Looking to connect Jira and Jama? Want to improve your Requirements Management process? Seeking better collaboration, visibility, traceability and control over your software value stream? You’ve come to the right place.
Your Problem
If you’re a product manager or business analyst, you know exactly how much time and effort it takes to turn a customer’s vision into a reality. Defining a set of accurate requirements that are truly representative of the customer’s needs demands a high level of skill, detail and thought. Thankfully, requirement management tools such as a Jama enable you to clearly define the customer request into requirements, features, epics and stories.
You will also, no doubt, know the pain of seeing the fruits of your labor – your meticulously articulated requirements – become, well, undefined. Seeing the wrong feature built, tested and delivered, or worse, never seeing it made at all – either lost in translation or just plain lost. All your hard work is undone, leaving you to explain to the customer why they aren’t getting what they asked for, or only a portion of what they requested.
The Cause
The main reason the requirement management process suffers is down to what we call the ‘loss of fidelity’, owing to a distinct disconnect between the practitioners who set out what feature should be built, and those that actually build it, i.e. the developers.
This disconnect occurs because developers, just like product owners and business analysts, are working in their own preferred purpose-built tool, such as Jira. And Jira and Jama do not naturally integrate or share information between each other, meaning both product managers/business analysts are forced into cumbersome, mistake-prone forms of communication such as email and duplicate data entry to manually replicate the vital information into disparate tools.
Make no mistake, communicating requirements this way is a nasty, complicated and a thankless task that inhibits collaboration and fragments the workflow, meaning your increasingly likely to miss that all-important requirement definition that your customer is expecting.
Solution
Sounds simple, but you need to integrate Jama with Jira bring product owners and analysts closer to your developers and the rest of software delivery process. Using Tasktop Integration Hub, you can quickly and easily integrate these two tools (and others), enabling requirements (and all associated attributes, comments, attachments and relationships) to automatically migrate and synchronize bi-directionally across Jama and Jira.
Furthermore, not only does this provide you with the visibility and traceability you need – both up and downstream – but by integrating Jama with the rest of the value stream, you can ensure all key stakeholders have the full context and latest version of a requirement as it flows through the lifecycle. For instance, how can you be sure that the right test cases are being run if your requirements aren’t flowing from Jama to a testing tool, say in HPE QC? This level of visibility and traceability is essential for delivering the right feature that works as initially scoped.
You can see how to connect Jama and Jira in the video below, where I explain how Tasktop easily and simply connects both tools, optimizes collaboration between yourself and the development team, ensures your hard work is rewarded and that your customer is satisfied.
For more information on preserving fidelity across all the teams and tools across your software value stream, contact us today and we can help you map out integration opportunities to optimize your value stream.
