Using Categories to manage product variants in Jama Connect

Author: Matt Mickle

Date: 01/01/25

Audience: System Engineers

Products Applicable: Jama Connect®

Use Case

Using Categories for Managing Variants in Jama Connect

Best Practice

This article describes how to effectively utilize categories within Jama Connect to manage product variants. 

Product Variants

Implementation

High Level Steps

Steps to Follow: 

1. Define a product
2. Define variants
3. Create variant categories
4. Apply variant categories to all items

Step 1: Define a Product

The first step is to build your first product project including all requirements, tests etc. and all traceability between them. 

Variability in this use case may be in the form of:

• Requirements coming from different regulatory markets 
• Different customer requirements
• Different configurations of components
• Different configurations of features

As soon you have the need to start creating variation based on one or more of these reasons or others, proceed to step 2. 

Step 2: Define Variants

The second step is simply to have defined the variants you want to create. 

You could have market variants like:

• Market
  
  • US
  • Canada
  • EU
  • China

You could have variants based on customers:

• Customers
  • Customer A
  • Customer B

You could have Variants based on product configurations:

• Variants
  • Compact Car 
    • Easymove 
    • Easymove Plus
    • Easymove Premium

If you plan to use Features then you would nest them for the variants:

• Variants
  • Compact Car 
    • Easymove
      • ADAS 
        • Blind Spot Detection
        • Lane Departure Warning

Step 3: Create Variant Categories 

1. Work with an Org Admin to enable categories and add your categories 
   • currently only available at the Org Admin level but Project level category admin is on the roadmap
2. Determine the projects in which the categories should be visible 
   • Visibility is set at the top node of the category tree, and maintained throughout. It is recommended to only set visibility specifically for projects and not Globally for this use case.
3. Enable Categories in relevant views of Jama Connect
   • Essential if you wish to see categories in reviews for example

Note: It is likely you will have multiple category trees for different variation methods:

Step 4: Apply Variant Categories to all items

It is recommended that when applying variant categories, you begin with the top level requirements, and propagate the category to all related items in the hierarchy. This will ensure that all items tied to that category will be categorized correctly and will facilitate the best ease of use for the team working with the category. 

You can easily identify and apply these categories to all necessary items using the following steps. 

1. Apply the categories first manually to any top level requirements such as Customer or Regulatory requirements. 
2. Create a filter for any items which are downstream and do not yet also have the category, similar to this:
   
   
3. Select the requirements in the filter and apply the category to them:
   
   Note: if there are more than 50 items you will need to select them a page at a time. This will be updated in the future to allow a select all of more than 50 items. 
4. Repeat step 3 until the filter is empty. 
   Note: for this to be fully accurate, you should have 100% traceability in your project. 

Feature categories

Adding Feature Categories to Items

For Features, it is the recommendation to use the category tree and nest feature categories below variant categories:

When using categories for adding features, be sure to add both the Feature category, and the variant category to the item. If only the feature is added, the item will show with the variant when viewed from the categories due to the hierarchy, yet is not officially added to the item and will not show up in filters for the category unless added manually:

The requirement shows under the Easymove Plus Category because it has the ACC category

However it does not have the EasyMove Plus Category, only the feature category

To add it quickly, simply select the requirements showing from the category viewing pane and add the category. 

Note: No need to add the other categories such as ADAS or Compact shown in this example. 

Adding Features to Variants

To simply add a feature to a variant, you can use an all features category tree like shown below, and then copy a feature from all features into the desired variant using drag and drop:

As a result, the category will be copied to the variant and all items which had the category will now also have the category for this variant.

To inversely remove the feature from the variant, simply drag it back to the appropriate location in the All Features categories, and choose Yes to Merge the category:

Note: You will not be able to delete a category if any items are associated with it, so this move method must be used to remove a category from a variant.

Also: If you already added the variant category to these items then you may need to manually remove it from the items in the project. 

References

• Categories Help Guide
• Categories for Releases/Product Versions

Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments below.