Requirements Traceability

Requirements traceability is an active area of research in system and software Engineering
A well accepted definition of requirements traceability was given in 1994 by Gotel and Finkelstein: "Requirements Traceability refers to the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both a forward and backward direction (i.e. from its origin, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through periods of on-going refinement and iteration in any of these phases)”

Now a days IT people are finding ways to reduce overall life cycle costs ,to deliver reliable and quality products. Every where we are finding fewer staff resources and higher quality expectations about the product/project in short term guidelines. In this kind of situation one needs some solution to keep in track the requirements, any change in requirements, and impact of changes in requirements on another module , and last and the most important one that whether our implemented system’s characteristics are matching with the requirements or not.
Today, applying Requirements Traceability offers a high level of project control and assured quality that is difficult to achieve by any other means. Through the advent of Requirements Management tools, Requirements Traceability has matured to support and enhance Project


Management, Impact Analysis and Change Management, Defect Management, process improvement and team communications.



Tracing requirements involves documenting the links between the various requirements (i.e., Business requirements, User requirements, functional and Test requirements) and Work Products (i.e., Requirements Documents, Design specifications, Software code, Test plans, Test cases and other artifacts of the development process.)

A Requirements Traceability matrix can simplify the process of tracing requirements. It serves as a graphical representation of traceable relationships between requirements and work products.

With a traceability matrix, IT teams can easily track customer requirements through the software development cycle, diminishing the risk of missing stated or derived requirements, especially when developing large, complex systems.

Along verifying system functionality, Requirements Traceability also tackles some other problems.

1. Requirements Traceability minimizes Scopre creep. Scope creep occurs when any feature or functionality in a final product does not link directly with a customer requirement. When it happens, it costs software organizations time. Without knowing the customer requirement, developers are left to analyze or define functionality on their own or in an uncontrolled manner. This often leads to defects and can be a source of poor system performance or usability in the final product. Requirements traceability detects where functionality or features are missing requirements earlier in the process.
2. Tracing requirements from development to testing checks that each functional
requirement used in development matches those established for test cases. This lets IT
teams double-check that all required system features are tested.
3. A traceability matrix identifies all the requirements and components of the process—such as design specifications, code and test cases—that need modification to fulfill the change request. This helps ensure that all affected work products are modified to support the change request.

Using a Requirements Management tool can offer additional information about customer requirements. IT teams across the development cycle can track, integrate and share key project information, or requirements attributes—such as priority, status, originator, cost, owner, release, assigned to, source, sponsor and notes.
The Requirements Management tool will also provide so many solutions such as requirements priorities(which module should be done first according to its priority) , functionality testing priorities (which critical functionality to be tested first) , notification of change in requirements to assigned people, promotes team communications , reusability of test cases, plans and scripts (if necessary and suitable) within the project or in parallel and subsequent project.
Many organizations recognize the importance of requirements traceability in implementing a quality software development program.

 Yet, a requirements management tool today allows organizations to do more. Using Requirements management tool project development and test managers can check that all customer requirements are implemented and tested, ensuring quality, reliablesystem capabilities and characteristics.