Requirements Traceability - Overview

Overview

Traceability as a general term is the "ability to chronologically interrelate the uniquely identifiable entities in a way that matters." The word chronology here reflects the use of the term in the context of tracking food from farm to shop, or drugs from factory to mouth. What matters in requirements management is not a temporal evolution so much as a structural evolution: a trace of where requirements are derived from, how they are satisfied, how they are tested, and what impact will result if they are changed.

Requirements come from different sources, like the business person ordering the product, the marketing manager and the actual user. These people all have different requirements on the product. Using requirements traceability, an implemented feature can be traced back to the person or group that wanted it during the requirements elicitation. This can be used during the development process to prioritize the requirement, determining how valuable the requirement is to a specific user. It can also be used after the deployment when user studies show that a feature is not used, to see why it was required in the first place.

Requirements Traceability is concerned with documenting the relationships between requirements and other development artifacts. Its purpose is to facilitate:

• the overall quality of the product(s) under development;
• the understanding of product under development and its artifact; and
• the ability to manage change.

Not only the requirements themselves should be traced but also the requirements relationship with all the artifacts associated with it, such as models, analysis results, test cases, test procedures, test results and documentation of all kinds. Even people and user groups associated with requirements should be traceable.