Announcements

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.

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

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.

Each month our customer webinar series, Ask Jama, presents a different topic and has time for Q&A. This month, on Friday, November 20, our Services Operations Manager Dennis Hodge will be talking about organization admin best practices and taking your questions. 

If you're a Jama admin, you likely have questions specific to your role that come up from time to time. Join this month’s Ask Jama webinar where Dennis will share tips for admins and what he’s seen work best for admins across the board. 

Please submit your questions when your register to help us ensure that we cover the topics you most want to learn about. There will also be open Q&A during the webinar. 

Register Now: Ask Jama About Organization Admin Best Practices, Friday November 20, 10-11am PST.

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.

Hey there Jama customers!

With the release of the fall 2015 on-premises release of Jama, the QA team would like to announce a number of supported software changes. We will be adding support in some areas and dropping support in others. These changes allow us to focus our development and testing efforts on a smaller scope. This in turn helps us deliver high quality software and add even more awesome features to the product.

Oracle 12c

Oracle 12c is now officially supported as a database for Jama. Oracle 11g is still supported at this time.

Tomcat Support Extended

Support of Tomcat has been extended to versions 7.0.35 – 7.0.64.

Windows 2003

Microsoft has ended extended support of their Windows 2003 operating system. As a result, Jama has made the decision to stop testing and supporting this operating system. This will free us up to spend testing resources on more modern systems.

Crowd 2.8

Support for the Crowd Connector is limited to Crowd 2.8, which is currently the newest version.

EA Connector

Support for the EA Connector is now limited to version 4.1.0 of the Connector with EA 9.3.935.

Firefox ESR Releases

This is just a clarification on what browser versions we test on. Jama does not officially test on the ESR Releases of Firefox. We do, however, test regularly on the latest release of Firefox.

As many of you know, Jama version 2014.2 was released November 2014. To align with Section 2 of our Maintenance and Support License Agreement, on December 20th, 2015, we will be ending full support for 2014.2, 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. If you are interested in receiving a pre-upgrade consultation, 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.

The latest release of Jama SaaS is on its way this Saturday, October 3.   Here is a glimpse at what to expect:

REST API  - The Jama REST API can now be enabled!  




Accessing your Jama data and extending your ability to communicate that information is easier than ever with our new REST API. The Jama REST API has been designed to provide developers with a standardized and straightforward experience for integrating with Jama.   Why is REST API the new Gold standard? Ease of use.  It is simple to write and document data, and can be cached for better performance and scalability.  Building custom integrations and reports are just a few of the enhanced capabilities you can now enjoy as part of your Jama subscription. To enable the REST API please open a support ticket at http://support.jamasoftware.com or email support@jamasoftware.com. 

Improved Application Performance

At Jama, we are continually looking for ways to be more proactive in how we help our customers ensure good performance.  In this release we have addressed some fundamental performance problems that we feel will improve your experience within the tool.  As an example, almost every action in Jama is protected by a permissions check that happens behind the scenes.  By optimizing these permissions many customers will see increased call speed.  We've also reduced the number of Jama tabs that get created by accident as you use the product in order to improve browser performance and reduced initial login time – saving you time and frustration.

 

New to using Jama? Or do you have new team members who could benefit from a kick-start?   

This short, interactive course introduces users to Jama and quickly prepares team members to begin working in the solution. We cover 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 manager Sandra Elliott for this monthly online session. The training is complimentary, but only 25 spaces per session are available, so reserve your seat now. 

Reserve your seat: Wednesday, October 7, 2015 7:00-8:30AM

During the final round of testing for this release we discovered a critical bug and will therefore not be deploying an update this weekend.  You will not experience any downtime as a result.

If you have questions or experience any issues, please contact Jama Support:

Email: support@jamasoftware.com
Toll-free: 1.800.679.3058 | Direct: 503.922.1058

U.S.-based support will be closed on Labor Day, September 7, from 7am Pacific - 11pm Pacific. European support will be open Standard hours.

The latest release of Jama SaaS is on its way this Saturday, August 22.   Here is a glimpse at what to expect:

New Capabilities

Upstream and Downstream relationships in List View

Do you ever wish you could see the future, but remember every detail of the past?  Some might call this a super-power, but we know it as Traceability and it continues to be a key capability within Jama.  We continue to improve your ability to quickly see the context of what you are working on by being able to look upstream and downstream from the item.   Within List View we recently added two new sortable columns labeled # of Upstream Relationships and # of Downstream Relationships. These columns provide users the ability to immediately see the number of related items and click on the icon to see the details of those items.




New user on-boarding flow as part of trials and new users


Even seasoned travelers sometimes benefit from having a tour guide in a new place.  What may seem like a simple feature on the surface becomes a larger feature in the bigger context of user experience. Jama's original on-boarding flow was built in such a way that prevented Jama from providing custom guides that educate users of new features.  The new form for creator license enables Jama to help the users along, providing a much better overall experience.

Single item menu with activity counts

Every picture tells a story, and in the case of Jama, this is true of items too.  See context for Jama items at a glance with the new item menu. The menu appears in the upper right corner of all items and can be configured to show data relevant to that data type. Each button corresponds to a widget of the item, such as relationships or comments. The bottom tabs panel is hidden by default, increasing room to read the item's content until more data is desired. Activity counts indicate what data may be most relevant, and clicking opens/closes the corresponding tab.

It has come to our attention that Atlassian has removed the SOAP API from its JIRA Cloud product. The JIRA SOAP API is a programming interface that we historically used to transfer data between Jama and JIRA with our JIRA Connector integration.

When we learned that the JIRA SOAP API was being deprecated, we responded by updating our JIRA Connector integration to utilize the JIRA REST API. The first on-premises version of Jama to use the JIRA REST API was 2014.1, released in May 2014. 

What does this mean for our Jama customers utilizing our JIRA Connector?
All currently supported versions of Jama, which include Jama hosted and on-premises versions from 2014.2 onward, contain the REST-enabled JIRA Connector. There should be no impact to the JIRA Connector integration on any supported Jama versions.

While our currently fully supported Jama versions are unaffected, we feel it prudent to warn users who are on earlier on-premises releases of Jama. The next on-premises release of JIRA, Server 7.0, will not have the SOAP API included.

Who will be affected?
If you are using the following combination of products you will be affected:

• Jama version 4.2.7 or earlier
• JIRA Connector
• Atlassian JIRA Cloud or the upcoming release of JIRA Server 7.0 

In this scenario the JIRA Connector integration will no longer function as a result of the SOAP API being removed from JIRA. If you have encountered this issue with JIRA Cloud or if you plan to upgrade to JIRA Server 7.0 and continue using the JIRA Connector with Jama 4.2.7 or earlier, we recommend upgrading your Jama instance to the newest version.

If you have any questions about this update, you can reply to this post.

The latest release of Jama SaaS is on its way and ready to serve up another helping of continual improvements. Dig in and please do let us know what you think.

Release Date: July 18, 2015 

NEW CAPABILITIES  

Search custom fields: Better search results! Previously, Jama custom field search would only include results from custom text fields. Searches now include custom fields matching a search to help users to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

Single click to select row in List View: Thanks to great customer feedback, we changed how rows can be selected within the list view. You can now click anywhere within the row (where a single click does not perform an action) to select the row, instead of double clicking. Less effort + quicker edits = improved workflows.

The latest release of Jama SaaS is on it's way and ready to serve up another helping of continual improvements. Dig in and please do let us know what you think.

Release Date: July 18, 2015 

NEW CAPABILITIES  

Search custom fields: Better search results! Previously, Jama custom field search would only include results from custom text fields. Searches now include custom fields matching a search to help users to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

Single click to select row in List View: Thanks to great customer feedback, we changed how rows can be selected within the list view. You can now click anywhere within the row (where a single click does not perform an action) to select the row, instead of double clicking. Less effort + quicker edits = improved workflows.

In conjunction with our Professional Services team, I'm excited to announce that we've made available some resources for your initial rollout of Jama. Even if your organization isn't a new customer, you may find value in the project plan! Check out Customer Resources for the links.

Happy Holidays! Jama US-based Support will be observing the July 4th holiday on July 3rd 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.

The 2nd Edition of the Jama Customer newsletter is hot off the presses!  If you missed it in your inbox, it is not too late.  You can check it out here: 
http://bit.ly/1MPq3QQ and read though to find out how to receive a $10 Starbucks gift card!

Hi everyone, we're excited to announce the latest release of Jama SaaS. See below for all of the new features to help you deliver great products.

Release Date: June 20, 2015

NEW CAPABILITIES

Search improvements

Search has been improved to bring forward more relevant results.

• Search results will no longer contain items only containing the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT (i.e. lowercased "and," "or" and "not" will be ignored).
• Wildcard searches are possible at beginning or end of words. Now, if you search for TRIM, you'll get results that include Trim0 through Trim9, etc. as well as OSCTRIM. Asterisks are not required in the Search box for this functionality.
• Search by field label means users will no longer be required to know the database field name and can search by the label they see in the UI. As an example, if you want to search for items with Story Points equal to 5, you'll search Story_Points: "5". Note that an underscore is required if there is a space in the field label.
• Grouping for more complex queries is now allowed with parentheses.

Facet performance improvements

The facets exposed when selecting "Filter Items" from List or Reading view were created using multiple calls and complex logic in order to display the correct value and count. As part of this release we have consolidated the calls into one, thus improving the performance and accuracy of the facets returned. Now when a user selects Filter Items to display facets, options such as as Item Types, Project, Author, and Last Modified By will display faster. This also enables us to add more facets in the future.

Recently viewed performance improvements

The Recently Viewed URLs on the users' home pages were pulling from the recently-viewed table. Over time as this table grows in size the ability to display the Recently Viewed was going to slow down. We've modified how this information is returned to prevent this from happening.

List and Home page UX updates

UX did some usability sessions around the home page and the list view and found some simple changes that would improve our users' abilities to find information. The changes are as follows:

• On the home page we've added the review status of "Reviewer" or "Approver" to the information displayed. Previously we showed only "Moderating."
• We've added hover help tips to the review Progress bar as well as menu items on List and Reading View.
• We changed the facet filter to be clearer. Filter Items will open the facet panel and Hide Filters will close it.
• "Filter Results" have been changed to "Filter By" on the facet panel when displayed.
• The Filter funnel icon on the project page has been changed to be a text link readingAdvanced Search.
• The Show/Hide Fields selector for List View used to readonly the Item Type, such as Defect. We made it more clear what the panel is for by adding "Fields" to the text, so now it would read Defect Fields.

Security Fixes
Due to security concerns we are no longer allowing direct upload of HTML or Javascript files, although they can still be zipped up. Any unrecognized file format will have its content type changed to disallow rendering in the browser, so some things that used to work in-browser may not for new attachments. HTML Javascript files previously uploaded will continue to be accessible.

The Jama Customer Support team is excited to unveil extended business hours for our Enterprise customers! After months of preparation, we have launched 24x5 business hours, starting Sunday 3pm PT and ending Friday 6pm PT. During this time, we are available to respond to your support tickets and calls via normal support channels. To accomplish this coverage, we have established 3 shifts. 1st shift, which operates out of our Portland HQ office, covers M-F 6am – 6pm PT. 2nd shift, also operating out of our Portland HQ office, covers Su- Th 3pm – 12am PT. Finally, our 3rd shift is based in the EU covering M-F 11pm – 7am PT/7am – 4pm GMT +1. These folks can provide multi-lingual support in Spanish, German, Portugese and French. We have built a great team of individuals covering all shifts and they are excited to work with you during these hours! For our Standard customers, support hours remain unchanged at M-F 7a – 5pm PT (US customers) and 7am – 4pm GMT +1 (EU customers).

As many of you know, Jama version 2014.1 was released May 2014. To align with Section 2 of our Maintenance and Support License Agreement, on July 13th, 2015, we will be ending full support for 2014.1, transitioning to limited or “best effort" support. What this means is that most functionality questions related to 2014.1 can continue to be addressed, though if a bug is suspected or you are running into another type of issue that requires a deeper-dive, we will recommend that you upgrade to the latest version and would be happy to consult on how best to proceed with an upgrade. If you are interested in this consultation, 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.

Update at 3:02pm PDT: We have resolved the issue with some of our hosted customers experiencing issues being unable to access their data post the maintenance that occurred on June 6, 2015.

Update at 2:30 pm PDT: We have made significant progress in identifying the root cause and are expecting full resolution within the hour.

Update at 1:45 PDT: We continue to make progress with our US hosted customers and the maintenance window for all EU hosted customers is progressing as planned.

Update at 12:45 PDT: We continue to make updates with our US hosted customers, the next update will occur at 1:45 pm PDT. We will be having a 90 minute maintenance window for all EU hosted customers. This will begin at 1pm PDT.

Update at 11:30am PDT: We are making progress on resolving the issue. In parallel, we are working on identifying the specific customers impacted.

Please note that US-based support will be closed on Memorial Day (Monday, May 25, from 7am PDT - 11pm PDT).

Hi everyone, we're excited to announce the latest release of Jama. See below for all of the new features to help you deliver great products.

Release Date: May 23, 2015

New Capabilities

Relationship count for calculated fields & multi select picklist
Calculated fields has added functionality. You can use relationship counts (number of upstream and/or downstream relationships) as a factor in a calculation, allowing you to "weight" priority based on the number of upstream or downstream relationships. This is very helpful when looking at priority based on related customers to a request.
We've also added values used on multi-select pick lists to our calculation methods. This will make setting up calculations even easier and more robust.

More compliant password resets
SOC compliance, this should help teams with security audits, etc. This requires the user to enter their existing password before changing their password.

Contextual URL's
Add bookmarks/links to places I want to save. FIXES BACK BUTTON!
The contextual URL's will apply to specific views:
*Home
*Project
*Item
*Filters
*Explorer (Component, Set, Folder)
*Releases
*Stream and Reviews already have URL's
(Don't forget to clear your browser cache so that the new routing works)

Updated Home Page (for recently viewed contextual URLS)
The home page today shows recently viewed projects but most users consistently navigate further into the project once there. This adds significant extra steps to the users daily work lives. With the new contextual URL's we are now aware of the most recent places (Components, Sets, Folders, Filters, etc) and can use this to provide users those recently viewed places directly on the home page. Now users will be able to link directly to the view.

Facet Updates (quick filters)
(new) Project Facet: We have added a Project facet. Now when you search cross project the facet view will include projects as a filterable criteria.
(enhanced) Author now includes both created by and last modified by. (We are working on getting ALL modified by but that will be in a later release)

BIRT Reporting Update (version 4.4.2)
*Improved UI & Performance enhancements
*Supports export to .xlsx and .docx
*Better filter and aggregate calculations
*Better Excel reports, including being able to export charts and graphs to Excel, including donut charts

Updated Single Item View
The single item view has been enhanced with more intuitive interactions, improvements to the editing flow, and a modern look. Users can quickly edit items by double clicking anywhere on the item content, without locating the edit button or opening a separate window. While in edit mode, users can update calculated field inputs and see the results updated in real time. This is especially useful if users have calculations such as Weighted Shortest Job First on an item, and wish to see the updated output values with different inputs. The tags, links, and attachments functionality has been moved from behind tabs and into the main item body. This valuable data is now easily scannable and editable in one spot at the bottom of every item. Together these updates streamline the process of adding and editing data in Jama.

Search service updates
Jama has moved to using Elasticsearch in a service that runs external to the Jama application.

This update plays a key role in our ongoing work to improve scaling through clustering and load-balancing and availability by decreasing the maintenance windows required for updating the application.

Search Projects
We've added search to the Change Project form. No more scrolling through your complex project list - as you type, the available projects will be scaled down.

At the core of Agile methodology is developing a shared understanding and commitment to what you're going to build, and then capturing feedback early and often to refine your plan. Even if all of your team members are universally aligned at the beginning of the product development cycle, keeping them in sync and managing change requires a parallel integration among the tools and data systems across the organization.

 Robin Calhoun, product manager at Jama Software and designer of the company's Agile Workflow Design (AWD), will share the practices the Jama team has put into place for their own product delivery process. The AWD is a "tool agnostic” approach that leverages recent discoveries in behavioral science research while keeping in the spirit of Agile. Robin will use Jama and JIRA to illustrate her experience in bringing product to market.

 Who should attend:

• Product Managers and Owners
• Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches
• Engineering Leads and Developers
• DevOps and Release Managers

 In this presentation you'll learn:

• Lessons from behavioral science research that explain why some workflows work and others don’t!
• How to unite development and product stakeholders
• Why it's key to actively collaborate throughout the development process and track questions, decisions made, and note issues 
  
• Examples of how to keep the progress data connected consistently across teams and tools
• How data can inform core product requirements and be referenced and reused

Register Now at http://www.jamasoftware.com/media/email/agile-workflow-design-lunch-and-learn.htm

As you might have noticed, and even engaged with, last month, Jama has launched an ask-an-expert series called "Ask Jama." Last month's topic was Test Management. This time around we'll be covering Reuse. If you are interested in joining us on Friday or have a question to ask, visit this post for more details.

What is the change?
On April 19, 2015, the certificate used to sign the SAML metadata will expire.  We will update the certificate on Wednesday, April 15th at noon PDT.
The metadata is available at https://auth.jamacloud.com/saml/metadata.
 
Who is impacted by this change?
Only customers who use SAML for SSO on Jamacloud will be affected by this change.
 
What action do I need to take?
If your Identity Provider (IdP) is configured to check for updates to the metadata you may not have to do anything.
 
After the noon update you will want to log in to your Jamacloud tenant from a logged out account. It is advised that sysadmins test from a browser that is logged out of both Jama and the IdP.
 
If you are unable to log in you may need to manually update the metadata available at https://auth.jamacloud.com/saml/metadata.

What will happen if I take no action?
System Administrators may see signature validation errors on SAML requests.  Jama users will be unable to sign-in to Jamacloud.
 
Can I apply the update ahead of Wednesday, April 15th at noon PDT?
No.  The metadata available for download with the new certificate will not be available until Wednesday, April 15th at noon PDT.
 
Why do this during a weekday?
Not all of our customers have an IT group available to validate the successful update of their IdP’s metadata over the weekend, and we intend to avoid a bad Monday morning where no one can log in.
 
Users that are already logged into Jamacloud ahead of the update will not be immediately affected by the change of certificate.  Only when their session in Jamacloud expires will the system check with your IdP.
 
Where do I go for further information?
Jama support is always available to answer any questions you may have about this change.

We're excited to announce today the launch of our Spring 2015 Release (2015.1). We've introduced new features in Jama to make sure the people who manage the what and the why of product delivery have the right information in the right place at the right time, and can make faster and more accurate decisions. 

If you've been following Jama news this year you likely have heard of these new capabilities as they've rolled out to our Jama hosted customers, who get these updates monthly. If you'd like to find out more about how you can migrate to Jama SaaS contact your Jama account manager. 

*Ready to upgrade to Jama 2015.1 right now?
The link to the download can be found here: 
http://www.jamasoftware.com/download/

*Interested in learning more about the new features in Jama 2015? 
Sign up for the webinar on May 13th:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1058786082428771842

NEW CAPABILITIES
*New User Interface
Jama has a more streamlined flow for using the core List and Reading Views, including in-line editing, simplified menu actions and check-box selection on large lists.
For a more in-depth look at the new user interface, watch our recorded webinar: http://www.jamasoftware.com/whats-new-fall14-hosted-webinar 

*Get to productivity faster with the new Home Page
One of the first things you’ll notice when you log in to Jama is the new home icon that leads to an improved home page that acts as your personal Jama launch pad.
In this new view you can:
- Quickly navigate to your most recently viewed projects
- View your active reviews you’re a part of, or start a new review
- Scan activity in the Stream including questions directed to you, actions, and decisions needed
This new view will give you a great place to start a productive day. And, if you’re bringing on new team members it will be easy to get them oriented to Jama and working in the system.

*Calculated fields enable better prioritization
If you have a long list of backlogged items you’re going to love Jama’s new calculated fields, one of our most requested capabilities. One of the most useful things you can do with this new feature is assign values to each item item in your backlog to determine their relative priority, making it easier to decide what to focus on next.
You can also create a custom field that calculates numbers in other fields, including sum, average and multiplication.
To learn more, visit the support community: https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/jama-now-includes-calculated-fields

*BIRT Reporting Update to 4.4.2
- Improved UI
- Performance enhancements
- Donut charts now available
- Supports export to .xlsx and .docx
- Better filter and aggregate calculations
- Better Excel reports, including being able to export charts and graphs to Excel
If you have existing BIRT reports, learn how to upgrade them on the support community: https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/how-to-upgrade-your-birt-report-to-4-4-2

*SOAP API throttling
The 2015.1 release of Jama introduces a new option to help system admins protect their Jama servers. The system can now stop aggressive SOAP integrations from overwhelming the CPU and degrading overall system performance by throttling the threads available and queuing SOAP requests. This option is configurable to fit the CPU cores available and requires a restart to enable.
To learn more, visit the support community: https://community.jamasoftware.com/jama/topics/soap-throttling

*Time Based Filters
You can now limit filter results to the past days, week, and months to see only the most recent and relevant information. This feature surfaces both in the advanced filter creation flow, as well as in the NEW filters to the left of the new List View.

*Patch fix on last activity date
New field that captures when changes happen (date and time).
 
*Event Indexing
If an admin re-indexes the system, the activities will be indexed in the background cutting the time to get back in the system by 30%.
 
*Additional Facets
We are currently support the following new facets to quickly filter through items by author and keyword to help you get to the content you want to see quicker.
   
SUPPORTED SOFTWARE UPDATES
*Oracle 10g database
We will be dropping support for the 10g version of Oracle. This version is no longer supported by Oracle. Support will continue for Oracle on version 11g. Currently Jama does not include support for any version higher than 11g.

*Java 8
Due to Oracle's end-of-life for support of Java 7, Jama has run Java 8 through a gamut of tests. With 2015.1, we will support both Java 7 or Java 8 (Oracle JDK only). This change has also allowed us to upgrade our BIRT reporting platform.

*Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Mainstream support through Microsoft has ended for SQL Server 2005, so Jama has made the decision to stop testing on this server. A survey of customers known to be using Microsoft SQL Server indicated support was not needed for 2005.

*Apple OS X Server
Jama has decided to stop supporting Apple OS X Server due to the small number of customers who are administering Jama on this server.

*Atlassian Crowd Connector
Jama now supports the latest release of Crowd Connector, 2.8.

We at Jama created the Support Community in part to share official documentation with our customers. However, the real value of a community like this is the opportunity you have to collaborate with each other. We’ve seen customers share great suggestions for how to manage release branching and how to report on Testing traceability with each other. Conversations like these are invaluable, so we’d like to see more of them. To encourage this, we’ve spun up a contest, and all it takes to enter is some participation.

*2015/04/16 edit: The contest deadline has passed. Thanks to everyone for participating and commenting. Winners will be notified and announced shortly.

If you’re a Jama customer, all you need to do is sign up for an account on the community (if you haven’t already), complete your profile, respond to another user’s post, and comment on this thread once you’ve completed those tasks. We’ll choose three winners from the pool of completed entries, judging them on the quality of the reply to another user. There are plenty of reasons to help a fellow user think through a problem or process, but we’d like to reward you for your effort!

How to Enter

1. Register as a user, providing your full name and company email address in your profile.
2. Be sure to complete your user profile with a name and avatar.
3. Reply substantially to one customer-created post in the Community, and
4. Leave a comment on the contest thread.

What You’ll Win

A Mini Jambox portable bluetooth speaker.

Rules

See full contest rules.

In observance of the Easter holiday, our European support team will be out of the office Friday, April 3rd. This covers the time period of 12am - 7am PDT.

Hello Jama Customers! For the Spring 2015 on-premises release of Jama, we have a handful of supported software announcements to make.

Oracle 10g database

We will be dropping support for the 10g version of Oracle. This version is no longer supported by Oracle: http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Oracle_10g

Supporting each database version requires extensive testing on every on-premises release. So after observing that version 10g was no longer supported by Oracle, we decided that our efforts would be better focused elsewhere. Support will continue for Oracle on version 11g. Currently Jama does not include support for any version higher than 11g.

Java 8

Due to Oracle's end-of-life for support of Java 7, Jama has run Java 8 through a gamut of tests. With 2015.1,  we will support both Java 7 or Java 8 (Oracle JDK only). This change has also allowed us to upgrade our BIRT reporting platform.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Mainstream support through Microsoft has ended for SQL Server 2005, so Jama has made the decision to stop testing on this server. A survey of customers known to be using Microsoft SQL Server indicated support was not needed for 2005.

Apple OS X Server

Jama has decided to stop supporting Apple OS X Server due to the small number of customers who are administering Jama on this server.

Atlassian Crowd Connector

Jama now supports the latest release of Crowd Connector, 2.8.

We're excited to announce the launch of the February 2015 Release of Jama SaaS. Jama will perform a brief update on Saturday, February 28 to roll out these new features.

We've introduced new features in Jama to make sure the people who manage the "what and the why" of product delivery have the right information, in the right place, at the right time, and can make faster and more accurate decisions.


WHAT'S
NEW IN THE JAMA FEBRUARY RELEASE 

User
home page is now the default landing page
When
you launch Jama you will have a personalized home page including active reviews you’re a part of,
comments directed at you, and a list of your recent projects.


Weighted shortest job first (WSJF) calculation

This calculation will allow you to combine
multiple factors of value to help make more informed decisions around
prioritization of your backlog. The calculation weighs items with a higher
value and lower effort as the thing to work on next. For more info on the recent addition of calculated fields to Jama, check out our blog.

New Icons
We have updated some icons in our UI. This is an early step in continuing to modernize the Jama interface. 


We hope you enjoy these new features. If you have questions please post them to the community.

Thanks,
Paul Andrews
Product Marketing Manager

Wondering what we did with your old feature requests?  Here's the answer, from our product management team.  

You’re all product developers, so you live right in the middle of this challenge: If you’re remotely successful you have way more good ideas (demand) than you can every implement (capacity).   

This is a good thing.  If the reverse is true (you have more capacity than demand) your project is at risk of being cancelled or your company is at risk of going out of business.

The art of product management is really about living within a constant flow of ideas and demand, and allowing only a tiny number of them to make it to development.  Let too many ideas through, and your team is forced to cut corners.  Or it just takes a very long time to finish anything.

At Jama, our customer base is growing much faster than our development capacity.  Every day, we hear about new and novel uses of the product, and you share tons of great ideas on how we should move forward.  

Your ideas are crucial to our process, and so our whole product management team is watching this community for relevant input.  We really do read and consider pretty much everything that comes through, even if you don’t get a response from a product manager directly.  

Just minutes ago I noticed an idea a customer had posted that relates to a feature we’re considering in April, and I stood up and walked over to Jeremy, (the product manager working on that feature).  We discussed it.  He had already noticed the post, and that idea had already had an influence on how he’s thinking about the work.  So even when you don’t see a direct response or see new features implemented exactly the way you would like to see them, you are having an influence on our work.

Many of you have submitted feature requests in the past, and we appreciate the work that you’ve put into those posts.  They have helped us prioritize our work and helped us design features.  We have kept that database and continue to refer to those posts as we make prioritization decisions going forward. 

We really appreciate the work Kristina and the rest of the support team does to work with you directly and advocate on your behalf, especially when we don’t have a chance to write personal responses to your ideas.

So please do keep posting your ideas - they’re an essential stream of input. But also do bear in mind that the art of building great products often comes from choosing what not to build, for us just as much as for your company.

Jama's offices will be closed on Monday, February 16 to observe Presidents' Day. We will resume regular business hours on Tuesday, February 17 at 7 a.m. PST.

Jama released a new update to our hosted servers on 2015/02/07. See the updated SaaS Release Notes and read about the latest features including Calculated Fields.

Jama has been actively assessing any impact to our environment from the glibc GHOST vulnerability that was disclosed on January 27th, 2015.   We have reviewed all of our services and have confirmed that none of our systems are vulnerable to GHOST. 

The GNU glibc is vulnerable to a heap-based buffer overflow that impacts any application using the gethostbyname function in any version of glibc-2.17 and lower.  While most of our services do not use this function, we have ensured that all servers have a patched version of glibc to ensure complete protection.

If you have any questions or concerns about our response to this vulnerability, please open a support ticket.