Waterfall Requirements management at its best.
January 08, 2016
Waterfall Requirements management at its best.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Jama
Jama was used at my former employer as an internal service offering to all company project teams. It was offered free of charge to any client we were supporting as a requirements management tool and also addressed requirements traceability, defect tracking, test case management, and a data object dictionary in some cases.
- Requirements generation and workflow. It's fairly simple to set up a requirements template and create a workflow for progression.
- Hierarchical categorization. While it may not seem like a big deal but the ease of which you can create parent child relationships makes it easy to group similar requirements (user stories) under related epics or folders. This is very helpful when trying to visualize at a glance what releases contained which features and not something some Agile tools are very good at..ahem...JIRA.
- Requirements traceability. While it does offer some pretty good traceability options it could benefit from more dynamic updates. (e.g. If all my downstream requirements are "met," how about auto updating a status field in the upstream requirement so I can tell the larger item (epic) is complete?
- Jama-JIRA connector was spotty at times. We used this to connect high level requirements down to the agile teams that were working on them, synchronization seemed to be working about 85% of the time.
- Project administrators don't have enough permissions. For example you need to be a Jama administrator [or] a project admin to create workflow for your particular project. You also cannot customize object types (e.g. a requirement). I don't know any two projects that use all the same fields.
- Faster, more accurate reporting. Prior to one of the projects I worked on, requirements traceability reporting was a manual asynchronous affair. That is to say whenever there was an update we had to make sure all of our spreadsheets were up to date. Jama did wonders for our requirements integrity from that sense, and made it much easier to generate various reports depending on what was being asked.
These products serve two different purposes really, JIRA with the GreenHopper plugin is a more tactical minded application.