This is the second article in our series of blog posts on notable updates from the requirements management (RM) tool market that happened since September 2014. It features updates concerning Jama.
Jama Software provides quarterly updates to their hosted SaaS solution and typically twice a year updates to the on-premise versions. Since our last update Jama Software provided the 2014.2 and 2015.1 on-premise versions.
While release 2014.1 focused on expanding the scope towards Jama’s vision of collaborative work the latest releases are clearly dedicated to improve the end-user experience with the tool.
Jama Software rearchitected the rich text editor. From an end-user perspective the new editor is now much more intuitive. The UI has a modern fresh touch. Drag and drop of images is supported as well as resizing them.
Users are now able to customize their login page individually. A couple of widgets with configurable settings can be used to optimize the personal experience.
To support progress tracking of development Jama has a new feature called “Rollup Fields” that lets users add a Progress Bar to an item that will indicate the progress made on related items. For example, if your team is working in Agile, you might have Stories related to Epics. Product Managers looking at the Epics can now see a roll-up of all progress being made on all Stories within a particular Epic. 
Efficient and effective reviews of requirements ensure a joint understanding about what is desired for the product. Jama has strong capabilities to support reviews. Now public reviews have been added. This allows to add stakeholders for certain aspects to the requirement related discussions.
Time based filters have been added to restrict the result of filters to a certain range in time. E.g. Users can now easily see what happened during their last two weeks vacation period.
Often, some requirement attributes are used in a way that they depend on other attributes. Jama now supports calculated fields to provide automation capabilities in this context. This new functionality allows integer fields in an attribute to be calculated for sum, multiplication and average based on other attributes. Using this feature you may for example calculate your requirements priority based on other attributes representing estimations and risks.
Advanced Requirements reporting is provided in Jama by utilizing the BIRT infrastructure. Jama now supports BIRT 4.2.2 version. Among others, this improves performance of report generation, provides donut charts, and allows exports to .xlsx and .docx format files.
Details about Jama releases can be found here: Jama release notes