Overview:

Traceability describes the establishment and maintenance of relationships between artifacts, such as a requirement and a design class or a requirement and a test case, so that you can track the completeness of work and assess the impact of changes.

Main Description:

Traceability is about understanding how high-level requirements (objectives, goals, aims, aspirations, expectations, needs) are transformed into low-level requirements, how they are implemented, and how they are verified.

Using traceability can provide the following benefits:

• Greater confidence in meeting objectives: Traceability increases confidence that objectives will be met by permitting coverage analysis to ensure that everything agreed to has been done.

• Ability to assess the impact of change: Traceability allows the impact (cost, schedule, technical) of changes to be assessed before work begins.

• Improved accountability: Traceability provides clarity about how the work contributes to the project as a whole.

• Ability to track progress: Traceability supports project tracking by assuring that requirements are implemented. For example, by verifying that a design artifact and test exists for each requirement.

• Ability to balance cost against benefit: Relating product components to the requirements allows you to compare benefits to costs.