Overview

Traceability is an important concept in Requirements management. If, say, a project breaks down customer requirements into functional requirements, then it wants to be able to check that a given customer requirement can be traced to one or more functional requirements and that a given functional requirement can be traced to a customer requirement. This is achieved in Jira by linking issues using a link type such as Trace, with the outward description “traces to” and the inward description “traces from”. A Customer Requirement traces to a Functional Requirement and a Functional Requirement traces from a Customer Requirement.

Jira itself places no restrictions on how links are used: Any type of issue can be linked to any other type of issue via any link type in any direction. This allows users to easily make mistakes in linking requirements. Requirements may be linked together with the wrong link type or the link direction may be incorrect.

easeRequirements Ultimate for Jira solves this problem by providing a Data Modeler, which is used to restrict which link types are available and how they are to be used with given issue types. For example, a data model may include a rule that says that the link type Trace can only be used between the issue types Customer Requirement and Functional Requirement and that the link direction can only be from the former to the latter.