The issue of traceability – the mapping of requirements to their products or systems and to each other – cannot be overlooked. Missing this component in your requirements specification can create problems throughout the development lifecycle, affecting architecture, design, and any subsequent modifications or evolutions to the requirements themselves.
A lack of traceability can make it difficult to know the impact of changes, resulting in inconsistencies that can derail implementation and testing, depleting budgets and resources.
Despite its importance, many requirements are not written for traceability. Oftentimes the sources of requirements such as business goals, higher-level requirements and stakeholders, are not documented. In many circumstances, requirements are mapped just to architecture or design elements and not to their testing component. A lot of times traceability is difficult just because of the extreme number of requirements that are often scattered across the entire enterprise.
This added complexity makes traceability even more important to ensure projects are delivering on stakeholder needs and that they are accounted for and tested.
A robust requirements specification template can provide this traceability by ensuring that:
- Requirements tracing is explicitly specified in the requirements engineering method and contract.
- Every requirement is uniquely identified for exact and clear referencing.
- Every requirement is labeled and written in a structured way.
- All requirements, including both functional and nonfunctional requirements, are traced.
- Everyone on the team understands the negative consequences of not tracing requirements.
- Proper tracing and resources are established.
- Tracing occurs throughout the development cycle.
- Evaluation of the tracing procedure is documented in the requirements verification stage.
Using the requirements specifications template, developers also will be able to provide:
- Forwards traceability – the ability to trace organization needs to requirements
- Backward traceability – the ability to trace backward from requirements to identify their origin
- Tracing of requirements to tests to ensure that each requirement is verified
- Tracing requirements to other requirements to keep track of parentage, interconnections, and dependencies
Ensuring that requirements are traceable can help your organization reduce requirements errors, manage scope creep, and better analyze impact. Tecnova’s Requirements Specification Template can make sure you’re tracing all the essential elements. Download it here.
