Definitions
A much cited definition of requirements traceability is the following:
Requirements traceability refers to the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both forwards and backwards direction (i.e. from its origins, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through all periods of on-going refinement and iteration in any of these phases.)
While this definition emphasizes tracking the life of a requirement through all phases of development, it is not explicit in mentioning that traceability may document relationships between many kinds of development artifacts, such as requirements, specification statements, designs, tests, models and developed components. The next definition addresses this issue:
Requirements traceability refers to the ability to define, capture and follow the traces left by requirements on other elements of the software development environment and the trace left by those elements on requirements.
The following definition emphasises the use of traceability to document the transformation of a requirement into successively concrete design and development artifacts:
In the requirements engineering field, traceability is about understanding how high-level requirements -- objectives, goals, aims, aspirations, expectations, needs -- are transformed into low-level requirements. It is therefore primarily concerned with the relationships between layers of information.
The principal relationship referred to here may be characterised as "satisfaction": how is a requirement satisfied by other artifacts? Other relationships that can be traced are, for example, "verification": how is a requirement verified by test artifacts?
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