Digital.ai (formerly CollabNet) aims to help enterprises and government organizations deliver high-quality software at speed with TeamForge, its application lifecycle management suite. According to the vendor, Digital.ai offers innovative solutions, provides consulting and Agile training services, supports more than 10,000 customers with 6 million users in 100 countries, and has been recognized for 13 consecutive years as SD Times 100 “Best in Show” winner in the…
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Jama Connect
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Jama Connect® is a Requirements Management software and Requirements Traceability solution. Jama Software enables teams to manage product requirements and enable Live Traceability™ across the development process, in order to reduce cycle times and improve product quality.
As long as you are looking for a tool that segregates who can do what with a given repository and branch in GIT, and do not mind strictly using TeamForge's Agile tracking software that comes native to the application, this is the tool for you. The tool is fairly user-friendly, and they have an excellent support staff. You're really buying that support, more than anything else. If however, your company insists on using separated agile tracking software such as Version One, I would not recommend TeamForge. They prefer an all or nothing kind of deal.
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.
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.
I would like to see personalization for managing artifacts, that is, allowing the user to customize pages and save personalized settings and then save them as bookmarks.
I would like an improved subversion browser such as a graphical user interface rather than a basic file explorer.
I would like built in features for CollabNet TeamForge integrated with subversion so that i can associate my private code branches and code changes.
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.
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
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.
It has always been available, except for preventative maintenance which is announced beforehand. Nonetheless, we experienced one day shortage over a miscommunication about payment.
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.
They always answer the phone when we put a call in, any time. They have consistently sent out contractors when needed and were there every step of the way when we switched over from ClearCase to TeamForge years ago. The support is what you really pay for when you buy into TeamForge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CollabNet TeamForge is superior to Mercury mainly because it has a subversion change management tool integrated with the product. CollabNet TeamForge offers more complexity but with more flexibility for managing and tracking projects. I think CollabNet TeamForge is more comprehensive than either Mercury and JIRA. They're all user friendly tools with short learning curves but CollabNet TeamForge is most efficient in my experience. JIRA was recently adopted for particular applications and is currently being evaluated by various technology teams.
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.
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.
CollabNet TeamForge has had a positive impact on the efficiency and productivity of managing and completing projects from specifications to software enhancements and from production issues/defects to bug fixes.
As a developer, CollabNet TeamForge allows me to focus more on delivering projects accurately and timely while maintaining communications with the business.
CollabNet TeamForge Is an efficiency life-cycle management product that helps my team meet business objectives by quickly delivering quality software, documenting projects in a smart and organized way and updating project status to senior management.
CollabNet TeamForge Subversion meets developers needs for change management and improves overall software development process in all phases of software lifecycle.
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.
