Jama Review for the Curious Mind
September 20, 2017
Jama Review for the Curious Mind
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Jama
Jama started being used as a part of a larger department of 25 people which also served as the "test bed" and "pilot" for cross-company as well as enterprise-wide use (we currently are a company of about 800 that is a part of a bigger corporation consisting of thousands of staff). The business problem it addresses is that it provides far better ability to enter, track, manage and report on software requirements than our previous application. It also solves the age old problem of costly maintenance and customization of tools such as this.
- Jama has the keen ability to provide hierarchy for requirements in a collapsible tree style management view allowing for far better reach of information then many of the other system we have used.
- Jama has the ability to create filters, tags and custom searches in order to better disseminate large scale requirements in order to be able to get from building to testing in less time.
- Jama possesses the ability to create and link between test assets and have a very intelligible view of managing the bridge between both worlds. It also allows for creation and management of test runs for different iterations of the test cycle; whether it is a dry run, full regression or partial corner case execution.
- Jama has great ability to create custom output from Excel files to Word which can filter and mine the data from requirements to test assets and present them in different print view for consumption of different audiences and stakeholders in different parts of the teams.
- Jama can have better overall SDLC management components especially bridging between different ALM tools.
- Jama is not an ALM tool but can have some better customization of defect reporting mechanisms as well as test run approach.
- Jama's ability to break out steps into sub-children in a test plan hierarchy can use a bit of improvement to make it more modular.
- Jama has brought some new life to our requirements management and how we see the inter-connectivity of functional requirements with System Requirement Specifications which are more UI centric.
- Jama has brought much better dashboards and reporting for everything it supports from printing test plans, requirements and specifications as well as test runs.
- Jama has had some challenge in usability as far as training and discovering features we did not know about. There seems to be a different way to do one thing and that is sometimes hard to hone in on how the best approach is. It is more open ended then many other tools like this. Training we have had but it seems that needs to be a repeated period requirement.
Jama has a lot going for it. Although it may not seamlessly plug in from the get-go into ALM tools or be an ALM tool itself, I believe it has a very bright future. In comparison to Rational Doors, we believe for our needs, it is much more of an bang-for-the-buck and feature rich for the amount of time needed to get up and running. We believe it is also more stable than Doors.
Since it is not an ALM application, it would not be fair to compare it to one but if Jama expands into that market aggressively, it can be a viable player.
Since it is not an ALM application, it would not be fair to compare it to one but if Jama expands into that market aggressively, it can be a viable player.