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.
Gemini is well suited to help track issues and change requests, projects, bugs, time logs, etc. It is less appropriate for reporting needs or general office management needs.
It is great for engaging stakeholders, both junior and senior because it is a friendly and easy to user interface. Just like any tool, it does need people that are willing to even engage, if they do however they will find Jama Connect very easy to engage with compared to some tools like DOORS which are technically very good, but the interface is less friendly. I find that Jama Connect is not as good for data export e.g. to Word documents. It is probably very possible to use Velocity to get what you need, but that is a very complex and difficult system compared to say DOORS Word Export.
File De-Duplication - Gemini does a great job of finding files that are bit-for-bit identical to each other. Typically these are caused by user replication, and Gemini sniffs them out and displays them for easy user decisions.
Similar Photo identification - Got a lot of similar photos, but not the exact same one? That's ok, this is a huge source of wasted space, and Gemini can deal with these too. If you're a "spray and pray" type of photographer, Gemini will help you clean up near-duplicate photos, helping you keep only the best.
Fast File Triage - Once Gemini has identified all these duplicates, what do you do with them? Gemini helps you triage the list of duplicates and easily decide which copies to keep. This is handy if you want to keep all files in the X folder, but not in the Y folder.
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.
Sometimes when I search for an Ad Group, duplicates appear. But when I go into the Campaign and look for the Ad Group, there is only one.
The line in which it says which Campaign and then Ad Group you are in should be frozen so that it would easier to select the Campaign to go back & then into a different Ad Group.
You can't search for a keyword by its affiliate id. That is extremely frustrating. When I search for a keyword by its name, it brings up all keywords with that name, no matter what match type it has.
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.
Gemini's development team continues to improve the product and provides a comprehensive roadmap of upcoming features that makes you want to upgrade as soon as a new version comes out.
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
The requirements and baseline parts are easy to use. The review centre is very useable and understandable, once you understand/set up the moderation. (This last part could use some refinement.) Integration/connectability (the Connect part of Jama) is quite possible, but the useability could use some love as well.
It has always been available, except for preventative maintenance which is announced beforehand. Nonetheless, we experienced one day shortage over a miscommunication about payment.
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've never had any problems with the support for the Gemini application itself, but it seems every time I re-install (on a single machine), I run into a licensing issue. As a result, I need to go to the app's website and request that my activation key gets reset or resent. In either case, it's a pain, but as I have to reinstall infrequently, it's a small price to pay for an otherwise solid application.
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.
Helpful and exhaustive and tailorable for our needs. Instructor was well versed and engaged. Material was a good reference and was up to date with tool. Overall, in person training was valuable for tool introduction. Trainer was an active user of the tool and worked closely with other clients. So, very knowledgeable.
Easy to reference and understand. Updated routinely to include new topics. Online training evolves to include more advanced topics and how to guides. Online training includes videos and reference guides that make it easy to perform more complex tasks. Online training is free and can be accessed from any computer.
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.
I have also used Google Adwords Editor - 4 stars and Bing Editor - 2 stars. The fact that it's so easy to edit a bid in Gemini is a big deal. And the toggle switch that changes a keyword or ad group from active to paused is extremely useful and easier to use than the drop down menus that Google Adwords Editor and Bing Editor use.
Polarion did not have the outside sales support that Jama Connect has. Polarion seems better suited for an Agile development lifecycle rather than an evergreen repository of requirements, design features, and verifications. Excel is the low-cost/low-feature requirements management solution. It's limitation to being a flat repository is also it's greatest strength, as the contents can be incorporated into other deliverables quite easily. DOORS is... DOORS.
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.
