Atlassian Confluence vs. Jama Connect

Atlassian Confluence is a great tool for housing important information and resources across the organization, as it's very easy to search and find content across different teams and departments. The search function is mostly very accurate and the additional tagging with keywords also helps in the search experience. It's also good at tagging other team members, which triggers an automated email to them. Atlassian Confluence also has an extensive template library for all kinds of purposes like project management, etc., which saves time overall.

Incentivized

Jama connect has the best UI compared to DOORS, Codebeamer, and PTC Integrity. It’s the clearest to use with the best usability. For example make traces between all requirements is as straightforward as clicking a button. The trace matrix view is highly configurable to get you to show anything you need. It has extensive filtering where every index in your requirement is indexed. Same with their export features, you can use default templates or create custom templates to export to PDF for all your regulatory needs like submitting documentation to FDA. This has helped us a ton without requiring much edits and letting us create up to date reviewed documents.

Speaking of review system, it’s well organized and you can set required approved and optional reviewers. Track your redlines in the tool and also view and resolve comments.

The one issue I’ve experienced is that with a large system the web app can take some time to load everything.

Incentivized

• Its integration with Jira for tracking development and the bugs and work linked to detailed Confluence documentation.
• We use it extensively for writing Software Product Requirement Documents, feature specs, architecture designs, and retrospectives.
• Our company follows compliance very seriously, so it helps in streamlining all documentation for ISO27001/27017 compliance and security-related information.
• Its integration with various tools allows us to create flow diagrams which are often required to make client and customer understand the overall flow of interactions across various modules of the design architecture

Incentivized

• Requirements Management in general
• Focus in the content without loosing the track of the evolution of the items by maintaining the exchange of information between the users inside the Tool.
• The possibilities to integrate this tool within our IT-landcape and with our other engineering tools is for us a leverage to success.

Incentivized

• You need to watch over the structure of the content yourself. if not you can get information added anywhere so nobody can find it.
• Top search field is hard to set to only search a section of pages.
• You really need to think your structure through before starting. a guide when setting up at the start could help in that perspective.

Incentivized

• The 'filtering' capabilities in Jama are not as good as they could be. In particular, the ability to "nest" filters is quite limited. I have certain seen much better capabilities in other tools. ('Cradle' is an example of a tool with excellent "nested filters" capabilities.)
• From an administrative point of view, the 'License' admin view is pretty disappointing. The particular thing that I'd like to be able to find out from it is the peak number of 'Float Creator' licenses in concurrent use on each day. If there's a way to get to that information, I haven't found it yet.

Incentivized

I am confident that Atlassian can come with additional and innovative macros and functions to add value to Confluence. In 6 months, Atlassian transformed a good collaborative tools into a more comprehensive system that can help manage projects and processes, as well as "talk" with other Atlassian products like Jira. We are in fact learning more about Jira to evaluate a possible fit to complement our tool box.

Jama is really easy to use and operate compared to other tools. This allows a process owner to get easier buy-in from the organization to see value early. My experience with this tool was very positive and we were able to see value early in its introduction

Incentivized

It's very intuitive for most things, making it easy to jump in and start creating pages and collaborating. This makes it ideal for onboarding new members to the team. There are a few areas that could be a little smoother, but overall it's a great experience.

Incentivized

The requirements and baseline parts are easy to use. The review centre is very useable and understandable, once you understand/set up the moderation. (This last part could use some refinement.) Integration/connectability (the Connect part of Jama) is quite possible, but the useability could use some love as well.

Incentivized

I do not recall having outages or applications error so far, very reliable and available.

Incentivized

It has always been available, except for preventative maintenance which is announced beforehand. Nonetheless, we experienced one day shortage over a miscommunication about payment.

Incentivized

We never worked against the tide while using Confluence. Everything loads considerably fast, even media components like videos (hosted on the platform or embed external videos from Youtube, for example). We are not using heavy media components a lot, but in the rare occasion we happen to use one we have no problems whatsoever.

Incentivized

With performance compared to JIRA, I do recommend Jama in this case. Jama provides very good performance, it loads immediately for any of the items and searches any item immediately. Performance is really good in all of the operations including creating stories, epics, item types or other support operations or report generation.

Incentivized

This rating is specifically for Atlassian's self-help documentation on their website. Often times, it is not robust enough to cover a complex usage of one of their features. Frequently, you can find an answer on the web, but not from Atlassian. Instead, it is usually at a power user group elsewhere on the net.

Incentivized

They typically answer within minutes of posting a ticket, and then you have a clear expectation of what the issue is, how to diagnose it, how long will it take to get resolved, and in which version a given problem is resolved, or if there is a patch for hosted services. They have a number of support people, and all of them are top-notch.

Incentivized

Helpful and exhaustive and tailorable for our needs. Instructor was well versed and engaged. Material was a good reference and was up to date with tool. Overall, in person training was valuable for tool introduction. Trainer was an active user of the tool and worked closely with other clients. So, very knowledgeable.

Incentivized

Easy to reference and understand. Updated routinely to include new topics. Online training evolves to include more advanced topics and how to guides. Online training includes videos and reference guides that make it easy to perform more complex tasks. Online training is free and can be accessed from any computer.

Incentivized

Overall, I am very satisfied with the initial implementation (and the subsequent upgrades and implementations made over the years).

This product has never rose to the level of being an major issue at an executive level. It has quietly and valiantly done it's job for our company!

Incentivized

Jama 2015.5 implementation is very smooth and no need for much manual work. Jama 8 has many challenges and we can not install it as smoothly as Jama 2015.5. Initially, Jama didn't provide the Jama 8's installer files or zip files and they were just providing docker files to everyone (which was really strange). It is the worst that they don't provide all the files at a time. Why should they tell us where we should deploy, and why only a dockerfile? I am not very satisfied with Jama implementation.

Incentivized

Atlassian Confluence is a super handy hub for sharing ideas and keeping all your docs in one place. While Jira Service Management is more about handling tickets and support issues, Atlassian Confluence really makes teamwork easy. I feel Atlassian Confluence is user-friendly, integrates smoothly with other Atlassian tools, and helps everyone stay in sync. It's great for brainstorming, and project planning as well. Overall, it is a great way to boost collaboration and ensure all team members are on the same page.

Incentivized

JCA is an extraordinary tool that is very simple to use and brings efficiency to the creation of requirements. It is particularly good at highlighting improvements to requirements which, when done properly and done up front in the engineering development process, will save significant time and prevent confusion downstream in the development process. It's difficult to quantify how much of a positive impact JCA would have on any individual project, but I would say it could easily save an organization more than its cost in terms of improving efficiencies and the traceability integrity throughout the entire portfolio of projects when applied correctly. This additional product from Jama is highly recommended.

This tool is very adaptable. So much so we use it for three completely separate projects, in three very different ways.

Incentivized

There is no horizontal scalability available in Jama, we have only one choice to scale it vertically. But vertical scalable applications always have limitations to grow. In this case, Jama doesn't support horizontal scalability functions like multi-node architectures with a shared drive for the home directory.

Incentivized

• Merging instances has saved search time - We used to have several instances of Atlassian Confluence, which means they're separate and so can't communicate with each other. We've since merged into one instance and now with the help of the search feature can find the documents you're looking for in seconds rather than several minutes.
• Cross linking product assets streamlines following paper trails - Being able to click on a BitBucket link from a Confluence page which then links to a JIRA ticket means you can follow paper trails really easily; seconds rather than several minutes.

Incentivized

• One experience that converted an engineer to using Jama Connect was an electronics engineer that was writing test plans. I showed them about how to write "unit" or very discrete tests and then showed them an automatic export to get the document. Thus the authoring of the document effort was taken away, they could focus on defining the test
• Unfortunately I have very much struggled to embed systems engineering, requirements management and Jama Connect as part of the 'ways of working' outside the systems and electronics teams.

Incentivized