Requirements Traceability

Requirements traceability is a sub-discipline of requirements management within software development and systems engineering. Traceability as a general term is defined by the IEEE Systems and Software Engineering Vocabulary as (1) the degree to which a relationship can be established between two or more products of the development process, especially products having a predecessor-successor or master-subordinate relationship to one another; (2) the identification and documentation of derivation paths (upward) and allocation or flowdown paths (downward) of work products in the work product hierarchy; (3) the degree to which each element in a software development product establishes its reason for existing; and (4) discernable association among two or more logical entities, such as requirements, system elements, verifications, or tasks.

Requirements traceability in particular, is defined as "the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement in both a forwards and backwards direction (i.e., from its origins, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through periods of ongoing refinement and iteration in any of these phases)". In the requirements engineering field, traceability is about understanding how high-level requirements – objectives, goals, aims, aspirations, expectations, needs – are transformed into low-level requirements. It is therefore primarily concerned with satisfaction relationships between layers of information (aka artefacts). However, traceability may document relationships between many kinds of development artefacts, such as requirements, specification statements, designs, tests, models and developed components. For example, it is common practice to capture verification relationships to demonstrate that a requirement is verified by a certain test artefact.

Traceability is especially relevant when developing safety-critical systems and therefore prescribed by safety guidelines, such as DO178C, ISO 26262, and IEC61508. A common requirement of these guidelines is that critical requirements must be verified and that this verification must be demonstrated through traceability.

Pre-Requirements Traceability. Requirements come from different sources, like the business person ordering the product, the marketing manager and the actual user. These people all have different requirements of the product. Using requirements traceability, an implemented feature can be traced back to the person or group that wanted it during the requirements elicitation. This can be used during the development process to prioritize the requirement, determining how valuable the requirement is to a specific user. It can also be used after the deployment when user studies show that a feature is not used, to see why it was required in the first place.

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