Requirements tracing

Requirem TRacing I n this ever-changing business and technology environment, the risk of inconsistencies in systems development and evolution multiplies. Experience reuse becomes a necessity in order to control quality, costs, and time, even when personnel changes. Requirements tracing is emerging as an effective bridge that aligns system evolution with changing stakeholder needs. It also helps uncover unexpected problems and innovative opportunities, and lays the groundwork for corporate knowledge management. However, few organizations fully recognize—or even understand—the true potential of the new methods and tools in requirements tracing. A network of projects worldwide has investigated the issues, studied advanced industry solutions, and developed research prototypes in order to provide a more coherent view of where we are moving. Far removed from its time-honored definition as a fuzzy early phase of systems development, requirements engineering is now recognized as the key tool to establish a vision of system-related change in its technical, cognitive, and social context [5]. In other words, it is the task of requirements engineering to proceed along three dimensions: managing the convergence of stakeholder interests toward agreement on key system goals and constraints; achieving a sufficient shared understanding of the issues involved in realizing the system vision, such as its functionality, nonfunctional properties, intended and unintended side effects; and documenting this understanding in adequate representation formats, for human information sharing as well as for computerized system development [6]. The intended result of this process is a structured but evolving set of agreed, well understood, and carefully documented requirements. Requirements traceability, then, is defined as the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both a forward and backward direction, ideally through the whole systems life cycle [3]. Four kinds of traceability links are typically distinguished with respect to their process relationships to requirements [1]: