Unlocking the Power of Jama Connect Interchange™ and MathWorks Integration

Keeping requirements and engineering tools in sync is crucial for effective product development. In complex product development, connecting requirements management with engineering tools is crucial for success.

When teams work in disconnected environments, the risk of errors and compliance gaps grows. An integration between Jama Connect Interchange™ and MathWorks tools like MATLAB and Simulink bridges this divide, creating a seamless, bidirectional flow of information. This connection ensures every team member, from system architects to design engineers, works in alignment with the most current data.

This powerful integration offers significant benefits that streamline development cycles and improve product quality. By automating the exchange of requirements and design data, teams can achieve greater efficiency and collaboration.

Key advantages include:

• End-to-End Traceability: Create a clear, auditable link from high-level requirements to detailed model elements.
• Reduced Errors: Minimize manual data entry mistakes and miscommunication between teams.
• Streamlined Collaboration: Enable systems and design engineers to work together effectively in their preferred tools.
• Simplified Compliance: Maintain a complete traceability chain to meet strict industry standards.
• Time and Cost Savings: Automate processes to shorten development cycles and allow teams to focus on innovation.

WATCH THE FULL DEMO BELOW

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Patrick Garman: Hello, my name is Patrick Garman. In this demo, I’m going to walk through an example of using Jama Connect Interchange to share requirements with MathWorks tools, then bring that information back into Jama Connect^® for complete traceability. Here’s what you’ll see.

First, I’m going to export a set of requirements from Jama Connect to a ReqIF file using Jama Connect Interchange. Next, I’ll import that ReqIF file into the requirements editor in MATLAB and link those requirements to model elements in Simulink. Once those links are in place, I’ll use MATLAB’s native ReqIF export feature to create a new ReqIF package that includes both the requirements and their Simulink connections.

Finally, I’ll import that ReqIF file back into Jama Connect using Jama Connect Interchange, which will update any requirements that were edited in MATLAB, and also create a new set of model items in Jama Connect to represent the Simulink model elements.

By the end of this process, you’ll see how Jama Connect maintains end-to-end traceability between requirements and model elements, bridging the gap between systems engineering and model-based design. So here I have a Jama Connect project, and you see I have a set of functional requirements here. And these are some requirements that I want to link to elements of a model that I’ve built in Simulink. And I’m going to start this process by exporting these requirements into a ReqIF file. And ReqIF file is essentially an XML file type, but it is a format that is specifically designed to be a standard file type for requirements management tools to enable this kind of exchange of information.

RELATED: Jama Connect^® Features in Five: Jama Connect Interchange™ — ReqIF Import

Garman: All right, so I’m gonna start. I’ve already connected my Jama Connect instance to my Jama Connect Interchange. And so I’m going to come to our conversations page, and I’m going to start a new conversation. Just gonna give it first, I need to tell it what tool I’m going to be connecting with, and so we’re going to go with Simulink. And next. And then we need to pick if we have more than one Jama Connect connector, we’ve gotta tell it which one we want to export and import with, and then we just need to pull the project ID. So here we can see this is project two fifty one. So I can search by project using the API ID, or I can use a text search using this drop-down menu.

So this project is a Simulink demo. There we go. Just type a few letters. It pops up for me. And then I’m gonna give my conversation a name, and this is how I can know if I’m having several projects or even several sections of a project that are exchanging information with Simulink. We want to have separate conversations for those. So now I’ve created the conversation space in Jama Connect Interchange, and I want to start by exporting. So I’m gonna come to my export page. And here, I’m gonna start by selecting a location.

Step one: Location. There are a few different ways that our locations can export a baseline. For this situation, I’m going to stick to the container and I’m going to select my functional requirements, even that set of. So I need to select either the project root or a component, and I’ll have a chance to filter items out. But here, I’m gonna select this component and click next. And within that, if there were other sets of items, I could filter those out, but this is the one that I want. So I’m going to save.

Now then, on export, there is field mapping that I can select. For example, if I had more than one item type, more than just functional requirements, I could select which item types I want to include. But I can also set which fields I want to keep for each of these. So there may be several fields that I just don’t care about bringing into MATLAB Simulink because they’re not relevant to the work that I want to do there. Or I just don’t need them and that other thing. So I can turn off any of these fields that I don’t care about or don’t need to have in in Simulink. So I’m only exporting the specific data that I want to import into Simulink.

Alright, so in this case, I’m really just keeping the name, description, and rationale fields. So I can save that export mapping, and Jama Connect will also capture all of your relationship types just in case we again we’re pulling the relationships back in, but those are all mapped automatically. So from here I can just initiate export. And confirm. And depending on how many items this is, you know, six or seven items, it’s going to be really fast. Depending on how many items you are trying to export into ReqIF, that could potentially take longer. But from this log screen, can see the progress, especially if you use the funnel icon, include debug, it brings in, it gives you some status, but ultimately, it gives you this link where you can download the ReqIF file. So here, I’m just gonna drag and drop that onto my desktop so I can find it. And now I’m going to switch over to MATLAB. So starting here in Requirements Editor, because I need to import those requirements that I did previously. Here, I’m gonna delete. So for that, I’m going to first clear out what I had done previously. I can’t do that. So I’m just gonna import. We are importing from ReqIF, and I’m just gonna browse to find the file that I saved to my Desktop.

RELATED: Transform Engineering Processes: Bridge Gaps Between Teams and Tools Effectively

Garman: So here we have that ReqIF I just created from Jama Connect. So we’ll open that. In these other settings, MATLAB automatically selects some things. I would say, you know, it automatically detects that it’s coming from Jama Connect. If you want to save this in a different location, you can do that here. Ultimately, we’re going to import these requirements. Alright. So here I have my second import, and you can see that these requirements have come through. Now then, I export the description rationale field. So why are they not showing up here? Because this is the MATLAB description and rationale field. For those Jama Connect elements, we need to come down here to custom attributes. And here we can see all of those, all of those fields as set that we exported. Alright. Now that we’re in MATLAB, this is our model that I want to start connecting things to. So in MATLAB, I’m going to select a model element here at the controller. And we will say that one point one is the one, so I can just right-click it and link from the controller. And I could even say, here we go, my Dryden Wind gust models are part of one point three. So again, I can create the link there. And let’s do one more. Let’s do this small gain one. We’ll link that to one point six. Okay. So now we’ve made we’ve added all of our links And and so now what we want to do is we want to take what we’ve done, I want to save it, but then I’m going to export this back to ReqIF.

Here, I can just reuse the original mapping from Jama Connect. If there are, you know, attributes that you want to remove, you can do that here. But the most important thing is we want to export links. So make sure that this export links box is checked, and then we can set a location. I’m gonna move this to our desktop again for easier finding. When we’re ready, we can just click export. So it’s running through everything. It’s gonna save that to our desktop. So, what we can do now is let’s come back to Jama Connect Interchange, and I’m going to switch to import because now we’ve pulled that data from MATLAB and Simulink and we want to bring it into Jama Connect. So I’m gonna go to my import in the same conversation. Click upload.

I’m gonna select that file that I just pulled out of Simulink. And we’ve already set the location, which we can edit if we need to, but we’re gonna leave it at the same location. And here we’re gonna map for the import. So we want to have our functional requirements mapped back to functional requirements in Jama Connect. And these others, these are those model elements that we want to bring back in. And so I’m gonna bring those in as Models. So I can select what item type in Jama Connect I want to have as a reference to those elements back in MATLAB Simulink. So I’ve turned those on. Now I’m gonna, oops, save our item type mappings. And I can switch to fields. And here, the same thing. I just want to map everything back to what it should be in Jama Connect. So here, I’m looking at those model elements. So we want to create this as a set. And we want to bring in the name of the set to the or the name of the collection from MATLAB to a set name in Jama Connect. But then we also have to establish these object types. So here are just Simulink objects. If we had, say, headers or information items, we could maybe map those differently. But we want to tell Jama Connect the Simulink objects should be brought in as folders, text, or models? And in this case, that’s the actual model elements. So we’ll bring them in as models, which is the item type that we map to in the first step.

So now Jama Connect is going to generate the mapping. So we are gonna pull here are the elements, the metadata elements that are found on these Simulink objects, and we just wanna map these back to an item in Jama Connect. So here description will go to description, name goes to name. And if we want to keep if there is a, you know, key, we could map that to an additional field. But once we’re done, we’re gonna click save.

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

Garman: Now we will move on to our next item type, which is functional requirements. And, again, functional requirements will come back in as a set. And we really only have to map those fields that we want to update. So here I can just leave that as a name, and here a functional requirement. We’ll go back to the functional requirement. And, again, we really don’t have to map many of these fields back if we’re not actually bringing in field-level updates. So here, I’m just gonna map the name. If I had made changes to the other fields in MATLAB, I would change those here. And the final step, I wanna go to relationships, and I just need to map these back into the appropriate even though they’re originally pulled from Jama Connect, and mapping them back to the relationship types that they were pulled from. The good thing about doing this import mapping is that you really only have to do it once. Once you’ve mapped everything in this conversation, you can just keep reusing this conversation and make updates as necessary.

Okay. Another thing you’ll notice with each of these relationships, have this option to reverse direction. And there, that is because some tools treat traceability in a slightly different direction. So, what is happening right now in Simulink, the way I created those is that the model element is actually upstream of the requirement. But in Jama Connect, we want the requirement to be upstream from the model. So I can just I can fix that by clicking this box to reverse direction. On each of these so that when it brings it in, they will be in the correct the relationships will be in the correct cardinal direction. Alright. So once we’ve done that, we can click save.

And now that we’ve mapped everything, we can initiate import. And Jama Connect is gonna ask us, “Do we want to update existing items?” And that’s what we want to choose for this, because we want to update the existing functional requirements, and those model elements will be brought in as new items. Now then, in future iterations, if we export these functional requirements and these model elements into Simulink again, say we’ve made updates, we want to redo it again, it’ll update the existing models that you’ve already imported. If you select create new items, it will only create new items. It will not update any existing items. So in this situation, I want to update the existing items. So we’ll confirm. And tells us to take a look at the logs page, and it’ll take a little bit for this to finish. So again, we’ll get a complete message when it’s done. But if we want to see more, we can enable this debug option.

And you can see that Jama Connect Interchange is evaluating, and it’s saying like, “look, no field changes happened” with these, so we’re not going to update those. But here we go. We do have a few fields that we had to update, and we’re creating those relationships because again, we linked three items. All right, so let’s go back into Jama Connect, and if I refresh my tree, you see that there’s this additional component here under my functional requirements. If I expand that, I have this set of models. And then here I have each of those models. So here is the controller. And you can see it has a link back to that element, the description field. And it is related to the transfer history with a “Satisfied By” Marker.

And that concludes the demo.  You’ve now seen how Jama Connect Interchange makes it possible to seamlessly exchange requirements with MATLAB and Simulink through the ReqIF standard. By moving requirements into MATLAB, linking them to model elements in Simulink, and then bringing those links back into GeometConnect, we’ve established full traceability between the system requirements and the model-based design. This integration helps your teams reduce errors, streamline collaboration across engineering disciplines, and maintain compliance with industry standards. Thank you for watching, and please reach out if you’d like to explore how Jama Connect can support your development process.

To view more Jama Connect integrations, visit:
Jama Connect Integrations

This blog overviews our recent datasheet, “Jama Connect Best-in-Class API for Creating Interoperability Across Your Development Toolchain for Live Traceability™”

Jama Connect Best-in-Class API for Creating Interoperability Across Your Development Toolchain for Live Traceability™

Siloed data creates significant roadblocks for businesses. Isolated information across teams and systems obstructs collaboration and slows critical decision-making. Open APIs provide a solution to this problem by enabling interoperability between compliant software.

Jama Connect features a best-in-class REST API for connecting to any other REST-compliant software or system. Our API is the basis of the many prebuilt integrations available from Jama Software & our partners.

What makes Jama Connect API the best- in-class

• Accessible: Anyone with a Named Creator license can utilize the REST API – at no additional cost and no charges based on number of API calls.
• Performant: Each Jama Connect Cloud instance allows up to 36,000 calls per hour/over 26 million calls per month, significantly more than other large SaaS providers.
• Reliable: Industry standard best practices, such as API throttling, maintain system stability for consistent and reliable performance with minimal latency.
• Comprehensive: We provide documentation accessible through Swagger UI, code snippet examples, and training from Jama Software’s services team who are experts in using the API.

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

KEY BENEFITS

• Streamline Integration Processes: Combine Jama Connect API’s simple, flexible, and easy to use framework with the API cookbook, a step-by-step guide with practical, real-world recipes that address common integration needs, offer clear best practices, and answer frequently asked questions.
• Boost Data Handling Efficiency: Manage data seamlessly with advanced features like strict pagination and the ‘include’ parameter. These optimizations
  ensure your API calls retrieve only what you need, reducing system strain and enhancing performance during data-intensive operations.
• Leverage Strict Security and Authentication: Prioritize security with OAuth authentication for Jama Connect Cloud users or Basic Authentication for self-hosted environments. Jama Connect API ensures the integrity and safety of your data during every integration.

Using the Jama Connect API

There are many ways to benefit from the Jama Connect API. Here are several examples:

• Reporting: Automate the retrieval of project data for reporting purposes. By making GET requests to the API’s/projects endpoint, users can fetch detailed information about all projects within their Jama Connect instance. This data can then be integrated into business intelligence tools for real-time tracking of project progress, resource allocation, and key milestones.
• Data & Trace Synchronization: Automate the synchronization of requirements and their trace relationships between Jama Connect and other REST-based tools for Live TraceabilityTM. This can be particularly useful for organizations that need to ensure alignment between their requirements management system and their development tracking tools. By leveraging the API, users can create scripts to push updated requirements and their traces from Jama Connect into their development platform or pull issue statuses back into Jama Connect.
• Test Results Import: Automate the import of test results into Jama Connect. This ensures precise control, real-time updates, and integration with third-party test tools and related workflows for more efficient and reliable verification of new and changes to requirements.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability Benchmark

Jama Connect API Resources:

• Jama Connect API Documentation
• Jama Connect API – Getting Started
• Jama Connect API Developer Resources
• Jama Connect Automated Testing video
• Jama Connect API – Sample API Calls
• Jama Connect API Adoption

Whether you’re retrieving actionable insights, integrating data across tools, or optimizing test workflows, Jama Connect API empowers your business with flexibility and performance.

Get started with the Jama Connect API today!

DOWNLOAD THIS DATASHEET:
Jama Connect Best-in-Class API for Creating Interoperability Across Your Development Toolchain for Live Traceability™

Traceable MBSE™ in Action: Integrating Sparx Enterprise Architect with Jama Connect®

In the complex systems engineering landscape, maintaining Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) across requirements and architecture is a major challenge. Engineers must ensure that high-level requirements flow seamlessly into architectural elements while managing changes across multiple tools.

With the integration between Sparx Enterprise Architect and Jama Connect^®, teams can achieve Traceable MBSE™ with bidirectional synchronization of requirements, architecture elements, and diagrams. This enables a holistic view of system design, ensuring real-time traceability, impact analysis, and compliance with predefined processes.

In this blog, Atef Ghribi, Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software, demonstrates the Sparx Enterprise Architecture integration with Jama Connect.

TRANSCRIPT

Atef Ghribi: Hello. My name is Atef Ghribi, and I’m a Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software. Today, we will be walking through the Sparx Enterprise Architect integration. But before looking at the tools in action, let’s explore the goal we are trying to achieve as well as the following approach.

Some of the major questions that systems engineers are faced with are related to traceability and how to ensure its completeness based on predefined processes, methodologies, and rules. Making sure that there are no gaps in the process and that all the needs and high-level requirements are covered and satisfied by the lower-level requirements as well as architectural elements, and figuring out how to overcome the challenges of managing changes across the traceability chain, which in most of the cases spans over and across multiple tools. Applying that to the architecture context results in questions like, how do architecture changes impact requirements and vice versa?

As MBSE leaders and advocates, the question is how to make sure that MBSE is accessible and usable easily and efficiently to non-modelers without the need to take care of all the logistics and know what the architecture tools require. With integrations to architecture tools, including Enterprise Architect, Jama Connect enables its users to leverage traceable MBSE to work and interact with the architecture providing a holistic overview of the whole systems engineering process.

Traceable MBSE is a technical approach for the creation, consumption, and measurement of systems engineering data with Jama Connect frameworks for achieving Live Traceability™.  The way it works is by enabling bidirectional synchronization of requirements and architecture elements between Jama Connect and Enterprise Architect, as well as syncing diagrams and traceability from Enterprise Architect to Jama Connect as the central engineering management repository.

Jama Connect uses the data to enable intelligent engineering management, providing the ability to detect process risks and identify gaps, measure progress and coverage, and analyze the impact of changes. What we will see in the integration is a simple flow between requirements and architecture elements, starting by creating requirements within Jama Connect and transitioning to Enterprise Architect to start using those requirements in the architecture, where we will be creating architectural elements like blocks, allocating the new requirements to them by creating dependency traces. And that’s all we will need to do as users. The integration will then take care of syncing those changes from the architecture back to our central engineering data repository, Jama Connect. Let’s see this in action.

RELATED: Traceable MBSE™ in Jama Connect: Quickstart Guide

Ghribi: What we see right now in front of us is the Jama Connect project that we are using for the integration, governed by this process or the so-called relationship rule diagram, where we can see the relationship rules that are defined and expected for this project. This will be the instrument that helps us measure the progress and coverage and identify the gaps later. What is interesting for us in the context of this integration are the two item types, system requirements, and architectural elements, as well as the relationship between them that enables users to allocate system requirements to architectural elements.

If we look at the left-hand side of the screen, we can see our project tree, which is the place where we store the content of our project. And we can there also find the system requirements that are managed within this project. So here as a system requirements engineer, I’m gonna be able to create a new system requirement that will be synchronized based on the integration to our Enterprise Architect. So keeping things simple, I’m gonna call this new system requirements.
We can select a type, and we can give it some text as a description. Let’s say description text. And we can save this one to our Jama Connect database.

The integration works now in the background to ensure a real-time synchronization of these changes into our respective EA project. If we also look at another location inside of our project, we can see the place where we defined the integration to sync our architectural elements. Both the diagrams as well as the architectural elements will be synchronized here. We will get back to this later to see how we change or how the changes that we’re gonna do in Enterprise Architect will be updated here.

Let’s switch now to Enterprise Architect and explore the project structure and see if we can find that new system requirement that we just created in Jama Connect. We are keeping the structure of this project simple. And for the sake of simplicity also, as you can see inside of the folder of requirements, we just have a plain list of our system requirements without any folders or any informational elements.

And as we can see, we can find the new system requirement that we just created listed here. So as an architect, I can now use that new input and go to my architecture and create a new architectural element. Save and close. That should create our new item in the Explorer for the project. Now we can start using that new element in our diagram, and you will be able to just place it inside of the diagram and link it. We can do the same for our requirement to create the traceability and allocate that requirement that we just got into the new architectural elements.

And just by creating the relationship as a dependency, we can make sure that now we have the traceability from our system requirements into our architectural element. We can now save the changes in this diagram. As an additional step, I will go to our requirements and start making some changes just to synchronize back and see how the description will change if we just add some changes from EA. Saving. And now we can go back to Jama Connect and explore the changes there.

RELATED: Intelligent Engineering Management with Jama Connect Live Trace Explorer™

Ghribi: Now as we go back to Jama Connect, we can explore our architecture again and see if we can see that new system architectural element. Just need to refresh first our trajectory. And now we can see that new element that was just created inside of our Jama Connect database. Now I can also take a look at the diagrams and see that internal block diagram that just got updated by the integration. In addition to these updates inside of my Jama, I can see also the changes that were applied to my requirement. I can start seeing the changes, that were just, synchronized. I can also start comparing, and understanding what exact changes were now made and modified between the different versions of my requirement.

In addition to that, the traceability that we just created inside of Enterprise Architect can also be seen here. If I go and open the live trace view inside of Jama Connect and scroll up to see how my architectural elements are synchronized and traced to system requirements, I can see the relationship between the new system requirements and the architectural element that was created inside of Enterprise Architect, also inside of charmer.

What we can also see in this view are all the gaps related to all the architectural elements that do not have any system requirements allocation. We can see the same information from the system requirements perspective, this time covering more system requirements. So if we just narrow down our trace view to our system requirements on the left-hand side of the screen and to our architectural elements on the right-hand side of the screen, we can start also seeing all those other system requirements that do not have any coverage or allocation into architectural elements based on the predefined process assigned to this project. We can see the same information also in our dashboard.

So if we use filters and widgets, we can simply see that information in real time and be able to capture any gaps in the process before it’s too late. Now Jama Connect helps us also to get a holistic overview of our project just by using the Live Trace Explorer™ I can just expand here on my project and open a full coverage view that compares the project or the state of my project to the process assigned to it and defines and shows a trace score in real time where I can focus on the exact KPIs and metrics that are relevant for me. For our case today, the architectural elements cover our system requirements where we can trust the progress and see the covered percentage in real time.

As soon as anything changes within Jama Connect or in Enterprise Architect, these values will be updated in real-time, and we can keep track of the progress. Thank you for watching this session on the Enterprise Architect 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 would like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your product development process, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com. If you are already a Jama Connect customer and would like more information about release management via reuse and synchronization, please contact your Customer Success Manager or Jama Software Consultant.

To view more Jama Connect integration demos, visit our
Jama Connect Features in Five Integration Series

In this blog, we recap our recent whitepaper, “Leveraging Jama Connect and Jira for Enhanced Requirements Management” – Click HERE to download it in its entirety.

Leveraging Jama Connect and Jira for Enhanced Requirements

Think you can manage your complex software requirements with Word and Jira alone? Think again.

In software development, teams need tools that enable them to manage requirements, ensure traceability, and adapt to changes without losing sight of their goals. Many companies rely solely on Atlassian Jira, often paired with Word or Excel, to handle requirements and track development tasks.

While Jira is highly effective for tracking implementation progress, it lacks essential features for managing requirements throughout the entire development lifecycle.

The limitations of using Jira alone can lead to costly setbacks, such as rework, missed deadlines, delayed rollouts, and compromised quality. These challenges stem from a lack of traceability, inefficient review processes, limited project visibility, and an incomplete definition of the system.

This eBook explores these issues and introduces a solution: integrating Jama Connect with Jira. Jama Connect enhances requirements management, enables Live Traceability™, streamlines reviews, and provides real-time insight into development progress.

Together, Jama Connect and Jira empower teams to achieve better software development outcomes

1. The Limitations of Using Jira Alone for Requirements Management

Lack of Traceability

The challenge of managing requirements with flat or disparate files like Word or Excel is significant. Teams that use these tools alongside Jira often struggle to keep requirements aligned with development tasks. Manual traceability in these formats is resource-intensive, prone to errors, and leaves significant gaps in coverage.

Without proper traceability, teams have limited visibility into their project’s true status, which can lead to costly rework and project delays. In fact, lack of traceability is one of the leading causes of negative project outcomes. When you can’t see how requirements connect to development and testing, the project suffers, and costs escalate — especially if defects are discovered later in the lifecycle. According to research done by INCOSE, the cost of fixing a defect can be up to 110 times more expensive if it’s found during validation rather than early on.

Jama Connect’s Live Traceability solves this problem by creating a digital thread through every level of development, from customer needs to verification and validation. This digital thread ensures that all requirements are covered and connected to development tasks, giving teams confidence that they’re meeting their goals and satisfying customer needs. Later in this paper, we’ll explore the many ways Live Traceability can dramatically improve your development process.

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

Inefficient Requirement Reviews

Reviewing requirements using Word documents can be frustrating and inefficient. A business requirements document often contains hundreds or even thousands of requirements. Teams must wait for the entire document to reach a draft state before circulating it for feedback. Stakeholders then provide comments through a combination of Word’s review features and emails, creating a fragmented and time-consuming process.

In this scenario, the burden falls on the business analyst to compile feedback, chase down reviewers, and manage multiple rounds of review cycles. This process is not only inefficient but also risks missed feedback or inconsistencies, as it’s difficult to track changes from one review cycle to the next.

Jama Connect’s Review Center streamlines this process. It allows teams to break down reviews into manageable parts and send specific sections out for feedback. Instead of waiting for an entire document to be finalized, teams can initiate reviews iteratively. The Review Center also automatically creates a baseline at the start of each review, providing a clear record of the requirements’ state before any feedback or changes are made. This reduces review cycles and accelerates consensus, saving valuable time and resources.

Business Analysts and Stakeholders are Frustrated

The lack of an end-to-end tool connecting stakeholders, business analysts, and software development teams is a major gap. Traceable Agile™ in Jama Connect is the answer. With Traceable Agile, there is no change for software teams and the development process is supported for both business analysts and stakeholders. Learn more here >>

2. The Value of Creating a Digital Thread with Jama Connect and Jira

Providing Development Insight

Jira is a powerful tool for tracking development tasks, prioritizing work, and managing sprint schedules. However, it lacks comprehensive visibility into whether requirements are actually being met. If development tasks, such as user stories, aren’t directly linked to requirements, it’s impossible to know how close the project is to meeting customer needs.

Unlinked development tasks open risks like scope creep, rogue development, or unintentional changes that affect other parts of the system. In these cases, teams may spend time on tasks that aren’t aligned with the project’s core requirements, leading to wasted resources and delayed timelines.

By integrating Jama Connect with Jira, teams can bridge this gap. Jama Connect retains the requirements context, while Jira provides insight into development progress. Each team can work within its tool of choice while sharing critical information, such as real-time updates on task status. This integration enables project managers to see how development is progressing against requirements, ensuring that every task is necessary, and every requirement is covered.

Only Jama Connect Delivers a Digital Thread that is Measurable and Live Traceable Across Best-of-Breed Tools Jama Connect’s digital thread connects best-of-breed tools like Jira and Cameo and enables you to auto detect risk early across all engineering disciplines. This has been shown to enable proven improvement to the product development process.

Clear Definition of System Requirements

A common misconception about Agile is that formal requirements documentation is unnecessary. Some teams try to decompose customer needs into user stories in Jira, thinking that’s sufficient. However, this approach has limitations. User stories describe specific interactions or functions from a user’s perspective, but they don’t provide the comprehensive requirements needed for a full system definition.

Traceable Agile ensures that every requirement and feature is documented, versioned, and kept up to date, providing a clear, evolving definition of the system. Unlike user stories, requirements offer a functional description of what the system must do, ensuring alignment with customer needs. With Jama Connect, you get a single source of truth for the system, one that evolves over time and reflects the current state of requirements, while also keeping a record of every change that’s made.

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

Companies Choose Agile for Speed, Jama Connect Delivers Speed AND Quality

Jama Connect solves common challenges with Agile initiatives, such as maintaining standards compliance, coordinating hardware and software teams, managing defects, reducing rework, and ensuring customer quality. Traceable Agile speeds the flow of software and hardware development and maintains the current and historical state of development quality to auto-detect issues early. Watch the demo >>

TO READ THIS DATASHEET IN ITS ENTIRETY, VISIT:
Leveraging Jama Connect and Jira for Enhanced Requirements

Jama Connect and CATIA: Traceable MBSE™ Integration through Cameo DataHub

For teams taking a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach to systems development, managing complexity and ensuring traceability are crucial. Jama Software’s integration with CATIA Magic, powered by Cameo DataHub, offers a streamlined solution collaboration between requirements, architectures, and mission needs. This integration bridges the gap between Jama Connect and CATIA’s tools, allowing teams to enable a federated data architecture approach and equip stakeholders with a deeper understanding of the system model.

RELATED: A Path to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) with Jama Connect^®

Why CATIA Magic?

As a leader in MBSE solutions, CATIA Magic supports SysML standards. Its commitment to following these standards allows for seamless customization to industry-specific needs, making it a powerful choice for complex system engineering projects.

Integration Benefits

This integration enables real-time synchronization of any Jama Connect data or model element with CATIA Magic, ensuring that teams can collaborate effectively while maintaining traceability across both tools. This connection simplifies complex workflows and enhances the accuracy of a system model’s requirements and architecture, eliminating manual work and reducing errors.

By supporting custom data mappings, bidirectional synchronization, and standard authentication methods, this integration empowers system engineers to trace changes, visualize updates, and maintain alignment across their tools — ensuring not only more informed decision making but also an increased confidence in the system design, and a more efficient engineering process.

Explore Integration in Action

Jama Connect to Cameo Integration: Watch below

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

Why Jama Connect?

Capabilities from a dedicated requirements management tool such as Jama Connect have built-in collaboration, configuration management, baselines, managing traceability across multiple levels of objects, managing the verification and validation activities, controlling access and change to objects using role-based permissions, and showing real-time workflow states at the object level. Jama Connect’s built-in workflow engine and dashboards give any stakeholder a 1000-foot view, a measurable view of status and progress, and exceptions to the defined systems engineering process.

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

In this blog, we’ll recap our recent webinar, “Elevating MBSE with SysML: Jama Connect® and CATIA Magic in Action” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

Elevating MBSE with SysML: Jama Connect^® and CATIA Magic in Action

What happens when Jama Software^®’s Traceable MBSE™ combines with Dassault Systèmes’ enterprise and system architecture modeling expertise in systems engineering?
This powerful and intuitive integration between CATIA/Cameo Systems Modeler and Jama Connect^® aligns business and engineering, bridging the gap between requirements management, system architecture, design, and product management.

This engaging webinar features Cary Bryczek – Jama Software and Saulius Pavalkis – Dassault Systèmes as they discuss the intersection of this technology and give a live demonstration.

What you’ll gain:

• Key trends shaping the future of MBSE across the aerospace & defense industry
• Challenges keeping Systems Engineers up at night
• The impact of Jama Connect Traceable MBSE in defense applications
• How Cameo Systems Engineering enhances system architecture
• A live demonstration of Cameo DataHub’s integration with Jama Connect

Don’t miss this opportunity to see how this integration can transform your MBSE approach, driving success from concept to deployment.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Cary Bryczek: To kick things off, I want to set the stage with some trends across the aerospace and defense industry that we’re seeing. I’ll talk about how those trends are creating challenges for chief engineers and describing what keeps them up at night, then I’ll set the stage for Saulius’s presentation by showing you what Jama Connect’s Traceable MBSE looks like and how it’s designed to solve those challenges. Saulius is going to take you on a deeper dive to show you how system models and Jama Connect interoperate.

So in the aerospace and defense industry, we are developing a new system that has complexity that far exceeds commercial product development. For example, the FAA’s program to develop the Unmanned Aircraft Traffic Management system involves not just a pilot and drone, but is designed to enable autonomous and semi-autonomous operation of multiple air systems, including the passenger and cargo delivery, in a really tightly integrated civil airspace. The elements in blue on the diagram are all distinct systems of their own, and the new traffic management system needs to integrate communications and data across all of those systems to provide this new capability.

In the highly constrained environment of outer space, for example, NASA’s Cislunar and I’m pretty sure the Artemis programs are focusing on the operation and survivability of autonomous systems. To develop a space system, NASA doesn’t do this in their own silo, but they have lots and lots of contracts and companies that they work with deliver parts of the system, just like in the DoD. For example, you have Blue Origin. They are developing a friction stir additive manufacturing part of the system in partnership with Langley, right? You have Redwire out of Erie, Colorado. They are developing another in-space manufacturing system. You have Canopy out of Denver. Colorado seems to be a popular place for space. They’re developing low-cost reusable thermal protection systems, right? And there’s really dozens more. The Cislunar and the Artemis programs are developing ecosystems and the ecosystems of those partners, right?

In the government agencies and aerospace and defense companies, they’re always evolving their strategies to be able to deal with this high degree of complexity to help streamline their engineering processes. For example, the DoD, they have published a new adaptive acquisition framework. So even not just in the engineering parts of it but the acquisition parts of it as well, there’s a new framework. This particular pathway is intended for large-scale traditional hardware acquisitions to help facilitate rapid and iterative delivery, like what the software capability programs are doing.

In 2018, we had the Digital Engineering Strategy outlining a vision to modernize how DoD designs develops, delivers, operates, and even sustains systems, right? By connecting people and process and data and developing these end-to-end digital enterprises.

The International Council on Systems Engineering, their Vision 2035 is intended to guide and inspire the strategic direction of systems engineering for the global systems engineering community, right?

The DoD’s Systems Engineering and Architecture group within the DoD itself is focusing on modernizing the systems engineering practice and they’re leveraging the capabilities coming out of SERC and MOSA to build systems that can be upgraded to incorporate new technology and respond to emerging threats, right?

With this new modernization of the SE approach, and now I know this is sort of an eye chart, you guys can look at it after the fact, the DoD has moved away from visualizing its process using that shape of the V model in favor of what more realistically takes place from a process standpoint, which is that modern systems engineering is highly cyclic in nature. Now, the outermost ring is as close to what the old V model, where concept definition is in the upper left, moves to system definition through architecture and design, over to V&V, and back around to start the next cycle. What’s important is that there’s a strong emphasis on measuring not just the system being built, but the process to build that system 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 the decision-making.

There really is a challenge to using a data-driven approach in the models. The DoD, I love this quote, “There’s a lack of an integrated approach to implementing systems engineering focus areas that’s creating a delay in implementing the digital transformation, which is necessary to ensure relevant guidance, skills, and training are available to deliver a disciplined approach to acquiring a weapon system.” Continuing to use legacy tools and approaches is what making integrated approaches gravely difficult. What’s necessary is to take a federated approach to data across the tool ecosystem and use tools with robust APIs, modern architectures that are standards-based. An MBSE approach requires an integrated approach to connect that system model’s architecture and requirements to program teams and software and hardware teams. It doesn’t mean using a siloed system modeling tool and expect those teams to be able to consume and understand that model. In fact, kind of what I hear a lot is, “How do I achieve the benefits of MBSE when no other engineers can access model parameters they need to use to make downstream decision-making, and how do I make decisions on tests and other things that’s downstream from the system model?” I hear that quite a lot.

RELATED: A Path to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) with Jama Connect^®

Bryczek: Those with technical oversight and responsibility for program success who are executing MBSE or even just traditional systems engineering commonly raise these following questions. This is what I think keeps chief engineers up at night. “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 those needs?” “How do I know if a change in the architecture will impact hardware or software teams?” And, “How do I streamline model design reviews?” I have a fourth one, too, “How do I detect unallocated systems architecture and requirements that sort of transcends the system model area and goes into the software models and the hardware models?” So that’s another favorite that I have.

So these questions really, we think, can be answered using what we term Traceable MBSE. The reality at most companies is that the end-to-end systems development processes is fragmented into domain-specific tools and spreadsheets that really don’t have a lot of collaboration or any, and this leads to fragmented requirements traceability and requires significant manual effort through emails and meetings and maybe even luck to try and prevent delays, defects, rework, cost overruns, right? Most companies have come to accept this 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 corrective action.

Keep in mind that model-based systems engineering is more than using the power of SysML. It is powerful. Systems engineering’s superpower to enable digital transformation comes when it’s able to connect to the entire development effort and facilitate software and mechanical teams with the ability to align their efforts to the system model, systems engineers being able to manage the state of development across the disciplines and automatically identifying risks through all stages of development.

So let’s maybe see what this looks like in Jama [Connect.] This is Jama Connect in a web browser. I’m showing a Traceable MBSE project for development of a cube set. In it, I’m managing the end-to-end development of the program mission goals and objectives, stakeholder needs, concept of operations, system requirements, subsystems, software and hardware requirements, architecture, safety risks, verification and validation, and even user stories from Jira. Jama [Connect] is going to provide that measurable end-to-end traceability for all of their elements. Their version control and baselines provide design, review, and approval, plus make the data visible onto a series of dashboards.

All the interactions with Jama [Connect] are done in this web browser. Just to give you a little bit of navigation overview, if you’ve never seen Jama [Connect], you can see the data. You can organize the data pretty much however you want. You’re not constrained to how you want to call the data. Want to look inside stuff, you can open up and look inside the dashboards. The series of dashboards can be laid out however you want. You can have multiple dashboards. So this is my main one. I want to see a trace exception dashboard, I’m able to just organize them how I want, surface up that information. And they’re live too, so if I wanted to go and look at what any of these are, show me my objectives, needs, or goals, I can just click on them and it takes me pretty much right to where I want to be.

One of the things that makes Jama [Connect] special is the ability to define a data model for the information that you’re going to be managing in the model or the Jama [Connect] project and define how the traces are related together. And then our Live Trace Explorer™ is used to show real-time progress against expected traceability. So I open up my Live Trace Explorer for this particular project. The Live Trace Explorer is used to show the real-time state of progress of all of the items that are being managed in the system against the expected traceability according to those rule sets. When integrated with system modeling tools, like managing architecture, Jira managing the flow of tasks, using Live Trace Explorer, you can obtain this holistic view of quality across your entire system development and software factory process.

So this left-hand side shows requirements coverage and the right-hand side of the Live Trace Explorer shows test coverage, similar to a V model. Here you can see the program system-level requirements. So here we scroll down, we have the program system level requirements and all of the relationships established for traceability. This is based on the project’s traceability rule set, remember? Your project might use different names than what you see here. You’re not really constrained to using what comes out-of-the-box Jama [Connect] at all.

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

Bryczek: The Trace Explorer in the upper right, this Trace Score™ shows an overall traceability score for your project that you can use to gauge how quality changes, hopefully improves over time. So all of these metrics are real-time from what’s happening right now, and so 64% traceability, this is probably maybe early to midstream in development. We’re still seeing people still establishing traceability, right? But by increasing your traceability score, we really hope to reduce the risk of defects, cost overruns, and delays.

So what about some of those questions that keep chief engineers and program managers up at night? What about the ones that we were asked about? So question one is, “How do I know if architecture and system requirements are satisfying all the needs?” This is tracked in our Live Trace Explorer as a percentage of coverage between the linkages. So here we see a 55% coverage between these stakeholder expectations, which we have 36 stakeholder expectations, so 55% traceability established so far between those. And we only have, and if you scroll down, if you want to see what the architecture is, the architecture, we only have 50% coverage between the architecture and requirements.

So what about, “How do I know if a change in architecture is going to impact testing”? You can really easily see that here, the changes between what’s happening to testing. You can even see a percentage of the suspect changes. So right now, I might’ve already changed some of the requirements of your architecture. 11% is showing suspect. Right now, I don’t have a lot of test plan coverage. Still kind of in the early phases as well.

What about the third question, “How do I know if a change in architecture will impact hardware or software teams?” Right? Again, you can easily see any of the downstream traces to different things. And this is live, too, so if I wanted to see exactly, show me those objects, I can just click, it’s all interactive, and see exactly what the traceability between architecture and system requirements look like. I want to add more information to the view, maybe I want to see what the rationale is or the status, I can add that kind of view really super easily to my view. Jama [Connect] is really designed to make it easy for anyone to come in, understand what’s going on in the program, click and see instant traceability based on what you’re looking at.

So another question is, “How do I detect unallocated system architecture and requirements?” Unallocated activity can be used by running a query. So I have a filter that says, “Show me all of the unallocated architecture.” So I have four architectural elements that have no traces for requirements, and if I turn my trace view on, you can see these are just standalone objects. There’s no traceability either up or downstream to requirements of any kind. We really want to make this as easy as possible, as powerful as possible for people to measure in real time what does their traceability look like, how do I use traceability to effectively enhance the process and remediate actions before they might possibly happen.

So in summary, as systems development continues to increase in velocity, engineering leaders and program managers really need answers to those really tough questions. System modeling tools alone don’t easily provide that. With Jama [Connect]’s Live Trace Explorer, this is providing that real-time traceability score. Our approach for managing and controlling process is using actual data. Jama [Connect] is really the only one that can provide that holistic view. Very exciting.

And now, Saulius would love to show us how Dassault is connecting Jama [Connect] and CATIA Magic.

RELATED: Jama Connect^® for Traceable MBSE™

Saulius Pavalkis: So you saw the Jama [Connect]site. Now we’ll talk about the integration part with CATIA Magic leading SysML and MBSE solution for system architecture. So what is the reason, what is the differentiator, why it is the leading solution? So this was first product to support SysML v1, and pretty much all the versions from that was supported with the complete standard, following already for almost 20 years, as we can see, of the SysML appearance. Now we’ll be working on SysML v2, which will be another evolution and, again, the same goals. We became de facto standard for the many different project types in the industry, and pretty much the quality and scalability of the product and strict following of the standard enabled that. You can’t support all the big clients with the custom solutions unless you will follow some standard approach which allows to customize for each specific one later on.

And that brings us to our core values. So it is completely open. Also, as we will see here also from OpenAPI side, because that enabled us integrate in the proper way with the requirement management solution, Jama Software.

Standard compliance, another big deal because if you support the standard, maybe it is a bit harder than to integrate specifically for specific needs, right? But once you follow that, it’ll apply for all the different purposes, plus it will be clear which part of the integration needs to be updated with the standard update and with the tool development, which is not the case when you don’t follow the standards, right?

Efficiency and user-friendliness, ability to customize, and that’s like one of the most significant values because again, if you follow the standard, you get the 90% for the industry needs, but then you need to customize for specific industry, like what type of the data you want, as you saw in the Jama [Connect], you can select data set, what’s needed for specific project, have ability to create your own data set and then synchronize only on that data set and work on that model.

We support mostly system engineering community needs, and that is pretty much 90% or something of the product, because standard compliance is one thing, but then actually system engineering to enable better results with the model than PowerPoint, better tables and data management, and Excel is the key differentiator when you want to work with the model sufficiently.

The big part is continuity to disciplines. As you saw, traceability is big part of the Jama Software solution. Same for us, we dedicate most the attention for these integrations with the rest of the ecosystem. This is perhaps one of the most popular integrations, maybe the most popular integrations which we have. But in general, these are disciplines in engineering and analysis.

And also system engineering life cycle, as Cary mentioned, design reviews, this is very important process. Every organization goes through it and also in collaboration with suppliers, and that’s technically insight but also other processes which requires formal process with the approvals and baselines.

So talking about this integration specifically, we are using DataHub as integration framework. What are the highlights? It comes as a plugin actually for CATIA Magic. It’s built in in CATIA Magic. And this integration is also not an exception. It’s using this major integration framework, which is mostly for requirement tools integration. One of the most used integrations which we have is actually requirement management tools, and the most useful integration, used integration likely will be Jama Software integration from requirements management side. It provides similar experience for all the integrations and already set up operations which are common for the users, not to expect some surprises, but it is also redesigned to be more optimal, more user-friendly, and supports the standards like OSLC v2, but in our case, we are using direct API to Jama Connect, which is always the best case when you have ability to leverage that, and that shows again the openness of Jama Software and CATIA Magic.

RELATED: Empowering Efficiency: Parry Labs Selects Jama Connect^® for Seamless Use, Unparalleled Traceability, and Streamlined Review Cycles

Pavalkis: The workflow is very simple, so pretty much you connect the data source to Jama [Connect]. Jama [Connect] can be on the cloud, on premises. You select the scope for the synchronization. We support only one operation, copy and synchronize, which is by far the most popular one from all the experience we have. We then select the mapping based on the data sets selected, you know, could be new requirement types, could be new relations and so, and then we synchronize, first of all, by copying the data, but later on by checking changes, seeing the changes available and acting on those changes, synchronizing and acting on those changes with suspect links in our site. And also, on top of that, we support diagrams as an image interchange, which is a big deal because then you can actually work independently without all these requiring to see another solution for the part of the data.

Now, when we work together, what are the key connection highlights? So we support advanced authentication methods, simple authentication, and OAuth 2.0. On project selection, we select the data which will be available, what type of data will be available, and that data will allow us to map just to those elements from Jama Software type and see them synchronized to CATIA Magic using DataHub. As you can see here, we have this Cameo DataHub view in CATIA Magic, Cameo, and it is based on the same selected data in Jama Software for the project, right? And then you can see it with the icons with the exact representation that allows you to have the seamless interface.

The leverage, the same dedicated UI for identifying changes, what’s new, what is modified, move, delete it out of scope, and this allows us to see the change before synchronizing, so you can even apply element-by-element synchronization and, based on the direction of synchronization, you can choose one or another way to synchronize, which is always good to choose in advance not to have the conflicts on the authoritative source of truth.

We have number of items, type of elements in Jama Software which we synchronize. You can see the full list. It’s far more than just requirement, the different other types of attachments and so on. We allow, as I said before, to import the images to CATIA Magic and from CATIA Magic export diagrams as images to Jama, which allows you to review the diagrams in Jama Software and also see the architecture views from Jama Software and CATIA Magic and act on them.

To watch the webinar and see the demonstration of this integration, please visit:
Elevating MBSE with SysML: Jama Connect^® and CATIA Magic in Action

Jama Connect Features in Five: Jama Connect Interchange – What Sets Us Apart

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, Mario Maldari, Director of Solutions Architect at Jama Software – will demonstrate the Jama Connect to Jira integration via Jama Connect Interchange™.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Mario Maldari: Hello. My name is Mario Maldari and I’m the Director of solution architecture here at Jama Software. Today we’ll be discussing the Jama Connect to Jira integration via our Jama Connect Interchange. We’ll be focusing on some specific advantages and differentiators that our integration provides for our clients. These advantages provide added value to our integration and allow our clients to better meet the needs of their process and ultimately speed up their development time with improved quality.

Let’s start in Jama Connect’s Live Trace Explorer™ and analyze gaps in coverage between system requirements and user stories. We can easily drill down into the trace view and identify gaps within our coverage. Once the gaps are identified, we can create new user stories to satisfy the coverage and improve our traceability score. Let’s go ahead and do that.

You’ll now see the gap in coverage for this particular item has been satisfied and is no longer being flagged by the tool. One unique aspect of our Jira integration is that a user can configure the synchronization interval. It can range from 15 seconds to up to 24 hours. This built-in flexibility allows for the integration to be customized to meet the needs of many different process flows and organizational needs.

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

Maldari: Navigating back to the user story that we just created in Jama Connect, you will now see an integration URL has been populated to the corresponding user story that was just created in Jira. In this case, the synchronization was quick, 15 seconds. Any subsequent update made to the item in Jira will synchronize and reflect back in Jama Connect with the same frequency. This way the two tools are always kept in sync and there is essentially no lag time.

Another major differentiation that our integration provides is the ability to create conditional rules for the integration. This allows users to be very specific about conditions for the creation and synchronization. They do not have to worry about the burden and overhead of sinking their entire project. They can be very specific regarding the conditions.
As an example, imagine a process that dictates that a new user story in Jama Connect will only get created in Jira when the Jira status in Jama Connect is set to do. This provides the requirements manager a level of process control where they can review the user stories and determine which ones and when they should be created in Jira.

In the Jama Connect Interchange configuration, if I navigate to the creation rule tab, I can see that there is a rule for user story creation. It’s configured to be triggered when the Jira status is set to do. I can add any number of rules and conditions based on my particular process flow. This allows for customization at a lower level and does not require the entire project to be synchronized.
Now let’s see how this works in Jama Connect. Utilizing Jama Connect’s List View, I can see which stories do not currently have a Jira status field set. I can review these and determine that I would like them to be created and synchronized to my Jira project. I can utilize the bulk edit feature and set the status for multiple items at a time.

RELATED: How to Achieve Live Traceability™ with Jira^® for Software Development Teams

Maldari: Because of the conditional rule I have set in my Jama Connect Interchange settings, all three of these user stories will be created in Jira and participate in synchronization. You will see that the Jira URL has now been populated and the corresponding item has been created in Jira. This is just an example, but you can imagine how this flexibility can be applied across your projects and specific to your attributes.

Another important distinction to note is how relationships in Jama Connect and Jira are maintained through the integration. This allows for a more holistic, contextual view of how requirements and user stories relate outside the direct linkage of the integration. For example, as a developer in Jira, I may want to have a reference to how the requirements relate to upstream and downstream links. By choosing a relationship type and performing a field mapping, I’m able to get this reference to display as web links in Jira. As a developer in Jira, this allows me to get a sense for the overall context of the traceability.

In this example, a developer will see a user story come into their queue, and they will have a web link reference to the upstream and downstream requirements in Jama Connect. This provides them with additional context while working on developing the user story. They are even able to navigate directly to those items in Jama Connect for further detail.

One of our core philosophies at Jama Software is making our tools easy to use and therefore easy to adopt and maintain. Our integration to Jira is no exception. The user interface is point and click and the field mapping has intelligence built in that does most of the work for you. It’s also worth noting that we do not require you to be a Jama Connect administrator to set up, configure, and utilize our integration. Jama Connect Interchange also provides detailed event logging, which allows IT teams to monitor events and current status of the configured integrations.

As you can see, the Jama Connect to Jira integration offers teams a robust set of features with configuration options to meet various organizational needs. This flexibility and ease of use combined with specific well-thought-out functionality sets us apart from other requirement tools in Jira integrations. To find out more about our Jama Connect to Jira integration through our Jama Connect Interchange, please reach out to your customer success manager or visit our website today at jamasoftware.com

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

Jama Connect® Features in Five: Cameo Systems Modeler 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, Gary Hayes, Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software^® – will demonstrate the Cameo Systems Modeler integration with Jama Connect^® using Intercax Syndeia.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Gary Hayes: Hello, and welcome to the Features in Five Integration series. My name is Gary Hayes, and I am a Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software. Today, we will be walking through the Cameo Systems Modeler integration for 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, dramatically reduces the risk of product delays, cost overruns, defects, rework, and recalls, and ultimately results in faster time to market.

Let’s start off today by looking at the two environments that we’ll be working with, Jama Connect and Cameo Systems Modeler. In Jama Connect, in our project here, we have a folder called swarming along with five requirements we’ve identified that we wanna be using. If we look over the Cameo System Modeler, you notice that we have the same folder, but we only have four requirements listed there.

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

Hayes: We can easily compare the items that exist in both environments, the four that you see here. We go into the plug-in that we’re using, identify the SysML repository, and we drill down on that folder that contains those requirements, and we can do a comparison between the source and the target. The plug-in will do the comparison for us. We don’t have to drill down and do a close examination.

When we get our results, we see that everything is green, indicating to us that the items in the folders that have been synchronized indeed match at this point. We can close this out for the time being, but you’ll keep in mind that we only have four requirements in Cameo, but we have a fifth one that does not exist currently in Cameo that is in Jama Connect. So we want to make sure that both environments do indeed match, and we can do that easily by dragging and dropping using that same plug-in.

We go back into our dashboard. We find our SysML repository, and we find our Jama Connect project that we’re working with. Drill down on that to find those requirements that currently are being synchronized between the two environments. We can easily see that we have the swarming folder along with its five requirements from Jama Connect and four from our Cameo environment. And to match those up, we want to drag and drop this into our Cameo environment.

And you’ll notice over here as it brings that over, you notice in the background, the cameo environment updates automatically to reflect the fact that we’ve brought a new requirement into the cameo environment. We can further confirm that by doing a synchronization check, doing that comparison once again at the folder level, compare our source and target, and hopefully, we’ll get all green one more time to show that the environments do indeed match up. But we don’t always have the luxury of dragging and dropping and never making any changes in any environment, so what we’ll want to do is make a change in one environment and push that from one side to the other. So let’s go into this individual requirement, broadcast to Swarm, and it’s annotated that it is indeed from Jama Connect. So we’re gonna remove that annotation in its title.

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

Hayes: We’ll go ahead and save that in our Jama Connect environment. You’ll notice that’s updated. Now we want to be able to show that same type of update. We’ll do that comparison first to see where we’re at because we never know when changes will occur. We can do our compare, make sure that comparison actually works, and flag us for a change. And indeed, we do. It comes up as pink or red, depending on your monitor, and flags us that there has been a there’s a discrepancy between the two environments. And you’ll notice too that it does the comparison. It doesn’t automatically make the change, and you can see that in the background. And in our Cameo environment, that change has not rolled over from Jama Connect to Cameo. So let’s make that change, permanent now. Let’s go ahead and do that push. We can push from our target to our source.

Keep your eyes on the Cameo environment in the background. As we make that change and it gets pushed over, you’ll notice that the name or the description of the requirement in Cameo indeed has changed, and so that has been updated automatically for us. We can do one last check with our compare tool, comparing source and target. So we get all green just for one additional factor of confidence that we get there, and you can see it there. So that’s one way to keep your Cameo and Jama Connect environments in sync using a plug-in.

Thank you for watching this Features in Five session on the Cameo Systems Modeler integration for Jama Connect. 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® 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

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