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Jama Connect

Jama Connect

Overview

What is Jama Connect?

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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Recent Reviews

My Review

8 out of 10
February 16, 2024
Incentivized
We use Jama Connect to create, review, and manage relationships among needs, requirements, use conditions, design V&V test docs, and risks …
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Jama review

10 out of 10
March 27, 2023
Incentivized
Jama is used for Requirements Management and Test Plan Management across a few different Business Units in the company I work for. While …
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Thanks Jama!

7 out of 10
March 24, 2023
Incentivized
We use Jama to manage our system architecture. This includes all levels of requirements and those trace down to our testing protocols. …
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Awards

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Pricing

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What is Jama Connect?

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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  • No setup fee

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  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is Jira Software?

JIRA Software is an application lifecycle management solution for software development teams. It allows users to create, prioritize and track the progress of tasks across multiple team members, and offers a wide range of integrations. It is offered via the cloud and local servers.

What is iRise?

iRise offers a prototyping and design platform for software development.

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Product Details

What is Jama Connect?

Jama Software® is focused on maximizing innovation success in multidisciplinary engineering organizations. Jama Connect® requirements management software is used to minimize the risk of defects, rework, cost overruns, and recalls in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, software-defined vehicles, and surgical robotics. Jama Connect enables engineering organizations to manage their development processes by leveraging Live Traceability™ across tools to measurably improve outcomes. The company states its customer base spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, financial services, and insurance industries.

The #1 problem managing the product development process is identifying risk early across siloed teams and tools.

Jama Connect® is designed to improve product requirement quality, auto-detects product development risk, and measurably increases performance across multi-disciplinary teams developing products, systems, and software — while still allowing the use of their tools of choice. With Jama Connect, teams can identify in real time:
Poorly written requirements with recommended improvements
Missing, changed, or late requirements
Gaps in verification and validation test coverage
Changes made in one engineering discipline that impact others

Product, Systems, and Software Development Teams that Use Jama Connect Perform Better.

With Jama Software's proprietary Traceability Scores™, teams can measure traceability to improve quality and accelerate time to market.

Jama Connect enables these six critical things for development success:
  1. Intelligently improve requirements
  2. Bring all collaboration and reviews online
  3. Unify test case management
  4. Auto-detect development risk
  5. Maintain product state across tools
  6. Manage product complexity and scale

Jama Connect Screenshots

Screenshot of Jama Connect - Live TraceabilityScreenshot of Jama Connect - Project Dashboard ViewScreenshot of Jama Connect - Requirements Management

Jama Connect Videos

Jama Connect Integrations

Jama Connect Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Polarion ALM, codeBeamer ALM, and Digital.ai TeamForge are common alternatives for Jama Connect.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.2.

The most common users of Jama Connect are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).

Jama Connect Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)0%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)30%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)70%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(147)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Stephen Czerniej P.Eng, PMP® | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Jama connect is being used for new projects in our organization and in particular, larger more complicated projects. Business issues to resolve: - requirement traceability - cross timezone communication - stakeholder input and acknowledgement - process improvement and requirement ownership
  • Requirement traceability and relationship flow. There are many different ways to show your coverage, flow of requirements, and where they are in a larger perspective of the project.
  • Review communication through the review engine is particularly well done.
  • Ease of using the system - the ergonomics is excellent. My users have an easy time getting used to working with otherwise complicated structures and organization.
  • The ability to pull information from different angles is excellent. The filters are very useful and other products don't compete here like Visure, Doors, etc...
  • The initial dashboard is very limited in functionality and views. The bar charts and pie charts are useful but quite cumbersome given you have to specify your filters beforehand. This is very important in my opinion as this is the top level summary that 90% of your management will only look at.
  • Coverage explorer - only 150 items at one time. This should be expand to all...
  • Verification and Validation need improvement on being able to package and coordinate test runs, cycles, and platform variations of these items. This is a bit cumbersome and difficult for beginner users to get used to.
  • It is very annoying and counterproductive that the users have to directly click "logout" to open up licenses. Admins can't boot people out of the system actively to fix if someone has to go home. You have to wait for 2hrs + for their license to expire.
  • Create/Edit licenses not defaulting to collaborator licenses is also very annoying for admins especially during very large concept stage input/reading efforts into Jama.
Well suited - requirement writing, decomposition, verification, and validation connection Not well suited - using Jama for project management and creating work packages
  • Positive - ROI - This is a hard estimate, but let's say we save at least 70% of email back and forth over 3 timezones using Jama in a project.
  • Negative Impact on ROI - too early to tell really since we are running Jama for a year only.
We expected to achieve and I believe have achieved: - Improved organization and content quality of requirements - Better requirement communication across organizations/departments that have difficult times to communicate. - Connect customer requirements/use cases to the technical derivation or decomposition - Provide a better home for verification and validation test cases with traceability to the sources - In general, a large improvement of a visual and detailed overview of traceability of requirements from regulatory requirements all the way down to risk items.
I have been an admin with Top Team Analyst as well as have played/practiced a bit with Visure and Doors. Jama is considerably better than Visure and Doors on the collaboration, reviews and traceability than Visure and Doors. Top Team analyst is a closer competitor that has better strengths in layout and form than Jama when writing detailed solutions and work packages, but Jama is better in collaboration and reviews for sure.
Jama suited our need for collaboration and communication plus a difficult stakeholder's approval roadblock. Jama provides a very easy to use interface and communication system that brought in the buy-in from all stakeholders based on the communication problems we needed to solve. Visure, Doors, TTA didn't quite perform as well in the communication/collaboration department where we really needed a boost.

One considerable difference I find is the review engine that Jama has. It truly is one of the most important things to be able to bring in many different parties from many different organizations into a review process and combine those reviews in an easy to read and manageable process. I think Jama really prioritizes and excels with his feature.
Yes
Excel, JIRA, ad hoc attempts of requirement organization, and other simple tools.
Program and systems engineering development.
Systems engineering and requirements management background. Design experience, architectural systems engineering experience, general computer (university) skills, networking and IT admin experience.
  • External and internal party reviews.
  • Requirement to test case traceability.
  • Requirement baselines and decision making history for complex projects.
  • Create project specific review boards.
  • Create test case specific artifacts that tie directly into internal test systems.
  • Develop program level requirements that can be distributed to many lower level projects in one process.
  • Connect to MBSE tools.
  • Connect to other enterprise tools.
  • Deeper automated testing integration with internal scripts/testing equipment.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Jama Connect is the source of truth for requirements within the SKA Organisation (SKAO). We have used internally within SKAO to communicate between Engineering, Operations, and Scientists, but also to do requirement reviews with external consortia, to get their input. We are also using it for requirement flow-down and traceability, and using several report tools. With the SKAO being a non-profit organization, the main goal is delivering maximum value for the system being designed and later implemented, and having an agile way of dealing with requirements helps us.
  • Having access to requirements from everywhere in the world.
  • Requirement reports for document-centric parts of the development.
  • Support for online reviews and discussions.
  • Cloud-based installations don't have full access to all reporting tools.
  • Online reporting templates are not too customizable.
  • Glossaries are not first-class citizens in Jama; it should be possible to link to glossary entries directly from requirements, and vice-versa.
It is a good way of providing a full framework for requirements management which is customizable; however, interoperability functions are not its forte. Support for ReqIF or other formats is not provided out-of-the-box, and would be very welcome. Also, integration with Jira requires a third-party product, but it is an integration that might be worth keeping in-house.
  • We do not measure the Return of Investment. We have moved past the Critical Design Review and moving into construction.
  • We expect to be able to measure ROI in the form of increased contingency in the next phase.
  • Engagement with the tool has not been universal; we had many people relying on the exported Word/PDF documents instead of providing feedback on Jama Connect directly or through reviews. Also many people are using Xray to manage testing of requirements in Jama, and need to integrate with it, currently testing a third-party tool for that.
  • We have been able to apply for a non-for-profit license for JIRA and Confluence; we don't seem to have such a possibility with Jama.
Easy management of requirements with integration to the Engineering Change Process. We have somewhat been successful in that, by creating reviews on sets of comments, and later importing the feedback into the system, but it is not too clear. Being able to link testing outcomes and testing plans with similar structures in Jama is the next step of the plan.
The internal model for Jama is sound, and traceability and suspect links are some of the best tools that we have. However, interoperability is not the best, and many times the requirements being provided by other parties needed a lot of massaging before being able to be imported in Jama.
I am also familiar with ReqIF Studio, and the NoMagic DataHub for requirement management. Jama requires no installation, and the use of floating licenses is quite useful. As long as your workflow can be kept in Jama, everything works OK. However, interoperability is the weak link, and DOORS has better interoperability. ReqIF Studio's support of the ReqIF standard is another good point, but collaboration requires a merging workflow that is cumbersome.
No
60
The main users of Jama Connect are the Systems Engineering, Project Engineering, and Mission Assurance teams. In addition, also the System Scientists, and the domain specialists outside of SKAO also make use of it. The number is a rough estimate… but we have ~60 fixed seats, and around 500 floating seats.
5
The System Engineering team is the main supporter of Jama Connect for the rest of the organisation.
  • Requirements Management
  • Compliance to requirements through testing evidence
  • Checking progress of system verification
Not Sure
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.
Yes
It was recognised as a bug, and a timeline for the release of the solution was provided.
They were able to diagnose a difficult fault… because the problem had been human generated without our knowledge. They were able to pinpoint the result, and provide a way of reverting a manual operation that, from the manual, could result in definitive loss of data. The data was recovered, and a new feature added for the future.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Jama Connect for collecting/gathering different types of requirements (i.e. business requirements, functional requirements, and non-functional requirements). We also used to get approval for those requirements to start working on it. Also, we use this as the golden source for all types of work to then track in JIRA.
  • Jama provides flexibility to add customized types of items, e.g. functional requirements, components or projects. Jama is useful for adding any specific attribute in any type of item.
  • Jama is useful to track approvals or get approvals for any specific requirement and proceed with it.
  • Jama provides a complete history of activities related to any item.
  • Jama doesn't provide any functionality or features to add any item type that has user validation in place. i.e. we added Jama_Authors item type and then used the same to create an attribute for the story. That attribute can't have the user validation, or we can not add it in Jama.
  • ALM protocol doesn't support URL type attributes in Jama 8. That must be fixed.
  • Jama doesn't provide an audit history of administrators on the UI to track the administrative activities.
  • Jama says 25,000 active items per project is good to get better performance, but it is less.
In the case of Requirement Management and Test Plans, Jama Connect is well suited. But in the case of tracking the progress of each requirement, task, or defect, JIRA is better than Jama. Workflows and other features of JIRA are better when compared to Jama. Also, Jama's backup strategy and support are not that as good as JIRA's. That's why I would not recommend Jama if you want more from the application.
  • Jama is providing good requirement gathering management which starts our current agile process and helps it run smoothly to quickly deliver objectives in less time.
  • Jama is only providing the approval mechanism for requirements, and that's the difference I see between Jama and JIRA. JIRA is a state management tool and it can be used to gather the requirements.
  • Jama is our golden source of all the requirements. It helped to link the requirements in ALM or in JIRA, which helps to resolve the redundant work as it is compatible to work with Tasktop.
We used Jama as requirement gathering purpose and we have achieved it very well. From the functionality perspective also from the automation perspective we achieved 60% from the Jama.

Jama doesn't provide self onboarding if it uses the LDAP directory and that is creating extra work for L1/L2 team. so, automation forJama can not be possible to reduce the manual efforts. Also, Jama doesn't provide the proper audition history which also doesn't satisfy most of the needs.
Jama is well managed in the sense of traceability, reuse, export or importing batches etc. Reuse operation is very useful to avoid redundant work. Jama reviews are helpful in case someone needs to review the requirements before approving it. Then, we can add multiple reviewers. This functionality is good in all other tools. Upstreams functionality is useful when we have two or more epics or stories upstream.
I have mostly worked with ALM and JIRA Software. they are good enough to gather the requirements but not much like Jama software. JIRA doesn't provide approval mechanism and ALM doesn't provide traceability and reuse or reviews functionalities so in all of them Jama is better to gather the requirements in SDLC framework. JIRA has too many plugins which add the extra functionalities to JIRA without vendor support. This is lacking in Jama and to only to get approval for requirements, we don't need to spend a lot of money on licenses.
15000
All business streams including development and support teams are using Jama Connect as our requirement gathering tool. Jama is used across all of the domains to write a requirement and acceptance criteria of each of those. Jama Connect is well suited for all kind of requirements, that’s the reason it is more popular in all of the business streams.
3
We generally recommend a DevOps background person to support Jama Connect. From the functional perspective to support Jama, there must be a skilled and knowledgeable person required because Jama is too vast to understand all the functionalities they provide, such as relationships, upstreams, connected users, attributes important, reuse operations etc. There are many more operations that can be supported by a skilled worker only.
  • Requirement gathering including business, functional and non-functional requirements.
  • Requirement gathering for development work and get the approvals for those requirements.
  • Reporting of all the requirement statues for presentation.
  • Integrating all these requirements with multiple applications like JIRA and ALM to reduce the redundant work.
  • Creating new requirements types
  • Creating new attributes in those requirement types
  • Using reuse operations
  • Linking Jama to Octane for the requirements and so that those requirements will be connected to test cases, test plans, and test results.
  • Creating new requirement item types and also new attributes to support the ongoing needs.
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.
Not Sure
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Third-party Reviews
Product usability and features are most important while purchasing any license. We look to see if it's really worth it to spend money on a thing that is going to help to improve the SDLC framework, bring traceability, and also provide good reporting to get the status of current projects. The product must reduce manual intervention and it should work as SaaS in local instance also. It should not have any issues in any areas of the platform.
Personally, I don't recommend using Jama Connect if you are looking for a requirement gathering system only, if you already have tools like JIRA or ALM. If there is JIRA, then you can develop your own approval plugin and it can bring the same functionality as Jama in JIRA. Most of the other features are available in JIRA, so we can use JIRA as development gathering tool. JIRA has a wide range of plugins that improve its the functionalities.

If there is no constraint on your budget, then I would recommend Jama for requirement gathering since we can keep requirements in separate tool and link those requirements to different tools. Even Tasktop-like tools consider Jama as the golden source of information.
  • Implemented in-house
No
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
There are many things that fall under change management such as certificate management, database whitelisting-connectivity, and other audit perspective things that need to be considered before the actual implementation. There were actually very few issues, but those did need to be sorted out before the actual implementation of Jama in multiple environments.
  • Jama 2015.5 was really very smooth and there were no issues faced while implementing.
  • With Jama 8, we have too many challenges due to multiple processes and interconnection of those processes.
  • Jama 8 had many bugs, but fixing them was not a Jama priority.
  • Jama 8 doesn't have good performance results which is the reason multiple teams don't want to upgrade the current environment 2015.5 version to Jama 8.
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.
  • Self-taught
Internal training is sufficient to learn Jama.
In the case of Jama 2015.5, it is very smooth and very simple. But in Jama 8, they made it quite complex.
There should be only one configuration file and startup file. Also for setting environment variables, there should be only one environment variable file before you start Jama. Where customers want to configure their project and with which database must be the choice of customers. Right now, Jama doesn't support Oracle.
We added customized item types and their attributes or report templates in Jama Connect.
Support teams fail to push the current defects to development teams to fix it. Jama doesn't provide 24/7 support, but it creates a lot of dependency. SOAP API calls and REST APIs are also not available for some of the automation which creates problems and adds extra cost to manage the resources doing those manually.
Yes
No, bug reports are never solved. Jama Connect has not fixed or prioritized reported bugs. One bug of Jama 8 is that TDS protocol doesn't support URL field of Jama, and it is impacting a lot of our projects. But, it still has not been fixed in the last 8 months.
Jama supported us on the weekend when they generally don't support on weekends or on their off hours. We were facing some issues with the application and we wanted to fix it on weekend, but we wanted help from vendor. They helped with prior notice of one week.
  • Creating item types and their attributes. In the case of Jama 2015.5, it is very smooth and very simple. But in Jama 8, they made it quite complex.
  • Reusing existing items for a new set of requirements.
  • Finding the activities of each item and history.
  • Adding users in Jama is a completely manual process and it is really very difficult to add in each group. User onboarding must be more simple.
  • Jama's database schema is more difficult to understand. We can not read or write a query for any work using the current names of tables. Jama's database schema must be simpler.
  • Doing automation with Jama REST or SOAP API is quite difficult.
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.
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.
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.
There are many challenges, we faced while integrating Jama with JIRA due to field values and attribute names. We need changes on both sides for any integration requirement, and that is time consuming. But, this integration really helps to reduce manual work and improve productivity.
  • File import/export
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
Tasktop
Jama is easy to integrate with multiple applications as field values or attributes of each item types are common and we can integrate with the destination's item types. Conversion of item type supported in Jama creates problems in case of integration, since conversion can't be supported in integrations most of the time.
If an item is integrated with any of the application, then Jama should not allow any conversion of that item otherwise the integration breaks. Also, REST API performance must be better because as soon as we increase the frequency of hits, Jama's performance gets degraded.
The vendor is good.
After the sales process, the vendor is average for the response to queries which raise support issues. We have a problem with their support hours as they don't have 24/7 support and it delays the resolution. We need to wait until their support member comes online, and even then we cannot set up meetings immediately.
I never participated directly in negotiating but I was aware about the negotiation process with vendor. We generally keep in mind support, licensing cost and escalation process while negotiating, as well as defects resolution, audit perspective principles, and security vulnerabilities.
Ask for 24/7 support in case of production issues or outages if you are negotiating. Also, set the SLA time for the issue resolution. For premier support tickets, SLA must be there. Performance related issues must be resolved with patches and any defects that need immediate attention or require an immediate fix must be provided by the vendor in a set time frame. Right now, Jama doesn't prioritize the defects on customer impact, they prioritize on their own.
Yes
The new release of Jama from 2015.3 to 2015.5 went very smooth without any issues. There were problems with 2015.5 to Jama 8 upgrade process. Jama has changed its base completely and provides only dockerfiles for Jama 8, which is not acceptable. They must provide options for individual customer need. They haven't tested Jama 8 outside the docker (since they support only that environment). Maybe they have changed this recently?
  • Some defects got fixed
  • New performance related improvements
  • New features
  • New fields support
  • Jama should provide REST API for more actions.
  • Jama should provide major features like support of plugins to customize the needs of the customer.
  • Jama should fix current major defects which I have discussed earlier.
No
No
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