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.
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Planview AgilePlace
Score 8.8 out of 10
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AgilePlace is a project management solution built around flexibility, data-driven analytics, and workflow automation. The software was acquired by Planview in December 2017 to expand that company's capabilities.
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
This tool enables the visual management needed in many offshore teams to easily and quickly see the pending work, work in progress and completed work.For teams that work with a waterfall methodology and do not have AGILE internalized, I believe there are other solutions from Planview or other providers.
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.
Ability to color code cards based on type, giving better visibility to the variety of tasks a team handles
Ability to set deadline dates and have those dates easily visible
Flexibility in design the kanban board. It is easy to add a lane or make a change on the fly. Work doesn't have to stop and a long process created to make simple layout changes.
Movement of cards is easy as well as the ability to connect cards to show dependencies.
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 Connect is not adding many extra features with their major releases. It showed launched new features, but those are not very useful for developers or creators working with Jama. From the performance side, Jama has been reduced it's performance in Jama 8 as compared to Jama 2015.5 from the functional perspective. The test suite must be provided by Jama to test the performance and function of things in our instance, but Jama doesn't provide it. Also, Jama requires a lot of manual intervention for adding users.
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.
LeanKit isn't the best designed Kanban system I've seen, but overall it's pretty usable. The boards I've used are pretty complex, so it can be difficult to find things. I found that searching and filtering for specific cards was somewhat of a challenge. Dragging a card from one lane to another is kind of a fun way to get things done though.
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 that LeanKit is very similar to Asana's Kanban feature and Trello, but is much less sleek looking than Asana. Asana's clean and sleek UI makes me enjoy project management much more than LeanKit. It might sound silly that the UI makes so much of a difference to me, but it really does. Trello is also sleeker than LeanKit, but I still prefer Asana because it has more customization options and a better interface. We are actually going to look into switching to ClickUp because we wanted something with a better UI. ClickUp seems to have a great UI with a lot of customization options.
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.
