Beyond Compare from Scooter Software headquartered in Madison is a utility for comparing different version of documents and seeing the differences. It also allows changes to be merged and synchronized.
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Jama Connect
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Jama Connect® is a Requirements Management software and Requirements Traceability solution. Jama Software enables teams to manage product requirements and enable Live Traceability™ across the development process, in order to reduce cycle times and improve product quality.
Beyond Compare is extremely good at the task of comparisons, whether that is text file comparisons or folder comparisons. It does a great job of easily highlighting the differences for users, and giving them the option of merging (in the case of text files) or synchronizing (in the case of folders.) In either case, no one on my team has ever had any reason to reach for another different tool.
Jama is an excellent tool for requirements management, development, and traceability throughout the development lifecycle. Jama aids in peer reviews of generated artifacts with time-boxed review cycles. Jama provides a robust ecosystem which is highly tailorable to the demands of the particular organization in which it is used
Focus in the content without loosing the track of the evolution of the items by maintaining the exchange of information between the users inside the Tool.
The possibilities to integrate this tool within our IT-landcape and with our other engineering tools is for us a leverage to success.
For date formatting discrepancies the software does not automatically mark the dates as equivalent; for instance ‘2019/10/15’ vs. ‘15-OCT-2019’. This would be considered a difference.
The columns/report must be ordered similarly. If extra data is available in one file, it should be removed or extra rows will be marked as differences.
For spreadsheet comparison, the user must save the file on the proper tab and then “recompare” within the tool. There is no way to switch between sheets in the software.
The 'filtering' capabilities in Jama are not as good as they could be. In particular, the ability to "nest" filters is quite limited. I have certain seen much better capabilities in other tools. ('Cradle' is an example of a tool with excellent "nested filters" capabilities.)
From an administrative point of view, the 'License' admin view is pretty disappointing. The particular thing that I'd like to be able to find out from it is the peak number of 'Float Creator' licenses in concurrent use on each day. If there's a way to get to that information, I haven't found it yet.
Jama is really easy to use and operate compared to other tools. This allows a process owner to get easier buy-in from the organization to see value early. My experience with this tool was very positive and we were able to see value early in its introduction
Again, given the intuitive nature of this program, there is barely any learning curve needed. It is simple, reliable, accurate, and just one of those tools you always have with you and rarely think about until you don't have it. Then it is a case of OMG what was I thinking? This program is just very easy to use, and that makes it more valuable to me than some of my other software tools that cost significantly more.
Jama is mostly designed for requirement gathering, but that can be possible using JIRA if we add only approval type of plugin for special requirement types. Jama's performance and features do not improve on a periodic basis i.e. with each release. Even bug fixes take a lot of time and they don't care about customer impact.
Jama is available most of the time if it is used within the application's boundary. Jama has very good availability if we use very high hardware servers. Sometimes we face issues if there are batch operations running.
With performance compared to JIRA, I do recommend Jama in this case. Jama provides very good performance, it loads immediately for any of the items and searches any item immediately. Performance is really good in all of the operations including creating stories, epics, item types or other support operations or report generation.
I have never needed support for this product other than learning how to use a new feature I was not familiar with. User forums and user groups that have used this product for their own purposes have always sufficed for anything that I needed help using with the product. Some of the features could be a little better outlined, but overall very easy to use.
They typically answer within minutes of posting a ticket, and then you have a clear expectation of what the issue is, how to diagnose it, how long will it take to get resolved, and in which version a given problem is resolved, or if there is a patch for hosted services. They have a number of support people, and all of them are top-notch.
Jama 2015.5 implementation is very smooth and no need for much manual work. Jama 8 has many challenges and we can not install it as smoothly as Jama 2015.5. Initially, Jama didn't provide the Jama 8's installer files or zip files and they were just providing docker files to everyone (which was really strange). It is the worst that they don't provide all the files at a time. Why should they tell us where we should deploy, and why only a dockerfile? I am not very satisfied with Jama implementation.
We've tried many: Code Compare, Meld, UltraCompare, and WinMerge. None of them have the depth of features and speed to handle the work we throw at Beyond Compare. The multi-tabbed interface allows us to sync multiple servers at the same time. It understands multiple file types, metadata, and encodings. It's the best tool for the job.
The major sellingpoints of Jama were the review-system for internal and external reviewers and the inclusion of (Use Case) modelling tools, while keeping the core requirements-centric. Ability to synchronise with currently in use test-tooling and the low learning curve were additional selling points. Availablity of support in our local language was much appreciated as well.
There is no horizontal scalability available in Jama, we have only one choice to scale it vertically. But vertical scalable applications always have limitations to grow. In this case, Jama doesn't support horizontal scalability functions like multi-node architectures with a shared drive for the home directory.
