Robust and functional, but average user experience
May 03, 2019

Robust and functional, but average user experience

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Jama Connect

Jama Connect is currently being used by our organization in one main department, but other teams also have access and reference it from time to time. It addresses 3 main needs: to integrate with JIRA which we use internally, to be our external face for our customers and to be our main source for reporting.
  • We like the feature where we can put things up for review externally and assign different people to either view or approve them.
  • The dashboard is helpful to show the things that we find to be important and it's good that we can show what is important to us.
  • I like the tree view to see into different levels as items are broken down. It makes things easier to find and keep organized.
  • Overall the user enjoyment could go up just by changing the font! It's not pretty to read, yet it's a lot of words.
  • I'd like to see more functionality that can be turned off or turned on in the settings so that I can start basic and build out my instance easier as I need it.
  • It would be nice to integrate with JIRA without having to go through TaskTop.
  • The ability to allow external customers to see into only the pieces of information we want to share has been necessary.
  • Allowing different teams to gather requirements and customer feedback in Jama and then allowing our internal development teams to use JIRA has worked out well enough.
  • It has all the functionality to be useful in many situations, but I'd love to see something a little more 'pretty' or fun to use.
We had a few main outcomes we were looking to achieve:
  • Have a platform where we can connect with our customers and have back and forth.
  • Be able to display some information externally and keep some information displayed internally only.
  • Have 1 'source of truth'.
We did achieve all of these outcomes, but we are now thinking about different ways to manage #3. In the end, it did not make sense to box the developers into one 'source of truth' if that source was Jama mainly because they need a wider array of tools than Jama in itself can provide.
Honestly, I really think it depends on your project whether using Jama is the right tool for you. There are a lot of options out there and I've used different tools in different environments. The collaboration function is good in Jama, but it's not enjoyable to use. The review functionality was crucial for this particular project we're on, and some of the leadership liked the traceability of requirements, even though it can get overwhelming when you're making a lot of changes!
Jama is robust and functional, but it's not fun to use. I use it because it can do things that I need to do, but not because I simply enjoy the experience. It is good for large, complicated projects that need both internal tracking and external reviewing, but not ideal for developers to use to track their work.