This blog previews our recent webinar. To watch the entire presentation, visit: “Breaking Through Organizational Inertia and Driving Adoption”

Breaking Through Organizational Inertia and Driving Adoption

Change is hard. Even the most advanced semiconductor organizations struggle to adopt new processes and tools. Resistance doesn’t result from bad intentions; instead, it arises from organizational inertia: entrenched cultures, siloed teams, and the very human tendency to stick with what’s familiar.

In this practical discussion, we explore how engineering teams are overcoming these challenges. Steve Rush, Principal Solutions Lead at Jama Software, shares proven approaches to reduce resistance, align teams, and drive lasting adoption of new processes.

What You’ll Learn:

• Identify what organizational inertia looks like in practice and how to address it
• Reframe conversations with resistant teams and stakeholders to foster alignment
• Practical strategies for driving requirements management adoption and ensuring long-term success
• Build momentum for change in complex semiconductor environments

If your organization is struggling to turn process change into real adoption, this session will share actionable ways to create traction where it matters most.

WEBINAR PREVIEW – WATCH ENTIRE PRESENTATION HERE

TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Steve Rush: Thanks so much, Juliet. I really appreciate that introduction. Well, hello everyone. My name is Steve Rush, and as Juliet said, I’m a principal solutions consultant here at Jama Software. And I’m genuinely excited to dig into this topic with you today. It’s one that’s close to my heart, and I think it’s something that everyone in our industry has run into at some point. Here’s what we’re going to cover. We’ll open up and frame the issue of organizational inertia. We’ll diagnose the inertia and profile the forms of it that may feel very familiar to you. We’ll talk about how to reframe the conversation with resistant teams. We’ll get into what actually works when it comes to driving adoption, and we’ll close with some questions from the audience.

Let’s get into it. First, let’s start with something I think we can all agree on. Change is hard. Even the most advanced engineering organizations in the world struggle with this, not because of bad intentions, but because of organizational inertia. That is a fact. Change agents trying to deliver better business outcomes, whether it’s digital transformation or getting ready for the era of AI, can feel like they’re steering ships through rough waters, and that’s because they are. Here at Jama Software, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, organizations with a huge collective history. Their tools, processes, systems, and people are deeply entrenched. Change can be volatile, turbulent, or just painfully slow. But here’s the good news. Adoption doesn’t have to be. Let’s unpack this together.

So what does organizational inertia actually look like? I chose this word inertia intentionally. I could have called this webinar overcoming organizational resistance, but I think that word, resistance, is confrontational right out of the gate, and I think it puts people on the defensive before the conversation even starts. I think inertia is a better term because this type of resistance or inertia can be passive or active. Institutional resistance is a form of active inertia. Organizational silos are a form of passive inertia, and I think the word is more precise here and more useful in our context. I think naming the inertia and understanding it serve you in two important ways.

First, it helps the change agent find the right solution. Not every approach fits every situation. Understanding which form of inertia you’re dealing with, whether that’s passive avoidance, hard personalities, institutional friction, or silos, helps you choose the right response rather than applying a one-size-fits-all solution. Second, it helps you communicate credibly to the people responsible for your success. Change agents can’t go it alone. You need support. The way you earn that support is by articulating the obstacles clearly, building a shared understanding of what you’re up against and what it will take to move through it.

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

Rush: Here are three forms of inertia that will probably feel familiar. Let’s walk through each one. First, institutional resistance. Teams have established workflows, tools, and norms, and any new tool or workflow can threaten the comfort of the familiar, even if the familiar may be efficient in that individual team’s context. The problem is that a familiar individual process or tool is siloed off and not integrated into a larger system context, causing issues with collaboration, problems with traceability, and re-usability. The flags here to watch out for are people saying things like this. “This new tool you want me to learn is too hard, or this new process is slowing us down, or the classic, why are we being forced to do this?” And to be fair, that last one contains a legitimate question underneath it. People want to understand why. Institutional resistance isn’t always loud. Passive avoidance, like quietly working around a new tool or falling back to legacy processes and homegrown spreadsheets, is a form of resistance as well. It’s one that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it.

Next, siloed teams. Teams are not working in a single source of truth, or not working in a common enough model. Requirements in this case can look different to the hardware engineer, the software engineer, and the systems engineer. And when teams operate in separate tools, with separate workflows and siloed off processes, they’re often solving the same problems in parallel, completely unaware of each other. The flags with this one tend to surface later, late-stage changes, missed approvals, finger-pointing at stage gates, and products that consistently miss launch dates, with everyone having a different explanation as to why. That is the silo talking.

These teams also miss the opportunity to learn from one another. A tool or process is being designed in isolation from the very groups that sit upstream and downstream that depend on their work. Personality-driven pushback. One skeptical voice can stall adoption across an entire team. Individuals drive organizational change for better or worse. And the loudest voice in the room isn’t always the wisest. The flags here to watch out for are lack of participation, unconstructive criticism, and skepticism without any rationale. Listen for this specifically. If someone says no without a reason, that’s a flag. No, and here’s why: it’s a conversation. No, just by itself is a wall. Here are a few patterns and sample feedback you’ll recognize when pushing a new tool like Jama Connect. We already track that in a spreadsheet. This is a software team problem, not ours. We don’t have time to learn a new tool right now. Our process works fine. It’s always worked. Can we map these patterns to the forms of inertia we just saw?

Here’s how I would map it back to the previous slide. I think this understanding is key, so we know how to respond and implement the right solutions, how to give support when we need more discovery, when we push back, and when we escalate. Now, the forms of inertia I’ve already outlined are broad, and I bet they’re familiar to everyone that’s listening in on this webinar, but I want to segue a bit and talk about the semiconductor industry specifically because I think they have a couple of unique challenges, but I hope that resonates across industries as well, and you pick something up. First, no unified data model.

RELATED: Traceable Agile™ – Speed AND Quality Are Possible for Software Factories in Safety-critical Industries

Rush: There is no one-size-fits-all data model for the semiconductor industry. The context in which the chips are utilized often drives much of the development. A chip going into a car might require a safety element out of context model. A chip going into a rocket might need to meet the objectives of DO-178C. A lab-on-a-chip project will need to adhere to certain medical standards. Oftentimes, these companies need to develop the data model from scratch, and that effort in and of itself is just a daunting task, so they choose not to do it because it’s too time-consuming and too difficult, and they only adopt a requirements management tool like Jama Connect if they’re forced to.

But we know there are studies suggesting that improved requirements and using a dedicated requirements management tool like Jama Connect reduce late-stage changes and defects and improve productivity. So it’s really in the company’s interest to adopt a tool like this. This is also where I think Jama Connect and our new semiconductor solution can help because it’s tailored for common semiconductor use cases. You can start using the tool right away for automotive manufacturing and shift design. It’s also very flexible, so you can configure it differently for different use cases very shortly after your Jama Connect purchase.

Too much functional safety focus. Functional safety tends to own the very first implementations of a tool like Jama Connect, which makes sense because good requirements management practices and processes are mandated in standards like ISO 26262 and DO-178C. So companies go out, and they purchase a requirements management tool if they’re mandated to meet the objectives of those standards, but they struggle to roll it out beyond those functional safety use cases, despite the fact that they have problems with traceability and collaboration, which the requirements management tool can help solve. So a functional safety bias may exist, which holds the tool back from expanding more broadly across teams and organizations, and those teams just end up not taking full advantage of the tool. Familiar wins the day.

THIS HAS BEEN A PREVIEW – TO WATCH THE ENTIRE WEBINAR, VISIT:
Breaking Through Organizational Inertia and Driving Adoption

The post [Webinar Recap] Breaking Through Organizational Inertia and Driving Adoption appeared first on Jama Software.

This is a preview of our recent webinar. Watch the entire webinar HERE.

Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization

Learn how to prevent costly production failures with standardized requirements management.

A survey by Engineering.com revealed that a staggering 83% of companies faced production outcome failures — such as significant delays, cost overruns, product defects, compliance gaps, recalls, omitted requirements, and extensive rework — often stemming from inadequate requirements management.

Join Grant Rhodes, Senior Solutions Consultant, to explore how standardized requirements management can drive consistency, predictability, and a competitive edge. This session will move beyond theory, offering actionable strategies to align cross-functional teams and streamline critical workflows.

What You’ll Learn:

• How standardized requirements management reduces rework, improves quality, and ensures compliance.
• Common challenges in standardization, like overcoming resistance and aligning cross-functional teams.
• Strategies to maintain process consistency without disrupting current workflows.
• How Jama Connect^® streamlines requirements elicitation, tracking, change management, and collaboration to prevent costly errors.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn best practices for successful requirements management and how Jama Connect can support a sustainable and effective approach.

THE VIDEO BELOW IS A PREVIEW OF THIS WEBINAR, WATCH THE ENTIRE PRESENTATION HERE

BELOW IS AN ABBREVIATED SECTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT

Grant Rhodes: Hello, and thank you all for joining. I’m Grant Rhodes, a Senior Solutions Consultant here at Jama Software. It might be that you are new to the discipline of requirements management, or maybe you have been doing it for many years. Either way, I hope I can provide some value today on the topic of standardizing requirements management within an organization. In my career, working with global teams in many different project settings, I’ve seen the importance of standardization firsthand. Requirements management has proven itself a necessary aspect of product development, reducing defects earlier in the development cycle. Standardization of requirements management processes leads to faster and more complete adoption of those processes and greater collaboration across project teams. On the agenda today, we will talk about how standardizing requirements management processes can benefit your organization, and look at some of the challenges that organizations commonly face when developing a standardized process.

Then we will dive into how Jama Connect can make the successful and sustainable implementation of a standardized requirements management process within your organization a reality. Before we get started, let’s make sure that we are aligned on what we mean by requirements management. Requirements management, sometimes called requirements engineering or requirements definition, is the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing, and agreeing on requirements, communicating them to relevant stakeholders, and controlling changes. It is a continuous process throughout product development and is meant to help companies take their raw ideas into more detailed requirements. The pillars of requirements management include requirements definition, requirements validation and verification, and requirements change management. The most fundamental motivation for any requirements management activity is the need to communicate effectively. While requirements are originally elicited on the first steps of the product development lifecycle, it’s important to keep in mind that they are part of a bigger picture and that ownership of that bigger picture may vary.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

Rhodes: For example, governance of requirements management processes may fall under your organization’s project or portfolio management office and be controlled centrally, or companies may opt for project-specific ownership. Just as there are multiple approaches to ownership of requirements processes, there is no one size fits all requirements management standard framework, and there are many standards that are proven to work. Examples include those defined in the Systems Engineering Book of Knowledge, the Business Analyst Book of Knowledge, and others. To point out a quote from Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” I highlight this because implementing some of the ideas in this webinar may lead to lively discussion that highlights competing ideas for requirements management and process standards. So now that we have a level set on our definition of requirements management and established that ownership and approach can vary from company to company and even from project to project, let’s move on to our main topic.

Standardizing requirements management across the organization, a concept that can be entirely agnostic and universally beneficial, no matter your project development structure or methodology. There is no question that requirements management has increased in prominence in recent years, and regardless of industry is largely no longer considered something that is nice to have for development, but rather an absolute necessity. Yet for most, implementation details often remain ambiguous and therefore difficult to apply. We can be entirely committed to getting the requirements right with little consensus on what getting the requirements right actually means. Without that agreement, how can we know if we are succeeding? Without a consistent end goal, how can we be sure the effort put into the requirements management process is worthwhile? This is where standardization arrives to save the day. The standard becomes our requirements management plan as opposed to a separate effort for each product or project that detracts from the effort that could be instead focused on development.

RELATED: Jama Connect Advisor™ Datasheet

Rhodes: There’s massive evidence demonstrating the benefit of defining, deploying, and enforcing requirements management standards for an organization. Those benefits include providing a framework for efficiency, predictability, repeatability, and a benchmark for improvement, better traceability, mitigation of risk, easier training and onboarding, and the elimination of unnecessary rework. Additionally, standardization allows organizations to leverage a diverse array of resources while maintaining consistent results and provides transparency, both in process and work performed. Just as the concept of reusing requirements and leveraging work already done is highly appealing, the standardization of a requirements management process could be viewed as reusing a proven process to ensure the repeatability of a successful development effort. A strong case for standardization is illustrated in the quote, “Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.” What you put in is what you get out. Valuable products are a result of high-quality inputs and high-quality processes.

Even perfect requirements can’t withstand the damaging effects of poor process. The pressure to reduce development time is ever-increasing, and standardization liberates development teams from worrying about the mechanics of the process and allows them to instead give their full focus to solutions development. Consider this quote from Lee Iacocca: “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” Imagine that a new tech company is developing a revolutionary product, but everyone is trusted with their own processes, causing teams to work in silos, maybe even following strong individual processes, but with little alignment. This disconnect can lead to misunderstanding of shared requirements, resulting in bugs and causing delays or extensive meetings to try and realign. If instead the product team defines a standard process for communicating and aligning on the requirements with a communication plan for regular alignment meetings, it would enable them to coordinate more effectively with the same vision about what they’re building.

WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization

The post [Webinar Recap] Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization appeared first on Jama Software.

What Is IBM DOORS Software? Features, Limitations, and Why Teams Are Switching

If you’ve worked in aerospace, defense, or medical devices, you’ve almost certainly run into IBM DOORS. It’s long been one of the most widely used requirements management tools in regulated industries. But the engineering world has changed since DOORS was built, so a growing number of teams now question whether it still fits their workflows.

This guide breaks down what DOORS does, where it falls short for distributed, compliance-heavy programs, and how tools like Jama Connect® address the gaps.

What Is IBM DOORS Software?

IBM DOORS, or Dynamic Object-Oriented Requirements System, is a requirements management tool for capturing, tracing, and managing changes to requirements throughout development. It’s most common in aerospace, defense, medical devices, and automotive, where regulators expect every requirement to be traceable and every baseline to be documented.

DOORS originated in 1991 as Rational DOORS and today exists as two separate products. DOORS Classic (version 9.x) is the original desktop client, and DOORS Next Generation is a web-based application built on IBM’s Jazz architecture. Despite sharing a name, these are architecturally separate systems, so teams moving between them typically treat it as a full migration rather than an upgrade.

Why Teams Originally Invested in IBM DOORS

The needs that drove DOORS adoption still matter, but DOORS has not kept pace with how teams actually work today. These are the capabilities that made it the default choice for regulated programs:

• Bidirectional traceability: DOORS became standard in regulated programs because it maintained linked relationships and an audit-friendly history of those links as requirements changed.
• Read-only baselines: Baselines act as frozen snapshots, which fits stage-gate and V-model workflows where teams need an immutable reference at defined milestones.
• Audit trails and signatures: For organizations under 21 CFR Part 11, electronic records expectations often drive tool and process choices.

Those capabilities explain why DOORS lasted so long in regulated programs, but they no longer set the tool apart the way they once did. They made DOORS a strong fit for document-centric development, which is also why organizations with established processes often keep it longer than they want to.

Key Features and Capabilities of IBM DOORS Software

Systems engineers and quality leads primarily use DOORS for requirements traceability, baselining, and custom scripting through DOORS eXtension Language (DXL), a scripting language for custom imports, reports, metrics, and tool connections. These are the core capabilities that drove DOORS adoption in regulated development:

• Requirements capture and traceability: DOORS organizes requirements into module-based, hierarchical documents and tracks traceability relationships in its own repository, so teams can generate traceability matrices and coverage reports from the stored data.
• Baselining and version control: Teams can create frozen baselines for project snapshots and compare versions to see what changed between releases, which fits stage-gate and V-model development workflows.
• Change management: DOORS tracks every requirement modification with a full audit history, giving quality and compliance leads a record of what changed, when, and by whom.
• DXL scripting and customization: Tool administrators build custom imports, automated reports, and integrations through DXL. Over time, these scripts tend to pile up and become their own maintenance burden.

These features worked well when most development happened in one building with one team, but that model breaks down quickly for distributed, multi-tool, and compliance-heavy programs.

Where IBM DOORS Software Falls Short

Teams tend to reconsider DOORS when the tool starts getting in the way of collaboration, compliance, or how fast engineers can move.

Outdated User Interface and Steep Learning Curve

The DOORS interface feels dated and inefficient for authoring, review, and navigation compared to current web-based tools. That friction shows up most during reviews, when large numbers of stakeholders need to read and comment quickly.

The learning curve makes this worse because DOORS requires careful upfront setup of its database and information architecture, and poor early design can create long-term cleanup work.

Limited Real-Time Collaboration

DOORS was designed for a world where engineers sat in the same building and passed documents through formal review gates. It has some web access, but real-time co-editing and inline comments on specific requirements aren’t built into the core product. When reviews require input from distributed teams across time zones, work tends to spill into email and Word documents instead.

No Cloud-Native Deployment Option

DOORS Classic is on-premises only, and even DOORS Next requires significant migration and administration effort to deploy. For organizations that need strict data residency, validated environments, or lower upgrade effort, that means ongoing IT work to keep servers running, patched, and validated.

High Administration and Maintenance Burden

For a lot of teams, the pressure point isn’t a single technical limitation. It’s the cumulative maintenance work that builds up around customization, reporting, and data cleanup, and it usually comes from a few predictable places:

• Specialized scripting dependency: DXL-heavy environments often require a small set of specialists who maintain scripts, troubleshoot imports, and update reports as processes change.
• Administration workload: Database design, permission models, and project setup can require dedicated tool administrators, particularly in multi-program organizations.
• Migration rework: Custom logic built for DOORS Classic frequently has to be rebuilt when moving to DOORS Next or another requirements tool.

Once those support tasks become routine, the tool starts consuming engineering time instead of protecting it, and that’s usually when organizations start looking at alternatives.

The Business Risk of Staying on IBM DOORS Software

Beyond the day-to-day friction, these limitations carry real risk for regulated programs, from audit gaps to missed updates to downstream test cases and delayed decisions that compound over time.

Compliance Exposure in Regulated Industries

Regulations are changing faster than legacy desktop tools were built to handle. The FDA QMSR, which took effect on February 2, 2026, incorporates ISO 13485:2016 by reference, meaning FDA now directly enforces ISO 13485 as part of its own regulation. The FDA’s cybersecurity rules under Section 524B for “cyber devices” (devices that contain software or have network connectivity) also raise the bar for traceability between cybersecurity risk analysis, design, and postmarket activities.

In aerospace and defense, teams face similar pressure around DO-178 A, B, and C, where DOORS hasn’t kept pace with the frameworks auditors actually expect. Across all of these regulations, the expectation is the same: requirements need to link through design, risk, and testing from start to finish. If those links break, the gaps usually show up during audits or postmarket reviews, when it’s too late to fix things cheaply.

Rework, Delays, and Downstream Quality Failures

Regulatory exposure is one concern, but the day-to-day engineering cost is just as real. When requirements, risk, and test artifacts aren’t kept aligned, upstream changes don’t consistently flag downstream test cases or risk assessments. Engineers can keep building against outdated assumptions until the problem shows up at integration or verification.

At that point, the question shifts from whether a change is needed to how much rework the program can absorb without affecting milestones, quality targets, or certification timelines. The later these issues surface, the more expensive they are to fix, which is exactly why live traceability matters more than stored traceability.

Product Failures, Recalls, and Missed Launches

When traceability gaps go undetected long enough, the consequences move beyond schedule and budget. Products can fail to perform specified functions, customers can discover defects after launch, and entire releases can miss their deadlines or blow past cost targets.

In the worst cases, regulatory bodies reject submissions or require post-launch recalls. All of these trace back to the same root cause: requirements, verification, and risk management weren’t connected tightly enough to catch problems before they reached production.

What to Look for in a Modern Requirements Management Tool

The right replacement for IBM DOORS should keep traceability current instead of treating it as static documentation. These four capabilities separate current platforms from legacy ones:

• Live change impact: When a requirement changes, every linked test case, design element, and risk item should be flagged automatically. Impact analysis should trace effects all the way downstream, not just one level deep.
• Collaboration in context: Reviews, comments, and decisions should happen at the requirement or test level, with an audit-ready record of who decided what and when.
• Open integration: The tool should connect to the rest of the engineering toolchain through APIs and standards without forcing every team into one vendor’s tool set.
• Proven results in regulated environments: Look for documented case studies from teams in your industry. For example, Dexcom reported a 60% efficiency improvement in systems engineering after switching to Jama Connect.

Those criteria help teams tell the difference between tools that store traceability and tools that keep it current throughout development. For a structured breakdown, take a look at our Buyer’s Guide to Selecting a Requirements Management Solution.

How Jama Connect Compares to IBM DOORS Software

Jama Connect is a cloud-based requirements management and traceability system built for live traceability, web-based collaboration, and open integration across complex, regulated product development. That’s why it often comes up when engineering groups evaluate a DOORS Next migration.

Here’s how the two platforms compare across the most important capabilities:

Here’s what each of the capabilities above actually looks like when you’re using Jama Connect:

• Live Traceability: When a requirement changes, every linked downstream artifact (test cases, risk items, design elements) is automatically flagged as suspect so owners can review the impact and update the affected work. Traceability Information Models (TIMs), which define the expected relationships between artifact types, surface coverage gaps automatically instead of waiting for a manual matrix refresh.
• Jama Connect Advisor: Scores requirements against INCOSE quality rules and EARS notation patterns during authoring, catching ambiguity and incomplete language before it propagates downstream. It also suggests refined rewrites so authors can fix flagged requirements in place, and can auto-generate test cases from approved requirements to speed up verification planning.
• Jama Connect Interchange: Keeps Jama Connect in bidirectional sync with tools like Jira and Azure DevOps through ReqIF and REST APIs, replacing the custom DXL scripts that DOORS environments have to maintain.
• Cloud-native deployment: Web-based access with list, document, and trace views, with no on-premises infrastructure required for cloud deployments.
• Familiar interface: The list view resembles Excel for teams migrating from spreadsheets, and the document view reads like a structured specification for review, which reduces onboarding friction and keeps traceability from spilling back into email and spreadsheets.

The migration itself can also surface problems that were hidden inside DOORS for years. As one project manager put it after migrating, “The whole migration of the documentation over to Jama Connect was an eye-opener, especially how it revealed the large number of duplicate documents we had that could be significantly reduced.”

Why Teams Are Switching from IBM DOORS Software to Jama Connect

If your team is spending more time maintaining IBM DOORS than actually using it, that’s a good sign you’ve outgrown it. When reviews happen in email because the interface is too clunky, when traceability only gets updated right before an audit, and when a simple migration to DOORS Next feels like a full program in itself, the real cost is all the engineering time your team loses working around it.

In each case, the tool that was supposed to keep traceability current is now the reason it falls behind. If your team needs Live Traceability, cloud-based collaboration, and integration with the rest of your engineering toolchain without the maintenance overhead, Jama Connect is built for exactly that. See how other organizations have made the switch from IBM DOORS, or start your free 30-day trial to see Jama Connect in action.

Frequently Asked Questions About IBM DOORS Software

Is IBM DOORS still supported?

IBM still supports DOORS Next Generation, but DOORS Classic 9.6.x reached end of support in September 2025, and while 9.7.x has extended support, IBM has not announced new feature development. Teams still on Classic often find that moving to a platform like Jama Connect can be less disruptive than migrating to DOORS Next, since the DOORS Next migration requires rebuilding DXL scripts and reworking workflows anyway.

What is the difference between IBM DOORS Classic and IBM DOORS Next Generation?

DOORS Classic (9.x) is a desktop client with DXL scripting for customization. DOORS Next Generation is a web-based application on IBM’s Jazz architecture with different extension and workflow concepts. Because they’re architecturally separate, teams treat the move between them as a full migration, not an upgrade.

Why are engineering teams moving away from IBM DOORS?

Common triggers include unsustainable maintenance load, an interface that slows adoption among newer engineers, and the need for web-based collaboration. Regulatory changes like the FDA QMSR and FDA Section 524B also push teams toward connected traceability that legacy desktop tools weren’t designed to support. Platforms like Jama Connect are among the alternatives teams evaluate when moving off DOORS.

How do you migrate from IBM DOORS to another tool?

Teams commonly use ReqIF export/import to preserve hierarchy and trace relationships. API-based migration works for more complex transformations. The biggest variable is how much custom DXL logic needs to be rebuilt or replaced. For migration planning, see Jama Software’s DOORS alternative comparison.

The post What Is IBM DOORS Software? Features, Limitations, and Why Teams Are Switching appeared first on Jama Software.

This blog overviews our Customer Story, “Transmutex Wastes No Time Choosing Jama Connect for Developing Nuclear Waste Recycling Systems” – Download the entire story HERE.

Transmutex Wastes No Time Choosing Jama Connect for Developing Nuclear Waste Recycling Systems

“Jama Connect’s ease of use is a big plus for us because we have a lot of people inexperienced with requirements who can now author and review requirements without training or other meetings,” – ALEXANDRE CARVALHO, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, TRANSMUTEX

ABOUT TRANSMUTEX

Transmutex is a startup reinventing nuclear energy by turning nuclear waste into clean energy, fresh fuel, and other products with industrial applications. The company is currently in a conceptual design phase for a nuclear reactor coupled with an accelerator that generates energy and a reprocessing plant that receives spent fuel assemblies to separate usable from unusable material. The resulting waste has a potential 5 to 200 times reduction in volume and 300,000 years to 300 years of radioactive lifetime reduction which reduces transportation, storage, and liability costs that exceed $90 billion in the U.S alone – these are expected to escalate to $186 billion if nuclear capacity triples as announced at the COP28 declaration.

CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW

Working in the highly regulated nuclear reactor and waste processing industry in collaboration with CERN, leading laboratories, industrials, and other startups, Transmutex requires rigorous requirements management and traceability processes to ensure safety, compliance, and project success.

Initially using Word and Excel documents to track requirements, the team knew that this was no way to trace up to 100,000 requirements for several complex systems and entire facilities to ensure requirements quality, documentation consistency, and change management reliability.

Transmutex chose Jama Connect over IBM^® DOORS Next^®, Cameo, and Capella for its combination of ease-of-use, requirements quality verification, customization, integration, and flexibility that provided the best fit to fuel the company’s development projects and growth.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: How to Select the Right Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

WITH JAMA CONNECT, USERS EXPERIENCE:

• Intuitive, easy-to-use solution allowing people unfamiliar with requirements to participate in authoring and reviewing requirements
• Requirements management customized to fit with the current startup processes and team, with flexibility to adapt to growth
• Dashboards tuned specifically for each team, including one providing a quick status check of the health and quality of requirements
• Quality verification of requirements authored and analyzed using Jama Connect Advisor™, allowing less experienced people to write requirements with confidence
• Complete history of discussions and analyses of requirements and risk accessible to everyone

““We have a dashboard which we call ‘the good, the bad, and the ugly’ with indicators that we create using Jama Connect’s powerful filters that allows us to quickly check the health and quality status of requirements to ensure that they are all precise, traced, and confirmed.” – ALEXANDRE CARVALHO, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, TRANSMUTEX

CHALLENGES

• Tracing up to 100,000 requirements for complex systems and entire facilities cannot be done using Word and Excel documents
• Involving people who are unfamiliar with requirements to be involved in authoring, commenting on, and reviewing requirements
• Identifying well written vs. poorly written requirements in a systematic way to avoid inconsistent documentation quality

Transmutex recognized that using Word and Excel documents would not enable its teams to manage large volumes of requirements with the quality and consistency needed to achieve design goals and regulatory compliance.

EVALUATION

• Ease of use and flexibility to ensure participation of a diverse user base
• Comprehensive requirements traceability from high-level systems to subsystems, with documentation needed for regulatory compliance
• Integration with architectural models in existing MBSE tools

After evaluating IBM DOORS, Capella, Cameo, and Jama Connect, Transmutex selected Jama Connect based on its ease of use in authoring, collaborating, reviewing, and tracing requirements of complex systems and subsystems. The company first learned about Jama Connect through G2, which has reported Jama Connect as the top-ranked solution by customers for years. Unlike competitors with steep learning curves, Jama Connect offered an intuitive interface that allowed the team with varying technical skills to become productive quickly, which was crucial for a startup operating under tight timelines. Using Cameo Datahub, the team integrated the requirements in Jama Connect with their MBSE architectural models in Cameo.

“Using Jama Connect Advisor to verify the quality of the requirements gives confidence to people who are not used to writing requirements.” – ALEXANDRE CARVALHO, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, TRANSMUTEX

RELATED: The Collapse of Requirements Quality Under System Complexity – How AI Can Help

OUTCOMES

• Intuitive, easy-to-use solution allowing people unfamiliar with requirements to participate in authoring and reviewing requirements
• Requirements management customized to fit with the current startup processes and team, with flexibility to adapt to growth
• Dashboards tuned specifically for each team, including one providing a quick status check of the health and quality of requirements
• Complete history of discussions and analyses of requirements and risk accessible to everyone
• Quality verification of requirements authored and analyzed using Jama Connect Advisor, allowing less experienced people to write requirements with confidence

“The ability to customize Jama Connect to our processes and teams means that we don’t need to compromise on half-done analysis or requirements or complicate the process further.” – ALEXANDRE CARVALHO, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, TRANSMUTEX

Learn how Jama Connect helps energy companies succeed with higher quality and faster time to market.

The post Transmutex Wastes No Time Choosing Jama Connect® for Developing Nuclear Waste Recycling Systems appeared first on Jama Software.

This blog overviews our Customer Story, “SPAN Electrifies Its Product Development and Safety with Jama Connect” – Download the entire story HERE.

SPAN Electrifies Its Product Development and Safety with Jama Connect

“By implementing Jama Connect, our teams are able to maintain transparency across stakeholders, streamline communication, and ensure alignment on project goals. This integrated approach reduces redundant efforts and helps accelerate product development cycles while maintaining compliance and quality standards,” – Arnaldo Arancibia, Senior Staff Systems Architect, SPAN

ABOUT SPAN

SPAN is an innovative company revolutionizing the home energy market with smart electrical panels, EV chargers, and energy storage systems. Headquartered in San Francisco, SPAN emphasizes sustainability and cutting-edge technology to deliver smarter energy solutions for homes, advancing how people interact with energy systems.

CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW

SPAN needed to improve traceability of requirements across product ideation, systems, hardware, and software development, while ensuring compliance with critical safety standards such as UL 916, UL 60730, UL 1998, UL 3141, UL 1741, and UL 9540, among others. As requirements grew more complex and teams scaled across functions, the startup recognized the need to replace its manual process for managing traceability in spreadsheets based on product requirements documents (PRDs) in Confluence.

To address these challenges, SPAN selected Jama Connect for its centralized platform that enables cross-functional collaboration and alignment using an easy-to-use, single source of truth for managing its systems, hardware, and firmware requirements, tests plans, and compliance documentation.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: How to Select the Right Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

WITH JAMA CONNECT, USERS EXPERIENCE:

• Streamlined system validation, reducing timelines by up to 25% through effortless tracing and organized requirements management
• Reviews with feedback and questions were reduced to two cycles, which expedited the way each new feature started being implemented
• Fewer delays and improved efficiency through automatic syncing of tasks in Jira and requirements using Jama Connect Interchange™
• Efficient reuse of requirements and tests for shared components between existing and next-generation products using Jama Connect’s Reuse and Sync capabilities

“Using Jama Connect for test reporting has increased my team’s visibility significantly. The ability to add custom cycles and show test progress is a huge help in getting clarity on the stability of our system.” – Paloma Fautley, Systems Integration Manager, SPAN

CHALLENGES

SPAN had various priorities during its growth phase, matched by equally pressing challenges that defined the criteria for a new solution, including:

• Difficulty finding information in Confluence and maintaining traceability for complex requirements across projects in spreadsheets
• Ineffective cross-team communication and collaboration due to siloed hardware and software departments and their workflows
• Struggling with a highly iterative development process involving increasingly complex requirements, while scaling startup operations

EVALUATION

Key stakeholders with experience with Polarion and IBM® DOORS® recognized that Jama Connect was the right solution because of its intuitiveness, flexibility, interoperability, and structured collaboration.

• Quick configuration and launch of a customized project structure that encouraged team collaboration and communication
• Centralized system providing a single source for tracking changes and ensuring alignment with product safety standards
• End-to-end traceability across hardware and software requirements and tests with connectivity to other development tools

“Jama Software’s core principles of collaboration, innovation, and customer focus have created a ‘Jama Connect culture’ at SPAN that encourages engineers to think systematically about requirements from development to testing, which are now central to their operations.” – Arnaldo Arancibia, Senior Staff Systems Architect, SPAN

RELATED: Engineering for the Cyber Resilience Act: Navigating Compliance Across the Product Lifecycle

OUTCOMES

Since implementing Jama Connect, SPAN has realized significant benefits from the solution that have contributed to greater confidence and speed in its product development process.

• Savings of about three months of system validation due to ease of tracing and organizing requirements
• Reviews with feedback and questions were reduced to two cycles which expedited the way each new feature started being implemented
• Fewer delays and improved efficiency through automatic syncing of tasks in Jira and requirements in Jama Connect using Jama Connect Interchange
• Efficient reuse of requirements and tests for shared components between existing and next-generation products using Jama Connect’s Reuse and Sync capabilities

Learn how Jama Connect helps energy companies succeed with higher quality and faster time to market.

The post SPAN Electrifies Its Product Development and Safety with Jama Connect® appeared first on Jama Software.

In this blog, we recap our recent webinar. Watch the entire presentation here, Requirements Under Construction: Bringing Control and Traceability to AECO Projects

Build Better AECO Projects: Overcome Misalignment, Rework, and Scope Creep

Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) projects are large, complex, and increasingly regulated. Yet many teams still manage owner requirements, design intent, and change decisions using disconnected documents, spreadsheets, and siloed repositories.

The result is misalignment between stakeholders, costly rework, scope creep, and limited traceability from early owner requirements through design, construction, and handover.

Join Dale Brown, Director, Infrastructure at NSI Advisory Services, and Jama Software experts, as they discuss the real-world challenges of requirements management in AECO projects.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why document- and spreadsheet-based approaches fall short on complex AECO projects
• How poor requirements visibility leads to misalignment, rework, and scope creep
• Practical ways to manage change while keeping stakeholders aligned
• How to maintain traceability from early owner requirements through design, construction, and handover
• What modern AECO teams need to support audits, compliance, and delivery confidence
• A look at how Jama Connect^® supports requirements traceability across AECO project phases

THE VIDEO BELOW IS A PREVIEW – WATCH THE ENTIRE PRESENTATION HERE

TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW

Requirements Under Construction: Bringing Control and Traceability to AECO Projects

Dale Brown: Thanks for inviting me to the conversation. Yeah, a lot of those folks probably really are doing systems thinking, or as we call it, systems engineering, but it doesn’t have to be engineering. It’s just using that system’s view of the world. So I’ll just try to explain it in a fair way, using lay terms as opposed to a lot of tech speak. I mean, we live in a very complex world in our daily lives. We’re surrounded by a complicated environment. Our cars, our phones, our homes, our offices, schools, trains, and planes. And we ourselves are pretty complex creatures.

And we’re part of a community, usually which is part of a town or a city, which is part of a state, which is part of a region, part of a country, and part of the planet. So that’s kind of the way all these parts, you can see how they aggregate. And that’s really what systems thinking is. It’s thinking about where I fit into a bigger picture, potentially, a bigger environment. So in the case of an infrastructure project, you would know that there are local codes of practice, state and national codes, and maybe even international. So where do I fit into all that?

And especially for the architects who are looking at the bigger picture to see how their design, what is the look and feel of what they’re trying to accomplish, both internally to say it’s a structure, or externally, if it’s a cool new stadium or anything really, does it fit? Maybe it’s not intended to fit, maybe it’s intended to stand out. So all of those external things affect their system thinking, and that’s it in lay terms. Hopefully that makes sense.

Joe Gould: Yeah, it definitely does. It’s a great perspective, Dale, great way of thinking about it. So thank you for that. So let me ask you then, where do you already see systems engineering principles showing up in AEC, even if we don’t call them that?

Brown: Yeah. And I mean, the terminology is such a big thing, Joe. But yeah, I see it all the time because you’ll get civil engineers who know they have to think outside of their particular part. And if we think that, again, using the word systems in defining what it is, it’s a collection of parts, or the more formal definition is a group of elements that form a system. But if you think of it just in parts, what’s their part in it? What is it that they’re designing? And so they’re already understanding, okay, they probably, if it’s the foundation person, they probably have to talk to the soils engineer.

And at some point, the civil and electrical guys have to talk, or the conduits are going to be put in the wrong place in the concrete. And that sort of thing, they’re already thinking about the system, even if it’s just the aesthetics, the look and feel. So they’re doing this, and they have been doing it for, well, I guess 6 or 7,000 years. So it’s not new. But I think what’s new and what’s kind of crept up is a new terminology related to aerospace, and actually, software has been the big push.

RELATED: Five Key Challenges AEC Project Owners Face and How to Solve Them with Jama Connect

Gould: Sure. No, that’s great, Dale. I’m hearing systems engineering more and more inside AEC firms. We have some large construction companies that we work with that are using systems engineering practices, for lack of a better term. Let me ask you then, so what are the most critical issues facing AEC companies today from, say, a delivery and risk perspective?

Brown: Yeah. What I’ve seen on a lot of big multi-billion dollar projects is that at some point, you have to provide a defensible audit trail of all the decisions, not all, but the critical decisions you’ve made, and especially if it’s a change order or something like that, why did you make that change? How is it documented? And where can I see that evolution of things in the design and then ultimately in the actual build? And if you can’t show that to either state safety oversight or a local building inspector, or the client, you’ll probably not get permission to occupy and use the facility for revenue service, which just means that from that point forward, all you’re doing is damage control.

You’re burning cash, you’re sadly probably also burning reputation, both of the owner, especially if it’s public money, and the state authority, whoever’s involved in it. So that’s the big risk: you build this thing and you either can’t use it because you’ve made some sort of an error partway through, or you’re not allowed to use it, which is almost kind of worse because you’re there, but you can’t provide that assurance.

Gould: Right. Yeah. I mean, you definitely answered my question. It’s like, what happens when you can’t answer those questions? And it sounds like it’s pure damage control, is what it is. And I think you nailed it, Dale. Can you talk about the financial and organizational impact of this lack of, and I’ll use the word traceability, and if you could just quickly define what traceability might mean, I think I know what it means, but I’ll ask the expert. What impact does that have financially and organizationally?

Brown: Yeah. So again, traceability is one of those terms that have become quite popular throughout aerospace and software design and development. And really, what it means is a defensible audit trail showing that this part must do the following things in the following ways in a certain environment. So you have to be able to show the relationship between all of those, which we call requirements. They can just be needs, but whatever terminology you want to use, you have to show that it’s linked and it has to be a repeatable thing. It has to be something that you can consistently show the linkage to, and that’s how we refer to traceability.

Also, if you’re doing tests, if you’ve built it or you’ve partially built it, and you need to show evidence that you’ve actually designed and built it to whatever requirements or codes of practice that are needed, then you need to show, again, that defensible linkage, and it has to be done consistently. So that to me is kind of a long definition of traceability, but hopefully it works.

Gould: Yeah, no, that definitely works. The impact of change, obviously, in the world of AEC, it’s not if it’s going to change, it’s when it’s going to change.

Brown: Yeah, yeah.

Gould: And having that, again, for lack of a better term, traceability or defensible audit trail, whatever we want to call it, is just absolutely huge. And really when we look at project management tools, I feel like they’re great for managing a project, use many of them across the board, but when you need to get granular on something and we need to understand impacts and decisions and have that audit trail like you spoke of, I mean, that’s just gold and financially not having it can just have a huge impact on the profit margin of that project. So thanks for that, Dale. So have we seen, I mean, I can speak to this, but have we seen real projects go sideways because of a lack of traceability?

Brown: Yes. Often, the old adage is that systems fail at interfaces, and if you don’t understand where something is connecting to something else, basically an interface, then that’s probably going to fail. And it can be as simple as the control rack doesn’t fit in the room, or the air conditioning that was designed for the room, the person designing the HVAC unit didn’t realize what the heat load was from that rack of electronics. And so there’s an example. Another more common one that I see sadly in almost every project is that the conduits were buried in the concrete in the wrong location, or they were the wrong size, or an assumption was made that you could mix the high voltage or even medium voltage with low-level signals. So those are examples of what happens. And some of those can get pretty expensive because the concrete’s still green, and already you’re breaking out the jackhammers.

Gould: Yeah. I mean, that’s such a huge impact on projects, and so thank you for that. Let me ask you this. If systems engineering or traceability is so valuable, then why has AEC been so slow to adopt these practices? I don’t understand.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: How to Select the Right Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

Brown: Yeah, it’s been a frustration and a passion of mine for a couple of decades now, almost, seems like 15 years anyway. And what’s happened is I think a lot of it is the words matter discussion we had earlier, where if you present it the wrong way and try to deploy it as if building a new train station or a new skyscraper or anything is the same as writing software. So if you use all the code terminology and try to ram that down the throats of people that have got, as I said earlier, thousands, if not hundreds of years of expertise backing up their education and they’re used to doing things a certain way and having a certain terminology guide them, they may not refer to requirements, or maybe in their mind, requirements means contract requirements only, and it’s not the same as a formal technical requirement, those sorts of misunderstandings in words.

But when you start throwing so much new terminology, and you force them, and you say, “You must do things this way. You have to get all the system requirements first.” And the civil guy, or maybe the architect on the project, is saying, “What do you mean? What are these words?” And they may or may not be familiar with it, depending on their age and their experience. And if you’re not communicating to them that you’re really just looking for what the user needs, what are the local codes of practice, what’s the basis of design? What are going to be the exceptions to the code, and maybe those are the ones that we have to really focus on because the rest of the stuff is already covered through normal building practices.

So now we’re kind of getting into a point of a side discussion, but a really important one on efficiency. So what’s happened is the industry has seen a lot of bureaucracy foisted on them through some words in a contract document that says, “You shall incorporate ISO 15288 systems engineering.” And they’re not familiar with it or the terms in a lot of cases. That’s changing slowly, but it’s also, you can’t apply it directly out of the software world into the AEC world. It just doesn’t make sense. You have to tailor it, you have to make it make sense.

So if you end up with making them do work twice, which is what happens in a lot of cases where they’ve already done a basis of design document, but now they have to deal with requirements in a separate requirements document or tool that was very expensive and they don’t understand how to use the tool and it’s been prescribed to them in the contract, sometimes they even put the tool in the contract and it gets very frustrating. So there’s been a bad history of this over the past few 15 years anyway, and we’re trying to turn a corner on that and really address maybe it’s just the exceptions to code that we really need to show extremely good traceability, extremely good audit trail evidence.

We don’t have to show every single nuance of every single design because it’s just normal practice. It’s going to be checked through and accepted through local building codes anyway. So let’s not do it two or three times. And I think that’s the distaste, and it’s created the resistance, in my opinion.

THIS HAS BEEN A PREVIEW – TO WATCH THE ENTIRE WEBINAR, VISIT:
Requirements Under Construction: Bringing Control and Traceability to AECO Projects

The post [Webinar Recap] Requirements Under Construction: Bringing Control and Traceability to AECO Projects appeared first on Jama Software.

Requirements Elicitation: A Step-by-Step Approach to Defining the Right Requirements

The success of any new product or project hinges on a simple, yet challenging task: collecting requirements. When done well in a carefully controlled process that lives up to the more aptly named eliciting requirements, it leads to a product or project that meets everyone’s expectations. When done poorly in a haphazard manner, it results in costly rework, missed deadlines, and a final delivery that fails to satisfy anyone.

The process of gathering input from a diverse group of stakeholders—each with their own priorities and perspectives—poses multiple risks. Time and costs can quickly spiral, and the danger of missing a critical requirement is ever-present. This article explores the basics and benefits of following a systematic process for requirements elicitation.

The High Cost of Unstructured Requirements Collection

Product and project leads are under pressure to get requirements complete before anything else begins. Without a systematic process designed to ensure intended outcomes, project or program success is exposed to these significant risks:

• Wasted Time and Resources: Ad-hoc soliciting, eliciting, tracking, and organizing requirements in documents and spreadsheets is incredibly time-consuming and prone to error. This inefficiency directly translates to higher project costs and slower time-to-market.
• The Risk of Missing Requirements: A disorganized process makes it easy for critical requirements to fall through the cracks. Discovering these gaps late in the development cycle leads to expensive changes and frustrating delays.
• Incomplete Stakeholder Input: Failing to identify and engage all relevant stakeholders—from internal teams like Sales and Product Management to external partners like customers and partners—can result in a product that is misaligned with market needs or technical constraints.

The key takeaway: An ad-hoc approach to collecting requirements is not just inefficient; it’s a direct threat to your project’s success.

How to Systematically Elicit Requirements: A 5-Step Process

To mitigate these risks, adopt a structured approach. These steps will help you gather, organize, and track requirements with greater clarity and efficiency.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Semiconductor

Step 1: Define the Project or Project Scope and Objectives

Before you elicit a single requirement, ensure everyone has a shared understanding of the goals. What problem are you trying to solve? Who are the users, and what are their priorities? What does success look like? What industry or corporate standards will require documentation to demonstrate compliance?

A clear project charter or vision document is essential for keeping all subsequent requirements aligned with the core objectives. This document should be a living resource, regularly revisited, and carefully updated in a controlled manner based on learning throughout the process.

Step 2: Identify and Map Your Stakeholders

A stakeholder is anyone with an interest in or influence on your product or project. Missing input from a key stakeholder is a common point of failure. The lists below are some common stakeholders but are not an exhaustive list.

• Internal Stakeholders: Product management, sales, marketing, engineering, quality assurance, and executive leadership.
• External Stakeholders: Customers, end-users, suppliers, partners, and regulatory bodies.

Create a stakeholder map to categorize individuals and groups based on their level of influence and interest. This helps you prioritize engagement and tailor your communication strategy.

Step 3: Choose Your Elicitation Techniques

There is no one-size-fits-all method for collecting requirements. Use a mix of techniques to gather comprehensive information:

• Interviews: One-on-one conversations are great for understanding individual needs and complex details.
• Observation: Ethnographic studies and usability analysis can expose current problems or identify opportunities that a product might solve, but that users and other stakeholders might not be able to see or articulate.
• Focus Groups: Facilitated group sessions are effective for brainstorming, resolving conflicts, and building consensus among stakeholders.
• Surveys: Use questionnaires to gather input from many stakeholders efficiently, as long as the requestions are articulated to avoid injecting bias and responses are interpreted carefully.
• Document Analysis: Review existing business plans, market analysis, and technical specifications to extract relevant requirements.

All of these techniques are powerful but can be risky in the hands of inexperienced personnel.

Step 4: Document and Organize Requirements in a Centralized System

As you gather requirements, you must organize them in a way that is accessible, clear, and traceable. A scattered process makes it impossible to see dependencies, track changes, or ensure complete coverage.

The most important part of this step is moving away from manual methods and toward a single source of truth that applies a systematic approach and automation to maintain control and visibility.

Step 5: Review, Refine, and Validate

Collecting requirements is not a one-time event. It’s an iterative process, and work products can span generations of products and product lines. Once documented, requirements must be reviewed by stakeholders to ensure they are clear, accurate, and complete. This feedback loop is critical for refining the product or project definition and gaining formal sign-off before development begins.

Other Key Considerations

What is the difference between collecting, gathering, and eliciting requirements?

While often used interchangeably, “gathering” or “collecting” can imply simply accumulating information sitting around waiting to be picked up. “Eliciting” suggests a systematic and organized process of soliciting, documenting, and managing requirements from various sources to build a complete and validated set.

How can I ensure I haven’t missed any key stakeholders?

Start by brainstorming all possible groups and individuals affected by the project, both inside and outside your organization. Review past projects of a similar nature to see who was involved. A key practice is to ask the stakeholders you’ve already identified, “Who else should we talk to?”

What’s the biggest risk of a poor requirements collection process?

The biggest risk is building the wrong product. Missing or misunderstood requirements can lead to a final product that doesn’t meet customer needs or business goals, rendering the entire development effort a waste of time and money.

Can AI help speed up the process?

Yes, Generative AI can be useful in suggesting requirements and uncovering gaps in requirements already identified. Be prepared to store suggestions that are outside the scope of the current project for possible use in future ones.

RELATED: BrightInsight Drives Efficiency Using Jama Connect^®

Use the Right Tool to Elicit Requirements

To ensure that your process for eliciting requirements for complex products or projects goes smoothly, use a modern tool designed specifically for that purpose. Jama Connect^® is designed to address the core pain points of requirements elicitation by providing a collaborative, single platform accessible to all your stakeholders from the start through the end of your project, as well as across product lines and product generations

With Jama Connect, you can:

• Centralize Everything: Create, review, validate, and verify all requirements in one place, eliminating the chaos of documents and spreadsheets.
• Improve Stakeholder Collaboration: Bridge silos between teams and provide all stakeholders with real-time visibility into goals, progress, and interdependencies.
• Enhance Requirement Quality: Use the Jama Connect Advisor™ add-on to Jama Connect to author and analyze requirements for clarity and consistency against industry standards, including the EARS syntax. Natural language processing (NLP) helps you write better requirements from the start, avoiding ambiguity that leads to costly rework later.
• Ensure Traceability: Easily track relationships between requirements, test cases, and risk analyses to understand the impact of any change.

Don’t let scattered documents and manual tracking derail your requirements elicitation activity. A systematic approach supported by the right tool is the key to developing complex products successfully.

Ready to streamline your requirements elicitation process?
Schedule a demo of Jama Connect today!

Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Mark Levitt and Sarah Crary Gregory.

The post Requirements Elicitation: A Step-by-Step Approach to Defining the Right Requirements appeared first on Jama Software.

The Future of Requirements Management: Top 10 Trends to Watch in 2026

Requirements management keeps changing and evolving. With new technologies and project demands emerging every year, teams can’t rely on the same old playbook and expect great results. Instead, organizations are finding new ways to define project needs, work together, and use technology to their advantage. Adapting these shifts isn’t optional; it’s a must for any business that wants to keep up and deliver real value.

Staying ahead of these changes is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge. This article will explore the ten most significant trends shaping the future of requirements management. From the integration of artificial intelligence to the growing importance of sustainability, we will provide actionable insights to help you prepare your team for the challenges and opportunities of 2026.

1. AI and Machine Learning Will Become Standard

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are moving from niche applications to core components of the requirements management toolkit. These technologies are revolutionizing how teams elicit, analyze, and validate requirements. AI-driven platforms can now automate the tedious work of sifting through customer feedback, technical documents, and interview transcripts to identify key needs and potential conflicts.

This automation frees up business analysts and product managers to concentrate on high-value strategic tasks. For instance, AI can generate initial drafts of user stories, acceptance criteria, and even test cases, significantly speeding up the development cycle and reducing the likelihood of human error. The result is a more efficient process that produces higher-quality, more consistent requirements.

2. Sustainability Goals Will Be Integrated into Requirements

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria have become a major focus for corporations worldwide. This shift is now directly impacting project development, as sustainability is no longer just a corporate goal but a tangible project requirement. Requirements management processes must now incorporate non-functional requirements that address a product’s environmental impact and ethical footprint.

This means teams will need to define and track metrics related to energy efficiency, material sourcing, accessibility, and data privacy. By embedding these ESG considerations directly into the project’s foundation, organizations can ensure that sustainability is a core design principle, not an afterthought.

3. Cloud-Native Platforms Will Dominate

The move toward remote and hybrid work models has accelerated the transition to cloud-based requirements management solutions. These platforms offer a single, centralized source of truth that is accessible to all stakeholders, regardless of their location. This real-time collaboration is essential for keeping distributed teams aligned and productive.

Cloud-native tools offer more than just accessibility; they provide the scalability needed to handle projects of any size and offer seamless integrations with a wide range of development and operations tools. This creates a connected digital ecosystem where information flows smoothly from initial idea to final deployment, enhancing transparency and overall project efficiency.

RELATED: Empowering Complex Development with Responsible AI

4. Cybersecurity Will Be a Day-One Priority

With the increasing frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks, security can no longer be addressed late in the development cycle. The practice of “shifting left” is becoming standard, meaning security considerations must be integrated into the requirements phase. A single vulnerability can compromise sensitive data, leading to severe financial and reputational damage.

Requirements management must now include the proactive definition of security protocols, data encryption standards, and strict access controls. Methodologies like threat modeling are becoming common practice during the initial project stages to identify and mitigate potential security risks before a single line of code is written.

5. Deeper Alignment with Agile and DevOps

The rapid iteration cycles of Agile and DevOps demand a fluid and responsive approach to requirements management. The era of the static, hundred-page requirements document is over. In its place is a dynamic, living backlog that evolves alongside the project. Achieving this requires deep, seamless integration between requirements management software and popular Agile platforms.

This tight alignment ensures that development work is always synchronized with the latest project requirements. It facilitates a continuous feedback loop, where learnings from sprints and testing can be used to refine the backlog instantly. This adaptive approach allows teams to respond quickly to changing market needs and deliver more valuable products.

6. Digital Twins Will Validate Requirements Virtually

Digital twin technology offers a groundbreaking way to test and validate requirements in a risk-free virtual environment. By creating a detailed digital replica of a product, system, or process, teams can simulate its behavior under countless scenarios. This allows stakeholders to see and interact with a virtual version of the final product long before physical production begins.

This is especially valuable for complex hardware, manufacturing, and infrastructure projects. Using a digital twin, teams can identify design flaws, optimize performance, and ensure that the documented requirements translate into the desired real-world outcome. This process minimizes costly late-stage changes and significantly improves product quality.

7. Collaboration Will Extend Across Business Networks

Projects today rarely happen in a silo. They involve a complex network of internal departments, external partners, suppliers, and customers. Effective collaboration across this entire ecosystem is critical for success. Enterprise communication platforms and business networks are becoming indispensable for sharing information and facilitating collective decision-making.

By integrating these collaborative tools directly into the requirements management workflow, organizations can create a transparent and inclusive environment. This ensures all stakeholders have an opportunity to provide input and that their feedback is captured, tracked, and addressed, reducing misunderstandings and preventing project delays.

RELATED: 2026 Predictions Series: Insights from Leading Experts

8. User-Centricity Will Be at the Core

Ultimately, a project’s success is measured by how well it meets the needs of its end-users. This has led to a much stronger focus on user-centric design principles within requirements management. Techniques such as developing detailed user personas, mapping out customer journeys, and conducting usability testing are no longer optional extras; they are essential practices.

Adopting this user-first mindset ensures that every requirement is tied to a tangible user benefit. By building a deep understanding of the user experience, teams can prioritize features that deliver real value, resulting in products that are not only functional but also intuitive, engaging, and enjoyable to use.

9. Advanced Analytics Will Drive Decision-Making

Collecting project data is easy; turning it into actionable intelligence is the real challenge. Advanced analytics and business intelligence tools are empowering requirements managers to make smarter, data-driven decisions. These platforms can visualize complex data sets, identify emerging trends, and even predict potential project risks.

By analyzing both historical project data and real-time performance metrics, teams can gain a much clearer picture of project health. This allows them to proactively manage scope, optimize resource allocation, and improve the accuracy of future estimates, leading to more predictable and successful project outcomes.

10. Continuous Learning Will Be Non-Negotiable

The tools, technologies, and methodologies in requirements management are in a constant state of flux. To remain effective, practitioners must embrace a culture of continuous learning and professional development. This involves staying current with new software, mastering emerging best practices, and honing essential soft skills like facilitation and strategic communication.

Organizations that foster this culture by providing access to training, certifications, and other learning resources will empower their teams to navigate the evolving landscape successfully. A commitment to continuous improvement is the key to building a resilient and competitive organization.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: How to Select the Right Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

Preparing for the Future

The trends shaping requirements management point to a more collaborative, intelligent, and user-focused future. By embracing these changes, your organization can not only keep up but lead the way. Begin by assessing your current processes against these trends and identify the areas that offer the greatest potential for improvement. The future of your projects depends on it.

Intelligently improve your development process with Jama Connect:
Start your free 30-day trial!

Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Decoteau Wilkerson and Mario Maldari.

The post The Future of Requirements Management: Top 10 Trends to Watch in 2026 appeared first on Jama Software.

This blog is a recap of our recent webinar. To watch the entire presentation, visit “Advancing Requirements Engineering in Semiconductor.”

Evolving Requirements Engineering: A Framework for the Semiconductor Industry

Unlike other industries, the semiconductor sector has no governing standards or regulations for developing and managing requirements and product data— despite being critical components of products across nearly every regulated industry. This absence makes aligning key methods and practices a critical lever for improving quality, reducing rework, and gaining a competitive edge.

In this webinar, Sarah Gregory, Principal Consultant, Systems & Requirements at Crary Labs LLC, and Steve Rush, Principal Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, explore how voluntary alignment on requirements engineering practices can elevate your processes.

What You’ll Learn:

• The current state of requirements engineering in the semiconductor industry
• The value of selective movement to common ground
• “Common enough” methods that deliver measurable improvements
• How to use the Jama Connect^® for Semiconductor Framework and Procedure Guide

Whether you’re defining your next generation of chips or improving process maturity across design teams, this webinar will help you align, simplify, and elevate your requirements engineering practices.

WEBINAR PREVIEW BELOW, CLICK HERE FOR FULL WEBINAR

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW BELOW

Advancing Requirements Engineering in Semiconductor

Sarah Gregory: Thanks everybody for joining us today for a discussion about requirements engineering in the semiconductor industry. After over 20 years of tackling challenges of requirements within a semiconductor company myself, it’s really great to be collaborating with the folks at Jama Software on the upcoming launch of a Jama Connect solution that’s tailored for what we do. This webinar is an introduction to that solution, kind of a soft launch of a broader set of resources that will be released in just a couple of weeks, significantly expanding Jama Software’s engagement in a sector in so many ways that’s foundational to industries overall. In this webinar, we’re going to give a brief overview of the current state of semiconductor requirements practice. We’ll talk through some challenges that are common to semiconductor, some are drawn from my own industry experience, but also from outside research publications and collaborations. These challenges may sound familiar to you too. And then we’ll also talk about the value of intentional movement towards aligning product development data practices both within your company and or any specific company, but also for semiconductor overall.

And we’re definitely seeing folks start to pick up on that. These aren’t alignments that a third party data model or a standard is mandating for you either, but practices that have a solid return on investment in your context both financially and in terms of quality and efficiency. Better alignment accelerates time to market and helps you respond effectively to change. A phrase that I found useful working in semiconductor about requirements as well as requirements engineering generally is common enough, not identical, not uniform, not standard even, but common enough practices that an organization or team can coalesce around in order to build some efficiencies in their product development practice. There are many ways to move toward alignment on common enough practices, but we’ll share just a few today and Steve will show you what they look like in practice if you were to choose to try them out using Jama Connect. Steve will also introduce the Jama Connect semiconductor framework that will be launching on December 4th the same day as a Jama Software hosted Digital Engineering Summit in San Jose. We’ll tell you a little bit more about that before we end today too.

And of course, we’re going to take some questions. We may not have time to catch them all in our short time together today, but please do put them in the Q&A. What we don’t get to today we’ll try to tackle over the next few weeks and we’ll make available in the semiconductor area of the Jama Software website. Let’s get started. A key first step in any collaborative engineering activity is to make sure that when you’re using a term, you’ve got a shared understanding of what that term means. When each of you signed up to attend today, you brought your own mental model of what we might mean by semiconductor, so let’s take just a minute to orient on that with the model that Jama Software uses describing eight different categories of companies. Now, this isn’t the only way to represent semiconductor and there are certainly different degrees of difference or commonality among these groupings, so don’t get wrapped around the picture here or those categories, it’s just to let you know that yes, semiconductor as comprehended by Jama Software is a very broad and diverse sector with different data management needs.

RELATED: Jama Connect Features in Five: Review Center for Semiconductor Development

Gregory: For example, the requirements for a semiconductor chip, for a chip design, they’re going to different than the requirements for litho and etch equipment to fab that chip. Companies in some of the boxes may also exist in other industry categories and they could be subject to standards in those industries as well, so it’s all a matter of what an individual company does that it informs what information they need to manage and how they need to manage that product data. It’s also possible for two companies or more in the same subsegment to manage their product data in very different ways and then for there to be commonalities in company practices across those lines too. It’s not in the scope of Steve’s and my discussion today to dig into these differences within the segments, much less different data management practices among them. Just know that the work that Jama Software is doing to support requirements engineering and data governance in the semiconductor industry, beginning with this initial release of the new semiconductor solution comprehends the scope.

We have eight categories, a lot of overlap, but just as important so many differences sometimes even within a single company within one of those categories. And it’s those differences, the scope and the breadth of them that is a challenge that in many ways is unique to the semiconductor industry. Several industries, automotive, medical devices, even some areas of oil and gas have prescriptive standards that govern how product data is structured, developed and managed. If you’ve been following Jama Software for a while you’ve possibly noticed a lot of resources that enable companies across those industries to deploy Jama Connect to manage their requirements conforming to those standards. Jama Connect has several predefined traceability information models or data models and specific templates that are purpose-built to accelerate the work of companies that need to meet those standards. In semiconductor, we don’t have such a standard at the point of product definition. You may have your own mental model of the information architecture at your company or at least in the part of the company where you’re working.

And if you happen to work in a standards-adjacent area, for example, your company or the part of the company that you’re in provides devices to automotive, standards that govern the automotive industry may be familiar to you at least for that part of your business. Otherwise, even within the same subsector in semiconductor, you’re going to find a lot of differences, a lot of divergence in how companies may architect their product data. In the absence of prescriptive standards that govern product information architecture a lot of that information architecture has just grown up organically. Now, when you look across semiconductor as a whole you might see some resemblance in some areas, but in others the information to be managed is quite different. No standards, no common regulations, very different products, all leads to a lot of divergence in practice, and that divergence can create drag and inefficiencies. Now, that points to one of the common traits across many companies in the semiconductor industry too.

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Advancing Requirements Engineering in Semiconductor

The post [WEBINAR RECAP] Advancing Requirements Engineering in Semiconductor appeared first on Jama Software.

In this blog, we recap a preview of our webinar, “Best Practices for Writing Requirements” – Click HERE for the full version.

Discover How to Remove Ambiguity and Improve Development Outcomes

Regardless of what terminology your teams use—”needs,” “features,” or “requirements”—the purpose of good requirements is to create a shared understanding of the promise, functionality, and value of the products you develop across all stakeholders. Ineffective requirements can lead to scope creep, delays, and poor product quality.

Watch our webinar to learn proven methods for writing better requirements to remove ambiguity and improve development outcomes.

In this insightful session, you will learn how to:

• Create a simple, systematic, and standardized process that your teams can follow.
• Separate requirements from design and establish a clear hierarchy.
• Ensure complete traceability of requirements throughout the development lifecycle.

Below is a preview of our webinar. Click HERE for the entire presentation.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Best Practices for Writing Requirements

Patrick Garman: Hello everyone, let me introduce myself and my co-host. I am Patrick Garman, I’m a Principal Solutions Consultant here at Jama Software, and I work with customers across multiple industries to optimize requirements management practices to help innovators succeed. Before coming to Jama Software, I had 10 years of product development experience and I’ve led teams to successful product launches in soft tech, consumer electronics, logistics, healthcare, government and public sector, and the financial services industries. And now I serve as the services lead for improving requirements quality at Jama Software. Joining me today as well is Danny.

Danny Beerens: Hi. Thank you, Patrick, for introducing me. I’m Danny Beerens, Senior Solution Consultant here at Jama Software, and I will be assisting Patrick today. I have nearly two decades of experience in system engineering, and I have successfully implemented, trained, maintained, and supported application lifecycle management application, specifically requirements management application. Throughout my career, I have worked on projects and collaborated with customers in the medical device, aerospace and defense, automotive, and semiconductor industries.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

Beerens: So let’s start off today. Jama Software’s purpose is to help innovators succeed, as Patrick already mentioned. And the key to successful innovation is writing high-quality requirements for your products. We want you to walk away from this session with an understanding of why requirements are important and give you a useful framework from which to build your requirements-authoring skills. Basically, we are setting the groundwork here. We’ll expose you to the challenges in product development as they relate to requirements, and we will talk about how requirements help to bridge communication challenges. We’ll also provide you with important information and tools for authoring better requirements. So helping you write better requirements is why we are here, but what does that matter, why are we really here?

What we want and what I suspect you want too is to build safe and high-quality products, and requirements are an essential element in defining, designing, and developing great products. So yes, we want you to write better requirements, but writing better requirements is a means to a better end, a high-quality safe product, and good requirements also mean getting that great product with hopefully less communication friction, reduced rework, and building a work environment that encourages collaboration, transparency, and focuses on quality.

RELATED: The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

Beerens: So, let’s start with talking about why requirements are important. Requirements are the building blocks of product development and strong requirements lead to better products. Conversely, vague and unclear requirements cannot only lead to product issues but also to safety concerns. These quotes you see here from the US Food and Drug Administration Design Control Guidelines for Medical Device Manufacturers, and highlight the importance of quality requirement management in delivering safe products to the market. But these justifications for requirements can be applied to any industry or product. Keep in mind, that design control activities are intended to drive quality and safety into the product development process. And here, they are stating that requirements are the foundation to those safety activities.

Of course not all benefits of proper requirements management are related to safety, these also call out the impact to later product development lifecycle activities, finding that missing requirements or even ill-defined requirements can cause expensive redesign and rework, which makes sense considering the later issues are found in the product lifecycle, the more expensive the issue is to resolve, as you’ll need to circle back to previous phases to identify and address the issue at the root, and their impacts along the way. Requirements management activities are a way to avoid these issues from the start, thus reducing rework and redesign, and improving your quality. It also ensures you make the time to market. While the specific regulations and standards may vary, the same requirement management practices and principles are applicable to any industry.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Best Practices for Writing Requirements

The post [Webinar Recap] Best Practices for Writing Requirements appeared first on Jama Software.