Work Product Descriptor (Artifact): Requirements Traceability
This artifact is used to trace the customer's business requirements, both to other project requirements and to other project artifacts within and beyond the requirements practice.
Purpose

This artifact is used for the following purposes:

  • To provide traceability between requirements or to other artifacts
  • To lightly check for completeness of the project requirements (please create a link to Traceability Checklist)
  • To assess the impact of changes to requirements.
Relationships
RolesResponsible: Modified By:
Output From
Main Description

Traceability is defined by identifying which relationships between requirement types - or other artifacts -- are important enough to track and maintain.

Properties
Optional
Planned
Key Considerations

In order to maintain the consistency of the traceability, this artifact must be re-assessed every time there is a change to the requirement or at the end of each milestone.

In a small simple project, the traceability matrix can be maintained in a spreadsheet. Automated tool support is helpful in a complicated large-scale project.

There are project resource costs to establishing and maintaining traceability. It is important to establish just enough traceability to support completeness checking and change impact analysis without over-using the technique by tracing "everything to everything".

Tailoring
Impact of not having

Reduced ability to ensure completeness of requirements definition. Reduced ability to assess the impact of changed requirements on other artifacts, both within and beyond the requirements practice.

Reasons for not needingAnother approach to traceability is to cross-reference other artifacts within each artifact. If such an approach is taken, then the traceability matrix becomes duplication of effort.

For projects with a small requirements set, maintaining traceability might be too much overhead.
More Information