Traceability
- Bruno Marotta
Overview
A best practice in product development is the adoption of a requirements-driven approach: all features of the product, as well as aspects of its development, should be directly or indirectly related to requirements. This concept is known as traceability. A related concept is coverage: high-level requirements should be covered by lower-level requirements and these in turn covered by other types of items such as test cases. For example, customer features can be broken down into functional requirements, which in turn can be related to test cases (represented as work items in Azure DevOps). We expect all customer features to be traceable to functional requirements and these in turn to be traceable to test cases. In this way we establish traceability and we ensure adequate coverage in our product development.
easeRequirements Linking Features
R4J Feature | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
Traceability Matrix | To view and manage the links between different requirements. See Traceability Matrix . |
|
Linking in easeRequirements compared to Azure DevOps
A basic form of traceability can be achieved in Azure Devops with links: for example, each customer feature is linked to one or more functional requirements, and each functional requirement is linked to one or more test cases. However, Azure Devops’ support for linking is insufficient for the complex hierarchical structures that characterize requirements-driven projects. A number of problems stand out:
The only way to maintain links in Jira is to open individual requirements and use the relations section to create or delete links. This procedure is unfeasible for complex hierarchical structures, where you want to look at a number of requirements at once and create the appropriate link relations immediately.