Requirements engineering (RE) is a combination of requirements definition and requirements management. Poor requirements can lead to countless change requests during system testing proven to cost up to 50 times more than during requirements analysis.

When managing requirements, organisations rely on requirements tracing techniques known as Requirements Traceability (RT).

“A requirement is deemed traceable if you can discover who suggested the requirement, why the requirement exists, what requirements are related to it and how it relates to other information such as systems designs, implementation and documentation.” – Kotonya G. Sommerville

ADVANTAGES OF RT’S:

• Manage any change to requirements understanding the links between requirement and the artefacts
• Track changes made to a requirement and the downstream impact (i.e. Test Cases)
• Understanding how and why the system meets the needs of the stakeholders by linking the requirement to design, implementation and verification artefacts (i.e. test results against your requirements)
• Deliver documents, test cases and tasks to support requirements.
• Reduces the impact of people leaving projects since information is captured within the RT.

IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications, state that a requirement should be traceable to its origin and facilitate future referencing.

CHALLENGES OF RT’S:

• Without a proper RT solution, organisations find the full capture of all conceivable traces extremely difficult when considering project time and cost. Organisations find that the effort of automating the process to assist in practicing RT is expensive and inefficient in terms of effort required.
• Small to medium size projects managing less than 100 requirements are less convinced of the benefit when it comes to managing requirements using an RT.
• To overcome the entire problem of managing requirements there is a need for Requirement Traceability solutions which integrates within your project lifecycle.

GOOD PRACTICES OF RT’S:

• For a given requirement, the associated test case/s which validate the requirement can be easily identified
• For a given test case, the associated requirement/s that it validates, can be easily identified.
• Changes to requirements will flag impacts to the associated cases and other artefacts.

If you are manually trying to create a matrix to report on the number of cases linked to your requirements then you’re probably experiencing pain and would realise that the next challenge is how do you capture, monitor and report on results, tasks, change requests, risks and defects which relate to your requirements.

Furthermore how can we share the report with details in real-time showing who has been assigned to manage the requirement?

TestPoint’s Vansah SDLC solution helps customers manage their RT’s efficiently across projects instantly using an adaptable solution which provides real time, accurate traceability information through software design. If a requirement changes or is no-longer approved the impact of that change is reflected across all associated assets.

TestPoint helps customers to elicit and document business requirements with Vansah by capturing industry and organizational best practices. Vansah’s SDLC drill down features has dramatically improved customers SDLC processes by ensuring the correct requirements are built and tested instead of having the wrong product built with un-manageable change requests.

WANT TO BUILD AND TEST THE RIGHT PRODUCT? TESTPOINT CAN HELP YOU MANAGE WITH VANSAH TEST MANAGEMENT FOR JIRA.

Webinar – Requirements Traceability Gadget for Jira