Announcements

Now easier to get your data moving with a new UI to map data from your ReqIF file to match your data in Jama Connect.

You can find a link to the download, updated user guide and release notes in our new Services Practices section! Don't know about the Data Exchange, please contact your account manager to learn more.

Higher Logic, our community platform provider, will be performing infrastructure maintenance on Saturday, July 14. There may be brief downtime during the maintenance window, which will begin at 11 a.m. ET and end at approximately 3 a.m. ET.

To make navigating the community easier, we've been making some changes this year. The most recent action we've taken is to rename the Best Practices community Knowledge Base, since the primary use of that section is for articles. We have shifted existing discussions into other sections.

Happy Holidays! Jama US-based Support will be observing the Independence Day holiday on July 4th. and our offices will be closed. Our EU-based operations will continue with normal business hours of 7a-4p GMT + 1. If you are an Enterprise customer and experience a critical issue while our offices are closed, please contact us through our on-call process.

If you recently purchased Test Runner licenses, take a look at this quick guide to setting them up in Jama Connect.

With the release of Jama Connect 8.25, we deployed a new and improved user guide. Note that any links provided by Support in the past will now redirect to the guide's main page, so you will need to search for the content. If you have trouble finding anything, let us know.

Jama US-based Support will be observing the Memorial Day holiday on May 28th and our offices will be closed. Our EU-based operations will continue with normal business hours of 7a-4p GMT + 1. If you are an Enterprise customer and experience a critical issue while our offices are closed, please contact us through our on-call process.

Jama Connect 8.25 is now available in your Replicated admin console!

We’re excited to announce several updates and enhancements to the Jama Product Development Platform.

As announced in February, 8.14.x no longer qualifies for full support. If you are using 8.14.x or older and need assistance, we will continue to support you at a best effort level.

Data Exchange latest release v1.4 is now available to download! This release allows users to select an attribute to act as a SPEC-OBJECT and/or SPECIFICATION legacy IDs instead of the default IDENTIFIER associated with each element type. Contact your Jama account manager to learn more. If you're all caught up, make sure to contact your account manager, who can assist you with obtaining an operator's license today!

Join Zeb and Kristina for the next customer webinar, Ask Jama: Best Practices for Implementing New Technologies, on Thursday, March 15. 

Zeb will share tips for making sure that your rollout is smooth, ensure adoption and get value out of Jama or any new technology you implement. Following the presentation, join Kristina and Zeb for a lively Q&A. 

As of March 31, 2018, we are reaching EOL for Jama 8.14.x. See Megan's post for more details.

U.S.-based support will be closed on President's Day, February 19, from 7am Pacific - 11pm Pacific. Note that the community will not be moderated.

European support will be available Standard hours.

Data Exchange v1.3 is now available to download! This latest release allows users to execute batch imports of ReqIF content, as well as batch exports from Jama. Contact your Jama account manager to obtain your operators license today.

Jama Software has a new partner for integrations.

Jama Support will be observing the global holiday on Monday, January 1. Enterprise business hours will resume as usual on Monday, January 1 at 10 p.m. PST for Enterprise customers, and Tuesday, January 2 at 7 a.m. for our Standard customers.

We're excited to make available some new REST API endpoints for our customers to try out. See Steve's post for information about what's available and why we decided to create Labs!

The latest version of the Data Exchange is now available to download! Contact your Jama account manager to obtain your operators license today.

It's been a while since Jess and Kristina have hosted an Ask Jama, but they're excited to get back to it and answer any questions you have about what was released in 2017.

Jama Support will be observing the US holiday Thursday, November 23 - Friday, November 24. Our US offices will be closed in observance of Thanksgiving, but support for our European, Asian and Australian customers will be available during European business hours.

Jama Software is excited to announce the release of 8.22 to the Express channel and to our hosted environment. Check out the Release Notes or our "What's New" video to learn more!

We have changed the HTML cleaner in Jama Software's rich text editor to ensure tight security. @Jess wrote an article describing what you can expect.

Jama Software is excited to announce the release of 8.20.1 to both the Standard and Express channels. Check out the Release Notes or our "What's New" video to learn more!

Effective 2017/09/08, the legacy TFS and Rally connectors are no longer supported. See the below link for more details.

We recently discovered a defect (SOS-DEF-2086) that prevents complete support bundles from being generated in Replicated 2.10.3. We recommend avoiding the affected versions, and instead using a previous version. Instructions can be found in the following article.

U.S.-based support will be closed on Labor Day, September 4th, from 7am Pacific - 11pm Pacific. Note that the community will not be moderated.

European support will be available Standard hours.

Curious what Jama has in store for its upcoming release? Check out @Jess' Product Bulletin.

Want to improve your requirements writing process to unify your team and provide better visibility? Join Jama consultant Preston Mitchell on July 20 as he shares best practices in a webinar exclusively for Jama customers.

If you use JIRA on the cloud, your integration may be affected.

I have received feedback that our release details and announcements don't always get to users, so I have invited everyone to this community. Please update Settings to subscribe to daily or immediate notifications.

Jama 8.15.1 is now available in Hosted & Express and 8.14.1 is now available in Standard (on-premises) channels.

First, make sure to Join the Feature Requests community (to the left). Then, select Add next to Latest Discussion Posts below.

Jama 8.14 is now available in the Express and Standard (plus Airgap) channels.

U.S.-based support will be closed on President's Day, February 20, from 7am Pacific - 11pm Pacific. Note that the community will not be moderated.

European support will be available Standard hours.

Jama is shifting support of the Integration Hub to Tasktop.

Our Product and UX teams are eager to work with some of our customers on future design.

After January 31, 2017 Jama 2015.2-2015.5 will move out of full support and into best effort support. Since the launch of 2015.5 Jama has released significant upgrades and features, as well as bug fixes and an improved upgrade process. Additionally, on-premises customers now have an option to receive releases every four weeks. To see all of the details please review the release notes. For more information about upgrading to the new Jama on-premises please review the documentation on the community, or contact your account manager.

Jama 8.10.1 is now available for download in the Standard and Express channels.

With 8.10 we have added version endpoints and updated the REST library.

Issue number: SOS-DEF-1429 – When executing a bulk action for a set of >50 items in a list view generated using the “Filter Items” side panel, items not included in the filter are also impacted by the
action.  Bulk actions are performed from the actions control button above and to the right of the list view, and include: Edit, Reuse, Delete, Batch Transition, Convert to, Subscribe, and Subscribe Others.

 

Summary: On October 24th, 2016, Jama found and confirmed a Critical defect in our software. When executing a bulk action for a set of >50 items in a list view generated using the “Filter Items” side panel, items not included in the filter are also impacted by the action.  For example, when executing a bulk delete action for set of items in a list view generated using the “Filter Items” side panel, and selecting a subset of those items for deletion, items not selected in the filter will also be deleted.  This defect is present in all 8.x versions of Jama.

 

Analysis: On October 25th, per our bug triage process, the Critical defect was taken to Scrum of Scrums for assignment and research per Jama’s bug triage process.  The defect was analyzed to assign appropriate resources and timeline for resolution.

 

Resolution: We are implementing code changes to enforce expected application behavior – when a bulk action Delete is initiated from list view with “select all” applied, Jama will respect all filters applied by the facet filter panel.  We are prioritizing corrective action for the Delete function specifically, as we believe this potential condition represents the most significant impact for users.  We intend to address the remaining bulk action controls in future Jama releases.

 

Timing for release of resolution:

Users can expect to receive this Delete action fix with the release of Jama 8.10, per the following schedule:

·       Hosted: 11/18 - 11/19/2016

·       On-premises Express deployment: 11/30/2016

·       On-premises Standard deployment: 11/30/2016

 

Known workaround:  Ahead of this fix to avoid the issue, users can filter items using the advanced filters and perform a bulk action using that filter.  Alternatively, users can select items specifically rather than use the “select all” option from the list view when performing a bulk action.

 

Steps to Reproduce:

1.     Open a set containing many items, folders, and text items in list view.  It must contain more than one screen of items.

2.     Filter the list to only show one kind of item (folder, text, etc.) where the filter’s result takes more than one visible page.

3.     Select all items from the filtered list.

4.     Select Actions/Delete.

 

Results:

All the set’s content is deleted.

 

Expected Results:

Only the filtered items should be deleted.

Hello Jama Community! I have some news to share about this site. We're going to switch community platforms this month. This is a positive for a few reasons: you will have a more full-featured text editor, the native ability to upload and share attachments, and ways to connect with other members. You will be able to subscribe to daily or weekly digests rather than all-or-nothing immediate notifications. Additionally, we're going to integrate our online training and success portal content into the community, so it will be a one-stop destination for all Jama learning needs.

There will be a slight disruption, as you'll have to get used to the new way of navigating and complete a new profile. However, all of the content you have created will be loaded into the new community. You will be seeing invitations to sign up in a couple of weeks. Please let me know what you think of it; you an always send feedback to community@jamasoftware.com.

I'll update you with more information about the switch soon!

Jama on-premises has been upgraded with the launch of Jama 8.x. After January 31, 2017 Jama 2015.2-2015.5 will move out of full support and into best effort support. Since the launch of 2015.5 Jama has released significant upgrades and features, as well as bug fixes and an improved upgrade process. Additionally, on-premises customers now have an option to receive releases every four weeks. To see all of the details please review the release notes.

For more information about upgrading to the new Jama on-premises please review the documentation on the community, or contact your account manager.

* Update - We have rolled back the settings as they appear to be a bit too aggressive in queue management. I will continue to update this post as needed. *

Just wanted to provide a heads up that we are making adjustments to our hosted throttling settings starting today. (Oct 6th, 2016)

Things will continue to work as described in below linked article, we are just looking to address reports of 503 responses vs. the expected 429. We will be monitoring this closely over the upcoming weeks and make further adjustments as necessary.

https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/throttle-jama-rest-soap-api-requests-8-0-and-above

Hi Jamasters!

We've been talking about our plans for supporting particular databases and browsers, and I'm hoping you can help me out here. If your organization uses Microsoft products primarily, could you weigh in? (With as much or as little detail as you can!)

-Is your organization using Edge, or do you have plans to use Edge? (Given we don't yet support it.) If the latter, what's the timeline?

-If you are an on-premises customer, is your organization using SQL server for your Jama database? If so, which version? Do you have plans to use SQL 2016?

-And while I'm asking questions: does your organization use the Health Report feature? If so, do you access it via email, or by navigating directly the Jama's admin section? 

Thanks!
Kristina

Hello!   We are very excited to announce a formal technical partnership with NoMagic, a model based systems engineering tool.   We are going to be presenting a formal press release next week and are looking for quotes from any existing Jama users out there who also currently use NoMagic.  If you are interested in sharing your feedback, please let me know and I will reach out to you privately.   Many thanks!

Hello Community!

As many of you know, the Jama Integrations Hub (JIH) version 4.3 was released in September 2015 and 4.3.12 was released in December 2015. To align with Section 2 of our Maintenance and Support License Agreement, on October 11th, 2016, we will be ending full support for the JIH 4.3 and on December 11th, 2016 ending full support for the JIH 4.3.12, transitioning to limited or “best effort" support. To learn more about “best effort” support, check out our article entitled Full Support and Best Effort Support Defined. You can find the latest JIH version here. If you have questions about upgrading the JIH, log a ticket and we will be in touch soon.



Thank you for your understanding and certainly let us know if you have any questions by replying to this post.

U.S.-based support will be closed on Labor Day, September 5, from 7am Pacific - 11pm Pacific. Note that the community will not be moderated on or between Friday, September 2 and Monday, September 5.

European support will be available Standard hours.

Jama's US servers are currently undergoing unplanned maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience; there is no estimated time for the servers to be back up, but we are working on it right now. We will update this post when the maintenance has been completed.

With the release of Jama 8.4 Standard, we're announcing a new airgap installation option for on-premises subscription customers. Jama's Standard Edition can now be installed on physically isolated networks. 

For most customers, even those in high-security environments, we recommend using the regular, internet-based install. That installation has fewer opportunities for errors and is easier to troubleshoot.
 
How do I know if I really need airgap?
Most high security customers do not need to use airgap for all installations. One Jama customer is a large defense contractor, and they only plan to use airgap on some small, isolated Jama installations for specific projects; their main Jama installations do not require airgap.

• If you are you running Jama in secured rooms that require you leave phones and laptops outside, or if you have a physically isolated network with no proxy servers, airgap is necessary.
• If you need to put the Jama application on removable media like a USB stick in order to transfer it, you probably need airgap.
• If you can transfer the Jama files over the network to do an install or upgrade, you may not need airgap.
• If Jama end users can access Jama from laptops that also access the Internet, you may not need airgap.

 
Regular Jama on-premises installations do not make use of an internet connection except when checking for Jama updates or downloading updates.  We've found that many customers are able to temporarily open an outbound internet connection through a proxy server, download a Jama update, and then immediately disable the internet connection. There is no inbound communication - Jama is never able to push data to your server, and we never collect data from you unless you explicitly choose to share it with us. You have full control over when your Jama instance installs updates.
 
What does it take to install Jama via airgap?
The process is quite similar, but there are about a dozen steps you'll need to add to the beginning. You'll need to download, transfer, and install the dependencies like Docker. You'll need to download the Docker containers for Jama, put them on removable media, and then transfer them to your isolated server. You will want to inspect our installation script to make sure you're comfortable running it.  Once you put all the files in the right places, the installation process should proceed the same as a regular Jama install. The process is not difficult, but because it's manual, it's a little more error-prone and so we only recommend you use airgap if you really need it.
 
How do I run updates?
When Jama announces an update, you'll be able to go to your personal download URL, download the update Docker containers, transfer them to removable media, and then move them to your isolated server. Once you've put them in the proper place, you will see an update available as an option in the Jama Admin Console, and you can run the update the same as with a regular Jama installation.

It’s official: TÜV SÜD recently completed Jama’s ISO 26262 “Fit for Purpose” functional safety certification. So how does this news help you?

If you design, build, or supply automotive electronics systems and components, knowing the backstory and best practices will help expedite development. Join us, July 28th at 10am Pacific to learn how teams creating products for safety-critical industries can lower the costs and risks of complying with functional safety standards.

Reserve your seat here: http://go.jamasoftware.com/jama-iso-26262-certification-and-best-practices-webinar.html

Jama's consulting team has been hard at work making BIRT and Velocity reports more accessible to our customers by adding them to our GitHub repo. Visit https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/additional-custom-reports-now-available to learn more about what is available.

Hello there,

We're happy to announce the latest version of Jama on-premises is now available for download. To request your updated license and download instructions visit www.jamasoftware.com/upgrade.

For more information, check out the What's New Video and the Standard Release Notes or Express Release Notes.

You'll also want to review the updated deployment information on the customer portal.

If you have any questions please reach out to your customer success manager or account manager. You can also post your questions in this thread.

Jama US-based Support will be observing the Memorial Day holiday on May 30th and our offices will be closed. Our EU-based operations will continue with normal business hours of 7a-4p GMT + 1. If you are an Enterprise customer and experience a critical issue while our offices are closed, please contact us through our on-call process.

Relationships are critical to working in Jama. They establish traceability, provide context around requirements, and they adapt to reflect the way any company builds a product. That’s why we are thrilled to be adding relationship information to the Jama Review Center in the latest hosted and Express on-premises releases (View Release Notes). Reviewers can now see the upstream and downstream related items for each item in a review. They can also click on each item to open a panel showing the item’s contents.

The related item data, which includes both the relationship and the related item's content, is fixed to what existed when the review was created. Publishing a new revision will incorporate any relationship or item content changes that have been made since the review was created or last revised. Review moderators can decide whether to publish a new revision and update the review with the most recent information. However, at this time there are no prompts to indicate that a relationship has changed for an item in review. Related Items in a review do not have any impact on a reviewer’s approval status, votes, or comments. They are available as context, and don’t count as items requiring review. 

Privacy for this feature matches the Review Center today. A review creator can only send items for review that are within his or her permission scope. Related items must also be within the review creator’s scope. If a related item is outside the scope, it will be included in the count of related items, but none of its information will be available to either the review creator or any reviewers (even if a reviewer might have permission to that item).

You can use this feature with Jama 8.2.0 by creating a review and selecting “Include Related Items” in the right column. This will bring you to a new setup step where you can choose which related items you’d like reviewers to see. You can modify these settings when publishing a new revision, meaning you can add related items to existing reviews to try out the new functionality. Related items settings can't be changed when editing a review.






Including related items in Review Center has been a frequent request from this community, so we’re happy to be releasing this first iteration. We’re continuing to add to this feature, and will be including it in the Jama Standard channel soon, so any feedback is very appreciated.


Thanks!

When our awesome community manager, Kristina, asks you to make a post-- you make a post!

We've gotten a lot of questions recently about importing automated testing results and executing automated tests via the Jama REST API.  Kristina wants me to make sure that this article is easily findable on the community, and I'm excited to start a discussion about it.

To help you get started there are links in the article to a GitHub repo that contains some example code.

We'd love feedback so please let us know what you think.

John

Jama’s on premises customers have long been able to develop their own custom reports, but until now hosted customers have been required to have a services engagement if they want to upload their own reports.

However, if you are a hosted customer and want to develop your own custom reports, you can now develop your own. The following describes the process for creating your own local Jama installation for development and testing and the process required to have Jama upload the new report.

Skills Required

If you are considering designing reports in-house, we’ve compiled the following list of key skills needed to create reports:

BIRT

SQL (Structured Query Language): BIRT reports are based on SQL queries that pull data directly from the Jama database. The reports developer should have a solid understanding of Selects, Inner and Outer Joins and Sub-Select queries.

Report/Development IDEs: BIRT is based on Eclipse so familiarity with an IDE (Interactive Design Environment) is very helpful. You will need to install, configure and work with the report designer.

JavaScript: Fancy report manipulation, calculated fields and other functions use JavaScript within the BIRT report. A basic understanding of JavaScript functions and syntax will be important, especially for complex reports.

Velocity


HTML: Velocity reporting is a Java-based reporting engine thatuses HTML for displaying the data. A basic understanding of HTML table structure will be useful in order to properly display your data.

Java: The reports developer does not need to know Java, but does need to have a familiarity with Java or another object oriented computer language. An ability to debug the code is essential for success in programming with Velocity.

Preparation


It is very important to develop on a Sandbox environment in order to maintain the integrity of your production data. If you have an Enterprise license, contact your Customer Success Manager to get a license for your own on-premises sandbox.

Prepare your sandbox server for Jama (See instructions for 8.x and 2015.5). Once the installation is complete, apply the sandbox license to this instance of Jama. 

Now you are ready to develop and test your Jama reports!

Development

For help getting started with BIRT, watch the training video at: http://www.jamasoftware.com/birt-reports/.

For help getting started with Velocity, watch the training video at: http://www.jamasoftware.com/velocity-reports/.

These are old videos, but the basic instruction is still sound.

The JamaCommunity is also a great place to find reporting ideas and help.

Submitting the report to Jama


Once you are satisfied with your report and would like to have it uploaded to your hosted instance, you should email the following to jamareports@jamasoftware.com

• the report file
• a .doc containing a screenshot of the report setup page and your Jama URL

Jama will look over the report to make sure there are no security issues, and will then upload the report to your hosted instance. If we find security issues, we will notify you of our concerns and wait for you to fix them before we re-check and upload the report. Note: JavaScript is not allowed in any custom reports.

A few things to remember

It does take time for the security review, so please allow a few days for the report to be checked and uploaded. We will do our best to respond in a timely manner, but cannot promise immediate action.

We will not check to make sure your report works once we upload it. If it doesn’t work, we will work with you to determine why, in case it is a setup error. However, you are responsible for the development and testing of your custom report.

Our next Ask Jama webinar is coming up Thursday, April 28 from 7:00-8:00am Pacific. Please join VP of Customer Success Patti Saunders, DevOps Manager Tom Healy and Product Marketing Manager Paul Andrews to learn about the changes coming with our next on-premises deployment. 

You'll learn about how these updates will improve the installation process and get answers to questions you may have about how to prepare. Register for the webinar here: http://go.jamasoftware.com/ask-jama-what-to-expect-with-the-next-on-premises-deployment-webinar.html. 

If you have specific questions, please submit them in the question box when you register so that we can make sure we answer as many questions as possible during the presentation. 

This past weekend we deployed a new release to our hosted servers, 8.0. There isn't any new functionality, but this release does herald a return to a major/minor versioning scheme. There were also eleven defect fixes, which you can see in the release notes here.

Hi everyone, thanks again for taking part in our beta program for the 8.0 on-premises release.

We have published an update to the beta channel. If you have already done the initial install you should now be able to try an upgrade. If you haven't done the initial install, you now have access to the latest build.

Check the install guide for more info on how to upgrade.


Note: This build is still beta, so please don't deploy to a production environment. 

One year ago we launched the Jama Support Community to provide a more interactive and valuable forum experience for our customers. While we put in some work posting new documentation and announcements, it is the users who made it work. Thank you for sharing your best practices, your API code snippets and your brilliant workarounds.

We love a reason to celebrate, so in honor of this milestone, we're holding a contest. Entering is easy and the winner will receive a one-hour conference call with Jeremy Myrland, a member of our product team and myself. The hour is yours to be used as you choose - ask questions, get pointers and tips from the perspective of the product team. The call will be scheduled at a mutually convenient time and you are welcome to ask up to 3 of your colleagues to join you.



So how do you enter to win?

Between Monday, March 28, 8am PDT and Wednesday, April 6, 5pm PDT do the following:

• If you are already a member of our Support Community: Login and respond to an existing post on the community or ask your own question.


• If you are not a member of the Support Community:  Become one! Just visit https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/how-to-get-started-in-the-new-jama-support-community, create a login and take a look around.

Easy, right? We'll draw the winner at random and notify them via email by Friday, April 8 at 5pm PDT. Let us know any questions you have about the contest and be sure to pass this information along to your colleagues. Each user may enter with no limitation on the number of entrants per company or organization.
Thank you for being part of our Jama user community, here's to many more Support Community Birthdays! 

We're excited to announce the launch of the  latest release of Jama coming this Saturday, March 19, 2016.  Here is a look at some of the new capabilities that you can expect:

@Mention users on Homepage

Users now have access to a link on the Homepage that filters the Comment Stream down to comment that they participated in. 

 

Permanent enablement of Enhanced Image Security

Due to some improvements in our reporting tools, the option to turn off Enhanced Image security has been disabled. All images will be embedded in exported documents, no longer requiring separate authentication. Customers who have requested EIS be turned off in the past will experience minimal effects.  You can learn more HERE.

 

Supported Software Changes

Dropped support for Internet Explorer 10. To see the current list of supported browsers please CLICK HERE. 

Interested in a sneak peek at Jama On-Premises 8.0 and our new deployment model?

As we move forward with our new delivery and deployment model, we are announcing an initial beta release to enable customers to get an early look, provide feedback, and try the migration process. The beta program will allow you to have direct access to the development team and provide feedback that helps us support your environments. 

Requirements for participation:

• The beta release is not meant for production use, but rather for a test environment.
• Customer will sign a beta agreement.
• Must be using MySQL or MS-SQL today.
• Must have an available Linux server that meets our system requirements.  You may not need as many resources as you have in production, but you'll want to have the minimum (4 cores, 12GB RAM).  Note that if you have a very large dataset you may get slow performance with a system like this, but that may be ok for testing purposes.
• Supported Linux versions: Ubuntu
  Server 14.04LTS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, CentOS 7+ . Please note your machine must support docker-engine (1.6+) which requires a 64-bit distribution with a kernel minimum of 3.10. Supported OS may change for production.
• Must have internet access on your Linux server (or be able to use a proxy to connect to the internet). We do intend to offer an option to install the production version without network access, but that will come later.
• Must not use the beta for production use.  It's generally good quality, but we will be making changes quickly in response to customer feedback.
• Participant feedback and support will take place through a community forum only open to participants. Standard Jama support channels are not available for this program.

Process:
1. Contact your Customer Success Manager to discuss and sign up for this program, or comment on this article. 
2. Jama will send an email with the beta agreement, installation instructions and an invitation to a private section of the Community. 
3. After installation, we would request you post your feedback to the Community.
4. Engineering team will respond to Community posts within 1 business day.
5. Jama will send a final survey with additional feedback request. 
Interested in a sneak peek at Jama On-Premises 8.0 and our new deployment model?

What can customers expect?
This will be a good-quality release, based the builds we are deploying to our hosted (cloud) environment.   However, we haven't tested every permutation of every migration scenario and every operating system/database combination.  If you do have issues with the installation process, engineers on our core engineering team will work with you to understand and resolve your issues. During the beta program, we may use this infrastructure to make new releases available to you to download and install that will address and fix any issues found by customers.  

We are constantly learning more about the different ways customers install and use our software, and the goal of this program is to make sure that we are taking your unique needs into account.

Jama’s 2016/03/19 hosted release includes the permanent enablement of Enhanced Image Security. Previously customers could elect to turn it off, but due to some enhancements in our reporting tools, the option is no longer needed. This change is available in on-premises Jama 8.0.2+.

So what changed? 

• We will begin embedding images in BIRT and Velocity reports. Previously the images required external calls to get image references, so users had to authenticate online. With Enhanced Image Security on, users who were not signed into Jama or who did not have a Jama login saw Red Xs instead of images. This means some customers opted to turn the security off.
• Accessing attachments via direct URL will require authentication. The biggest impact for this will be users of the JIH, who will need to be authenticated to view embedded images synced over from Jama to JIRA.

How will that affect users? 

• Any user who downloads or receives a report will see all images since they are directly embedded. If you are an organization that had turned off image security in the past, you will now see broken images in previously-generated reports. This means you will need to regenerate the report. Additionally, users will need to take an extra step if they generate a Velocity report (including the built-in All Items report) and attempt to upload the report to Jama as an attachment. The report will first need to be saved as a Word document before being uploaded. 
• Any user who accesses an attachment or image via direct URL will need to be logged in. Embedded images synced over to JIRA via the JIH will not be visible to JIRA users not authenticated in Jama. To work around this, images will need to be added to items as attachments and attachment syncing will need to be enabled.

Jama is used for managing requirements and the manual test cases that validate and verify those requirements. However, many teams that work in Jama also validate and verify their requirements through automated testing via a separate Automation Test Tool (ATT).

If you want to demonstrate traceability from your requirements to both manual and automated testing results in Jama, you can leverage our API to bring automated test results into Jama. Learn about two sample approaches on the Customer Portal.

Read the article >>

We are excited to announce the latest hosted (SaaS) release of Jama is launching this weekend.  Updates include:

• Search on home page

Search all of Jama from your home page. Just like the search bar at the project-level project, search on the home page allows users to quickly find all the content they seek. All existing search functionality, including Boolean operators (AND, OR & NOT) and the ability to search specific fields, is available from this feature.

• New REST resource to manage org/project group membership

Jama Support is observing the US holiday on Monday, February 15. Our US offices is closed in observance of Presidents' Day, but support for our European, Asian and Australian customers will be available during European business hours.



Business will resume as usual on Tuesday, February 16th at 7am PST for our US customers.

I wanted to take a moment to reflect back and comment on the 3 recent unplanned on-premises releases.  We understand that frequent on-premises releases can be disruptive, as it takes our customers time and energy to evaluate, validate, and install each release.  We don't take these investments in time and energy lightly and do our best to evaluate the costs of such releases with the expected benefits across our customer base. (Our hosted environment may be a better choice for those of you with limited IT staff who are able to use cloud-based tools, since we handle the update process for you.)

That being said, when we discover critical security or stability issues that are important to our customers, we will continue to fix these issues and make fixes available.   The first two releases addressed issues that were showstoppers for customers who rely on JIRA integrations; the third impacted users who export baselines.  While these issues may not have impacted you directly, we felt that we had a responsibility to provide a quick remedy to those impacted customers.
 
Here at Jama we take overall product quality and critical production defects seriously, whether they're in our hosted or on-premises environment.  After each critical issue is fixed, a pair of engineer team members conduct root cause analysis with support from management, going beyond direct and contributing causes to identify the underlying technology, people, process, or management-driven root cause.  Once the root cause is identified we work cross-functionality to create a mitigation and follow-up plan to prevent issues from occurring in the future.   We have completed this process for 2015.3 and 2015.4 and are currently doing further root cause analysis on 2015.5.
 
Jama and my team are committed to evolving our quality practices to deliver a better product to you and your end users and doing it in a way that lessens the impact to your organization.

Between January 23rd and February 20th, the team released several exciting new REST capabilities.

• Baselines - Retrieve all baselines within a project, the
  details about each baseline and the versioned items that make up each
  baseline.
• Releases - Manage a project’s release values.
• User Groups - retrieve all groups in the system, determine membership and
  include/exclude users. User provisioning is now possible by combining
  Groups with the existing user resource.

Added versions endpoints to items, attachments, test plans and test runs.

OAuth2
is now available to our customers using SSO (SAML) to manage their user
logins. Receiving the OAuth2 clientID / secret will initially be a
manual process with our support group, however we will soon begin work
to make this self service and open up OAuth2 to all our hosted
customers.

And finally, you asked for an option to retrieve items via the documentKey and so we have delivered a new parameter, available on abstractitems, that provides the ability to retrieve an item or list of items by the user known identifier.

If you're interested in developing with Jama's REST API, I highly recommend you view last week's Ask Jama session. Our consultant John walked through the API and answered many questions. You can view the recording of the webinar on our Jama Customer Portal: REST API Video. While you're there, be sure to check out the other content and resources available to you. 

Please note that the REST API is currently available in hosted Jama environments and in a limited beta program for on-premises customers. It will be available for all on-premises customers later this year. Let me know if you have any questions about availability.

We are excited to announce the latest hosted (SaaS) release of Jama is launching this weekend.  Here is a glimpse of the new capabilities we have added:

Relationships: Add many to many in list and reading view

Creating relationships is one of the core workflows that our customers use on a daily basis. Up until now it has been necessary to work from a single item when creating relationships (one to many), but from the list or reading view this was not possible. With this release we've added the ability from the list and reading view to select and relate many items at once. This significantly reduces the time necessary to create relationships.

REST API endpoint updates


In October we launched our RESTful API, a modern, standards-based API.  This release includes new REST API endpoints for: Item Versions, Baselines, Releases, Get by DocID. Learn more about the REST API here. 

 OAuth API key (SAML)

Hosted customers who use SAML single sign on can now authenticate to the REST API with OAuth.  To enable the REST API and to get an OAuth key please contact Jama support. To get your API key please contact Jama support.

 Upload File Whitelist Update

We have added .tra and .jama extensions to whitelist. Learn more about the whitelist on the support community .

If you’ve worked with anyone in Jama—a support engineer, a CSM, a consultant, etc.—you know that we have a goal to release two on-premises versions a year. This means that if you host Jama yourself, you have two opportunities a year to upgrade and enable the new features and bug fixes that hosted customers see almost monthly.  We want these releases to be impactful and worth the time spent upgrading. However, our primary goal is to ensure Jama works as needed for our customers; this has meant we have done more frequent releases over the past several months to address critical issues and minimize impact to our customers.

In 2015.1, our first on-premises release for the year, we introduced many key features like a new UI and Calculated Fields. 

2015.2, our second and typically final on-premises release for the year, included some performance boosts and the ability to move items between projects.

However, a bug was quickly found, SOS-BUG-1001, which affected customers using the legacy JIRA Connector. For customers using this integration, the bug’s impact was so critical that we opted to release a third version (2015.3) with the added bonus of JIRA 7 compatibility. Then SOS-BUG-1023 was identified: here's a post detailing the conditions for it. While it requires a specific set of conditions to occur, its impact could be weighty, which led to where we are today—we’re releasing a third iteration of the 2015.2 code base, 2015.4.

So what does this mean to your organization? 

• If you haven’t yet upgraded to 2015.2 or 2015.3, then 2015.4 is the only (and best) available download. There isn’t a material difference* among these versions besides the JIRA fixes. 
• If you don’t use the legacy JIRA Connector, 2015.2 and 2015.4 will appear much the same*. 
• If you do use the legacy JIRA Connector, you’ll want to upgrade to 2015.4 so you don’t come into contact with SOS-BUG-1023.
• *Note that 2015.4 also includes a "fix" for SOS-BUG-1037; the 2015.2 and 2015.3 on-premises versions are missing files necessary for the Import Relationship Plugin to function. If you have already installed 2015.2 or 2015.3 and do not use the legacy JIRA Connector, submit a support ticket and we will provide you the files needed for the plugin to function. It's not necessary to upgrade to 2015.4 to enable the functionality of the relationship plugin.

You can reply to this post if you have any questions about the technical details, or speak with your account representative if you’re curious about Jama’s release strategy.

Our December hosted release is live and we have included some additional endpoints for moving collections between projects and upgraded Swagger which provides the in app documentation.

We have also added a new release updates section to the documentation site to help with discovery.
http://dev.jamasoftware.com/rest#updates

We are currently finishing up several new endpoints to provide access to versions, baselines and releases. OAuth2 is undergoing testing and expect to make it available to our SSO (SAML) customers this month.  Receiving OAuth2 clientID/secrets will be initially be a manual process with our support group, however we will soon begin work to make this self service and open up OAuth2 to all our hosted customers.

Interested in weighing in on what we should be focusing on next? Please review our list and weigh in with your preferences and needs here:
https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/whats-up-next-for-rest

And one more thing! We've been busy working on improving the management of the explorer tree and once this update is available we will provide the ability to set an item's location in the explorer relative to its peers. Currently we only provide the ability to set an item's parent, which means each item can only be placed at the bottom of a collection of items. This limitation was required to preserve system performance as the moving of items in the explorer is expensive and doing it in a fast automated fashion in a large project could bring the system to its knees.

Jama Support will be observing the global holiday on Friday, January 1. Business will resume as usual on Sunday, January 3 at 3pm PST for Enterprise customers, and Monday, January 4 at 7am for our Standard customers.

Two new features in December's hosted release! 1. Relate to existing

As we continue to unify and consolidate user flows, obvious areas of improvement are when there is a need for a user to first navigate to an item before doing an action.  These moments becomes prime candidates for the action being available in the list/reading view. One of those actions is the ability to relate to existing items. There are two ways to create relationships. You can add a new item and have the relationship created at the point of saving or you can related to an existing item. Up until now the only action that could be done from the List/Reading view was the Add New flow.  With the December release we've added the ability to Relate to Existing from the List/Reading view.





Notes on this release:

• Currently you can select only one item in the list/reading view, but in January you will be able to do a many to many.

2. Direct Coverage Facet

Ever since we added the rules we essentially enabled more true tracking of "coverage." It's worth noting that "coverage" is not necessarily an industry term. We initially took it from the QA world where coverage is used to convey "Test Coverage." Our philosophy was that the same concept of coverage matters all the way upstream, especially in light of the research that points to "missing requirements" as a key point of failure. The introduction of the Direct Coverage filter brings a new quick filter that focuses 100% on the relationship rules. A user looking at a list of requirements can quickly see which of the items are missing coverage based on the rules defined. This filter matches the Relationships Status field, but there are instances such as the positive scenario of Has Downstream where there is no status associated but is still a useful filter.




Some notes on the inner workings:

• We struggled with the terminology. The title should be used in combination to understand what's being filtered on. For example Missing Downstream is really "Direct Coverage Missing Downstream." The key here is that if you allow relationships to something or don't have any rules, then there is not sense of coverage. There are only relationships. In this instance the Missing Downstream option would be zero. 

In many cases plain text is just not enough to communicate tests effectively. We heard from this community that basic formatting and images would greatly improve your ability to describe test steps clearly, and would make the tests tied to requirements much more valuable. So, starting in the December hosted release rich text and images will be supported in Test Case steps.

Keep reading for a review of the new test step editing features, and instructions for how to turn this capability on for your team!



Features of the new Test Step editor:

• Ability to add text formatting.      

• Drag to reorder (all supported browsers except IE10).

• Ability to add images in steps.
  • Images can be added from the user's computer (picture with plus icon), or selected from existing Jama attachments (folder icon).
  • Large images will be resized automatically to fit the width of the cell, like a thumbnail. To see the full size image, right click and open the image in a new browser tab. This works from the test runner as well.

To enable rich text in Test Steps:

1. Go to Admin > Item Types section.
2. Select any item type that is a Test Case type (may be named something other than test cases), and select Configure.
3. Select the testCaseSteps field type, and select the edit pencil.
4. Check the option Allow Rich Text and save.

If the admin later disables rich text in Test Steps:

• If the admin wishes to remove the ability to add rich text, no data will be lost when the "Allow Rich Text" box is unchecked. Users will not see any existing steps break and the content will still render. It is up to the users to decided what formatting tags to remove. Jama does not automatically strip tags, and renders correct html tags in steps with or without the rich text mode enabled.

• The difference will be in the edit mode. The rich text and images won't render and instead the html tags will appear. Below is the same test case, in edit mode with rich text off:

    


Final Notes:
Currently the new rich text editor is only available in the inline edit mode, accessed by either double clicking the test case item, or using the edit pencil. We chose to only update the inline editing mode because there was an opportunity to use the latest rich text editor, have more modern and expected interactions, and to take advantage of more screen real estate.

This does mean a temporary inconsistently as we transition to interactions without the constraints imposed by the modals. To allow us to create one cohesive experience, we’re moving away from modals and more toward inline creation and editing throughout Jama. This is one more step in that direction.

The recommended flow is to quick add Test Cases using the familiar modals triggered by the Add buttons, and to do the majority of the content creation and editing from the single item view inline. In the future we plan to trigger the single item inline edit mode when adding items from any location. This will replace the modals and will be a more consistent and intuitive experience, where inline editing gives you a better sense of what the final item will look like as you work.

The latest release of Jama SaaS is on its way this Saturday, December 12.   Here is a glimpse at what to expect:

New Capabilities

Rich Text and Images in Test Steps

Rich text can now be used in test steps, including the ability to insert images in test steps. This requires a change via Admin > Item Types > Test Case [or any custom types enabled with this widget] > Configure > testCaseSteps. Select the pencil to edit the field and check the Allow Rich Text option and Save.

Diagram Editor Update

We have updated the diagram editor with new shapes including UML objects, BPMN for Business Process Modeling and SysML. Overall ease-of-use is drastically improved with new editing tools and options. Text within shapes will now automatically wrap.

Coverage Facets for Quick Filters

Jama uses Relationships and Relationship Rules to help users better manage coverage. With the new Coverage facet users can now directly from any list or reading view filter based on the rules defined for the project. For example, if you are looking at a list of requirements, and you want to quickly know which requirements are missing downstream items based on the rules defined, you can now filter on "Missing Downstream." This will evaluate the rules defined for the project to determine what qualifies and will filter the view. If there are no rules defined only the facets for "Is Suspect" and "Causing Suspect" will show.

Relate to existing from List/Reading view

We have added the ability to "relate to existing" in the List and Reading views. Currently the functionality works when selecting a single item in the view which eliminates the need to navigate to each item. In future releases we will be adding many-to-many capabilities.

Move Items

Users can now move a set or component from one project to another while maintaining the history and all key metadata of the items being moved. This can help you make your Jama instance more performant if you have more than the recommended number of items in a project. Read this article  for more details.

System Health Report

The goal of the report is to give administrators insight into what they can do to optimize performance in your specific installation. It does not prevent user actions in any way. Instead, it's a tool built to highlight past activities that you can improve in the future, such as generating slow reports or extra large test plans. The report links to recommendations that users can act on right away. This is maintained as a support community post​ so we can be there to help.  This report is the first step to educating users about intended usage patterns and configurations.

New Blue Notifications

Jama has new notifications that advise the user if an operation exceeds recommended parameters. The goal for the prompts is to provide advance notification around costly operations, as well as to link to best practices for how to minimize them in the future.


Improved Application Performance We continue to improve application response and performance, particularly for our large enterprise customers. Our development team is working hard to ensure you get the best Jama experience.



Security Updates


Updated password rules

Top level complexity setting for Jama managed passwords has additional rules to comply with TRUSTe certification.

• No more than 2 sequential characters (123, abc)
• No more than 2 repeated characters (222, aaa)
• No more than 2 adjacent key placement (qwerty) main US keyboard

Changes to the ability to use iframes in the rich text editor

In the interest of better security, we’ve introduced a few changes to the rich text editor in both the item editor and the collaboration stream. In previous iterations of the rich text editor, a user could include a hidden iframe element in the text of a comment or description, which could employ a link to load potentially malicious content from another domain. Because Jama does not have access to this content until the link is clicked, validating its contents to prevent these attacks is not possible. Instead, we are removing the ability to load this content within open Jama pages by making the following changes: 

• Users can no longer use target attribute of the a element to target specific elements in Jama. Top-level targets, such as a new window, may still be used. 
• The iframe element will no longer allow the name or id elements.
  Most users will not be affected by these changes. 

However, if you have inserted links in rich text fields that interact with iframes or other elements on the page, these interactions will no longer work after the item in has been updated.

Thank
you to everyone who attended our recent Ask Jama webinar about organization admin best practices. You can now watch a recording of the webinar below. I’ve also included answers to a couple of the questions we didn’t have time for during the live session below. As always, please let me know if you have follow-up questions.






 If we have requirements at 3 levels: High, Medium and Low [priority], what is the best way to connect these levels to one requirement? 

 It sounds like you have 3 different requirements with three different priorities, correct? There are a couple different strategies for connecting your requirements assuming that High, Medium and Low are all values in the same Priority pick list.

·            
You could use “dependent on” or a custom relationship type, and connect these three prioritized requirements upstream to your one requirement.

·            
If you need to maintain a visual hierarchy for these, you could add these three requirements as sub-items, in which case the hierarchy would indicate to users that they are all connected to one requirement. I would still utilize relationships.

 

Do you have any tips for optimizing the dashboard?

 Watch this short video to learn how you might configure your dashboard to gain insight into the progress of your projects.






 

 

Hi Community!
Jama Support will be observing the US holiday on Thursday, November 26-Friday, November 27. Our US offices will be closed in observance of Thanksgiving, but support for our European, Asian and Australian customers will be available during European business hours.

Business will resume as usual on Sunday, November 29 at 3pm PST for Enterprise customers, and Monday, November 30 at 7am for our Standard customers.

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you know that we have discovered a potential issue that prevents syncing between Jama and JIRA Cloud. It appears a recent update to the JIRA Cloud may prompt the error "IllegalArgumentException," so items are failing to update. Another symptom of the issue may be duplicate items being created in JIRA. If you're using our legacy JIRA Connector or Jama Integration Hub powered by Tasktop (JIH) and syncing to JIRA Cloud (not on-premises installations of JIRA), you may be impacted. 

Hosted Jama customers: This issue was corrected during a maintenance period on Saturday, 2015/11/28.

On-premises Jama customers: At this point Support recommends disabling the JIRA Connector if you sync to JIRA Cloud. As a reminder for on-premises customers, we do not yet support the JIRA Cloud version, JIRA 7.  Please reply to this post or open a Support ticket if you sync to JIRA Cloud. We are currently determining a timeframe for making available a patch for Jama and the JIH.

Hey everyone! The community platform, hosted by Get Satisfaction, is running into various issues this morning. They are actively investigating it. I apologize if you run into any problems—if you have a burning question or problem, I recommend submitting a ticket through normal channels at support.jamasoftware.com. I apologize for any delay this is causing you in getting the answers you need.

Are you new to using Jama or have a team member who is? Register for one of the few remaining spots in this month's new user training, coming up on Wednesday, November 11 from 10:00-11:30am PST. 

This short, interactive course introduces users to Jama and quickly prepares team members to begin working in the solution. It covers the most commonly used aspects of the tool and provide context around how it can help your team build great products. It’s the perfect starting point for someone new to Jama.

To get your questions answered and get started using Jama, join training specialist Jerry McCorkle for this online session. The training is complimentary, but space is limited, so reserve your seat now. 

Reserve your seat: Wednesday, November 11, 2015 10:00-11:30am PST

Our 2015.2 on-premises release is now available. If you check out the release notes, you’ll see that it’s almost all about performance and not about new features or defect fixes.
 
Here’s why we did it this way.
 
We hadn't planned to do a second on-premises release in 2015. We’ve been working on a new architecture that uses services to scale, and we’ve been deploying it in our hosted environment all year.  We plan to release this in early 2016 for on-premises customers. Early alpha tests of the new architecture show significant improvements in indexing time and CPU usage for some customers with very large datasets.
 
At the same time, Jama usage is growing, and we’ve had some very large customers adopt Jama this year as they’re migrating off of legacy requirements managements systems. Some of these customers have been adding users and data at a faster rate than we’ve ever seen.  While most Jama customers see good performance, these large customers were inventing new ways to use Jama with more complex data structures and larger volume that we were used to, and they were having a hard time with performance.
 
We decided we couldn't wait for 2016.1 to address some of these issues. Because we work in an agile way, with 2-week development sprints and an 8-week mid-range planning cadence, we were able to shift focus quickly, and we began work on 2015.2 at the end of the summer.  
 
With this release, we've focused on 3 areas: improved performance, guardrails, and scaling recommendations.
 
Improved Performance: You can see the high-level list of improvements in the release notes. We targeted several areas that we knew would have a broad impact (checking permissions and assembling requirements in the backend). We did targeted work on Review Center and the Stream to optimize how much data gets loaded.  We also optimized the in-browser tabs to improve performance in slower browsers, particularly when you leave your Jama session open for a long time.
 
Guardrails: Sometimes, users can consume a lot of resources by accident, without realizing the impact they're having. For example, exporting a document with hundreds of items is relatively fast. Exporting a document with thousands of items can take longer, and if several people are exporting at once on a system without a lot of processing power, they can slow down the system. So we now provide users with warnings throughout the system when they try to do a heavy reuse or sync operation, letting them know it might be better to do it during off-peak usage hours. We also provide a system health report that helps Jama admins track down intensive usage.  And we've added a feature that lets you move sets and components out of projects that have grown unwieldy.
 
Scaling recommendations: Customers successfully use Jama with millions of items and thousands of users, but at large scale it’s important to watch your data growth.  Wondering how big a project can get, or how deep the tree can go?  Eric Rickson has shared a set of recommendations for Jama at scale. 
 
We hope you enjoy the release.  Most customers will see modest improvements, because we've targeted fixes to scenarios common among our largest customers (massive datasets, hundreds of concurrent users).   Changes to the UI are minimal and we don't expect any training to be required for end users, so you can deploy this release without disruption.
 
And we're back to work on our 2016.1 release, which will package up all the great features we’ve delivered to our SaaS customers in 2015, and make them available in one package for on-premises installation.

Thank you to everyone who attended our recent Ask Jama About Rolling Reviews session. You can now watch a recording of the webinar below. I’ve also shared answers to some of the biggest and most commonly asked questions. As always, please let me know if you
have follow-up questions.


Watch a larger format version of the recording here: http://go.jamasoftware.com/ask-jama-rolling-reviews-webinar-recording.html


Can you clarify the differences between a rolling and a gated
review?

A rolling review is an iterative review that continues throughout
the life-cycle of your product and can be conducted on a cycle or cadence. A
rolling review is opened once and republished as items are approved and filter
out, and new items are added. A gated review is a review of an entire section
or component or full document and produces a baseline and sign-off of those
items, typically done at a product milestone or release. A rolling review would
be done on a continual basis and lead up to a gated review.

Is there a way to setup project workflows so that when all items
in a review are approved, it will automatically transition to another workflow
state?

The two types of workflow in Jama (Project and Review Center
Workflows) are incompatible. Review Center Workflow has the benefit of
automatically changing a status once the review is “finalized.” However, this
workflow feature is not as flexible or configurable as project workflow. You
can select items on the Stats page of the review and use Batch Transition
Workflow to manually transition approved items to another state. It’s not
automatic, but at least it can be done from within Review Center.

How can we include relationships within a review so that reviewers
can see how items relate to other items?

Including relationships in review is not a feature Jama currently
offers, but we’re working on it. I recommend visiting the community to discover
workarounds:
https://getsatisfaction.com/jama/topics/increased-visibility-for-review-center
and https://getsatisfaction.com/jama/topics/how-to-get-relationsship-into-excel-and-import-them-back-int...

With archive, what limitations are there on reviews that have been
archived?

None. The reviews cease to be displayed on the Reviews page, so
that page loads a little quicker. Users can change their view to Include
Archived Reviews. They then have the same level of accessibility to the reviews
as they did prior to Archival.

Baselines - How does it help manage a project? Does archiving a
Review lose the Baseline from the project?

Using baselines to manage a project is worthy of an Ask Jama
session in itself! Do you have any questions about baselines specific to
Reviews?

Archiving will not remove the baseline from the project.

Using custom templates for Word document export. Example walk
throughs would be very helpful. Attaching mockups and illustrations in
functional spec and designating them as visible or hidden in document export. I recommend checking out the Ask Jama
session “Getting Information In and Out of Jama”. If you have any remaining questions, feel free to create a new thread on the
community.

Can you tell me more about baselines?

Baselines are created with every revision of the review. When an
item’s status is changed to Approved and it is removed from the review, then
the item will not show up in the next review baseline. What particular concern
do you have with rolling reviews and baselines? The behavior isn’t any
different.

How do rolling reviews impact performance?

Rolling reviews should not impact performance negatively. You may
have more reviews open at a time, but they will contain fewer items.