Requirement Traceability Coverage
This guideline describes how to measure and use the Requirement Traceability Coverage metric.
Main Description

Overview

This coverage measure shows the percent of high-level requirements (as defined in the Requirement Management Plan) that have lower-level requirements traced to them. As your team stabilizes and scopes requirements at a high level, it is appropriate to refine the requirements to lower-level requirements, specifying traceability among them.

Requirement traceability coverage is a way to measure that requirement effort is put toward refining requirements that are within scope, and that a broad perspective is taken in that refinement effort.

In some ways, this measure is a reciprocal of Untraced Requirements, though it used for a different purpose.  

Measurement Method

The percent of high-level requirements that have lower-level requirements traced to them over time i.

Measurement Analysis

Use a line chart to show the percentage of requirement traceability coverage through the lifecycle. Depending on the kind of project, the desired value is moderated by trending toward a learned mid-range value (that is, there is the possibility of too much traceability).