Free yourself from the land of many documents

There are many traditional tools people use to collect requirements - from simple spreadsheets or documents to expensive enterprise application life-cycle management (ALM) suites – each with their own challenges and limitations. We believe in order to be successful with the collection of requirements, a tool should be more people-centric than document-centric.
 

Central Web-based repository

Contour provides immediate access to requirements and other project data from anywhere in the world using a standard web-browser. Get your data out of silos within the project team and start sharing.

Flexible importing

Contour makes it easy to immediately start capturing project requirements regardless of when you started your project. If requirements and other artifacts already exist you can import them from CSV, MS Word or Excel.

Rich Text Editor

Contour provides a rich editor that enables users to capture requirements directly into the central web repository. Requirements and other project artifacts can be created with rich text, hyperlinks, tables, images and more. Content templates enables the team to quickly generate uniform artifacts, available to team members across your organisation for immediate requirements collaboration.

Capture all related items

Contour's flexibility enables the team to capture all types of artifacts including requirements, business rules, use cases, story cards, defects and tasks.  Contour provides a number of pre-defined artifact types out of the box, or users can define their own.

Drag and Drop

We've built Contour as a Rich Internet Application that allows you to quickly and easily drag and drop items within the hierarchy you've defined, giving you the flexibility to define requirements or other items once. Organise them, or re-organise them as often as needed.

Start Connecting

It's just easier when you're connected. The same is true for projects and Jama believes connections within the team are just as important as trace relationships between artifacts.

Impact Analysis

Contour enables users to see the impact of a change - before making the change. Contour can show the project artifacts and team members working on those items that may be affected. This is one of the primary benefits of implementing project traceability.

For example, if a business analyst is about to change a requirement, Contour can show who is currently working on a related design document, who is working on a related test case and that someone has already completed the dependent help page. Contour uses trace relationships to determine which project artifacts might be affected and displays those to the user.

Traceability relationships

Traceability is a key benefit of requirements management. Contour tracks relationships throughout the project to alert the team when changes are made that impact other items. For example, if someone updates a requirement that has a related use case and test case, an email notifies the team that these two items are affected. In addition, these items are flagged as “suspect” in the system for review.

Cross-Project Relationships

In addition to relating items within the same project, you can also relate items across multiple projects that have interdependencies. Simply navigate to the other project and select the item or multi-select several items that you want to relate and in a single click, they will show in your relationships view.

Maintain Control

Contour enables project managers to take complete control over change within their projects, providing three levels of change management:

• Baseline an entire set of artifacts at significant milestones in the project
• Capture change to individual artifacts and generate a version history
• Manage the process of change requests of the project lifecycle

Visual Relationships View

We've made it easier to create traceability relationships between requirements, use cases, test cases and other items.  You can choose to see traceability relationships in a table layout or as a visual layout.

Version Tracking & History

Once change control is turned on, Contour begins tracking each change made to project artifacts.
When a requirement is changed, a new version is created and the team can be notified  

Side-by-Side Comparisons

When questions come up such as, "When did that happen?", Contour provides a side by side version viewer that makes it easy to see when changes were made.

Change Request Management

Contour also provides a change request manager to help control the team-process of completing a change.  Change requests can be entered directly into Contour and tied to the related requirements. 
This enables instant impact analysis showiung which artifacts and team members are affected.

Tabs 

Contour uses Tabs that open along the top of the application to allow you to have several items open at once and therefore easily switch across multiple items, saving you valuable time.

Trace Matrix  

You can quickly run a Trace Matrix to assess the traceability relationships between your sets of items such as requirements and change requests.

Collaborating with the entire team

Contour's web 2.0 interface was designed from the ground up for team collaboration. Unlike legacy requirements tools typically designed for use by a single department or user role, Contour provides the entire enterprise with access to requirements and other artifacts. Including external stakeholders if required, via a read-only user license. 

Discussion threads

Each requirement and artifact in Contour has a discussion thread for the team to add comments and collaborate on individual items.

Filters 

Another view Contour offers is filters. As you begin to capture thousands of requirements, test cases, defects and other items within Contour, filters become an increasingly valuable tool to use to hone in on specific lists of items you need. You can create filters for yourself or share them with others. 

Tags

Tags provide a flexible way to categorise project artifacts. Tags may be used to group items in ways that the hierarchal structure doesn't allow. Each project artifact contains a tags component where tags may be viewed and selected.

Push & Pull notifications

There is nothing more frustrating that finding out development was just completed on an outdated requirement. Keeping the team up to date can be an administrative hassle. Contour eliminates the need to send out duplicate emails with the latest requirements document attached. The entire team, regardless of location gains immediate access to the latest information and receives email notification when things change.

Notification groups keep updates targeted to those who need to know.

Reporting

Contour includes a rich reporting platform that provides the ability to summarise and model data in many ways. Reports can be generated in PDF, RTF (Word), Excel, HTML and other formats. Contour also provides a template engine for creating document style reports that may include images, tables and rich text for requirements specifications, change requests etc.  Report templates are standard HTML documents that use cascading style sheets for formatting. These can be created from within Contour or any HTML editing tool.

Unlimited Collaborator licenses

Contour provides unlimited read-only reviewer licenses with every implementation.  Not only does this provide significant cost savings, but it opens the door to immediate global information sharing.