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.
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OpenText ALM/Quality Center
Score 8.0 out of 10
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OpenText™ ALM/Quality Center, formerly from Micro Focus, serves as the single pane of glass for software quality management. It helps users to govern application lifecycle management activities and implement rigorous, auditable lifecycle processes.
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.
HP ALM is well suited for waterfall projects specifically if the teams are novice. It provides excellent support for project planning, tracking & test management. Top leadership can efficiently track, measure and report on project milestones & key performance indicators. Development teams have access to a wide variety of tools to automate their development, testing, bug tracking, and reporting tasks in one place. Its extensive documentation and tutorials help new users to learn this tool pretty fast. Though for agile teams HP ALM Octane can be explored but its not value for money & did not handle distributed teams well.
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.
Release & Cycle Planning - Whether it is a new release or managing change requests, HP ALM can handle it all. In one click you can generate the status of a particular release from scoped requirements to test executed and everything in between. It also have KPI functionality which cane generate health indicators for each release to make go and no go indicators. The baseline features is a well thought out feature which is often neglected in many organization.
Requirements Management - HP ALM provides all the features which are needed by robust requirements management professionals. Teams can easily create and update the requirements and provide the full visibility to the team downstream. The tractability and impact analysis feature is the greatest suite of HP ALM complemented with great reporting and graphs.
Test Management - This is strongest module of HP ALM and provides the maximum values to team using HP ALM. Teams can perform manual, automated, performance and mobile testing with HP ALM. WIth HP UFT, teams can easily execute automated test case within ALM and report the results back. It also integrates with HP Mobile Center and test can be executed within HP ALM.
Defect Management - Simple and Strong are the two words to describes HP ALM defect module capability. Team can use it out of the box or customize it using workflow scripts to accommodate any process flow a organization may have. Their tons of features within this module which helps in expediting your release cycle and help you market the release faster.
Dashboard & Reports - HP has made numerous improvements to this module since I have known this product. You can generate any report or metrics if the data is present in ALM. Their are many after market solutions which can extend ALM data beyond the out of box reporting capabilities.
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.
Because it lets me track the test cases with detailed scenarios and is clearly separated in folders. Also the defect filter helps me filter only the ones that have been assigned to a particular area of interest. The availability of reports lets me see the essentials fields which I might be missing the data on and helps me to work on these instead of having to go through everything.
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 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.
It is a great tool, however, it got this rating because there is a lot of learning that takes a lot longer than other tools. There are no mobile versions of ALM even with just a project summary view. I believe ALM is well capable of integration with other analytics tools that can help business solutions prediction based on current and past project data. This is Data held in ALM but with no other use apart from human reading and project progress. ALM looks like a steady platform that I believe can handle more dynamic functionality. You could add an internal communication platform that is not a third party. Limit that communication tool to specific project members.
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.
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.
We have various criteria as a part of the requirements in which we gathered from teams. We started evaluating each requirement across the tools, and we started providing score ranges from 1-10 and the Quality center holds top to that. Some of them are listed below: User Experience
The tool should be easy to use for testers, end-users, and administration
The tool should have available integrations to IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio and IntelliJ, which are used most commonly. Ability to execute tests from within the IDE
Available integrations to ALM tools (Jira) , where we are able to associate Requirements, Defects, Epics and User Stories with Test Cases. Ability to measure test effectiveness through these integrations
Availability of relevant documentation for users, administrators and managers.
Availability of on-line help for quick resolution to tester’s needs.
24x7 Vendor support for quick resolution to issues and to ensure maximum productivity
Availability of intuitive, easy-to-use interface for end-users
The tools should have the ability to import test cases from common tools like Excel and export test results into Excel and PDF
There is a low learning curve for end-users. The ability to quickly onboard technical and non-technical end-users quickly is great.
The tool should have powerful search capabilities and should provide the ability to search and filter based on test case information or attributes of the test cases.
The tool should provide the ability to search and replace text or field values and auto-replace content based on conditions.
Test Management
The tool should support Central management of test artifacts, and support for product structures for managing test artifacts.
The tool should be able to provide support for popular Testing Methodologies including Agile, Exploratory, TDD, Black box testing, Functional testing, etc., and should support Finastra’s shift-left philosophy.
The tool should support the ability to create and manage test cases and test steps.
The tool should be able to segregate manual and automated tests and should be able to measure effective automation at the product level. The tool should also provide the ability to link/associate manual tests to automated tests.
The tool should provide the ability to create test suites by associating test cases and have the ability to execute test suites as well as report on tests at the test script, test case, test suite, and product levels.
The tool should support Test Data - Defect Link and should be able to provide complete Traceability Coverage at product and release levels.
The tool should provide the ability to stop tests before complete execution. The tools should also have the ability to resume test execution from the point of last pause or failure.
The tool should provide the ability to capture screenshots of successful or failed tests for documentation purposes and to capture replication steps.
The tool should allow capturing and storing attachments at a test step or test step level.
The tool should support parameterization for different test data.
The tool should have versioning capability for test artifacts.
The tool should have the ability to integrate with Mobile testing tools and should help manage test cases related to the native apps, simulators, and emulators for mobile testing.
The tool should have the capability of creating manual template tests.
The tool should provide history changes for all available fields.
The tool should have the capability to save and view Favorites
The tool should provide a shortcut key functionality for features.
The tool should have the capability of scheduling the test suites to run.
The tool should provide the capability of the "Check Spelling" feature while writing tests. Reporting and validation
The tool should support standard test reporting out-of-the-box.
The tool should provide the capability of creating, saving, and reusing reports and dashboards for all users.
The tool should provide the capability of sharing reports within user groups.
The tool should provide the capability of exporting reports and report data to Excel and PDF.
The tool should provide the capability of customizing, configuring, and modifying reports to suit product development team requirements.
The Tool Should provide Dashboards, Widgets, and Reports which can be customizable for business teams to highlight scheduled tasks and provide insight into progress.
The tool should provide Full Coverage and traceability Matrix reports. Administration and Usability
Tool - Server installation should be available on Windows and Linux
The tool should support Windows, Linux UI, and Mac for client interface.
The tool should have support for Web interface and should have support for commonly used web browsers like IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
The tool should have support for LDAP servers (AD) and should support single-sign-on capabilities. The tool should provide the ability to integrate with multiple LDAP servers simultaneously.
The tool should have the ability to create users at the tool level (outside the LDAP domain) to support partners and 3rd party entities.
The tool should have APIs for integrations and reporting. Preferably, the tool should support REST and SOAP APIs.
The tool should provide authorization and authentication through user groups.
The tool should enable an easy way to create, manage, delete, and deactivate users and user profiles as required. The tool should have the ability to move users across groups in a simple and intuitive manner.
The tool should provide the ability to import and export users from Excel, LDAP, and through APIs.
The tool should provide the ability to segregate roles and responsibilities at a tool level, project/product level, or a group/team level.
The tool should support a distributed topology for implementation and installation.
The tools should provide clustering capabilities, high availability architecture, and options for disaster recovery implementation. The licensing option for the tool should also support these capabilities.
The tool should provide out-of-the-box capabilities for backup and recovery of data in a simple, initiative manner.
The tool should have the ability to integrate to Jira, HP ALM, GIT, and other standard tools that are defined in Finastra.
The Tool should provide the capability of configuring file change alerts and to whom to send the Email notifications.
The Tool should provide the capability of configuring user notifications. Integration , Automation, and Operation
The Test management tool should provide Rest API support for integration with the test automation framework.
The Test management tool should support rest API integration with the test automation framework. It should support the following features:
Automated Test suite creation, modification, and deletion
Automated Test case creation, modification, and deletion
Manual test case mapping with automated test scripts. API capability to do mapping externally
It should support live reporting of automated test during execution
It should support controlling test execution from external tools like Jenkins, VSTS etc.
Capability to upload, modify and delete automated test reports
The Test management tool should Feature to map automated test scripts with manual test cases and update test status and reports
The Test management tool should Feature to create automated test suites and execution controller dashboard with live report capability. Capability to define test execution dependency.
The Test management tool should report dash board for both manual, automation and test report history
The Test management tool should be able to run Test execution on remote machine and parallel execution capability
The Test management tool should have CI / CD support and integration with different tools like Jenkins, VSTS etc..
The Test management tool should have GIT integration
The tool should have support for mobile testing. The tool will have the ability to integrate with Mobile testing tools like Appium, Mobile Center, Perfecto, etc.
The tool should support native mobile application testing, simulation-based testing, and emulators-based testing to support shift-left.
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.
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.
By developing a single template for use across all divisions, common training, ease of reporting, and consistent use is gained by the enterprise. This meets many requirements imposed by regulators as well as reducing costs for support, integration and training.
With consistency, we are able to develop regression tests and automate them efficiently. Having a regression suite ensures that code deployment does not break existing code. Once new capabilities are introduced into production, these functional tests can be added to the regression suite and automated for future use.
As the environment grows, the need to support multiple testing applications is reduced. ALM is scalable. As the number of projects and users increases, adding additional database or application servers is easily managed.
