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Jama Blog: Leverage your collective genius.









Posts Tagged ‘software development’

Leverage your collective genius with the new Contour 3.3

Friday, October 14th, 2011

Communicating requirements and getting buy-in with your team has never been easier. Contour’s collaborative features help you embrace change throughout the development process. Three new features include:

1. Subscribe Others :: Keep your team in the loop on important items.

Project managers can subscribe team members to email notifications to keep everyone in sync and alert them to new comments or updates to requirements.

2. Link Items :: Link to items and attachments from other items within Contour.
To provide greater context, you can now create a quick link to reference a requirement from within another requirement. Another common use of this feature is to create links to a glossary of terms.

3. Word Exports Enhancements :: Export data into your own custom Word format.
Customize your Word template to fit the format and styles that you need, including the relationships, comments and other data fields from Contour.

Take action: Get the latest version of Contour.

Need support?
Visit our support forum, email support or give us a call at 1-800-679-3058. If you need help upgrading or have any questions, please let us know.

Can you say, WaterScrumFall?

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

In the world of developers, being part of an agile team is cool – they tend to be innovative and customer focused.  Our research has shown that Agile is growing and has tripled since 2008.  While it continues to gain momentum it is not always the best process for all organizations.  The majority of teams are using a hybrid approach and are constantly evolving their process to best fit their project needs.

In a recent article on Software Quality Connection, Lisa Morgan explains how and why many teams are moving to a hybrid approach. She discusses why many teams struggle to go only agile and quotes John Simpson saying, “The difference between the [hybrids] and the Agile purists is that the majority of companies still need to maintain the structure and control inherent with requirements management best practices.”  Lisa further explains that while many larger organizations prefer older methods that define all requirements upfront, they tend to be slower to develop.  According to Forrester Research Senior Analyst Tom Grant, too much documentation can cripple a team’s velocity but the lack of documentation can damage a team’s success.

At the end of last year we conducted an industry-wide survey including over 800 participants about the challenges, trends & successes in requirements management today.   Our findings showed that 40% are hybrid, and 26% are waterfall, and that only 19% are purely agile.

For more information about today’s world of RM, download a copy of the 2011 Report.

Contour 3 is here.

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

Welcome to the next generation of requirements management, where power meets flexibility. Read the press release about Contour 3 >

This morning, we launched Contour 3, the latest release of Jama Contour. With Contour 3, you can manage complex projects according to your own processes — and keep everyone connected at all times. CEO and co-founder Eric Winquist explains, “Building great software and hardware inherently is a very social process that leads teams to make new realizations, develop new ideas and, hopefully, achieve continuous innovation as projects progress and mature.” Contour 3 continues to remove the complexity of managing requirements with new features like system hierarchy, the Review Center and enhanced filters. Learn more >

The new system hierarchy allows your team to create a structure that accurately reflects your complex projects. The Review Center helps you keep everyone in sync on the scope. With the enhanced filters, you can create custom filters that you can keep private or share with your team. Other new features in Contour 3 include multi-level traceability and custom reports. You can see each of these new features in action on our How-to Videos page. Each one of our how-to videos is less than ten minutes long, so you can start using Contour 3 faster. Watch a video >

If you’re upgrading from Contour 2.9.9 (or an earlier version), be sure to see What’s New and read the Release Notes for more information about upgrading. This is a new and exciting release with loads of functionality, but it will include significant changes. Upgrade now >

Collaboration & managing requirements: Software Development Times.

Friday, September 17th, 2010

In its September 15 issue, Software Development Times featured the evolution of requirements management (RM). Author Lisa Morgan contacted our own John Simpson, Director of Marketing and Community Outreach, as a contributor.

As Lisa explains, we at Jama Software estimate eighty percent of companies “fall somewhere in between pure waterfall and pure agile in terms of software development and requirements implementation.” Lisa asserts, “the collaborative nature of agile development is also affecting the evolution of requirements tools.” Within the article, John explains, “Before, people viewed requirements as the beginning of a process, and then they forgot about it until revisions were necessary. Now requirements management is a foundational layer that ties the beginning to the middle and end.”

Through her research, Lisa concludes that RM needs “more attention than than it’s getting in some organizations,” but that “providers will have to overcome perceptions that requirements tools represent too much overhead when there is no time to waste.” Our RM solution, Jama Contour balances the flexibility of a Web application with the collaboration, change control and scope management that product development requires.

Check out the article here (PDF) or read the full SD Times (PDF) from September 15 (“Managing Requirements: How Much is Enough?” pg 23-25).


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