, predictable models of all emergent behaviors. So global systems of systems performance is difficult to design. That leads to testing and verification. Verifying upgrades to existing systems of systems is difficult and expensive as well, which is hard to scale. These are some of the factors that have led us to think about how we can help.

Another question we asked ourselves is why is requirements authoring so hard? If we look at the industry approaches for requirements authoring, we looked at the International Council on Systems Engineering’s (INCOSE) Guide for Writing Requirements. There’s a need to exercise a core subset of 40 rules in the INCOSE Rules for Writing Requirements, and in addition to that, an assessment of 49 requirement attributes. So just following INCOSE alone requires a substantial amount of training and understanding and then applying it, which can take a lot of time.

We’ve also found that EARS, the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax, is being adopted by many organizations developing complex systems of systems. That includes Airbus, Bosch, Dyson, Honeywell, Intel, NASA, Siemens, and others. What EARS does is gently constrain the textual requirements. The EARS patterns provide guidance for writing a requirement sentence and provides syntax structure with an underlying rule set. Even these industry preferred approaches are challenging to apply, so we’re looking at how we might address that.

So today, just as a brief example, product requirements quality drives fidelity and efficiency in the product development cycle. If you look at this automotive example, there are many systems. It’s a complex system of systems that are dependent on each other. Any of these systems can lead to confusing the operator or systems operating optimally. If you look at the traditional V model of approaching systems engineering, the requirements are fundamental at the very early phase. So immediately after your needs analysis, you need to have really clear, concise, accurate requirements definitions.

The negative outcomes of poorly written requirements has been well-documented. It often leads to delayed time to market, late stage errors in the product, inaccurate translation of stakeholder needs into product attributes, and the lack of development team synergy. As teams are very organic today, the requirements need to be documented clearly and in an understandable way so that the team can execute with high performance. And then, ultimately failure and verification and validation can happen without high quality requirements.

Related: How the EARS Notation Supports Effective Requirements Management and Live Traceability™ 

Huckett: A secondary challenge is the training and reinforcement of requirements authoring skills. The lack of proper requirements can lead to product issues, and it’s a significant challenge in today’s environment. 30% of engineering degree holders are nearing retirement globally, and in the US 79% of American workers agree that to retain or increase their future employability, they need to continue with their learning and development. Computer scientists, 47.5% participate in work-related training to maintain and extend their skills, and engineers almost 60% do the same. So onboarding, retaining, and training system engineers remains a significant challenge.

With those items as a background, I’d like to introduce Jama Connect Advisor. Jama Connect Advisor is an add-on for Jama Connect Cloud. It’s an intelligent natural language advisor that improves the quality of requirements. It allows you to author intricate product requirements quickly, easily, and with precision. It is powered by engineering-based natural language processing, so not a general-purpose aid. It is engineering language-based. The advice provided is based on the industry-recommended best practices for the INCOSE rules and EARS notations.

Jama Connect Advisor has a very significant side benefit, while you use it, it augments skills and reinforces organizational preferences while authoring. So not only is Jama Connect Advisor doing the pragmatic work of improving requirements quality, but your systems engineers are learning how to do that more quickly and efficiently over time with its use.

When we look at Jama Connect Advisor’s capabilities, its features include analysis and advice from industry-leading practices, INCOSE rules, and EARS notation. The application is designed to put these two together to increase the quality, accuracy, and efficiency of requirement statements. So that’s its unique value. The guidance is provided seamlessly while you are editing in Jama Connect, which we’ll demonstrate in a moment. So really, the advantages are that experts can work faster confirming the application of INCOSE and EARS as they go, sharing their expert knowledge across the organization.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE ENTIRE WEBINAR:
Write Better Requirements with Jama Connect Advisor™

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Katie Huckett
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