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Overview

The Traceability Matrix displays a two-dimensional matrix showing the links between two sets of requirements or other types of items. For example, you could have high-level customer features displayed as rows and their related lower-level functional requirements as columns. Links can be created and deleted on the fly. The Traceability Matrix helps you to visualize complex relationships within a set of requirements and to quickly repair incorrect links.

To navigate to the Traceability Matrix, open a project and select the Traceability Matrix at the Boards Menu.

It is important to understand that the effective use of the Traceability Matrix depends on the practices of your organization and its development process. You need to take into account how different types of requirements or other types of issues are structured, as well as how they are linked together and used. An organization might have different practices for different situations, so different matrices can be defined and saved in the Traceability View.

The sheer number of requirements in a project may also be a challenge to understanding traceability, so identifying significant subsets of the requirements and saving them in different views also promotes an effective solution.

Traceability Matrix Layout

A panel on the left of the coverage view provides a list of saved views and context menu operations them.

The requirements are arranged in a two-dimensional matrix. Arrows appear in the intersections of the rows and columns where the corresponding requirements are linked. For example, if customer features form the rows of the matrix and functional requirements form the columns, then the arrows show which functional requirements are linked to their customer features. The arrows show the direction of the link. A link shown as A → B indicates that A has what Jira calls an “outbound” link to B, while B has an “inbound” link to A. Red triangles to the right of the arrows indicate suspect links. Hovering over an arrow reveals the type of the link.

Operations

Purpose

Action

New View

Configures the work items and links to display in the matrix. See the section “Configure View” below.

Save

Save the changes in an existing view.

Save As

Saves a new view or saves and existing view with a new name.

Refresh

Rebuild the matrix with fresh data from the server.

Download

Download the matrix as an Excel spreadsheet. Please note that this operation might take a long time depending on the matrix size.

Select an empty cell to add a relation between the work items. See section “Adding Links” below.

Select a cell with a link to delete the link. See section “Deleting Links” below.

New View

This option allows you to configure the matrix by defining the scope of the work items you want to have displayed in the columns and rows. You can also choose the types of the links you want to have displayed between the work items. The scope is determined based either on the types of the items or a query.

  • Work items types: Select which types of work items should be included in the given axis.

  • Queries: Select a Query as the source of the work items for the given axis.

  • Link types: Define the types of links to be displayed in the matrix.

  • Scope: When checked, displays all requirements in both axis regardless of them being linked or not. If not checked, only shows work items that have a link between both axis.

image-20240917-123348.png

By selecting Show, a matrix is generated including the items in the defined scope. The links betwen the items are also shown in the matrix, indicating a relationship between them.

Adding links

New links can be added between any two displayed work items directly in the matrix by selecting the cell intersecting the items. Please note that you can only link types selected in the configure view.

Deleting links

To delete an existing link, select the desired link in the matrix. A confirmation popup allows you to confirm the deletion. If there is more than one link type between the work items, you can unselect the links you do not want to delete.

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