Requirements tracking is a project management technique used in software development to ensure user needs are met and defects minimized. Business analysts document user needs, develop product features, and link them to functionality. Traceability matrices compare user needs with product features and requirements, and approved requirements are passed on to quality assurance personnel for testing. Implementing requirements traceability can reduce rework costs and make systems more easily updated.
Requirements tracking is a technique used in software development projects to ensure that user needs are fully met and defects are minimized. When using this project management technique, the user must dictate requirements, development and quality assurance. Basic implementations may use spreadsheets to create matrices, and sophisticated implementations often use special requirements management applications.
A business or systems analyst will meet with various stakeholders to determine user needs for a given project. These needs will be documented and often fed into a requirements management application. Based on the user’s needs, the analyst will develop a number of product features.
The analyst will link user needs to the functionality of the associated product, establishing the traceability between these two elements. From the product characteristics, the analyst can develop use cases as part of the requirements analysis. Use cases are documents that describe a user’s interaction with the system, showing the steps the system is required to handle. The analyst traces the product features into the necessary steps in the use case that satisfy those features.
Not all user needs can be described through user interactions with a system, so a different type of specification document may also be required. These additional specifications may include system reliability and usability requirements. Requirements should also be traced to relevant user needs to maintain traceability of requirements.
Many organizations make use of a document called a traceability matrix. This matrix can compare user needs with product features and product features with requirements. The comparison allows the business analyst to verify that each product feature meets the needs of each user and that each feature has additional support use cases or requirements. It can also help the analyst determine if unnecessary requirements have been created.
Approved requirements are passed on to quality assurance personnel. QA personnel will use the requirements to develop test cases and track test cases based on the requirements. You can use a traceability matrix to ensure that all requirements have supporting test cases and that no unnecessary test cases have been added.
Implementing requirements traceability for systems engineering can offer benefits to an organization. It can help ensure that the system meets user requirements and reduce rework costs. Systems developed using requirements traceability should also be more easily updated. If additional development is done on the system, the traceability matrix can help the project team identify user needs, product features, requirements and test cases that may need to be updated.
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