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.
N/A
Micro Focus Caliber (discontinued)
Score 1.3 out of 10
N/A
Caliber by Micro Focus (formerly Borland Caliber), is an application requirement management offering. It has been discontinued, but similar capabilities are supplied by Micro Focus by Dimensions RM.
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
I personally would prefer other products on the market right now such as Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Test Manager. I think having a product like Caliber that can only do requirements without integrating with a another system makes things a little more time consuming.
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.
Borland Caliber tracks functional and non-functional requirements pretty easily. You can easily add a requirement and attach a spreadsheet or a picture if needed.
Moving the hierarchy of requirements is fairly easy by just dragging and dropping.
Assigning users to approve requirements is simple by the fields included when adding a requirement and then submitting for review.
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.
I think Borland Caliber visually needs to be updated. It looks very out of date compared to other products on the market. The text box has a notepad feel to it and it's hard to make it visually catching.
Borland Caliber needs to be easier to integrate with other testing and development products on the market.
Having fields more related to URS and FRS would be helpful to auto-link to a document. So enter in a URS or FRS document ID at the beginning of a project in Caliber and then auto-assigning requirement IDs to link to pieces of code or test cases and having the user be able to decide a naming convention.
Borland Caliber needs a specific table for linking to a document ID and then each requirement could auto-generate a sub ID for each requirement to make the process of filling in User Requirements and Functional Requirements more efficient. Then the user should be able to modify the sub ID if the naming convention needed to be different.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think Borland Caliber is better than Atlassian Confluence and has way more options for ease of use and reporting. Team Foundation Server is my personal choice as it comes as a package for developers to link to requirements easily and link to test cases. Borland Caliber is visually the least attractive of the three systems I have used. If you need just a requirement manager for tracking and reporting then Borland Caliber is a great choice.
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.
