Item: Jama Connect
Rating: 7
Author: Cristian Bodnarasec

Overall Satisfaction with Jama

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Jama has been chosen by our product marketing group to fill their need for a tool where they can describe the product requirements(from the Executive Summary down to detailed product specifications), have a common place for related files, collaborative edits on documents and for supporting the review process. The planning features like the project notion and scheduling the releases are used as well.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Product requirements: a nice and easy way of writing requirements, keeping them classified and organized
Requirements review: the information to review is displayed intuitively in the User Interface and adding your review comments is enabled for every line item in an individual paragraph
Administration: for a cloud application the administrative features are extensive with an acceptable level of details

Cons

User roles and permissions: I would like to use the company's Active Directory groups when granting permissions for projects. We have it integrated with Okta, however, I can only add people to Jama one by one.
Out of the box reporting - you can never have enough reporting or custom reporting capabilities. However. Jama has just several and only on demand. Automatic scheduling of reports is not there.
For more complex requirements you may find it a little difficult to use Jama.
Price may be an issue for many. It is a cost per user and it is more expensive that other cloud tools we use, with a bigger ROI than Jama.

Return on Investment

For our marketing team, it made a difference having it all in one place, improving the team's collaboration on requirements reviews.
We are not sure yet if the cost for this software is worth paying for since we are not using it at its full capabilities; we will reevaluate at renewal.
We were thinking of adopting this tool also for software requirements and test plans, but we realized that it is not suitable for an Agile development methodology.

Alternatives Considered

Atlassian Confluence

We are using Confluence for software projects requirements. Even if it is not as dedicated to requirements as Jama is, software developers will choose Confluence over Jama if they already have JIRA for their Agile software development. The Confluence macros are a big plus over Jama. However, for nontechnical teams it makes sense to go with a lighter, nicer and easier to use tool like Jama, and that is what we did for our marketing department.

Likelihood to Recommend

For simple requirements that need to go in one place and through a review process with a team, Jama is a good option. It has a nice, readable way of presenting the content, making it easier for people to review and provide feedback. It also offers support for adding test cases along with test plans, so my opinion that this tool is fit for non-technical people that need to manage a non-software development project with the goal of achieving good results(like a marketing team describing product marketing requirements).

Comments

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Jama for product requirements