What Jama Software Wants You to Know About Jama 8
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Richard Harris |
From aerospace to automotive to medical devices, software is quickly becoming the differentiator in hardware products. Case in point, today there are more lines of code in a John Deere tractor than in the first space shuttle. But making hardware requires rigid workflows that seem counter to more flexible, agile concepts used for software development.
Jama Software will soon announce the next rev of its flagship product that will help product development groups improve software, hardware and integrated systems collaboration to deliver products at greater speed and quality, with transparency that is frequently mandated in complex or highly regulated industries. So we sat down with Derwyn Harris who co-founded Jama Software in 2007 to talk about what’s coming.
ADM: Who is Jama Software and what does the company do?
Harris: Jama is a modern, collaborative requirements management platform that companies use to develop complex products and systems. The Jama solution enables cross-team collaboration throughout the product delivery process, from requirements definition to product delivery, that ensures that what was intended gets built correctly the first time. We serve hundreds of customers in the aerospace, semiconductor, medical device and automotive industries, including many of the Fortune 100 and top defense contractors. We were founded in 2007 and are based in Portland, Oregon.
ADM: Tell us about Jama 8. What are the new features and how do they help enterprise app developers?
Harris: Jama 8 represents a significant milestone in Jama's evolution and continued belief in the value of cross-team alignment through requirements, traceability and collaboration. A big part of Jama 8 was the general availability of our REST API. Our customers are now leveraging the API to find greater value in the tool by further customizing it to their company and industry needs. Looking ahead, we're excited to further expand our ecosystem through our relationships with partners.
ADM: What trends are you seeing in terms of app development and adoption in the enterprise?
Harris: Many of our customers are not in what has traditionally been seen as mobile app spaces due to high security and compliance needs. However, the market demands have changed what mobile really means, and systems have simultaneously become more secure. The need for requirements in these types of enterprise apps is significant. Often projects get derailed because a requirement is missed. something goes wrong because you missed a requirement. The process of building a product is long and fraught with opportunities for information to be missed or lost. Tracking requirements with a tool that provides overview.
ADM: How is Jama Software, specifically Jama 8, supporting these trends?
Harris: The core of how we support these trends is through the involved personas. We look at everything from a customer and user perspective. The types of tools that the groups that we work with gravitate toward are iterative, changing, and specific to their needs. Developers need to be connected to each other and other teams in order to achieve their objectives, but also to unlock innovation. Coordinating and collaborating with different teams increases complexity, and to see the payoff, teams need to be aligned. When done successfully, cross-team collaboration yields better results, but teams need help managing that complexity
ADM: What can we expect to see in the future of enterprise app development?
Harris: Mobile development is becoming increasingly necessary and relevant within the corporate enterprise and systems space. Mobile apps are expanding, and there are many different types of apps. Some of our automotive customers require mobility within their testing environment because they need to be able to go on site in order to carry out their tests. We're also seeing a lot of mobile development in military contractors and subcontractors. The defense industry demands that an immense amount of information be available to personnel, and data integrity and security are paramount. As enterprise apps become more prevalent in the workplace, there are new and different questions that developers are going to have to ask. Understanding business users differs from understanding consumers. There are often security concerns with corporate users that do not exist with other types of app users.
Editors Note:
Derwyn Harris co-founded Jama Software in 2007. Currently he serves as the Director of Product Marketing where he helps Jama develop and define the direction of the product, as well as the company. Derwyn has a long history as an engineer, consultant and trainer, with broad experience deploying complex software-integration projects of all sizes, including serving in the Air Force as an Avionics Systems Specialist, working at TCI Cable as an Operations Manager, and Sirius Computer Solutions as an IBM Business Partner consultant.
Read more: http://www.jamasoftware.com
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