The Journey from Paper Documents to Jama Connect

Product management (marketing) produces a new product proposal in Word doc. We take the document and pull hard requirements out to create an engineering requirements document, adding any missing requirements from the marketing document. Periodically, we export the Jama Connect requirements back to a word document for project management and engineering to work to. Eventually, requirements are exported as excel so the test team can import them into their test case database.

We look for a well defined scope for a project before it is kicked off. This allows for reasonably accurate time and budget estimate. Forcing the development of a requirements spec that is signed off by both marketing and engineering prior to project commitment helps to eliminate "feature creep" and facilitate a controlled change-order environment.

Historically, we used Word documents; which is arguably the worse possible choice for a requirements document but people still cling to the idea. Jama Connect allows us to have a searchable database of requirements and organized reviews but still export Word documents for others. A different department is using Excel for requirements tracking. This seems to work Ok. If we ever abandoned Jama Connect, this is probably what we would go to. Others are also using Doors. I haven't used it in years but when I did, it was very clumsy. It got the work done but was an effort to use it.