Jama Connect Reviews

This is a requirement management tool for collecting business requirements, such as end user needs, as well as technical system and software requirements. It's all about documentation and management. We provide support as consultants to some of our clients and we are customers of Jama Connect. 

Jama helps companies deal with regulatory requirements by providing suitable tools for managing those demands. A key feature for us is the templates and predefined settings as well as relationship management. You can create relationships between requirements and test cases, as well as having an inbuilt test management module, which is really useful.

The user interface could be modernized and the product lacks project management functionalities. There are some features lacking more advanced linking functionalities and the like. Several of our customers have asked for those to be improved, but the company has prioritized elsewhere. The user interface is reasonable but to keep up with the competition, they need to think about how it looks and feels.

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

We've had some minor hiccups but the solution is stable. 

The solution is very scalable. Our customers generally have somewhere in the range of 500 users, mainly involved with R&D, and engineering.

During the implementation we had weekly meetings with customer support and they are very, very good. 

The initial setup is somewhat complex with deployment taking around six to 12 months. Generally, the customer defines the requirement management process and roles, and then they look for the predefined models, select the right one and modify it to their needs. Users need to be trained and that is usually followed by some testing using a pilot project. 

We used two teams of three people for deployment. We also built some integrations. Maintenance is carried out by an internal two-person team. We provide maintenance for a period after the deployment, and then the customer takes over.

ROI is years away because it takes time to adapt the tool and it takes quite a long time to use it efficiently because it requires changes in the way a company functions including some cultural change that involves doing more around requirements management rather than just ad-hoc development.

Jama Connect is fairly expensive, but it does the job. I believe they offer licensing on both a monthly and annual basis.

If you decide to use this product begin with a small use case and then expand. Think about how you will connect your requirement management process to other engineering processes. It's very important to have a clear scope for Jama and also a clear idea of what is not in Jama.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We are using the hybrid cloud deployment model. 

Jama helped our employees, mostly software engineers, to be more aware of where the requirements are and how to determine them. The visibility is more clear. We can better fulfill international standards in our line of work.

To have a single source for all the requirements and all the change requests our company gets is the most valuable feature. It has also helped us to keep track of reviews. 

It is rather slow, so the speed of the process and consuming information should be improved. It doesn't have a nice way of viewing information. We would like to see better interfaces for consuming information. 

I would like to see better interfaces for consuming information. Also, there should be more support for writing specifications. I would like to see a standardized way to define terms, a glossary. When I'm writing text it would help me to automatically link to those terms.

Scalability has been okay but we are using a single sign-in, so we use Google to sign in to our Jama Connect, but it is not ideal because you limit the functionality of a third-party system.  For example, if I want to invite a third party to a review, that third party doesn’t have a way to log into the system because we are using a single sign-on and that third party needs to have a Google address in our company in order to access our instance. That feature needs improvement.

We have around 40 users and we have around 10 active creators, people that are actually making content. 

The initial setup was a positive and painless process because the consultant came to our company and helped with everything. They helped us through everything and it is on their cloud so to initially set up and configure everything was a good process because we had the consultant coming into our company and helping us with everything. It was painless and a really easy and nice process.

We tried codeBeamer, Polarion from Siemens and Next Generation Doors, but we chose Jama because they have a good marketing team and are enthusiastic for you to use their product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I am most familiar with the Test and Requirements Management functionality, especially Test. I think the data model has stood up well. The UI is easy to train a new tester on, and the dashboard has be a good tool for others wanted "real time" status of the progress in testing. The traceability tracking is very good, though we mostly export and work in Excel for Analysis.

Support has been excellent - an advantage of working with a somewhat smaller vendor interested in making users successful.

We migrated from TestLog, Excel and Word documents, and are still partially in transition for requirements. With a significant portion of the QA team offshore a web-based solution was needed. We are able to use the tool very collaboratively across 3 or more teams performing testing and managing requirements. Combined with the dashboard which increased the visibility of test results in real time across the organization, and a 2-3X improvement in traceability, we have much better coverage and can prove it. It has a capable REST API interface and an integration hub. It plays well with other tools, and doesn't seem to assume that it is the center of your tool universe."

There are some areas where UI is a little week, and some areas where's it's very good. The ability to track, version and display changes to test cases over time is excellent. While the data model for traceability has been solid, I often find that most analysis requires export to Excel. Happily the export works well, and there is a decent (re-)import capability. Like any tool, it has some quirks here and there, and there are a set of work-arounds for certain things which have become part of our usage.

Several years.

We used the SasS model which has been easy and allows simple access for contract help offshore to be added as needed without compromising internal systems. The rate of adoption was much higher than expected, or an onsite installation might have been considered. Although we don't use it, there have been updates to the onsite deployment and support models recently which seem to be getting decent reviews on the user forums.

There were some glitches early on, perhaps because our usage outgrew whatever type of server were on. This is the core tool for the QA team so we are sensitive to outages. We have had very few issues with availability of late. Patches sometimes cause minor issues / adjustments ... perhaps plugging a hole that we were taking advantage of... It has been prudent to alert users when an update is coming and ask them to be attentive to any changes.

We did have some issues of scalability issues early on. I believe we pushed the envelope on numbers of test cases, and did suffer some performance issues, and outages in effect. I believe some improvements were to address our experience. It seems like things have been tuned, and our organization now has 2 instances (for a number of reasons). I'm not aware of significant issues with scalability anymore.

It has been OK. Last time I looked into it, I thought the license management tools were a little weak. OK for floating licenses but I'd have liked the ability to export records for all license usage to Excel (as the tool does well elsewhere) so I could do my own analysis.

It's been one of the best aspects of Jama in my experience. The support people will dig for a work-around when I've run into a problem. The creation of an online community at the start of 2015 has been very helpful. There are any number of capable users willing to share their experience.

TestLog. It was "out of gas" for our needs, and probably had been for some time. In theory it has a web interface but it was definitely not scalable to our needs.

Using SasS was pretty easy of course, but configuration was necessary. In the beginning we had just *one person* set up the framework for accounts, groups and permissions, and it's stood up well as a result. We got a little consultant help early, but still made a few configuration mistakes (in retrospect). Within a couple of weeks the first team had test cases ported and was using Jama. Rarely did we need to revisit the prior tool.

Don't have any hard numbers to share. I know the test coverage is significantly improved and now we can check it easily and continuously. The cost of licensing went up noticably since we started with Jama, and its usage far outstripped our original expectations nevertheless.

Ask for help pulling data about your usage. Floating licenses seem proportionally more expensive than some other tools, but that floating usage is tracked reasonably well. You might start out with more floats and see how it goes unless you know you have folks (like QA) who will be using the tool 8 hours/day. The Enterprise licensing model seemed to work out.

We evaluated a number of other tools. There were more comprehensive and configurable options but they would have required more dedicated resource in-house to configure and manage. Simpler, less expensive options seemed like they might be outgrown in a few years. Jama was a good compromise for the usage anticipated.

We set up several projects to tinker in early, and that was quite helpful. We made some tweaks after porting, but got it mostly right at the start. We were mindful of getting caught up in analysis paralysis, but I believe within 6-8 all teams had moved to Jama and never really looked back.

We primarily use the solution for requirement management and test management.

It increases communication regarding the requirements. Compared to document-based requirement management, where it's hard to know where diversions are stored, etc., it makes it easier. Also, Jama has made communication between the stakeholders easier.

Compared to other requirements, management tools, etc., this navigates well. That's the most valuable feature. The user interface with the navigation capabilities and also the relationships and reporting tools are all good.

Test management can be improved. It's not so scalable. The user interface needs to split things into small projects.

The solution is stable. They do have maintenance break every now and then, but they are planned breaks so we are informed beforehand when they pull it down. There hasn't really been any outages or anything like that, however. We're happy with the level of stability that's offered.

The solution is scalable in some ways but not others. It scales so that you can put a lot of data and users. The performance is okay in this sense. The user interface, however, is limited when you have a lot of data in one project. We have 400-500 users on the solution currently. We plan to increase usage. It's under deployment still.

Technical support answers fairly quickly compared to others like IBM or Atlassian. They also offer quite a good knowledge base for advanced cases and how to plan it, etc. via videos that they provide. They are quite useful.

The initial setup was a bit complex. It requires some configuration, even though you have a cloud set up so you don't have to install anything. You need to configure quite a bit around the relationship models and attributes and objects, etc.

We had some consultants that were recommended by Jama to assist with the implementation.

We evaluated quite a lot of options. This solution seems to be the most complete product and it has the requirements management part, which is really mature. Compared to IBM, it's easier to use. Jama has the mature features, but it's still user-friendly for beginners and that's the point when you deploy it to a big audience. Everyone needs to learn it and it's helpful if it's not too hard to learn. That was the biggest selling point. That, and the cloud offering. The cloud offers no limitations and the security is quite good.

We use the cloud deployment model.

I've found the Jama is pretty much top of line nowadays. I'm certified IBM DOORS consultant as well and compared to that, DOORS may have more functionalities but it's also far more complex. The functionality of Jama is much easier.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use Jama Connect for requirement management.

The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface.

I have inquired about pricing for this solution but have not yet heard anything, so their response time in this regard is something that should be improved. For example, listing the pricing structure on the web site would help.

I have been using Jama Connect for about one month.

This solution is stable. It didn't crash and I haven't had any problems.

Being a cloud-based solution, it is scalable. I am the only person who is currently using it in my company.

My only contact with support to this point is that I have asked for pricing and received no response.

The initial setup is easy and it only takes a few seconds to install.

Jama Connect is pretty standard in terms of requirement management. I cannot say that they are any features that stand out.

At this point, I cannot say whether or not I would recommend this product because I do not know the pricing. If the price is good then I would recommend it but I just don't know yet.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.