Managing Industry Standards in Jama Connect®

Managing Industry Standards in Jama Connect®

Tracing industry standards with requirements is crucial for ensuring that your product meets regulatory and compliance standards. In Jama Connect®, linking industry standards with requirements ensures traceability and compliance throughout the product development lifecycle.

There are several ways you can ensure traceability between requirements and industry standards:

1. Reference Industry Standards directly within the Requirements

Referencing industry standards directly within the requirements is the most basic way to implement and manage industry standards in Jama Connect®. If industry standards are available in PDFs, images, Docs, etc., they can be imported into Jama Connect® as attachments. Once imported, any requirement, test, or other items can be associated with the industry standard documentation using the 'Link' feature in Jama Connect®. The Link feature is available in any Rich Text field by selecting the "link" icon in the Rich Text menu.

Please choose the appropriate industry standard documentation from the attachments section and link it to the item.

An alternative approach is to include a "Standards Reference Name and Link" field within the item type and link it to the applicable industry standards. These links can point to a file or URL; specific sections or pages of the standards can also be specified. This method works well for externally hosted standards and can be accessed via URLs.

The pros of this approach are its easy implementation, adding relevant fields on item type in Jama Connect®, and its adaptability in using hyperlinks for externally located Standards documentation, providing a flexible and user-friendly experience.

The cons of this approach include being more complex to trace; for example, it's complicated to see all items referencing the same standard; it is difficult to access "closed source" standards that cannot be accessed with clickable URLs; manual effort is required to update links to new revisions of a standard; it is prone to user errors; and it's harder to show many-to-many standard to requirement references.

2. Create Traceability to Industry Standard Proxy Items in Jama Connect​®

Determine which industry standards are relevant and then create Proxy items in Jama Connect® (such as documents, requirements, or custom fields) that represent these standards. Organizing these proxy items in a logical structure, such as folders or projects, helps to keep them accessible and manageable.

The pros of this approach include easily tracing requirements and relevant standards, linking requirements to multiple standards, and referencing the actual published standard, not a local copy​

​The cons of this approach include traceability, which needs to be granular to specific sections or requirements; multiple users clicks to view the actual standards related to items; and manual effort by the library owner to keep proxy items and references up to date. ​

3. Import and Manage Full Standards in Jama​ Connect​®

Managing full industry standards in Jama Connect® involves integrating complete standards documentation into project workflow so that these standards are consistently applied and tracked.  Gather all relevant industry standards, including documents, guidelines, regulations, etc. Ensure documents are in a compatible format (e.g., Excel, Word) and organize them into manageable sections or categories in Jama Connect® components, item types, folders, and items.

If the standards are in a structured format like Excel, map the fields to Jama Connect® item types accordingly using Jama Connect® native import features. If documents are not in a compatible format, you may need to create and input key sections or items manually.

Create Jama Connect® items (e.g., requirements) that reflect the various sections of the industry standards and establish relationships between the standards items and project requirements using Jama Connects relationship features. This creates traceability between product artifacts such as requirements, test cases, etc., and industry standards, ensuring compliance.

With the Jama Connects Reuse and Sync feature, you can utilize industry standards across multiple product teams and projects in Jama Connect®. In Jama Connect®, each item represents an industry requirement. You can use different views to identify where requirements from standards have been improved in various product teams and track how standards have changed across different revisions.

Pros of this approach include importing complete standard documentation and branching for product teams' use, complete and granular traceability reporting, and tracking differences between the original library copy, product copy, and new standard revisions.

The cons of this approach include importing the complete standards into the Library, which may require a lot of effort. Importing the standard into a tool may lead to licensing issues. The standard's revisions must be incorporated in Jama Connect® to track the differences across versions, baselines, or reuse/sync features.

4. Import and Manage Relevant Sections of Industry Standards​

Importing and managing relevant sections of industry standards is a hybrid approach that balances having complete standards in Jama Connect® and creating traceability to standards proxy items. It is suitable for standards that need a simple reference URL in the library and full traceability, as well as for importing a specific document/section​ at other times. 

Pros of this approach include Lower LOE for import and reuse and complete and granular traceability reporting only to relevant sections.

The cons of this approach include Potential licensing issues with importing standards to a tool and the need for careful management of diffs for sections of standards that are imported and reused by product teams​ only.