What is Jama Connect? Read on to discover how Jama Connect Requirements Management works — what problems it can help you solve and who uses it, along with a tour of its features, pricing, and integrations. I’ll also explain how Jama Connect compares to similar tools.
What Is Jama Connect?
Jama Connect is the leading platform for requirements, risk, and test management. With Jama Connect and industry-focused services, teams building complex products, systems, and software improve cycle times, increase quality, reduce rework, and minimize effort proving compliance.
Jama Software was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Portland, Oregon with offices in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and across the United States. Jama Software began when the company’s co-founders saw an opportunity for improvement in the product development process. They believed, “The worlds of software development, systems engineering, and product design are changing drastically, and the convergence of them has created an unprecedented opportunity for innovation.”
The company’s flagship product, Jama Connect, is a requirements management solution for hardware and software teams that has evolved to include test and risk management capabilities, allowing teams to scale their product development. Jama Software integrates with best-of-breed solutions across the entire product development cycle and provides adoption-oriented professional services to accelerate time to value and set customers up for success.
Who is Jama Connect for?
Jama Connect is designed for teams building complex products, systems, and software. Product managers and engineers can define and trace requirements, decisions, and relationships on multiple levels to deliver compliant, market-driven products effectively. Jama Connect helps teams deliver high-quality products on time and on budget by aligning stakeholders through efficient and collaborative reviews, identifying risks early on, and visualizing connections between regulations, requirements, and test cases throughout the development process.
Jama Connect is most used by those in industries such as automotive, aerospace and defense, medical device, consumer electronics, enterprise software and services, industrial technology, financial services, insurance, and semiconductor.
What challenges does Jama Connect help solve?
Challenge #1 – Document-based solutions: Often, small organizations or those building less complex products use a document-based process for requirements management. This can lead to documentation in silos which limits visibility, collaboration, and scaling capabilities, and often makes it difficult to prove compliance in regulated industries.
Solution: Jama Connect provides a true system of record and action for the active product development process. Teams can use Jama Connect to collaborate on requirements and test cases in real-time, gain end-to-end project visibility, scale across product lines and versions, and achieve compliance as a by-product using Jama Connect as the definitive system of record for requirements management.
Challenge #2 – Legacy requirements management: Some organizations may have established processes using legacy solutions characterized by outdated technology, software not designed for today’s fully integrated systems, and limited support for Agile and lean methodologies.
Solution: Jama Connect provides a modern approach to requirements management, providing a flexible platform with integrations that support multiple, concurrent development methodologies and traceability that enables management of complex, mission-critical processes.
Challenge #3: Regulatory pressure and the burden of compliance continues to increase: Many industries are seeing a trend of increasing regulation that broadens the scope of functional safety. Additionally, recent security and privacy breaches have led to a zero-trust culture driving an increase in market regulations that support organizations and the end consumer. As the demand for compliance increases, it becomes difficult and expensive to demonstrate compliance in regulated industries using manual processes and legacy tools.
Solution: Jama Connect gets teams up and running quickly with industry-specific frameworks that align to standards, building confidence in compliance to regulations. Jama Connect allows teams to easily show auditors how decisions were made with reporting that provides visibility across product definition, design, building, and testing phases and exposes relationship and dependencies between teams. Reporting in Jama Connect provides analysis that supports industry compliance and demonstrates to auditors the connections between regulations, requirements, and test cases.
What’s on the Jama Connect Roadmap?
Since Jama Connect launched in 2007, the platform has continued to evolve. In 2019, Jama Software rolled out several new features, including stronger capabilities in risk management and enhancements to one of Jama Connect’s leading features, Review Center. The product roadmap for the coming year includes some exciting updates, namely:
- Ensuring audit readiness with enhanced baselines
- Bolstering Review Center functionality
- Enhancing the Jama integration ecosystem, starting with an OSLC adapter
Jama Connect Features Overview
To get an idea of how Jama Connect works, here’s a tour of the main features and how they can help you efficiently do requirements, risk, and test management.
1. Live Traceability
Trace view in Jama Connect enables live traceability across all your requirements, risks, test cases, and items. Live traceability allows users to understand the impact of change, view test coverage, assure quality, and easily navigate upstream and downstream relationships.
2. Review Center
One of the most valued features in Jama Connect, Review Center, takes an iterative and collaborative approach to reviewing requirements and tests in real time. Review Center simplifies the review and approval process by providing stakeholders easy access to provide their feedback where required, resulting in quicker response times and faster review cycles. Review Center allows users to share product requirements among multiple teams for review and confirmation, confirm acceptance criteria, negotiate engineering responses, iterate on specifications, and confirm agreed-upon requirements.
3. Real-time Collaboration
Jama Connect encourages and enables collaboration, communication, and engagement. Shorten milestone phases, reduce development cycles, improve efficiency, and help your teams identify risks and opportunities with real-time collaboration in Jama Connect.
4. Reuse and Baseline Management
Create catalogs of reusable requirements and baselines of your development streams at milestones or versions.
5. Workflow and Configuration Management
Configure a workflow to support a set of transitions from one status to another over the course of an item’s lifespan. Jama Connect uses item workflows to create a common pathway for items to follow.
Jama Connect vs IBM Doors
Jama Connect is a modern requirements alternative to IBM® DOORS® with options that replace, co-exist, or connect to IBM DOORS. As a modern alternative to traditional legacy platforms, Jama Connect enables digital transformation with a more efficient and user-friendly approach to managing risk and compliance. Jama Connect provides an easy-to-use, flexible, and open platform in comparison to DOORS. A detailed comparison can be found here.
Jama Connect Integrations
There are a variety of options for Jama Connect integrations. Jama Connect supports custom integrations and extensions via our REST API. The Jama Connect Integration Hub integrates to 55+ market-leading tools. Included integrations can be found at https://www.jamasoftware.com/platform/jama-connect/integrations/.
Jama Connect Pricing
Jama Connect offers competitive pricing, aimed to drive additional value in your product development process. To learn more about Jama Connect pricing and license options, please complete the form on our pricing page: https://www.jamasoftware.com/platform/pricing/
Our specialists will follow up with you to schedule time to develop an ROI-driven business case and discuss a solution that fits the unique needs of your organization.
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