Artifact: Requirements Traceability |
This artifact is used to trace the customer's business requirements, both to other project requirements and to other project artifacts within and beyond the requirements practice.
Domains: Requirements
Purpose
This artifact is used for the following purposes: To provide traceability between requirements or to other artifacts To lightly check for completeness of the project requirements (please create a link to Traceability Checklist) To assess the impact of changes to requirements.
Relationships
Roles | Responsible: Analyst | Modified By: Analyst
Tasks | Input To: Assess Requirements Consistency | Output From: Assess Requirements Consistency Manage Changing Requirements Organize Requirements
Description
Main Description | Traceability is defined by identifying which relationships between requirement types – or other artifacts -- are important enough to track and maintain.
Selected Representation | For each traceability relationship, a grid is prepared in which the rows are of one requirement type – for example, features -- and the columns are of another requirement type – for example, business objectives – or are of an artifact type outside of the requirements practice – for example, test cases. Whenever an item in a row relates to an item in a column, put a mark in the intersecting cell to represent the traceability relationship. The table below shows an example of traceability between business objectives and features.
Features \ Business Objectives | -bus_obj_01- | -bus_obj_02- | -bus_obj__03- | --bus_obj_04- | ......
-feature_01- |  | X |  |  |
-feature_02- | X | X |  | X |
-feature_03- | X |  | X |  |
-feature_04- |  |  |  | X |
........ |  |  |  |  |
Key Considerations
In order to maintain the consistency of the traceability, this artifact must be re-assessed every time there is a change to the requirement or at the end of each milestone. In a small simple project, the traceability matrix can be maintained in a spreadsheet. Automated tool support is helpful in a complicated large-scale project. There are project resource costs to establishing and maintaining traceability. It is important to establish just enough traceability to support completeness checking and change impact analysis without overusing the technique by tracing "everything to everything".
Tailoring
Impact of not having | Reduced ability to ensure completeness of requirements definition. Reduced ability to assess the impact of changed requirements on other artifacts, both within and beyond the requirements practice.
Reasons for not needing | Another approach to traceability is to cross-reference other artifacts within each artifact. If such an approach is taken, then the traceability matrix becomes duplication of effort. For projects with a small requirements set, maintaining traceability might be too much overhead.
More Information
Checklists | Requirements Traceability
Concepts | Traceability Traceability Matrix
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