This artifact records information about relationships between information in the development. It is often a logical rather than a physical construct. There is generally no specific physical "place" where all this information exists, but it is distributed throughout the physical storage of the information used for development.

The traceability record allows those involved in the development of a system to understand the relationships between different elements in the development, for example, which requirements are tested by a particular test case.

Where information is needed about the relationships between two specific types of information (for example Stakeholder Requirements and System Requirements), it is often extracted into a Traceability Matrix.